Confused

There's a style of cultivation that's a sort of perennial garden plot. Common in the New World, North Africa, other places. It's called conuco. Usually stocked by roots and stems. Very efficient, good use of space, in the tropics you could eat out of it constantly. And it already has a name, conuco; I think I leaned the word in the late seventies, when we gardened a greenhouse on Martha's Vineyard. Now, whoever it is that does these things wants to "introduce" the Old Norse word swithe (with the form swidden thrown in) as the word(s) for it. IT ALREADY HAS A NAME. I was reading this in an off-print which I immediately took outside and torched in the BBQ grill. It's bad enough that words change meanings over the years. I've been told many times, as a compliment, that my work was the shit; gay is hardly ever used anymore to denote a frivolous time. It's not that I mind words being added, petrichor, is a nice word, as is derecho. Swithe is fine, and swidden is ok, but there's already a word. I've installed hundreds of windows, and on a lot of them, especially the more expensive (and better) ones there's often a sticker from The American Fenestration Council certifying that the window is, or does, what it claims. I always wanted a job with The American Fenestration Council. Even just as a janitor, though cleaning up after those de-fenestration orgies would probably be a pain. All those bodies, all that blood. Although I think in Prague they were actually thrown into a canal and they opened the windows first. History is difficult because it's so difficult to know what to believe. Edward Gorey said one night, when we'd eaten all of the lamb stew, all of the bread, and consumed two bottles of a very good cab, that everything should be read as fiction. He mostly read crap, Victorian fiction, the third floor of his house was choked with bookshelves overloaded with pre-romance Romance novels. Herbert was a odd reader too, when I think about it, he loved the early novels of Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop, Crome Yellow, and I admired them too, in the way that they paralleled Proust. Reread Beckett's little book on Proust. I think it's titled Proust. Paula Poundstone does a very funny bit about naming things. The best that Beethoven could come up with was String Quartet # 67. And even that was probably somebody later, trying to keep things in order. He probably thought of it as that tune he'd used to bed the miller's daughter. One needs to study motivation. When I'm alone in the woods, with my John Deere hat and my looking glass, I seldom think about that other world. Kins(e?)y walked over from B's cabin. She had a couple of very cute puppies that somebody had dropped off in the forest, and I explained the phenomena of people dumping unwanted animals. They were cute puppies, but all I could think about were a couple of Chinese recipes for puppy and I felt not an ounce of sentimentality. Hardened-off to the whole idea of keeping an animal of any kind. If you have a dog, it runs off other animals, if you have a cat it eats birds. I can barely keep myself alive, who needs the added burden? On Saturday you pick up hundred pound sacks of sweet feed, and on Sunday you haul a ton of hay. And one of those was your only day off. Back to digging post holes. Spare me the grief. I'd rather spend Sunday afternoon plinking at Neco Wafers, sipping a gin and tonic, considering the placement of a comma.