Word Watching ~

The origin of words or phrases is always fascinating.  The label "peeping tom" comes from a seventeenth-century embellishment of the story of Lady Godiva's naked horseback ride in the year 1057.

Almost certainly an apocryphal tale, the story has it that Lady Godiva had pleaded with her husband, Leofric, English nobleman and Earl, to lower the taxes on the people of Coventry.  He agreed only if she would ride naked through the town's market place.

The seventeen-year-old Godiva called her husband's bluff.  However, she had previously made a pact with the townspeople that they would remain indoors behind closed shutters if they wanted their taxes lowered.  Everyone complied except a tailor by the name of Tom.  "This prurient citizen peeped through his curtains, drawing upon himself instant calamity by an unspecified agent; he was struck blind or in some versions dead."

Tailor Tom left a legacy to the English language, the phrase, "peeping Tom."

~ Source: The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, Clifton Fadiman General Editor, 1985.

The Beauty of Things ~
by Robinson Jeffers*

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things ~ earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars ~
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality ~
For man's half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant ~ to feel
Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry,
The rest's diversion:  those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing:  reasons, but not the reason.

*American poet ( Jan. 10, 1887 ~ Jan. 20, 1962)  ~ The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford Univ. Press, 1988.

Thoughts on Writing ~

"Good writers work themselves physically.  Melville and Sandburg did farm chores.  H.L. Menken, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay all gardened.  Malcolm Cowley saws wood.  And Robinson Jeffers did stonework as a daily ritual, adding one room after another to the house he had built himself in Carmel, California, with huge stones he hauled up from the beach below.  I like the image that routine suggests ~ Jeffers struggling to catch flighty words in the morning and lifting heavy stones in the afternoon.  It's as if the one activity gave substance and form to the other."

~ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Introduction, Writers in Residence. The Viking Press, 1981.

Banks of The Grand ~ Mohawk Chapel Brantford ON

Authors:
H. Mellville (Moby Dick)
C. Sanburg (Three Pulitzer Prizes)
H. L. Mencken (Happy Days)
Wm. Williams (The Red Wheelbarrow)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)
Malcolm Cowley (WW 1 Correspondent, writer)
Robinson Jeffers (Poet, environmentalist)

"The best place for a writer to work is in his head," remark attributed to Ernest Hemingway.


(To our readers:  The only photos currently available through Blogspot are previously published ones.)

Thought for Today on the Art of Writing ~

"A pretty good way to make a living, you might think ~ to be free to frolic away the afternoons of your life.  But you mustn't be fooled.  Anyone who has ever tried to write knows that you don't just sit down and bang it out.  It is necessary first to seethe and torment yourself.
"Robert Frost may have written many of his poems at single sittings, as he boasted, but weeks of reflection, if not a lifetime, went into them first.  An idea must have a chance to work its way out of the brain and into the viscera before it goes down on the page." ~ C. Lehmann-Haupt, Introduction, Writers in Residence.

~ Glynne Robinson Betts, Writers in Residence, American Authors at Home, The Viking Press, 1981.

Tomorrow:  How do good writers help this process along?

Thursday, January 17
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

PUBLIC DESIGN WORKSHOP

for the Cayuga Streetscape Plan

Upstairs in the Cayuga Arena

for details contact:  Mike Evers, Mgr. Planning & Development, Haldimand County

905-318-5732 ext. 204 or mevers@haldimandcounty.on.ca

This is an important development that will affect all of us.  Let's support our local municipality in their planning for the downtown business section of Cayuga.

We've come a long way ~

From a "shelf" in a marketplace on Cayuga Street, we are now several rooms on the main thoroughfare.

Thank you to our bookshop family and friends who have supported us, made this quiet corner a place to be.

We look forward to new adventures and more conversation.  "The coffee pot's always on..."  Thursday, January 17, 1:00 p.m. will be our first Round Table Reading in the new year.  There are more topics than hours!  Everyone welcome.  Admission:  A Smile.

~ John & Lorna

Anger, frustration, violence dominate our modern news media ~

Gavin De Becker writes in his book, Gift of Fear*:

"If we studied any other creature in nature and found the record of intraspecies violence that human beings have, we would be repulsed by it.  We'd view it as a great perversion of natural law ~ but we wouldn't deny it."

"As we stand on the tracks, we can only avoid the oncoming train if we are willing to see it and willing to predict that it won't stop.  But instead of improving the technologies of prediction, America improves the technologies of conflict:  guns, prisons, SWAT teams, karate classes, pepper spray, stun guns, Tasers, Mace.  And now more than ever, we need the most accurate predictions.  Just think about how we live:  We are searched for weapons before boarding a plane, visiting city hall, seeing a television show taping, or attending a speech by the president.  Our government buildings are surrounded by barricades, and we wrestle through so-called tamper-proof packaging to get a couple aspirin.  All of this was triggered by the deeds of fewer than ten dangerous men who got our attention by frightening us.  What other quorum in American history, save those who wrote our constitution, could claim as much impact on our day-to-day lives?  Since fear is so central to our experience, understanding when it is a gift ~ and when it is a curse ~ is well worth the effort."

~ *Gift of Fear - Survival Signals That Protect us From Violence, Little, Brown & Co., Canada, Ltd., 1997. De Becker is a three-time presidential appointee changing the way the U.S. gov't. evaluates threats.

(Apologies - Pictures currently unavailable through Blogspot.  Hopefully to be resolved.)