Medicine Show (2)

This entry is part 17 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

 

The folk concept of a dancing crow pre-dates the Jump Jim Crow ministrelsy and has its origins in the old farmer’s practice of soaking corn in whiskey and leaving it out for the crows. The crows eat the corn and become so drunk they cannot fly, but wheel and jump helplessly near the ground where the farmer can kill them with a club. —“Jump Jim Crow,” Wikipedia

While a blackface
musician pays Jump
Jim Crow for
the assembled yokels, oh Lord—
the fake Indian sweating
in a scratchy blanket
holds up a bottle, holds it up:
pale blue universal nostrum of frost
whose patent can stay pending
almost indefinitely.
It’s impossible not to buckdance.
I swear they turn a key
somewhere in my liver
& banjo us with the bright
plink of coins.
This is one church where
we’re all in on the joke
& no one expects the wine
to be anything but whiskey.
A freight hurtles by & we rock
in its sudden wind,
its whistle better
than any pipe organ.
When your baby wails
like that, cracks Indian Bob,
it’s time for a spoonful,
& the banjo man winks & taps
his rawhide belly.
Somewhere John Brown
is plotting treason, & You—
You are with the sparrows,
rapt, watching how
comically they hop.

Backache and Kidney Mixture Number 20

Sledding Plummer’s Hollow

My sledding video from last winter was such a success, I thought I’d try it again this year. The conditions were pretty icy and scary last winter, so I stopped at the half-way point, not wanting to risk the video camera any farther. (I hold it in my right hand as I ride — this isn’t a helmet cam.) But this winter, given all the wonderful cold weather and regular snow, sledding conditions have been exceptional, and with the January thaw imminent, yesterday afternoon I went ahead and shot this video of a sled ride clear to the bottom, a mile-and-a-half-long run. It isn’t quite non-stop, as you’ll see: there are two places, slight uphills on the way down, where I had to get out and walk for a few yards. (The first is the half-way spot where I stopped in last winter’s video.)

Since I was on hard-packed snow rather than ice this time, the ride was relatively quiet. It’s the quiet that I love about sledding, as much as the speed, so I decided to dispense with rousing music on the soundtrack and go for straight realism. (Actually, a little less realism might’ve been nice, but unfortunately my camera doesn’t have image stabilization. I also apologize for all the sniffing — but that too is the sound of winter, isn’t it?)

I’ve been sledding for a long time — since at least the age of four, I think. My mother remembers watching me sled the hill below our farmhouse in Maine, trudging up and flying down over and over at zero degrees Fahrenheit. We moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971, when I was five. We did a lot of sledding as a family in the early 70s; my mother’s back still permitted her to go down a gentle slope sitting up. I remember sledding by moonlight, the five of us, taking turns on a shifting assortment of runner sleds and wooden toboggans, our whoops strangely not out of place in the silvered landscape. We never had anything plastic, nor even an aluminum saucer. We were arch traditionalists.

Winters were serious business back then, boys and girls. I remember our first brown Christmas, sometime in the late 70s, because it was such an exception. This winter so far has been like a trip into a time-machine (and given the option of going anywhere back in time, how many of us from happy families wouldn’t choose our own childhoods over the most stirring periods of human history?). January was always the best month for sledding because it was the coldest.

February, by contrast, was always the serious snow month, which brought its own excitement — snow forts, long walks on snowshoes — but it also meant we had to do a lot of tromping in order to keep the sled runs open. Dad showed us how to shuffle slowly along in a straight line, making several passes. But I don’t think anyone else had the patience for it but him and me, and after a few years it was all me. I was an inveterate day-dreamer, so it didn’t much matter what I was doing — I was always somewhere else, deep in a story. And you know, maybe that explains the attraction of sledding to someone like me, who never got into sports otherwise: going down a hill on a sled is one time I am fully alive to the present and nothing else.

After Mom’s back got too bad to permit any more sledding, Dad stopped too, and from the mid-70s on, his main contribution was to mow a sledding trail through the field with his tractor and brushhog each fall. Oddly enough, we didn’t otherwise keep walking trails through the fields mowed back them. We were still raising chickens and ducks and cutting hay, so I guess we viewed them more as hayfields than meadows for wildlife watching. We didn’t, for example, have the trail down through what we call the amphitheatre, where I start my sled ride in the video. The sledding trail Dad mowed every year went straight down from the upper edge of the field opposite the barn. We’d sometimes shovel snow into a bump at the bottom to make group toboggan rides more exciting: airborne!

It’s funny the way people look at me now, as an almost 44-year-old man, when I mention I like to go sledding. As I noted in last year’s post, even though lots of adults enjoy skiing and snowboarding, somehow sledding is for children. But is it? About a week before Christmas, I was joined by a couple of kids — my four-year-old niece Elanor and an older boy of around nine, I think, and the boy’s father, who’s my age, joined in as well. We had a blast sledding and tobogganing down through the field. But I couldn’t help noticing that both children seemed to regard the walk back up the hill as something onerous. Well, to be fair, their legs were a lot shorter than mine, but on the other hand, they were in way better shape than me. The walk up the hill is how you build up the warmth that makes the ride down tolerable, I told them, but they weren’t buying it. So maybe you have to be a grown-up to truly appreciate sledding.

One of the other things besides sledding that signals my permanent adolescence to most people, of course, is the fact that I don’t own a car and barely know how to drive. I am not a big fan of the internal combustion engine. But I’m not sure I’d enjoy sledding nearly as much if I weren’t so accustomed, as we all are, to the contrasting experience of riding in a car. It makes sledding feel like a magic carpet ride.

It helps that these days I invariably sled in a sitting position, which is a bit slower than lying down because of the way the weight’s distributed — the runners tend to bite in toward the back and it can slow forward momentum considerably, depending on the conditions. But it feels faster and more dangerous, especially the sharp turns when you risk tipping over. About ten years ago I started to notice dangerous twinges in my lower back whenever I went over a bump while sledding prone, so much as loved sledding that way I was forced to switch. Our neighbor Paula threw her back out a couple weeks ago while sledding with her grandchildren in front of their house (the third residence in Plummer’s Hollow). And she’s just a year older than me.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the real reason most adults prefer to leave sledding to the kids. But I hear there are an increasing number of publicly designated sledding hills, for example in Pennsylvania state parks, and given the tendencies of people in my generation to try and prolong childhood indefinitely if possible, I suspect I might even be part of a trend. But even if all the downhill skiers decide to switch tomorrow, forgo their lazy-ass ski lifts, and take up something truly physically demanding, I think I’ll still stick to the quiet and solitude of a Plummer’s Hollow sled ride.

How to tart up a WordPress category page

Since I’m running the new podcast from within a category here, I decided it was time to make some long-delayed tweaks to the category archive pages. Some of this information was surprisingly hard to come by, so I thought I’d share it here for fellow WordPress users (note that this only applies to independently hosted sites, not those on WordPress.com).

1. Displaying an RSS button next to the category title

All WordPress categories have their own feeds, but if you want to give your readers the ability to subscribe to them, you have to display them somewhere. I can easily envision someone being only interested in my Nature/Ecology or Photos categories, to the exclusion of everything else. But since I [used to] list my categories in a nifty slide-down menu (click the Browse link in the navigation bar), I couldn’t work the RSS links into a list, which is the usual approach. Why not display them at the head of each category archive page instead?

First I downloaded the standard orange RSS feed icons, uploaded the smaller one (14×14 pixels) to Via Negativa’s media library, and copied and pasted the URL into Notepad. Then after considerable searching, I found the requisite code, added the icon link in the appropriate spot, and placed it one space to the left of the bit that calls up the category title in category-archive.php. Here’s what I ended up with:

<?php
$this_category = get_category($cat);
print '<a href="'.get_category_feed_link($this_category->cat_ID, '').'"><img src="http://yoursite.com/wp-content/ ... /feed-icon-14x14.png"></a>'; ?> <?php single_cat_title() ?>

2. Adding the category description to the first page of the archive

You might’ve noticed that the categories section of the WordPress dashboard (left menu, Posts drop-down) allows you to edit each category to enter a description. These descriptions can even contain links — see for example my Photos category, where I’ve just added links to my photoblog and Flickr page. Most blog themes leave descriptions out, but they’re a great feature, I think. I don’t know why I didn’t do this a long time ago. Here’s the code:

<div class="category-description"><?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { ?>
<?php echo category_description( $category ); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?></div>

The conditional statement restricts it to the first page of the archive. The div definition of course can be anything you want, and one look at my current styling will tell you that I am not someone you want to consult on design.

I’ve barely begun adding descriptions to categories, and probably won’t add descriptions to all of them, but it’s looking like a good way to add additional information or important qualifications. And I just realized that the new descriptions appear as mouse-over text in this theme’s Browse menu, too. Far out.

3. Styling categories

The above tips barely scratch the surface of what’s possible. To create different styles for each different category archive, you have to create a new template file for each category and upload it to your theme. This involves copying and pasting the code from the main category.php into a text editor, then naming the file something like category-7.php, where 7 is the number id of that category. Finding that number is the only tricky part. In the categories section of the dashboard, move your cursor over the category link and look in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. At the end of the string, where it says cat_ID=x — that’s your number.

With new category template files in place, it’s just a matter of defining the CSS styles in the stylesheet and modifying the files accordingly. It’s not something I plan on doing, but I include it here for the sake of completeness. (Please note that if you want individual styles for posts on the index page according to category, that’s an entirely different procedure.)

4. Adding custom sidebar text to categories

This is another thing I’m unlikely to implement here, but it seems really useful for magazines and other not-so-bloggy websites. There are a growing number of plugins to apply this and other CMS functions, but not being a real geek I’m not really qualified to evaluate them, so you should really look elsewhere for authoritative assessments. (Not that you’ll find any: good information on WordPress is hard to find, lost in a sea of search-engine bait.) For what it’s worth, though, we’ve been using the new WP Custom Widget for qarrtsiluni’s first online chapbook (to add publication history notes in the sidebar of pages like this one), and it’s easy to use and still works fine, knock wood. So if I wanted to add custom text to category sidebars, I guess that’s where I’d start. The real way to do this is with conditional tags, but that requires some pretty gnarly coding — it’s not easy copy-and-paste stuff as in the examples above.

Woodrat Podcast, Episode 1

What I’ve been reading, what I’ve been writing, and what’s up with all the banjos

Topics include: Why a podcast and what I hope to accomplish with it; what a woodrat is; how to keep mandatory titles from messing up haikus; poems by Howie Good, John Haines, Sarah J. Sloat, Esther Jansma, and Vasko Popa; what I look for in poetry and why I write it; how I got started writing banjo poems; Jonah and the gourd vine; and New Year’s resolutions.

Links:

Thanks to T.M. Camp for the podcast inspiration.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

Tree feast

three deer in snowy woods 2

I’ve been remiss in not linking to Jason Hogle’s wonderful Festival of the Trees #43: The Celebration Tree Grove. It manages to be everything that the previous edition of the FOTT, hosted here at Via Negativa, was not: elegant, concise, thoughtfully composed. Nor did Jason neglect to include a conservation message:

The grove stretches out before me, stone trails and wooden benches leading me through the birth of a place where loved ones are honored, remembered and celebrated. Not remembered through statues and not honored with memorials. A more important kind of dedication celebrates lives lost: the planting of trees. The grove represents the very spirit of 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.

Go visit and enjoy a feast of links.

three deer in snowy woods 1

Today was the last day of deer season in Pennsylvania. These three does, which often hang around the houses, weren’t quite out of the woods yet when I photographed them from my front porch today around 11:30. Today was the sunniest day we’ve had in quite a while, and I had been intending to capture the long shadows and sharp contrasts when the deer showed up. Thank you for making the forest more photogenic, even as you do your best to ensure that it has no future by eating as many shrubs and seedlings as you can.

three deer in snowy woods 3

Feasting on the limbs and saplings felled by October’s freak snowstorm is O.K., though, I suppose.

If you’d like to be included in next month’s festival at the U.K.-based treeblog, here’s the call for submissions.

Banjo vs. Guitar

This entry is part 19 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

 

The Banjo Player, by William Sydney Mount (1856)
The Banjo Player, by William Sydney Mount (1856)

Where guitar says body, banjo says head.

Where guitar says soundboard, banjo says membrane.

Where guitar says six, banjo says one for each finger.

Where guitar says bridge, banjo says keep going.

Where guitar says hole, banjo says full.

The Dueling Banjo

This entry is part 16 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

 

Don’t be fooled:
this whitefaced smile,
these nickel-plated teeth,
this laughter can fuck you up.
Just ask the sadistic master
whose slave put the banjo on him
composed a devastating satire
with a rolicking tune.

Men was a-singing it while cutting
trees out in the woods.
Women singing it in the fields.
Even the little children
played games to that song.
Pretty soon folks was singing it
all up & down the river.
Master Robert couldn’t go
nowhere among the slaves
without hearing something of it,
maybe just the tune without the words,
like they was humming it

so Richard Creeks remembered
decades later.

Why laughter? Because tears
were expensive, love meant staking
your happiness on a master’s good will,
but laughter was free.
The banjo doesn’t ask which star
turned a blind eye on your birth.
It doesn’t lullaby or sweet-talk
like some guitar.
And because its father was a goat
& its mother was a gourd vine,
all the while you’re shaking,
head tilted back, it’s climbing
& stripping your tree.

*

Italicized lines condensed and lightly edited from “Richard Creeks on Songmaking,” in A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore by Harold Courlander (Southmark, 1996), pp. 376-377.

The internet must die

That haunting snippet of music you kept hearing on NPR, between stories on “All Things Considered”? Thanks to npr.org and the internet generally, you were able to track it down within minutes and listen to the whole song for free, because someone had thoughtfully uploaded it to YouTube. But alas, aside from that snippet, the song had nothing to offer, and it kept offering it for more than five minutes over progressively more synthetic beats. You try listening to a couple other pieces by the same band, and they’re so horrible you can’t get past the first minute. You’re reminded of a woman you glimpsed once in a side-street for several seconds, and how she haunted your imagination for years thereafter. What does the imagination know? Just enough to be dangerous. But the internet — the internet knows too much.

Open-Backed Banjo

This entry is part 18 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

 

I am untroubled by serpents
or the marinated feet of pigs.
I bear no antipathy toward bears
or the bees they bedevil,
& the devil never tempts me
to any evil I can’t invent on my own
(forgive me if I don’t delve into the details).
What makes me break down is a banjo,
lonesome as our only god the clock
but with two hands, both of them fast.
Looking in its open back
can be disconcerting: What makes it go?
There’s nothing but a bare rod
& the smell of rain.
Where’s the balance wheel?
The escapement?
The gear train?
It calls to me, the ghost in its machine.
Play it, son!
Make it ring like a hammer on steel
& rattle like a Gatling gun
until it smokes.

Catskin Banjo

This entry is part 15 of 34 in the series Breakdown: The Banjo Poems

 

The shack was hers,
every plank & plunk of it.
In heat when they treed her,
bleary with need, she had let
the dog get between her
& the door.
She went up the tallest
walnut she could find,
but the man struck
the bark with the flat of his axe
& listened—
she felt its long deep shiver
as if it were her own.
We’ll take ’em both,
he told the slobbering hound,
& began to chop.
With each blow
her claws dug farther in
& her sex pressed down
like a third & spellbound ear.
She rode it to the ground
where the dog & the axe were waiting.
A lifetime later
her hide still held fast
to the walnut wood.
The shack was hers,
every plank & plunk of it.
Five strands of gut
thin as claw marks
stretched from top to bottom
of the only door.

*

I am indebted to Foxfire 3 for information on making catskin (and other) banjos. Their older informants were recalling practices from their youth in the southern Appalachians around the beginning of the 20th century.