at a bookstore recently—remember those?—The Stoneslide was reminded of an important restaurant maxim. A customer two people ahead was complaining with vigor and petulance about an inconsequential matter. She was laying into the clerk, too, not only the store, despite this being out of the clerk’s control. The clerk was a pro, though, letting the woman’s illegitimate vitriol drip off her like the midnight spray in a dive bar on New Year’s Eve. As I watched the clerk take it like a champ, I recalled the ageless piece of wisdom that the only thing worse than a customer speaking is a customer complaining.
Resilience and consuming drive to produce are critical to writers. So is determination to stand tall before truths one confronts. A writer who wants to do work that lasts must be equal to the power of observed truth. Poet Robinson Jeffers was one of those writers.
But in great writing, no truth is simple. The words contain all the sensation, all the emotion, and all the cogitation of the writer’s lived experience—whether those elements be immediate in the text or not. We have uncovered the story of how Jeffers composed the stirring lines that bring on the end of the poem “Hurt Hawks,” and we believe this new context adds to the prismatic splendor of the poetic image.
The Stoneslide Corrective occasionally studies early drafts of writings, in order to learn, to instruct, to grow, and sometimes in order to explore for the sheer enjoyment of compositional exploration. Consulting the work of scholars, archivists, biographers, librarians, private foundations and repositories, and, when appropriate, consulting the writers themselves, we re-create the process through which a work was brought into being, often including the many drafts writers go through.
Note: All historical work is verified by HistoriRight, Inc.
Unless you’re at church, temple, mosque, or a court proceeding, do feel free to turn up the volume of the device you’re using to read this (except your brain, of course; please don’t turn up that device’s volume).
The Stoneslide Corrective saw a bumper sticker the other day that read, “Kids who hunt, fish, and trap don’t mug little old ladies.” We wondered briefly if this claim was true. But the research to prove or disprove the claim exceeded our attention span, and we accepted the generalization in the way we accept so many generalizations each day to keep from overloading our brains with rowdy thoughts. Since we saw this sticker on a car parked on a busy street in a densely urban area, clearly the intent here was to warn passersby to be on their guard against kids who don’t hunt, fish, and trap, since those are the likely muggers. So, when you’re walking through the city streets, seek children carrying rifles, fishing rods, and steel-toothed spring-loaded traps, and stay close to those children. Then we started wondering if there might be a better bumper sticker—one with even broader usefulness. What other warnings drawn from generalizations might prove helpful? We came up with, “Kids who mug little old ladies don’t grow up to crash the world financial system.” We’ll have to get that printed, stat.
