MarysLibrary

American Names

I've long loved this poem by Stephen Vincent Benet, American Names.

I have fallen in love with American names,
The sharp names that never get fat,
The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,
The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,
Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

 

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,
There are English counties like hunting-tunes
Played on the keys of a postboy’s horn,
But I will remember where I was born.

 

I will remember Carquinez Straits,
Little French Lick and Lundy’s Lane,
The Yankee ships and the Yankee dates
And the bullet-towns of Calamity Jane.
I will remember Skunktown Plain.

 

I will fall in love with a Salem tree
And a rawhide quirt from Santa Cruz,
I will get me a bottle of Boston sea
And a blue-gum nigger to sing me blues.
I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

 

Rue des Martyrs and Bleeding-Heart-Yard,
Senlis, Pisa, and Blindman’s Oast,
It is a magic ghost you guard
But I am sick for a newer ghost,
Harrisburg, Spartanburg, Painted Post.

 

Henry and John were never so
And Henry and John were always right?
Granted, but when it was time to go
And the tea and the laurels had stood all night,
Did they never watch for Nantucket Light?

 

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Conservatism

I'm reading Andrew J Bacevich's American Conservatism a surprising book. It is a collection of essays about conservatism in America and it is enlightening. It helps me make sense of the positions some politicians and historians have taken. And it points out the error of assuming anybody who calls himself a Republican or a conservative is really what he says he is.

Definitions of what it means to be conservative by Russell Kirk and William F Buckley, Jr clarify the origins of modern American conservatism. And point out where it has gone astray. Pieces by Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, and Allan Bloom are particularly interesting.

Now I need to find a collection like this addressing American Liberalism.

Mitz of Bloomsbury

Mitz is comfort reading for the last days of the lockdown when there is little left in the genre you haven't read and re-read. It's about a marmoset that Leonard and Virginia Wolfe adopted just before World War II. 

If you liked Flush, you will love this.