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Brush up your Poetry, Michael Macrone, Ph.D, MJF
books, 1996.
Chaucer’s poetry added the following lines to the Engish
idiom:
To let sleeping dogs lie.
In one ear and out the other
To strike while the iron is hot
Patience is a virtue
To see and be seen
To wet one’s whistle
To make a virtue of necessity
Cork Boat, John Pollack
Reality wasn't all that different. Back on the river, we muscled our way slowly
westward, day by day. Although Curtis and Jennifer had to leave us in Regua,
we were joined, at the same time, by a college buddy of Garth's, an environmental
engineer named Garvin Heath. Garvin was a big, ebullient guy, well over six
feet, and he could pull his weight and then some. Better yet, he was full
of good stories.
One tale in particular really captured my imagination, a project he called "Peripatetic
Pancakes." A few years earlier, to celebrate his thirtieth birthday, he
had hired a mule train to haul four hundred pounds of pancake mix, syrup, jam,
skillets, fuel, and other supplies a dozen miles into the Sierras of California.
There, he set up camp and for the next two weeks cooked free, all-you-can-eat
pancakes for any and all passing backpackers.
At first, people were flabbergasted at this unlikely IHOP-in-the-wilderness.
Then word started spreading along the trail. One hungry man, a dot-corn refugee,
stumbled into camp with only a few raisins left. When Garvin welcomed him warmly
with unlimited silver-dollar pancakes and a choice of eight toppings, he was
practically speechless with gratitude.
Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson, First
Vintage International, 1992.
You said, <! love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can
say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? <! love you* is always
a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it
and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship
them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.
The Seuss The Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Suess,
Charles Cohen, Random
House, 2004.
Most people's understanding of Ted Geisel begins with a man hovering around
50 years of age, already established as a wildly popular children's author.
It was in that context that Ted published an article in which he excoriated
adults for losing a healthy sense of humor when they grew up:
Have you ever stopped to consider what has happened to your sense of humor?
When you were a kid named Willy or Mary the one thing you did better than anything
else was laugh. ... A strange thing called conditioned laughter began to take
its place. ... [It depended on] financial conditions. Political conditions.
Racial, religious and social conditions. You began to laugh at people your
family feared or despised—people they felt inferior to, or people they
felt better than. . . . You were supposed to guffaw when someone told a story
which proved that Swedes are stupid, Scots are tight. Englishmen are stuffy
and the Mexicans never wash. You discovered a new form of humor based on sex....
Your capacity for healthy, silly, friendly laughter was smothered!
Big Shots, A. J. Baime, New American Library, 2003
When Jack was two, his mother died. A couple years later, his father, Calaway
Daniel, remarried, and little Jack didn't take it lightly. With twelve brothers
and sisters, he was a neglected kid. So he ran away—all the way to
the neighbor's farm, where "Uncle Felix" (no relation) lived. A
short time later, one of the tiny community's leaders took the boy in, giving
the orphan a home (think Albert on L/'tt/e House on the Prairie). The Reverend
Dan Call was a Lutheran preacher who owned a general store and a still at
a place called Louse Creek, and he needed an apprentice. Not only did Jack
find a home— he found a trade as well.
At just nine years old, Jack Daniel began making whiskey.
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi, Random House, 2004.
I could not see my favorite mountains from where I sat, but opposite my chair,
on the far wall of the dining room, was an antique oval mirror, a gift from
my father, and in its reflection, I could see the mountains capped with snow,
even in summer, and watch the trees change color. That censored view intensified
my impression that the noise came not from the street below but from some
far-off place, a place whose persistent hum was our only link to the world
we refused, for those few hours, to acknowledge.
That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland
it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers,
we moved in and out of the novels we read. Looking back, I am amazed at how
much we learned without even noticing it. We were, to borrow from Nabokov to
experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into
a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.
Lakota Noon, Gregory Michno, Mountain Press Publishing Co. Missoula, MT. 1997
In his twenty-eighth year of manhood, White Cow Bull had been with many / women
but had never taken a wife. Yet, there was a pretty young Cheyenne woman named
Meotzi (Monahsetah) who had caught his eye. His Cheyenne friends said | she
was originally from the southern branch of the tribe, but no Cheyenne man could
marry her because she had a seven-year-old son born out of wedlock. In| addition,
the boy's father was said to be the white soldier chief called Long Hair. He
had taken Meotzi to his tent after his soldiers killed her father, Little Rock,
eight years ago during the fight on the Washita River. Meotzi, in her twenties
and still unmarried, now lived with the Northern Cheyennes with her son.Yellow
Bird. He had light streaks in his hair and always seemed to be with his mother
in the daytime.White Cow Bull could never get a minute alone with Meotzi. At
night he would come calling. Meotzi knew he wanted to walk with her under the
courting blanket, but she would only talk to him through the tipi and would
never consent to come outside.58 Perhaps this would finally be White Cow Bull's
lucky day. Riding for a time around the Cheyenne circle, he saw Meotzi carrying
firewood up from the river. Yellow Bird was with her.White Cow Bull just smiled
and said nothing.
From the Heart of the Crow Country, Joe Medicine Crow, University of Nebraska,
1992
About 1919 the secretary of the interior issued orders that the Crows must
get rid of their horses. This was like ordering a man to kill his best friend
or brother. It was also ordering a people to relinquish the traditions, customs,
and values of their culture, their way of life! Naturally, no Crow could abide
by the secretary's orders. The ultimatum came about 1923, that the government
would get rid of the horses. Local non-Indian cattle outfits were contracted
to kill the horses on a bounty basis. The killer would be paid four dollars
per animal when he produced the tip of a horse's ear. Some killers would bring
in big sacks of ears. One large outfit had to import Texas gunmen to do the
shooting, as local cowboys were soon disgusted with the slaughter. Of course,
the Crows would not kill horses.
Fluke, Christopher Moore, Perrenial, 2003.
Well, time passed and some whalers came to the island, bringing steel tools
and syphilis and other wonders from the West, and before anyone knew what was
happening, they, too, were thinking that they wouldn^t mind a few cocktails
and a measure of nookie. So rather than sail back around the Horn to Nantucket
to hoist noggins of grog and the skirts of the odd Hester, Millicent, or Prudence
(so fast the dear woman would think she'd fallen down a chimney and landed
on a zucchini), they pulled into Lahaina, drawn by the drunken sex magic of
old Maui. They didn't come to Maui for the whales, they came for the party.
Terrible Lizard, Deborah Cadbury, Henry Holt and Co, 2000.
Cuvier's large extinct mammals, the mammoth, the mastodon and Megatherium,
were found in the most recent, Tertiary deposits. In older strata Cuvier identified
an ancient sea lizard, 'Mosasaurus^ or 'lizard of the Meuse', and several extinct
species of crocodile. His studies suggested that entire animal races had been
wiped from the face of the earth. He was haunted by the desire to know what
had happened to the vanished creatures. Why would God create these beings if
He planned only to destroy them? Cuvier wanted to ascertain whether 'species
which existed then have been entirely destroyed, or if they have merely been
modified in their form, or if they have simply been transported from one climate
into another'. Quite why and how extinction occurred was a puzzle that remained
to be solved.
Fall on Your Knees, Anne-Marie MacDonald, Simon and Schuster, 1996.
sat—She sings like twelve saxophones and a freight train, she wears about
a pound of gold, the band just tries to keep up with her. She's no lady. Her
songs are all unbelievably unhappy or lewd. It's called Blues. She sings about
sore feet, sexual relations, baked goods, killing your lover, being broke, men
called Daddy, women who dress like men, working, praying for rain. Jail and trains.
Whiskey and morphine. She tells stories between verses and everyone in the place
shouts out how true it all is. Imagine—the more interruptions, the higher
the praise, like a real chorus. Picture Sweet Jessie Hogan at the Met. The best
opera is just high-tone Blues.
Land Circle, Linda Hasselstrom
I watched an especially fat skunk waddle out of the barn and pursued it across
the garden. I thought if I followed far enough I might make it move away. That
skunk would let me get within ten feet, then turn, face me squarely, and stomp
its front paws repeatedly on the ground, then turn again, wave its tail, look
over a shoulder, and proceed. I was so entertained by this procedure that I
followed for a couple of miles. I liked that air of confidence. I've seldom
seen a skunk scurry, or slink, or in any way seem ashamed. Their lifestyle
is relaxed; they walk sedately and erratically, wandering toward whatever interests
them, behaving as if their dress-for-success immaculate white and black gives
them confidence—when it's really their cologne.
A Case of Curiousity, Allen Kurzwell, Harcourt, 1992
The tour began slowly. Slugs do not make ideal guides. Slow to acknowledge
the directions of the Abbe’, slow to take Claude to the more interesting
parts of the property, slow, in fact, in all aspects of his being, Henri
did only one thing quickly – exasperate those around him.
The Measure of All Things, Ken Alder, The Free Press, 2002
For seven years Delambre and Mechain traveled the meridian to extract this
single number from the curved surface of our planet. They began their journey
in opposite directions, and then, when they had reached the extremities of
their arc, measured their way back toward one another through a country quickened
with revolution. Their mission took them to the tops of filigree cathedral
spires, to the summits of domed volcanoes, and very nearly to the guillotine.
It was an operation of exquisite precision for such violent times. At every
turn they encountered suspicion and obstruction. How do you measure the earth
while the world is turning beneath your feet? How do you establish a new order
when the countryside is in chaos? How do you set standards at a time when everything
is up for grabs? Or is there, in fact, no better time to do so?
Resist Much Obey Little, Remembering Ed Abbey, Hepworth and McNamee
William Eastlake
I first met Ed Abbey at my ranch in Cuba, New Mexico. I taught Ed how to ride
and punch cattle. When the cattle started to punch back, Ed decided to become
a writer. Ed discovered that to become a writer you must learn to drink a lot,
which can be accomplished with much practice and dedication to the art. The
art of drinking. What tempted Ed into the writing trade was what got the best
of us into it. You can sleep late. Those who take writing seriously solemnly
end up in Hollywood writing "The Guiding Light" and "Little
House on the Prairie."
Ed decided early in life to save the planet, and he damn near did. First of
all you have to learn to write well—which Ed did—then you have
to bum around the country to discover who's going to blow us up—which
Ed did. Then Ed set about blowing them up—and he did.
Home Grown Democrat, Garrison Keillor, Viking, 2004.
I was six-foot-three, 136 pounds with my shoes on, I looked like a folded
ironing board with hair, I didn't go around mirrors. I was so near-sighted
that without my glasses I lived in an impressionist world. I was in the Young
Democrats Club and the girls I knew were Democrats and sympathetic to needy
cases. The club took a ski trip to Theodore Wirth Park, my first time on skis.
These were the wooden kind with the single leather strap across your shoes.
I got in the back of the line at the top of the hill. I didn't use poles because
I had no idea what to do with them. I pushed off from the top of the hill when
nobody was looking and suddenly I was a physics experiment, trying to stay
vertical, hands over my head, trees racing by, the law of gravity all over
me, and a small spruce zoomed toward me, three feet high, and I leaned to one
side and the ground came up and whacked me and I slid on my face for a hundred
feet or so and collected a few pounds of snow under my shirt and pants, and
hiked down the hill and never tried skiing again. I still remember every moment
of that run. People ski for years trying to attain an intensity of experience
that I got the first time. I went to the ski lodge and there was my crowd,
the doinks, the gimps, the losers, hanging around the lobby fireplace and pretending
to have a very very good time waiting to go home. I took a cup of spiced tea
and sat down on the couch and glimpsed myself in an old cracked mirror across
the room, a small dark cloud with a lizard face, inept, impoverished, faintly
ludicrous, a person I wouldn't have wanted to know.
Life on a Young Planet, Andrew Knoll, Princeton University Press, 2003.
To
me, science's creation story is a deeply engrossing narrative that, told correctly,
helps us to understand not only our biological past, but the Earth
and life that surround us today. Contemporary biological diversity is the product
of nearly 4 billion years of evolution. We are a part of this legacy. Thus,
by coming to grips with life's long evolutionary history, we begin to understand
something of our own place in the world, including our responsibility as planetary
stewards.
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and The Amazon, Redmond O’Hanlon,
Vintage Departures, 1988.
There are no leeches that go for you in the Amazon jungles, an absence which
would represent, I felt, a great improvement on life in Borneo. But then there
are much the same amoebic and bacillary dysenteries, yellow and blackwater
and dengue fevers, malaria, cholera, typhoid, rabies, hepatitis and tuberculosis
- plus one or two very special extras.
The Best Travelers Tales, Travelers Tales 2004
The Snake Charmer of Guanacaste, Patric Fitzhugh
Machetes are like Central American credit cards— nobody leaves home without
one. They're everywhere. The machete is part of the Central American male identity.
The machete is the Swiss Army knife on steroids, practicality manifest, the
solution to every problem by which an American is rarely confronted: Need to
hack a path through the jungle? Open a coconut? Kill a deadly reptile? The
answer is a shining silver blade.
The Basque History of the World, Mark Kurlansky, 1999
THE BASQUES SEEM to be a mythical people, almost an imagined people. Their
ancient culture is filled with undated legends and customs. Their land itself,
a world of red-roofed, whitewashed towns, tough green mountains, rocky crests,
a cobalt sea that turns charcoal in stormy weather, a strange language, and
big berets, exists on no maps except their own.
“The Serpent” Biophilia, O.E.Wilson Havard Press, 1984.
Perhaps the most bizarre of the biophilic traits is awe and veneration of the
serpent… At least five ;percent of the people at any given time remember
experiencing them, while many more would probably do so if they recorded
their waking impressions over several months… The Hopi know Palulukon,
the water serpent, a benevolent but frightening godlike being. The Kwakiutl
fear the sisiutl, a three-headed serpent with both human and reptile faces,
whose appearance in dreams presages insanity of death. The Sharanahus of
Peru summon reptile spirits by taking hallucinogenic drugs and stroking their
faces with the severed tongues of snakes. They are rewarded with dreams of
brightly colored boas, venomous, snakes, and lakes teeming with caimans and
anacondas. Around the world serpents and snakelike creatures are the dominant
elements of dreams in which animals of any kind appear. They are recruited
as the animate symbols of power and sex, totems, protagonists of myths and
gods.
Prague, Arthur Phillips, Random House 2003
When you ask him your little question – profound or prosaic, about tea
or tyranny – he will seem to marvel at the sweet and unlikely triumph
of Life and Justice that allows for a world in which you, young person (though
you may be nearly as old as Imre himself), can thrive and exert yourself, free
of dictators, and have the time and freedom to wrestle with questions such
as this one. He appreciates this new world, charmingly represented by you and
your curiosity.
Winter World, Bernd Heinrich, Harper Collins, 2003
Crossbills raise their young when the seeds of spruce or pine cones are most
plentifully available. This often requires them to lay their eggs in the
winter. Nests with eggs have been found in New Brunswick, Canada, in the
middle of January, and in February near Calais, Maine (Smith 1949). Crossbills
are reputed to breed at almost any time of the year depending on any of a
variety of different kinds of cone seeds they may find. In contrast, the
crossbill’s relatives in the family of finches to which they belong,
our goldfinches as well as European Goldfinches, are the latest-breeding
birds; they delay breeding until August, when their seeds (thistle seeds)
are ripening.
The Man Who Found Time, Jack Repcheck, Perseus Books, 2003.
Most previous scholars who had developed hypotheses about the earth had never
questioned the church’s teachings. They saw Noah’s flood or the
waters of the unformed earth as the explanation for all odd geologic formations,
thus allowing the age of the earth to fit within six millennia… Hutton
completely ignored the Bible and the Deluge, and as a result he was able to
clearly see what rock formations told him.
Hutton’s theory was deeply upsetting on two counts. First it questioned
the veracity of the Bible, and second, it displaced humans from close to the
start of time. If the Book of Genesis was correct, man was created only five
days after the earth was; if Hutton was correct, the earth had existed for eons
before man came along. So, Copernicus took man away from the divine center of
things, and Hutton took him away from the divine beginning of things.
Charles Darwin, writing seventy years after Hutton, took the concept of the divine
away from man altogether. Darwin’s thesis was that far from having been
created miraculously by God, the species Homo sapiens was simply descended from
an ancestor shared with the common ape. No divine intervention was needed.
It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong, Berkley Books, 2000.
If you saw my body underneath my racing jersey, you’d know what I’m
talking about. I’ve got marbled scars on both arms and discolored marks
up and down my legs, which I keep clean-shaven. Maybe that’s why trucks
are always trying to run me over; they see my sissy-boy calves and decide not
to brake. But cyclists have to shave, because when the gravel gets into your
skin, its’ easier to clean and bandage if you have no hair.
One minute you’re pedaling along a highway, and the next minute, boom,
you’re facedown in the dirt. A blast of hot air hits you, you taste the
acrid, oily exhaust in the roof of your mouth, and all you can do is wave a fist
at the disappearing taillights.
Cancer was like that. It was like being run off the road by a truck, and I’ve
got the scars to prove it. There’s a puckered wound in my upper chest just
above my heart, which is where the catheter was implanted. A surgical line runs
from the right side of my groin into my upper thigh, where they cut out my testicle.
But the real prizes are two deep half-moons in my scalp, as if I was kicked twice
in the head by a horse. Those are the leftovers from brain surgery.
Vanishing Halo, Daniel Gawthrop, Greystone Books, 1999
The boreal forest forms the longest natural border in the world, a continuous
belt of green broken only by the Bering Sea and the northern Atlantic Ocean.
This green halo dominates any map of the globe with the North Pole at its center.
The magnificent Russian taiga contains the largest unbroken tracts of forest
in the world. Stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, these
Russian woods include 54 percent of the world’s coniferous forest and 21
percent of the planet’s total forest area. A t 4 million square kilometers
(1.5 million square miles), that’s nearly twice as large as Brazil’s
rain forest. Most of the Russian taiga lies in central and western Siberia.
Pompeii, Robert Harris, Random House, 2003
Attilius shielded his eyes and contemplated the villa. He had never had much
use for philosophy. Why one human being should inherit such a palace, and
another be torn apart by eels, and third break his back in the stifling darkness
rowing a liburnian – a man could go mad trying to reason why the world
was so arranged. Why had he had to watch his wife die in front of him when
she was barely older than a girl? Show him the philosophers who could answer
that and we would start to see the point of them.
The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman, Harper Paperbacks, 1994
Coyote Peyote by Carole Nelson Douglas
Nobody thinks of Las Vegas as a huge, artificial oasis stuck smack wattle-and-daub
in the middle of the Wild West wilderness like a diamond in the navel of a
desert dancing girl. Nobody sees its gaudy glory as squatting on the onetime
ghost-dancing grounds of the Southern Paiute Indians. Hardly anyone ever harks
back to the area’s hairy mining-boom days, which are only evoked now
by hokey casino names like The Golden Nugget.
The Long Summer, Brian Fagan
Lake Agassiz was the largest of the many meltwater lakes that lay along the
Laurentide ice sheet's southern margins in 11,500 B.C. It supported cold-loving
mollusks that nourish in water temperatures of about 5 degrees Centigrade and
was such a large body of open water that it exercised a profound influence
on the climate of the surrounding ice sheet. The cold surface of the lake caused
a stronger southward flow from the perennial high-pressure centers over the
ice to the north. This flow, in turn, blocked warmer winds and rainfall from
the southwest. As a consequence, the Laurentide received minimal rainfall.
The combination of global warming and scant snow accumulation meant that the
margins of the ice sheet, and the Superior Lobe, retreated inexorably. Lake
Agassiz grew and grew, swollen by glacial meltwater. By 11,000 B.C. the lakes
waters extended so far eastward they almost completely flanked the lobe’s
southern edge.
The rise continued. A tiny rivulet of freshwater crept across the deflated
lobe and its moraines into what is now Lake Superior. The rivulet soon became
a narrow stream, cutting rapidly into the soft ground. Soon the outflow became
a rushing torrent, then a deluge. A vast inundation of glacial meltwater burst
into the Saint Lawrence River. Within months, perhaps weeks, Lake Agassiz ceased
to exist, except as a few remnants, like modern-day Lake Winnipeg.
The Myth of Excellence, Crawford and Mathews, Crown Business, 2001`
Years ago, we were invited to a dinner hosted by August Busch III, chairman
and CEO of the Anheuser-Busch Co. The dinner was held at The White House, arguably
at the time the finest restaurant in Anaheim, California. One entered the event
by waking down an artificially created aisle that terminated at the feet of
the host. “Bud or Bud Light?” Busch asked each guest in turn. If
the answer was “Bud, please,” Busch nodded to a barman to his left.
If the answer was “Bud light, please,” the nod went to the barman
on his right. “Good evening, Bud or Bud light?” the genial Busch
asked us when we had made our way to the front of the reception line. “Would
you happen to have an O’Doul’s?” we asked. “Get this
man an O’Doul’s,” Busch commanded an unwary waiter. “We
don’t carry that – is Sharp’s okay?” the poor waiter
asked. (For the uninitiated, Sharp’s is produced by Miller Brewing.)
Not an award-winning display of service, but that is another story.
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie, Time Warner, 1995
“
Are you sure this is what you want?”
“
No. But we need the money. We ain’t got no money.”
“
Does everything have to be about money?”
“
Of course it does. Only people with enough money ever ask that question anyway.”
“
There’s a kind of freedom in poverty.”
That’s a lie. Checkers thought and felt worse for contradicting a priest,
her priest.
“
Jesus didn’t have any money.” Father Arnold said.
“
Yeah, but Jesus could turn one loaf of bread into a few thousand. I can’t
do that.”