On Sunday, a friend and I, after lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, visited Kaboom Books here in Houston. He left with a stack of books. I found one: Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast, 2018). I know her thanks only to Yvor Winters, who championed her work and rightly called her “a minor poet of great distinction.” Crapsey (1878-1914) reminds us that reputation is fleeting and uncertain. Only dedicated readers keep a writer alive. Without the occasional reader, Crapsey would be doubly dead. She devised a homegrown poetic form, the American cinquain, much influenced by traditional Japanese verse, and reminiscent of the work of her contemporaries, the early Imagists.  The editors, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, bring together a selection of Crapsey’s poems, excerpts from her study of metrics, letters and five essays by academics. Most of her poems are graceful and brief, feather-like in their delicacy yet often concluding with a sort of stinger at the end. Take “Triad”:   “These be Three silent things: The falling snow . . . the hour Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one Just dead.”   For Crapsey, who was ill for much of her life and died from tuberculosis at age thirty-six, death is a recurrent theme, as in “The Lonely Death”:   “In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.”   During her lifetime, Crapsey edited only one volume of her work, Verse, published in 1915, shortly after her death. Her range of subjects is narrow – death, dying, illness -- and family difficulties limited her growth as a poet. Yvor Winters, who survived tuberculosis, as did his wife Janet Lewis, wrote of Crapsey: “[T]he only known cure, and this was known to only a few physicians, was absolute rest, often immobilized rest. The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous.” We see Crapsey’s resistance to “immobilized rest” in her poem “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window”:   “Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: ‘Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.’ I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!”   Effective antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis wouldn’t become available until the nineteen-forties. A reader resists it, but there’s a pervasive sadness about Crapsey’s work, coupled with courage. It’s similar, though at a different level of accomplishment, to the what we experience when reading Keats and Chekhov. Tuberculosis killed both, at ages twenty-five and forty-four, respectively. “To the Dead . . .” concludes:     “And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; ‘Yes, yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are.’ And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.”

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Fragments from the cutting room floor, vol 4

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My operating rules and way of living. This is a m.o. (mo) page, or modus operandi page. It lists out the way I approach my life and the rules I apply to it to thrive. This is a living document and will be added to as more comes to mind, or as I develop new ones. It is mirrored at /mo. Feel free to make your own. Let me know if you do, and I'll list yours at the end of my mo page. Simplicity and defaults keeps things simple: stock apps, stock methods. Only specialize and customize if a need really can't be met. I stay away from almost every chain when it comes to purchasing something. I seek out locally-owned businesses or small niche businesses. Given the option between a small business and a tiny business, I opt for the tiny one. Even more so if it's owned or operated by BIPOC, immigrants, and/or queer folk. Scale and choice matters. I want people to be unafraid to start tiny businesses and to be encouraged to continue to do so. I do not buy from Amazon. I am not a hardcore minimalist, but operate like one. If something comes into my possession, it has to be necessary. If something comes into my possession, it should do more than one job. If something comes into my possession, it must do its primary job best. Most items should be thought of as tools: to enable me to do something. Items owned should be of the highest quality possible at a reasonable budgetary spend, but would likely be too much money than most would consider reasonable. I seek items that can be repaired whenever possible or have as long a life as feasible. Items should be grail items: it is the pinnacle of its kind, is timeless, and durable. Buy used: modern culture treats life as disposable. I rail against that and seek things that you will pass down to your grandchildren or similar. Walking is preferred, when possible. Take public transit when possible. Ride a bicycle. Drive less, and only drive when I must. I own a vehicle. It's used. It's now 17 years old. It's made by Toyota. It enables me to go very far, and into the backcountry. It is driven mostly for adventure. It is parked when in the city and at home. I will do my best to extend its lifespan and keep it running until it can no longer. I do not ingest highly processed foods. I eat whole foods as much as possible. I am restrictive in my diet, partly out of age and care for my body, but also because I have been diagnosed with SIBO and have nummular/discoid eczema (a rare form). I was able to come off long-term topical steroid use and keep my horrendous all-over eczema at bay because of adopting the AIP protocol. I will pay for high quality food. My body requires movement. I provide this to it through running (formerly decades of cycling), rock climbing, yoga, strength training, and general physical play. I am not an early adopter of technology. Most tech should be repairable, easily replaceable, or used until it reaches end-of-life. See item purchasing above. Phone is Airplane mode at night. I'd keep it in another room like others do, but I tend to wake up in the middle of the night and need music (downloaded) to listen to, to fall back asleep. Computers, modems, and wi-fi are powered down at night. I love Airpods because of my hearing loss and physically smaller left ear, but detest that they are ultimately disposable products. I am moving back towards wired headphones. I wear natural fibers on my body almost all of the time. I keep synthetic clothing to a minimum — typically limited to running shorts (lowest friction for my eczema) or for outdoor pursuits (rain shell, down jackets). I wear cotton and merino wool. With my eczema status, all plastic-and-oil based clothing feels creepy-tingly-gross on my skin. At an eatery: prioritize establishments that have reusable dinner- and silverware. Coffee shops: for here, please. Worst case scenario: paper or compostable containers. When possible, and remembered, I have a Snow Peak titanium spork on me to reduce utensil use when eating out at a fast casual or for food to-go. I love to cook. You don't need to, but you should be able to do some basic cooking so you can feed yourself. Pick up food takeout when possible and tip the restaurant versus using a delivery service which is already gouging you on pricing, and getting reamed on their cut of the profit. Pay them directly. Do your own groceries. Spend the time to get out in the world and community and talk and be amongst people. I do not pay for video streaming services, but am paying for a YouTube Premium subscription because creators and artists and filmmakers and nerds and enthusiasts have better and real stories to tell. Always take the stairs. Always walk the travelator. Visit this post on the web or Reply via email