haplessness, consumption, and brevity

The Cubs are inflicting the usual dose of October heartache/heartburn, so I'm going to pickle carrots instead. (There's also work to get through, but staying away from monitors for the next few innings seems like a good idea.)

There seems to be no escaping Thoreau today, albeit in texts that address the mythologizing of him. In Mark Caldwell's The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862-1954, his death from tuberculosis is presented as an example of a 19th-century tendency to cast such deaths as gentle, pure goings-into-the-good-night -- an erasure of what one could argue were the victims' true personalities (vigorous, worldly, earthy) when they were healthy. And Dawn Potter relays Katherine Schulz's observations about Thoreau, including thought-provoking comparisons of Walden to Prospect Park (neither being all that off the grid) and Thoreau to Laura Ingalls Wilder (fictional vs. real isolation).

(An extra layer to this, which I only just remembered: I'm attending a wedding later this year in Prospect Park... and the groom and the officiant and I participated together in a mock trial about thirty years ago where I was drafted to portray Thoreau. "But I haven't read any Thoreau." I forget how our classmates persuaded me that a quick trip to the library would give me enough to improvise with, but I vaguely recall them managing to make contrarian-ness sound like a compliment, and they later reassured me when my Thoreau turned out to be a terrible witness on behalf of Socrates [who was once again sentenced to death], because what I'd said as him was in character.)

Signal boost: 7x20 is seeking tweet-sized pieces by women and writers of color. Non-paying market.

On a related note, I'm the featured poet at 7x20 this week. So far:

Code Name Taurus...
Persian calligraphy

*peeks at scoreboard* FFS, Cubs. OK, I'm off to do some violence to root vegetables.