SCALES #42: stinted pasture
Hello!
A little piece of hyper-local research: it seems possible “Mistick fields” was not in fact a name once given to Medford south of the Mystic, despite what Wikipedia claims, citing an 1855 history. In a punchy fact-checking article from the April 1916 issue of the Medford Historical Register called “Some Errors in Medford’s Histories”, John H. Hooper sets the record straight:
“Mistick fields were on the north side of Mistick river (Malden and Everett). The land between Main street, Medford and Menotomy river was called the Stinted Pasture. And between Menotomy river and Medford pond was called the Line field. Creek Head creek was called Nowell’s creek.”
All these names on top of names (the Menotomy River is now called Alewife Brook), for geographic features that don’t always even still exist.
The force of personality in “Some Errors...” distracted me from the fact that its assertions in fact are just as unsupported by citation as the article it claims to correct. It’s a reminder I can be a pretty credulous person: first for assuming a fact on a Wikipedia page bolstered by a citation to a book must be true, second for assuming a forcefully presented fact-check, with no supporting evidence, must be true. Never hurts to be reminded there’s enough carefully done, morally engaged reporting being done that it’s always a good idea to think critically before assuming a circulating fact must be true.
And maybe, like me, you wonder what “stinted” means. To the OED! “2. Of pasture: divided into or subject to rights of pasturage; limited to the pasturing of a definite number of cattle.” But also more generally, limted in quantity or scope. (George Eliot in Romola (1863): “He was content to lie hard, and live stintedly.“)
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I’m midway through Alexander Chee’s new How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In as far as I’m getting before its library due date, it has read so far as a more-or-less autobiographical essay collection, arranged chronologically: an undergrad creative nonfiction course with Annie Dillard, AIDS activism in San Francisco, MFAing at the Iowa Writers Workshop, cater-waitering for William F. & Pat Buckley.
Having just caught up on a piece about Dillard and the writing of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I appreciated the Dillard essay’s sketch of her strong personality:
“In that first class, she wore the pearls, and a tab collar peeped over her sweater, but she looked as if she would punch you if you didn’t behave. She walked with a cowgirl’s stride into the classroom, and from her bag withdrew her legal pad covered in notes, a thermos of coffee, and a bag of Brach’s singly wrapped caramels, and then sat down. She undid the top of the thermos with a swift twist, poured coffee into the cup that was also the thermos top, and sipped at it as she gave us a big smile and looked around the room.”
Chee is also generous with sharing Dillard’s shop talk: Describe emotions through action. Verbs make writing vivid. Count the verbs per page and try to increase their number (after Johnson). “Don’t ever use the word ‘soul,’ if possible. Never quote dialogue you can summarize. Avoid describing crowd scenes, especially party scenes.”
But other parts of the book take a broader view of the (what has to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek) title. A brightly rendered essay remembering a night in drag on Halloween night in the Castro is clearly formative for Chee, on equal footing with his Dillard course. I admire how Chee unapologetically weaves together topics that could be seen as in opposition—personal history, the craft of writing, politics—in a way that doesn’t foreground one at the expense of the others. Though they don’t necessarily all fit together tidily, a complex, true-feeling whole emerges.
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“The metaphor of birth applied to literary works has never seemed convincing to me. The metaphor of weaving seems more effective. Writing is one of the prostheses we have invented to empower our body. Writing is a skill, it’s a forcing of our natural limits, it requires long training to assimilate techniques, use them with increasing expertise and invent new ones, if we find we need them. Weaving says all this well. We work for months, for years, weaving a text, the best that we are capable of at the moment. And when it’s finished, it’s there, forever itself, while we change and will change, ready to try out other weaves.”
Leon Neyfakh debriefs on the making of Watergate podcast Slow Burn, his first audio documentary project. He found that different forms demand different strategies for transitions:
“You can’t really do elegant transitions in radio. You don’t want elegant transitions, because you need the person who is listening to notice that the action is shifting. In print I might be compelled to find the exact right word so that it feels seamless to go from A to B. In audio it’s way better to just make it clear you’re now talking about something else. Because if the person has drifted off, up to that point, at least they’ll click back on and they won’t be confused when they tune back in about why they’re there.”
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—Adam