Though Matthew and Marilla would have been considered me a fine specimen of boyish orphan for Mrs. Spencer to bring home from the orphanage, they, like my farming fathers before me, would have been disappointed. And a little puzzled, if experience teaches me well. As a child, I was so instinctively bad at farmwork–so dizzyingly incapable, forgetful, and unknowledgeable–that I would even make visitors to the farm tilt their heads in puzzlement. My father, who lived and breathed farming, who left the streets of Vancouver as a hippy youth to farm, who travelled to other parts of the world to help poor farmers farm better–even he knew when I was very, very young, that I would not walk in his ploughed furrow.
See, that’s part of it. I know that a ploughed field is made up of ridges and furrows because “ridge,” “furrow,” and even “plough” (spelled that way) are such evocative words. But I could never actually ever plough a field. It wasn’t just tools and machines, but the whole life of the farm. Except for my keenly refined habit of stumbling upon skunks, nothing else I did on the farm went well for me. Unless the 4th “H” in 4H–the “H” I can never remember–is “Hapless,” this is another sign that I am one of the few people to ever fail 4H. The other signs include scattering crowds, terrified animals, the worst animal in our farm’s history, my bloodied and tear-stained face, and a certain bovine organic compound convincingly painted upon my lily white show uniform.
Honestly, if I was the Cuthberts’ boy, we would have lost Matthew around chapter 7 or 8.
I have come to a resolution about this, mostly. The fact is that I have never fit in well to “guy” spaces. I never liked hunting, have never caught a fish in dozens of outings, and I have always thought snaring rabbits a cruel affair (though that’s probably because of Watership Down). Guys can fix things or build things, but I’ve never had the knack. The only car thing I was ever good at was detailing, which is what guys call cleaning. And in a place and time where hockey was a thing like religion in Montgomery’s novels, I was so poor as a hockey player that I was lumped in with the heretics like soccer lovers or moviegoers. I was frequently picked last, after the girls.
This is largely how my life has gone. The result has been, not unhappily, that I am often in “girl” spaces. I liked to read growing up, and it was largely the girls I knew who could talk about books (though I was so awkward as a teenager that the conversations usually didn’t get off the ground). In college, when I finally discovered I had a brain that I could use from time to time, it was my female classmates that I had to keep up with. I have always been pretty good at connecting with guys, but it is entirely normal in an evening for them at some point to gather somewhere and talk about guy stuff and I discover that I am surrounded by women.
It is not much of a hardship. The women in my life have been very compelling. My wife is a superstar in her field, far more excellent than I will ever be in my career. My sister is now a successful leader. My mother was a fiery feminist who finished her degree as a young mom and then ran for politics as a young woman in the 80s. My grandmother, like Lucy Maud Montgomery before her, took her teaching license in a year and forged a career for herself in the Great Depression and through the war. Most of my bosses and team leads have been women, many of my co-teachers have been women, and my PhD supervisor is a woman. Honestly, in the top 5 students in any undergraduate cohort I teach, there will usually be one guy. But there always be at least 4 women who are the best and the brightest.
I am used to being around powerful women. Yet, I must confess, I find the L.M. Montgomery Institute conference a wee bit intimidating. In the four-day conference, there is only one other name on the paper presentation list that is definitively in the “guy” category. There were a couple of other lads at our workshop day yesterday, but women dominate the program with what look like strong and varied projects. All the keynotes are women, and there was a rumour that the “greats” in the field were haunting the UPEI halls yesterday–these are the (mostly) women who challenged the view of the literati gatekeepers that Montgomery’s work was popular slub, just another clatch of genre fiction that will pass as the girls that read her grow up. They took Montgomery seriously and forged a space for academic conversation.
It’s a little bit intimidating, frankly.
I think about these things, about me as a boy in this women’s world I love so much, because I think that L.M. Montgomery invites us to think about gender in her books and in the places we live in. “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy!” is one of the great literary contrivances of the 20th century. And of that period we might want to reach back to Virginia Woolf’s brilliant work to think about women and literary spaces in new ways, Montgomery’s work, though more varied in quality, is rich and ready for exploration.
Besides, I’m not the first guy to walk into this room. Among the Montgomery trailblazers was Dr. Francis W.P. Bolger, a local legendary figure that we lost last year. Father Bolger was the kind of historian who excelled as a storyteller. I remember as a teenager watching his lectures with fascination and starting to feel that hunger for the past–which, when you listened to Fr. Bolger, felt like “our past.” Fr. Bolger took Montgomery seriously, and joined these renegade women in creating space for me at this conference (indeed, in creating the conference to begin with).
So, I must admit that as I get ready to head into the conference today, I am feeling well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit. I hope there isn’t anything too startling in that. I suspect that I will be received well enough, and if I am well behaved, I can avoid having a slate broken over my head.
I am part of the social media team for the conference, and you can follow at #LMMI2018 on Twitter and Instagram. On Sunday or Monday I will be blogging some highlights and notes I made during the weekend. Feel free to chat online, and I may add an update or two on here.
Update: So, there are some guys here. At least a dozen in a crowd of nearly 200. One is a teaching colleague, Dave Hickey, who created a gorgeous display, “Unearthly Pleasures: The Artful Astronomy of L.M. Montgomery.” This is a digital exhibition based on his academic work, highlighting how connected Montgomery was to the heavens. I also had a chance to meet some Japanese scholars and a Japanese-Canadian librarian. Breaking out my rusty Japanese, but I can still bow in all the right ways. I think I’ll be okay.
Update: Had a great Day 1. There is a real warm feeling in the room with some strong papers. I’m already mentally tired!
And this is why you are a rock star. Praying for you today, dear friend.
Thanks Elaine!
This is a lovely post that reminded me of a good friend who loves lots of “girl” things and spends a lot of time in a world full of women. I’m always very glad and grateful to have a friend who will exchange book theories (and fan conspiracies about Gilmore Girls, and enthusiasm about musicals) with me. I know that conferences are somewhat different, but I am sure your keynote will be received in much the same spirit! 🙂
Thanks so much Lou Lou! I think I have a richer experience because of my life in the worlds I play in. I’m doing pretty well here. The conference is filled with generosity of spirit.
And I’m not a keynote speaker, just another paper presenter. But I am super pleased to be included!
I wish I could be on a conference with an all-woman keynote list, just for a change. I’m fairly sure I’ve experienced the opposite though.
I really liked this post and hope you’ll enjoy the conference!
Ah, yes. I am in theology so there are a lot of male spaces. I don’t mind that the tables are turned here.
Thanks for the note. I am enjoying myself but already mentally full and tired!
I just saw my old Narnia discussion partner, the Rev. Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali (later Bishop of Rochester) quoted as saying, at the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem the other day, “there is, I believe, a feminine genius in reading the Bible. How women read the Bible can be different than how men read it, and men can learn from that.”
Sweet blog post! And you know my husband doesn’t always fit in the typical guy crowd either. I looked up the hashtag on twitter and IG and look forward to following them. Enjoy!
Awesome! Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I like Jared.
So, I don’t particularly enjoy things like camping or fishing and I’ve never been hunting either. But would you turn those things down or consider doing them at least once in your life?
I’d consider doing them once 🙂 and then call it good enough!
Actually, I’m a camper, and will hunt for food. I’m just not very good at it!
hahahah! Well, then you’re one up on me 😉
I hate camping…
The “(mostly) women who challenged the view of the literati gatekeepers that Montgomery’s work was popular slub” sounds very ‘Inklings’/Wade authors-ish to me. (I think, among other things, of Anne Ridler agreeing with the suggestion that Williams looked on his novels as entertainments, adding that he never made a “distinction between literature and entertainment, either in his own reading or in what he wrote”, which seems characteristic of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Frances Burney, and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, too, for a couple earlier examples.)
David, to clarify: You are saying those figures did not separate entertainment and “literature” as a special thing? Did that give them a more catholic taste–a wider reading?
Just saw this reply! Yes – not that in whatever specific ways they would not recognize different genres and stylistic ‘registers’, but that they did not pit “literature” and “entertainment”/”pop literature” against each other, or compartmentalize them strictly, in their appreciation or their own work. That accessibility and immediate enjoyment, and depth and richness, all go properly together.
I just saw my old Narnia discussion partner, the Rev. Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali (later Bishop of Rochester) quoted as saving, at the Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem the other day, “there is, I believe, a feminine genius in reading the Bible. How women read the Bible can be different than how men read it, and men can learn from that.”
As at least a great Anne reader, so far, I’m not sure I ever thought of LMM as especially a writer for girls, or for children, though I suppose I can see immediately that the Anne books, like Narnia, and The Hobbit, are ‘children’s books’ for accessibility, in the first place, and distinctly of a girl’s perspective (to start with). Interesting matters of ‘distinctness’ and ‘commonness’/’sharedness’ to ponder…
I suppose Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and Robert Grave’s Homer’s Daughter (1955) might feature interestingly in such a discussion.
And, should I feed Lewis’s striking question (and impressions) to Greeves 88 years ago today (22 June 1930) into the matter? “I have finished [Mary Webb’s] Precious Bane and think I have enjoyed it more than any novel since the Brontë’s [sic]. Why do women write such good novels. Men’s [“Mens” 1979] novels, except Scott, seem to me on the same level as womens’ [sic] poetry.”* (In another (non-fiction) prose context, some 24 years later (OHEL, p. 307), he wrote, “If quality without bulk were enough, Lady Bacon might be put forward as the best of all sixteenth-century translator.”)
*’Lewis, Hooper, and the Apostrophe’: a paper long-since written (or ‘long due’)?
“Except for my keenly refined habit of stumbling upon skunks, nothing else I did on the farm went well for me.” Wow, did this involve unbudgeted-for tomato juice expenses, and a lot of submersion time? I always wished I could have a pet skunk (‘de-scented’). We did later get raccoons housing in the porch roof on their own initiative, but they entailed the expensive of getting a firm with humane traps to rehouse them further into the country, rather than becoming ‘livestock’.
Interesting! Speaking as a woman who feels bad at/bored by much that is traditionally considered feminine (including some of the best things, like emotional intelligence), like you partly because I’d rather be reading or writing, I wonder if intellectual pursuits have their own gender or non-gender in broader society—I think intellectual men and women both tend to be regarded by people who don’t share their interests as not masculine enough or not feminine enough. Though I think you’re absolutely right that it’s easier to find women who’ll talk about books than men in high school, and I’m pretty sure being a guy would have been much harder on me socially and emotionally than being a woman. Hope the conference is still pleasant.
Certainly the academy is gendered (easier to see in romantic languages with gender-specific nouns). But intellectual pursuit? Wow, interesting question. Intellectual life was a male space for so long, with bright, educated women as interesting exceptions (sometimes also as heretics, witches, or sages). Now, where the intellectual world is peopled (in my generation) with women and men, are we intellectual women and men a certain kind of non-woman or non-man?
I am pleased to be a guy, even if I’m not a guy’s guy. I kind of like the fluidity.
It turned out to be an excellent and welcoming conference. But the response of the crowd, some claimed, had a feminine tint to it. More on Thursday.
Thanks for your reply! I expect from this and other things I’ve noticed on your blog that you have interesting ideas on gender in general. Anywhere on the blog I should particularly look to see more?
Yeah, I don’t think on here. It is a dicey day and age to be talking about gender and I’m hesitant to use my pulpit here until I know more and have lived more. I think I have said that I am a feminist and egalitarian, and I do use feminist tools for reading literature and theology. Honestly, I’m a bit afraid to say much more.
…yeah, makes sense. Lot of complex and sensitive issues there.
On another note—I have a possibly impudent question. This may never happen, but I sometimes fancy the idea of trying to do academic work on the Inklings. Unfortunately, I am a bookstore clerk with nothing but a B.A., albeit in English literature—do you think anyone would publish me? Do you have any advice on this project? I’d be grateful for any thoughts you have to offer.
Not a bad question at all. I do this all the time.
Two paths: an independent writing-scholarship path with your own rigorous schedule; or you can get an MA locally or by distance and find out what works for you. Have you looked at Signum University’s MA in imaginative literature? It has a Tolkien Studies track with other Inklings courses in its imaginative lit pathway.
I gave my first paper at Kalamazoo as an undergraduate, and the 2016 Tolkien among Scholars conference in Leiden had various ‘independent scholars’ (including me) reading papers (and having them published in the proceedings), and I suspect that is not unusual, so, no harm in asking around – also among interested publishers, like the Mythopoeic Press, Walking Tree Publishers, Nodens Books, Luna Press Publishing, Wipf and Stock… (though in practice I can be shy about that…!)
Thank you both! In the event I go for formal grad school (a very uncertain thing) I’m likely to go whole hog and aim for a fully funded lit PhD, but I have looked at and been tempted by Signum University’s offerings all the same. I have been (off and on) doing ambitious but disorganized self-study and have every intention of continuing to do so—most recently I wrote a paper on my other favorite author (Diana Wynne Jones) that I’m trying to coax into being good and perhaps will try to publish too. It’s great to know publishers who might be worth contacting about Inklings work—thank you!
Good wishes for pursuing your current paper! I haven’t caught up with Diana Wynne Jones’s Reflections On the Magic of Writing (2012), but see from the Wikipedia bibliography of her works that it includes “Reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia” – and “The Shape of the Narrative in ‘The Lord of the Rings'” (and many other interesting-looking titles). She cheerfully accepted an invitation to speak to the Lewis Society, and one thing I particularly remember was her admiration of Tolkien’s brilliance a narratologist. (Her Wikipedia article has a link to a lively 2003 interview with Caron Parsons, with some interesting things about Lewis and Tolkien.)
Thank you again! I haven’t read through Reflections either, but I read a lot of those essays on her official website before it was taken down (again and again as an obsessive teenage fan—wish I’d found the courage to write to her before her death; still can find the website on the Wayback Machine). Are you very familiar with her fiction?
“Intellectual life was a male space for so long, with bright, educated women as interesting exceptions” – I’d love to see an overview of the contours of that in the history of Christendom till, say, 1800. (Things like St. Charlemagne apparently not being able to write much, but being able to compose allusive Latin poetry in his head, and St. Teresa of Avila not knowing much Latin but writing superbly in Spanish (or did she, too, dictate?), both in contrast to, say, St. Eudocia, Hrosvitha, Anna Comnene, St. Hildegard of Bingen, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, spring to mind…)
I haven’t read all of Avila’s Mansions book–goodness, a tough book–but I was under the exception it was hers. Would it be fair to say that most of the genius female minds in Western Europe and the UK from 500-1500 ended up being honoured as saints?
Me neither, but I read a wonderful Dutch translation of her Life (but have not dug it up again yet to check the editorial stuff about just how we come to have it). It fun how one of her poems has been (as it were) ‘mainstreamed’ as a Taizé chant.* That’s an intriguing question my immediate response would be probably lots, anyway!
*For a couple tangents, interesting how (1) Williams uses a translation of one of St. Hilgegard’s in his play, The House of the Octopus, (2) many women have been hymnographers by composition and translation.
I just read that the board of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) of the American Library Association decided to change the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal (first presented in 1954) to exclude ‘Laura Ingalls Wilder’ because her work “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values”. Her books were produced (and all but one published) between 1932 and 1943, thus coinciding with LMM’s last two Anne books, both Pat books, and Jane of Lantern Hill. Has LMM come in for similar treatment on either side of the border (or elsewhere in the English-speaking world), to your knowledge? If not, do you think that likely (or is that too unpredictable – or, again, all to predictable)?
I don’t know Wilder’s work, and care nothing for her specifically, but the ALA’s stunning lack of subtlety shows where their true heart lies. The hypocrisy! If the comments and vignettes are racist–perhaps they are–then they were racist in 1954 too, when the first medal was awarded. Deadly. Some future artist or government or culture will reject the ALA for its lack of inclusivity, I’m sure.
Lots of people make Wilder-Montgomery parallels, but probably mostly reviewers. Her name popped up at the conference but nothing more.
There is distress about Montgomery’s base ignorance about aboriginal peoples and a few slighting comments. I like the discomfort, and that people felt free to address it. But there was also some subtlety, a recognition that if she ever had met an “Indian” she may have had her world opened a bit. Or perhaps had stereotypes confirmed? Who knows? I never met an Ainu person living in Japan, and have no daily contact with First Nations people in my life–though one of my cronies in middle school would take me to drum circles and other things. When I worked at a community college out west, 1/3 of our students (800/2400) were aboriginal. If you wanted stereotypes confirmed, you could get them confirmed there. If you wanted new experiences of a people unknown to you, it was the perfect place.
What the ALA confirms for me is that we will find new kinds of puritanisms and prejudices to limit our vision as life moves on. Today we are hyper-shocked if someone says something offensive along a certain line. The weird anti- and pro-Jordan Peterson blather is indicative of that. To read a person from another culture and time–like Wilder–and not appreciate her space is anthropologically problematic and shows the limits of our vision. At the same time, to tacitly accept the racisms and hatreds in texts leaves people oppressed and our community impoverished.
I loved reading them both, first as a grown up, and perhaps to a certain extent for similar reasons – vivid books about children, with an inner sense of their experiences, in a recent, agrarian past.
I haven’t seen any ALSC specific details, yet – but ran into a reader who knows his Wilder who points to the fact that in Little Town on the Prairie, the inhabitants of a town in Dakota (in 1882) staged a minstrel show – in blackface. I can’t say I remember that, and will have to look it up, to see how it is depicted.
For, another point I’ve seen raised is, the question of attention to distinctions between depiction and commendation – e.g., in his Otello, Verdi is not obviously revealing his innermost thoughts and trying to persuade us to adopt them with the words “Credo in un Dio crudel… (‘I believe in a cruel God – who’s like myself’) sung by Iago! Is this a foray by ALSC against possibilities of depiction?
I think you’re very much on target in saying “we will find new kinds of puritanisms and prejudices to limit our vision as life moves on.”
Thanks for the steady head, here. I got a wee bit heated. I find the moral police today not just offensive but tiresome. A large part of that is that I am largely in moral sympathy with their views–until the point they sit in judgment of other times and places and cultures (which I find inconsistent with liberal inclusivism and anti-colonialism).
I just encountered a striking observation: “Perhaps Laura Ingalls Wilder would be pleased her name is no longer associated with an award from an organization like ALSC.” (That is, ALSC as currently constituted and directed.)
The opposite of a wiz at international copyright law, I yet suppose Laura Ingalls Wilder will not be largely out of copyright till 2028.
LMM, on the other hand, I suppose largely has been, since January 2013. Which, alas, I further suppose can mean open season on her work where ideological hijacking is concerned. And, lo, Netflix seems to be mainstreaming a certain sort of fan fiction (if that’s among the ways of putting it) – if the quotations from a 15 July Indie-Wire interview with writer-producer Moira Walley-Beckett are accurate (e.g., ““It was very exciting for me and the writers to create that. We’ve been talking about the queer soirée, which is how we refer to it, since we all first sat down together” – !).
What’s the copyright rule where you are? In Canada it is author’s death + 50 years, so Lewis is out of copyright (but not all his books, some of which are posthumous or owned by others). Laura Ingalls Wilder would, I guess, be out of copyright in Canada as of last January.
To continue this sub-theme or whatever, now I saw that some UK organization that describes itself as “a small independent charity with a national and international reputation” (which revised a key word in its name, from “Language” to “Literacy” when it became a charity), CLPE, has (funded by the Arts Council) produced ‘A Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children’s Literature 2017’ “to quantify and evaluate the extent and quality of ethnic representation in children’s publishing in the UK.”
I have not yet proceeded from the announcement with “summary of findings” to the linked full report, and so do not know if “processing submissions of all children’s literature published in the UK that featured Black or minority ethnic (BAME) characters to determine to what extent they were represented” includes reprints as well as new works first published in 2017. The Wikipedia article, “Classification of ethnicity in the United Kingdom” (as “last edited on 16 July 2018, at 05:05 (UTC)”) does not offer a history of the designation “‘black, Asian and minority ethnic’ (BAME)”, but does note that it (among others) has “been criticised on a number of grounds, including for excluding national minorities such as the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish from the definition of ethnic minorities”. (Curiously, CLPE in their announcement (as quoted above) have omitted “Asian” in stating what BAME includes.)
The summary includes “Over half the fiction books with BAME characters were defined as ‘contemporary realism’(books set in modern day landscapes/contexts)”, and “Only one book featuring a BAME character was defined as ‘comedy’”. Apparently, ‘contemporary realism’ is distinguished from historical fiction, but I don’t know who is doing the defining or where fantasy and science fiction may figure in the exercise.
If it included reprints, and a broad sense of ‘ethnic’, as well as breadth as to what gets considered ‘children’s literature’, it would be interesting to look at various Inklings fictions in this way. E.g., Hobbits are very much ‘minority ethnic’ in terms of the imagined population of Middle Earth, as is Merlin in Edgestow. And, even in a narrow definition, Inkamasi is a central character in Shadows of Ecstasy, and presumably the various centrally important Persians in Many Dimensions would count as “Asian,” and the various centrally important Roma characters in The Greater Trumps as “minority ethnic”, and I suppose Prester John in War in Heaven as one or the other. If “Only 1% of the children[‘]s books published in the UK in 2017 had a BAME main character”, 57% of Williams’s novels do (with various degrees of humour evident and arguably all classifiable as ‘comedies’ in the ‘happy ending’ sense, if complex and unusual ones)..
Well, this is an intriguing turn. I still go back to the concern of social puritanism (with excuses to the Puritans) in the protectionism of today. What about, instead, a resource that helps parents and teachers read offensive great books of the past to kids?
The “(mostly) women who challenged the view of the literati gatekeepers that Montgomery’s work was popular slub” sounds very ‘Inklings’/Wade authors-ish to me. (I think, among other things, of Anne Ridler agreeing with the suggestion that Charles Williams looked on his novels as entertainments, adding that he never made a “distinction between literature and entertainment, either in his own reading or in what he wrote”, which seems characteristic of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and Frances Burney, and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, too, for a couple earlier examples.)
Yeah, the Inklings were set aside for being genre fiction. Slighting references to Williams’ potboilers, Lewis’ kids books, and Tolkien fandom were common enough I guess. The early fantasy lit scholars had to defend fantasy as “literature.”
Lewis addresses this somewhere, right: today’s canon is yesterday’s popular fiction?
I can’t remember, but it sounds likely… what springs to my mind is his (and, I think, also other Inkling) attention to the opposite re. ‘fairy stories’ which were court entertainment-reading/lit. in the days of Louis XIV, and get ‘relegated to the nursery’.
As someone who is at least a great Anne reader, so far, I’m not sure I ever really thought of LMM as especially a writer for girls, or for children, though I suppose I can see immediately that the Anne books, like Narnia, and The Hobbit, are ‘children’s books’ for accessibility, in the first place, and distinctly of a girl’s perspective (to start with – and a woman’s, later). Interesting matters of ‘distinctness’ and ‘commonness’/’sharedness’ to ponder…
I suppose Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) and Robert Grave’s Homer’s Daughter (1955) might feature interestingly in such a discussion.
And, should I feed Lewis’s striking question (and impressions) to Greeves (made 88 years ago the other day – 22 June 1930) into the matter? “I have finished [Mary Webb’s] Precious Bane and think I have enjoyed it more than any novel since the Brontë’s [sic]. Why do women write such good novels. Men’s [“Mens” 1979] novels, except Scott, seem to me on the same level as womens’ [sic] poetry.”* (In another (non-fiction) prose context, some 24 years later (OHEL, p. 307), he wrote, “If quality without bulk were enough, Lady Bacon might be put forward as the best of all sixteenth-century translator.”)
*’Lewis, Hooper, and the Apostrophe’: a paper long-since written (or ‘long due’)?
I’ve been working on “Anne’s House of Dreams” as ambiguous theodicy, and it is hard to read a book like that as juvenile fiction.
I guess Lewis didn’t know about Dickenson, though he would have mentioned a handful of women in near-first class poetic places. It’s a good question about women-men and writing that Woolf goes some way in answering in “A Room of One’s Own”.
good luck with that apostrophe paper!
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be savvy enough to figure out how to search for apostrophes, given searchable texts… which makes it sound like a life’s work, unless someone had systematically collected examples as they went along (or, of course, did know how to set ‘search’ properly)!
Quickly checking the index to Collected Letters, vol. I, I see (20 June 1916, to Greeves), “I have never yet read any of Christina Rossetti’s poems […] I believe she is very good” – followed by a tantalizing series of references to his wanting to, and not yet getting, to take a look at Greeves’ copy – starting 102 years ago today! (I’ll have to try to follow up and see if he ever discusses her, later!).
You say, “Except for my keenly refined habit of stumbling upon skunks, nothing else I did on the farm went well for me.” Wow, did this involve unbudgeted-for tomato juice expenses, and a lot of submersion time? I always wished I could have a pet skunk (‘de-scented’). We did later get raccoons housing in the porch roof on their own initiative, but they entailed the expensive of getting a firm with humane traps to rehouse them further into the country, rather than becoming our ‘livestock’.
Ugh, yeah. I stank at times. We sat it out. I never had full direct spray, but there were some lonely days post-skunk.
Skunks are very beautiful, but do raccoons ever get over being nasty and shifty?
I don’t know, but I grew up loving Sterling North’s Rascal and his Raccoons are the Brightest People, so I’m very predisposed in their favor, but also see it would probably not be a good idea to try to have them as pets.
Driving around wooded bits of Pennsylvania and distinctly smelling skunk spray, I’ve wonder how terribly far it carries and lingers.
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