Crows and Loafing Shed

In the vernacular, a shed used to shelter livestock from inclement weather, and to which they have full-time access (as opposed to a barn, where they are either shut in or shut out), is called a loafing shed.  I guess, for cattle, loafing is not only permitted, it's expected.  Below is my depiction of the loafing shed that was on our farm in Granville, Ohio, in the 1960's.

"Crows and Shed", original watercolor on paper, 5" x 7", matted and signed.

Moving, Perhaps, In a Different Direction

     My wife, Jan, and my friend and neighbor, Diane, have suggested that - maybe - nobody wants a picture of Faulkner, Hemingway or Crazy Horse. They tell me Granville people want pictures of Granville. Why they don't step outside and look at it, I don't know. But, Jan and Diane are never wrong...

     So, here is my latest (and currently, only) eBay offering. It is, of course, Granville's most prominent landmark.

Swasey Chapel, Denison University, Granville, Ohio

     I would also like to know if anyone would be interested in commissioning a "portrait" of their home. Please let me know!

Past and Present...No, Just Past

            I recently "joined" a website that pays very little money for very small articles.  They asked for a writing sample, so, I prepared two.  I had my wife pick the better one, which I cannot share, because having submitted it, it is now the property of that website.  Let's just say it had something to do with the wonderful sights, conversations and aromas of a cheese shop that once was in Granville, Ohio.

            Here is the other one:

From the shop’s front door, beyond the pink-and-green ladies’ department, a narrow hallway leads to the men’s department of The James Store.  Here, the well-dressed customer may buy any sort of sport coat – as long as it is a navy blazer or a Harris Tweed.  Blazer buttons may be brass or silver, at the customer’s request.   To complement the jacket, certainly a pair of slacks in gray-flannel wool or khaki will be found.  All that is now required are a pair of oxblood Bass Weejuns penny loafers, a Gant button-down Oxford shirt, in Tattersall, white or blue, and a cordovan braided-leather belt.  A tie is optional, as are socks.  The customer who seeks more casual attire will want to add a pair of Levi’s blue jeans.  No further purchases are necessary, as these are to be worn with the Gant shirt, the braided belt and the Weejuns.

The proprietor of The James Store is Jim Bone.  Mr. Bone, as customers of my generation call him, treats every customer exactly like his best customer.  If the customer needs only a pair of socks – presumably in late fall – he will leave the store, socks on feet, feeling like he is Mr. Bone’s best customer.  I know I always do.

On Borrowed Books

Steve Layman's post On Borrowed Books, prompted this:

          I have read a borrowed book,
          But not like it was mine.
          I read it, opened just a bit,
          Afraid to crease the spine!

What's the Worst That Could Happen?

I have decided to try to sell some of my pictures on eBay. 

Here is a sample:

The complete listing is here.

What's the worst that could happen?  Feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Keith Piper Took Them by Surprise

Denison University's Coach Keith Piper was a great coach and a great person.  His son, David, posted a recent reminder on Facebook.  I'm sure Coach Piper was a great dad, too. Thanks, David.

Coach Piper continued to coach single-wing football long after other coaches had moved on the the T-formation and others. Keith said, "It's good for utilizing slower, smaller players, and because opponents only see it once a year, you take them by surprise."

Buffalo State looked pretty surprised to me.

Read the article from TheDEN here, and from Sports Illustrated here.

"Determined to Do Something Real Bad"

Erin, at  The Books I Should Have Read, has found a wonderful book.

Letters from a Woman Homesteader

For Mother's Day this year I received a Kindle. I promptly filled it with dozens of free public domain works, including Letters from a Woman Homesteader, which is a collection of letters from Elinore Pruitt Stewart to Mrs. Coney, a former employer of hers. It only took reading one letter and I was hooked.

I had never heard of this book, but upon searching for more information about Elinore, I found that she has something of a cult following. Here are the basics. Elinore was born either in Arkansas or Oklahoma (reports vary) in 1876, the eldest of nine children. She was married and had a daughter. Her first husband died and she took her baby daughter further west and worked as a laundress and nurse for Mrs. Coney in Denver. It is this former employer to whom the letters are addressed, written after she filed a claim on land in Wyoming in 1909.

And what letters! Elinore is a consummate storyteller, bringing to life the the beauty, grandeur, and danger of Wyoming and the colorful people who were settling it in the early 1900s. She introduces her readers to people of all types, including immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Mexico. She paints vivid pictures of sleigh rides through a vast white landscape, a cattle drive and the search for bandits, a desperate woman alone on a starlit winter night giving birth to her child, an eccentric and ancient Southerner and his lost love, sunset wagon rides across a landscape covered with wildflowers, and so much more. Her interactions with the interesting people in her "neighborhood" are endlessly fascinating.

But what makes her letters so fresh and compelling is that Elinore is a fearless woman in a time when her sex  were considered too delicate for "men's" work and still would not have the right to vote for another decade. She was not afraid of hard work and taking chances. And yet she was feminine, writing not only of mowing hay but of raising children, making meals, sewing garments, and matchmaking.

One of my favorite of her letters involves an impromptu trip she took with her then two-year-old daughter. The menfolk were off on a cattle drive and their women were making a trip into Utah. Her employer (who may have been her husband as well at this point) had forbidden her from going because the trip was dangerous and he didn't think it would be good for her daughter Jerrine. Here is the first part of that letter.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Next day all the men left for the round-up, to be gone a week. I knew I never could stand myself a whole week. In a little while the ladies came past on their way to Ashland. They were all laughing and were so happy that I really began to wish I was one of the number, but they went their way and I kept wanting to go somewhere. I got reckless and determined to do something real bad. So I went down to the barn and saddled Robin Adair, placed a pack on "Jeems McGregor," then Jerrine and I left for a camping-out expedition.

It was nine o'clock when we started and we rode hard until about four, when I turned Robin loose, saddle and all, for I knew he would go home and some one would see him and put him into the pasture. We had gotten to where we couldn't ride anyway, so I put Jerrine on the pack and led "Jeems" for about two hours longer; then, as I had come to a good place to camp, we stopped.

While we had at least two good hours of daylight, it gets so old here in the evening that fire is very necessary. We had been climbing higher into the mountains all day and had reached a level tableland where the grass was luxuriant and there was plenty of wood and water. I unpacked "Jeems" and staked him out, built a roaring fire, and made our bed in an angle of a sheer wall of rock where we would be protected against the wind. Then I put some potatoes into the embers, as Baby and I are both fond of roasted potatoes. I started to a little spring to get water for my coffee when I saw a couple of jack rabbits playing, so I went back for my little shotgun. I shot one of the rabbits, so I felt very like Leather-stocking because I had killed but one when I might have gotten two. It was fat and young, and it was but the work of a moment to dress it and hang it up on a tree. Then I fried some slices of bacon, made myself a cup of coffee, and Jerrine and I sat on the ground and ate. Everything smelled and tasted so good! This air is so tonic that one gets delightfully hungry. Afterward we watered and restaked "Jeems," I rolled some logs on to the fire, and then we sat and enjoyed the prospect.

The entire post is here.

Thanks, Erin!

 What do we do with our blogs?  When we borrow from each other, allude to each other, even cite each other, are we a mutual admiration society, patting each other on the back?  I don’t think so.  What happens – what we hope will happen – is that we will then venture further and find more art, more inspiration and more creativity.  It’s not that we are copying what our fellow has done, it is that what our friend has done reminds us of something we might do.  So let’s call it the interconnectedness of things.  Synergy if you please.

            I have an example.  My friend Rob, the creator of the wonderful Hammock Papers, posted this great Bobby McFerrin video.  But what struck me was the McFerrin interview, when Bobby says, “When I was a kid growing up and we bought albums, we treated them with such reverence, we would listen to every single cut, first to last, whether we liked the pieces or not, we were patient enough to at least give the [pieces] a chance.”

            I read this from Rob’s blog the very same day that I had read an oddly similar thing in Just Kids, by Patti Smith.  Smith is relating the experiences of herself and Robert Mapplethorpe at twenty years old.  Both will become famous avant garde artists, but at this point, they are “just kids” in New York with big dreams but no TV, no radio and no money.  Here is the excerpt from Just Kids.

"At night we played the records we liked to draw to on our battered player.  Sometimes we played a game called Record of the Night.  The album cover of the chosen record would be prominently displayed on the mantel.  We played the disc over and over, the music informing the trajectory of the evening."

          When music is used for the appreciation of it, and not just as background noise, you get Bobby McFerrin, and you get this:

 

Corvidae from Kaizen Journey

"I think crows are interesting, predatory, alert, intelligent..."

I do too, and I think your wonderful drawing is spontaneous and calligraphic.
Thank you, Alsokaizen.

More wonderful stuff here.

Clouds

"We people possess records, like gravestones, of individual clouds and the dates on which they flourished.

"In 1824, John Constable took his beloved and tubercular wife, Maria, to Brighton Beach. They hoped the sea air would cure her.  On June 12 he sketched, in oils, squally clouds over Brighton beach.  The gray clouds lowered over the water in failing light.  They swirled from a central black snarl.

"In 1828, as Maria Constable lay dying in Putney, John Constable went to Brighton to gather some of their children.  On May 22 he recorded one oblique bluish cloud riding high and messy over a wan sun.  Two thin red clouds streaked below.  Below the clouds he painted disconnected people splashed and dotted over an open, wide coast.

"Maria Constable died that November.  We still have these dated clouds."  

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

Maybe we possess records of the clouds as records of ourselves.

Radio Baseball

A little boy in pajamas,

Supposed to be asleep,

Sits in the hall, sits on the floor,

Against the wall, next to the door

Of his big brother’s bedroom

And listens to night baseball.

No one in the ballpark

Will have a better seat.

Pacquiao vs. Ali?

            The Manny Pacquiao versus Shane Mosley fight was last night.  I followed the round-by-round blow-by-blow via a real-time blog.  It was not a close fight; Pacquiao, the favorite, both with the touts and with the fans, won decisively. 

            Boxing is not as popular as it once was.  This has mostly to do with the fact that there is no Muhammad Ali these days; there is no one as brilliant inside the ring, no one as vibrant outside the ring.

            When I was young, Ali had captured the imagination of everyone, at least among those who had imagination.  He repeatedly did what nobody thought could be done. He defeated Sonny Liston.  During the referee’s instructions, the sports writers present suddenly realized – despite the statistics on the “tale of the tape” – that Ali (then, Cassius Clay) was considerably bigger than Liston.  He defeated Liston in the rematch, also, with the famous “phantom punch”, now clearly discernible with modern technology.  Later in his career, he would come back from a suspension for draft evasion to win back the title.  Still later, he won it for a third time.

Following the suspension, it took Ali several fights, including a title-fight loss to Joe Frazier, to reach the title fight in Zaire.  By the time Ali had earned another title shot, the new champion was George Foreman.  

            In Ali’s time, a heavyweight title fight was a major event, nearly as big as the Super Bowl, and attended by dozens of celebrities – even if it was in Africa.  At ringside for the “Rumble in the Jungle” were famous writers George Plimpton and Norman Mailer.  Nobody  - I mean, nobody - thought Ali could defeat the much younger, much harder-hitting George Foreman.  Of course, he did beat him, in fact, he knocked him out.  

            In last night’s bout, nothing surprising happened. Pacquiao was lackluster and still won handily.  For several years, I have been aware of the existence of a photograph that captures the astonishment of Plimpton and Mailer at the knockout of George Foreman by Muhammad Ali.  Below, please see what it looks like when something surprising does happen.

George Plimpton, center, Norman Mailer, with glasses