WaPo shines a light on the ghost pipe... which looks familiar.

Screen shot:

Here's the link to my post from last year, and here's the WaPo article. Excerpt:

“Ghost pipe is the bee’s knees for anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, migraines, muscle spasms and just all the things,” says a popular forager on [TikTok]. “It makes you feel very Zen and grounded.”

“Basically, it will solve all your problems,” a user whose account is dedicated to holistic healing says in a video that has been watched more than 17 million times....

Ghost pipe became widely popular in the mid-19th century, thanks to a group of physicians known as the Eclectics, who rejected the punishing medical practices of their day — such as bloodletting and mercury-induced purging — in favor of botanical remedies. Eclectic doctors administered ghost pipe as a tonic, sedative and antispasmodic. The odd flower also blossomed in the popular imagination. In 1890, the cover of Emily Dickinson’s debut book of poetry featured a painting of the plant; the poet called ghost pipe “the preferred flower of life.”...

"She selected four of her favorite poems and mailed them to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an essayist and minor poet...."

"In her cover note dated April 15 [1862]... one of the most famous letters in all of American literature, [Emily] Dickinson asked Higginson if he was 'too deeply occupied, to say if my Verse is alive'.... Higginson, who was bold in politics—an outspoken abolitionist and a secret supporter of John Brown...—but timid in literature, was evidently not encouraging. (His answer has not survived.) 'Thank you for the surgery,' she wrote in a follow-up letter, and, in another, 'I smile when you suggest that I delay "to publish"–that being foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin.' She continued to send Higginson poems, and he continued to find fault with them. 'You think my gait "spasmodic,"' she wrote in her third letter. 'You think me "uncontrolled."'... But over a long correspondence with Higginson... Dickinson discovered that letters themselves could be an art form rivaling poetry. Asked for personal details by Higginson... she answered... 'You ask of my Companions. Hills–Sir–and the Sundown–and a Dog–large as myself, that my Father bought me–They are better than Beings, because they know–but do not tell–and the noise in the Pool, at noon–excels my Piano.'"

From "'A Loving Caw from a Nameless Friend'/A new collection of Emily Dickinson’s letters reveals them to be a major literary achievement, related to her poems and perhaps exceeding them in experimental energy" (NYRB).

Here's the book under discussion: "The Letters of Emily Dickinson" (commission earned).

How I came to read "They shut me up in prose" (and talk about it with ChatGPT).

1. The Supreme Court, in a new opinion, used the word "who" to refer to Twitter (as if Twitter were a person (Elon Musk?)).

2. I studied the OED entry for "who" to see if there might be some justification for using "who" like that. Couldn't find any.

3. I became entranced by the "archaic or literary" use of "who" without an antecedent as in Shakespeare's "Who steales my purse, steals trash" and A.A. Milne's "Hush! Hush! whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." We'd normally say "whoever" in that situation, but why is that? However did "ever" come to clutter our speech?

"It’s good to know that Melville, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, had the company of 'a black Newfoundland dog, shaggy like himself, good natured and simple.'"

"('My shaggy ally' was how [Emily] Dickinson referred to her own Newfie, Carlo.) Readers of Moby-Dick may remember that after Ishmael wakes up in Queequeg’s arms in the Spouter-Inn, and complains of the 'unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,' Queequeg 'shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water.'"

 
Writes Christopher Benfey in   "Shaggy Allies/It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog" (NYRB).

I looked up the passage in my own (Kindle) copy of the book:

"It was the exact same feeling. It was amazing. When I came in from Columbus Circle into the park? I just started crying. The exact same emotions."

Said Trephene Andrea Wilf, quoted in "The New York City Marathon Was Canceled. Runners Ran the Course Anyway. The 50th New York City Marathon would have been Sunday. Some runners still ran the 26.2-mile course despite the cancellation" (NYT). 

Even without the race banners lining city streets and ubiquitous advertisements on subway cars, taxis and billboards, New Yorkers knew the significance of the weekend, perhaps even more so this year. And many took note. They put up signs, cheered for runners in homemade marathon race bibs and wrote encouraging words with chalk on the sidewalk.

The human mind is powerful. It made me think of the Emily Dickinson poem...

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, 

One clover, and a bee. 

And revery. 

The revery alone will do, 

If bees are few.

Apple's Emily Dickinson.

It's getting a reaction.

This new Dickinson show on Apple TV+ is hilarious for the simple reason that it’s triggering copious amounts of white people into “This isn’t Emily Dickinson!” rants and that makes me wanna watch it more, oddly.

Bravo, Tim Apple...

— Major K, MBA (@MajorKMusic) September 22, 2019

Me, I'm going to watch it and everything else more oddly.

"Many Democrats still wonder how folks in the Midwest can believe what they hear from Donald Trump."

"The answer: Often, they don’t. In Trump Country, people have learned to take a wait-and-see approach to the president’s extreme and categorical statements... I believe this explains the low-key response so far to the threat of a trade war with China among the farmers who stand to lose the most.... This distinction between the president’s words and his deeds might seem to cut against the Midwestern mythos of straight-talking folks who say what they mean and mean what they say. But there is another kind of mythical Midwesterner, the sort that Meredith Willson celebrated in 'The Music Man,' whose flinty exteriors cloak a soft spot for fast-talking flim-flammers. Trump entertains them and, besides, they never really expected a marching band."

Writes David Von Drehle in "Folks in the Midwest have Trump all figured out" (WaPo). I guess David Von Drehle has "folks" in the Midwest all figured out. He seems to live in the Midwest. Me too, but only on the island of Madison, so I know basically nothing about the Midwest Midwest, except from the viewpoint of people who are horrified to be surrounded by it. And last I looked "Music Man" was a Broadway musical, but it was written by a man who grew up in Iowa (albeit more than 100 years ago).

That said, I have something of the midwestern attitude toward Trump that Von Drehle described. Settle down, give the man a chance. See what he actually does. And, good lord, isn't he entertaining! Let's be kind to our guest, even if he's rough and weird.

And I can't help connecting this to the previous post, the notion that the whole truth must be told at a slant. By the way, I have always seen the feminine in Donald Trump.

The funny thing is, Trump seems to be delivering clear speech and stating the harsh truth straight on. That flummoxes some people when much of what he says turns out to be wrong.

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant..."

Wrote Emily Dickenson, quoted by the novelist Mary Gordon, leaving out the word "all," talking with the actress Glenda Jackson, in "Mary Gordon & Glenda Jackson Talk Poetry, Theater and the State of Feminism" (NYT)"

GJ: I’m so pleased you said that, because I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson. The view of both Stevie [the British poet Stevie Smith, played by Jackson in "Stevie"] and Emily Dickinson seems to be that here were these two solitary, depressed, lonely women, but they lived in these fantastic worlds!

MG: They’re great, greater than anybody around at that time. But their forms are small. And so, female gets defined as minor. Some of American women writers’ best work was done in the form of the short story: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Jean Stafford. I think what’s funny is around the same time that Emily Dickinson wrote, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

***

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise,
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

ADDED: This seems to gesture, differently, at the "fake news" problem we fakely fret about these days. Maybe the participation of women has changed public discourse in a way that we haven't quite acclimated to. Consider the benefits of circuitous truth. It's the only way to get the "all" that even Mary Gordon let slide.

"Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning..."

"The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma."

Judith Shulevitz — in a NYT op-ed titled "In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas" — describes a room set up by students at Brown University in response to the news that a libertarian would be debating with a feminist about sexual assault on campus.

Much as I think students should be challenged to think about difficult matters and not babied, I would like to give some credit to the students who came up with that particular safe room, going to such an extreme with the Play-Doh and all. It shows some sense of humor and light-heartedness. Actually, it could be read as making fun of the trigger-warning mentality.

This got me thinking about my favorite poem:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—   
One clover, and a bee,   
And revery.   
The revery alone will do   
If bees are few.

I'm thinking: The Play-Doh alone will do....

Related: "Grownups Pay Big Bucks to Attend NYC 'Adult Preschool.'"

To make a prairie it takes a puffball and one monarch...

One puffball...



and a monarch,



And a bookmark.
The bookmark alone will do...



If monarchs are few.

Prairie flower...

... and a bee:

"What's your favorite Woody Allen movie? Before you answer, you should know..."

Dylan Farrow puts her sad face between you and whatever Woody Allen movie you might have been hoping to enjoy.

Over at Reason, Nick Gillespie looks like he's working up to a response, a reasonable response, to the questions he frames — "Did Woody Allen Molest His Daughter, Dylan Farrow? And If So, Should You Disavow His Films?"

Gillespie reveals that he doesn't even like Woody Allen. He says Allen "ceased to produce consistently interesting movies decades ago," which either means that he hasn't noticed "Blue Jasmine" or that he really meant to write "ceased the consistent production of interesting movies decades ago." "Blue Jasmine" (2013) is certainly consistently interesting. So was "Midnight in Paris" (2011). Maybe "To Rome With Love" (2012) was only interesting in parts. But, good lord, Woody Allen has consistently made interesting movies. Look at the IMDB list. He has made at least one movie in every year since 1977, which is probably when Gillespie imagines that he stopped being interesting.

Gillespie shifts the topic to the more general question — "When — if ever — does the biography of a creator mean that you cannot or should not in good conscience patronize an artist?" — and he doesn't even answer that. He throws it over to the readers: "What do you think readers?"

But I want to get back to Woody Allen. Dylan Farrow writes: he "sexually assaulted" her. I'm putting that in quotes not to express disbelief, but to observe the generality of the term. We're told that she was playing with an electric train but not what body part of his came into what sort of contact with what body part of hers. We're told "what he did to me in the attic felt different" from other things he did that she also did not like. Those other things are specified: He had her under the covers in bed with him when he was "in his underwear." He put his thumb in her mouth. He put "his head in [her] naked lap."

After a custody hearing denied my father visitation rights, my mother declined to pursue criminal charges, despite findings of probable cause by the State of Connecticut – due to, in the words of the prosecutor, the fragility of the "child victim."

So there will always be a cloud on Woody Allen's reputation, but it's not as though he could have removed the cloud if only he'd been prosecuted and had his day in court. He'd have enjoyed the presumption of innocence, and that means suspicion would remain even if there were a not guilty verdict.

These charges are not new. I read the 1992 Vanity Fair article that had all of this material, and I've seen maybe 15 Woody Allen movies since then, some more than once. "Blue Jasmine" is, I think, the only movie I saw this year in the theater, and I returned to the theater to see it a second time. So, through my own actions, I've obviously answered Gillespie's question yes, in the case of Woody Allen movies. I can in good conscience go to see his movies. For one thing — unlike Gillespie — I like Woody Allen. It's fine to have your "good conscience" about avoiding things you don't even want to do. The morality test only applies when — to use Woody Allen's Emily Dickinson's expression — "The Heart wants what it wants."

I feel empathy for Dylan Farrow, but I think we are living in a fallen world, and we are surrounded by human beings all of whom have their sins, known and unknown. To purport to know what cannot be truly known is also a sin. To punish and shun one person out of preference for another when the truth is not known is surely not an exalted virtue, if it is a virtue at all. The works of art exist and are real and apart from the artist. And when someone chooses — as Woody Allen has — to remain silent all these years, to keep to himself, producing good work, incurring no further charges of harming anyone, I think we are not doing something morally wrong to receive that work for whatever value it has, independently, as art.

That said, it appears that the celebration of Woody Allen, the man, on the Golden Globes TV show is what provoked Dylan Farrow to come forward. But Woody Allen was thousands of miles away from that event. He was not soaking up the adulation. The art/artist separation remains, and yet we can reframe Gillespie's question to focus on a more particular consumer-end moral problem:  At what point do accusations of wrongdoing against an artist make it wrong to enjoy a staged celebration of the man?

Woody Allen himself seems to loathe all staged celebrations of artists. Has he ever appeared at any awards show? Perhaps he's got a personal awareness of guilt that shames him away. But we are all sinners, and it might be best if we all had an aversion to the celebration of celebrities.

To paraphrase Jesus: Let him who is without sin among you be the first to watch the Golden Globes.

UPDATE: "Mr. Allen has read the article and found it untrue and disgraceful. He will be responding very soon."

"As the daughter of a successful lawyer, Dickinson would have had ample access to quality paper..."

"... leading some scholars to argue that later in her life she was deliberately experimenting with ways of presenting poetry beyond the conventions of the printed page."

"Who was the better war poet, Rupert Brooke (i.e., WWI romantic jingoism) or Emily Dickinson? Answer: Emily Dickinson."

In the comments to this morning's post about J.D. Salinger, Richard Lawrence Cohen (my ex-husband) paraphrases something Salinger once said.

That got me looking for Emily Dickinson's war poems, but I got distracted thinking about something else I read this morning, the obituary for the actress Julie Harris. She played the part of Emily Dickenson in a 1977 play called "The Belle of Amherst." A quick search on YouTube turned up a fine print of the entire 90-minute play. It probably shouldn't be there, and I won't embed it, but here it is.

Black licorice! Potty training! Emily Dickinson!

Now that I've wandered over to the San Francisco Chronicle web page — I was looking for info on that "Star Trek" doodle, I find some intriguing headlines:

1. "State expands warning on eating black licorice." (A particular brand has lead in it. It's not the old story that glycyrrhizin is dangerous.)

2. "Photo of mom potty-training kids at restaurant table sparks outrage."

Kimberly Decker [who took a photo and posted it on Facebook] says the mother in question lugged portable potties into the restaurant, placed them on chairs and sat her children down on them. At first Decker thought the potties were booster seats but when the mother stripped off her children’s clothes, she realized the twins were going to the bathroom—in the middle of the restaurant in front of other diners.

“She had to undo the jumpsuits, and take them all the way down so they were completely nude, with the jumpsuits down to their ankles just eating their chicken nuggets, sitting on little toddler potties”...

You have to question whether Decker made the right choice in posting the photo online.

3. "Scholars may have 2nd photo of poet Dickinson."

Kelly said perhaps the best evidence [that it's really Emily Dickinson] is an ophthalmological report that compared similarities in the eyes and facial features of the women in the photos....

That could shift some perceptions about the Amherst native...  For instance, a book in the 1950s was the first to propose Dickinson had a lesbian relationship with [the other woman in the photograph, Kate Scott] Turner....

I am nobody.

I read it in the Wall Street Journal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo says:

"I am nobody."

Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

Ah, yes! The Emily Dickinson poem:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring blog!

(I added a letter!)

Emily Dickinson meets...

... Grand Theft Auto.

America's "literary flowering" was "a rebellion against what was thought of as academic, effete and indoors-y in English writing."

So how can a real, American literary artist take a job as a creative writing professor? Asks David Gessner.

[I]t’s hard to imagine [Thoreau] taking a break from one of his marathon strolls to waste three hours teaching a graduate workshop. Equally difficult is picturing Melville asking a group of undergrads, “What’s at stake in this story?” or Dickinson clapping a colleague on the back after a faculty meeting.

Yes, but did Henry and Herman and Emily have health care insurance and a retirement plan?

Gessner struggles with his cushy life and its obligations:

[C]reation of literature requires a degree of monomania, and that it is, at least in part, an irrational enterprise. It’s hard to throw your whole self into something when that self has another job.

But surely there are some jobs that provide substance and raw material for the writer. (Whaling, for example.) The problem with writers having jobs other than writing occurs when those jobs consume their time and attention, turn them into boring, conventional people, and give back nothing worth writing about.

But Gessner worries that the ideal of just writing is too irrational:

[Y]ou are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you’re going next. Creating your own world is an invitation to solipsism, if not narcissism, and as well as being alone when we work, we are left, for the most part, to judge by ourselves if we have succeeded or failed in our tasks. (Three guesses in which direction we most often lean.) My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. “You’re not living in the real world,” he said. I reacted with a young man’s defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don’t forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching.

Ah, yes, academia is lovely. I love teaching. All teachers must say that. But there are other, richer jobs for the writer. And I'm not convinced that a literary writer does well to spend so much time reading and correcting the writing of other people who are not very good. If you're going to teach and write, wouldn't it be better to teach some substantial subject that will have you thinking about something about that real world your father wanted you to live in? History, science, law....

Gessner ends his reverie thusly:

[A] part of me worries that my work has become too professional, too small, and worries that I don’t spend as much time as I should reading or brooding or even fretting. Yes, my lifestyle is more healthful, but is health always the most important thing? The part that answers no to that question is now lying in wait, looking for ways to undermine my so-far-successful teaching career. In fact you could argue that that part of me had a hand in writing this essay, which I am finishing now, a few weeks before going up for tenure. After all, what would that part, my inner monomaniac, like more than to tear off his collar and sabotage the job that keeps him from running wild?

Oh, is that what this essay is all about? Conquering the fear of being denied tenure? What do you think, would tenure denial be a blessing for Mr. Gessner? Do you want him back in his room, brooding and fretting year 'round?