Measurable, specific, attainable, all these things, right?
Here's my 2015 goal: I want to be writing and editing text, as in chapter text, for NaNoWriMo, November 2015. Yeah, I know it's about novel writing. Yeah, I know that's ambitious.
I'm putting it out there, though. And I'm going to pick this blog back up and blow the dust off and rattle it around a little bit.
I'll start next week, with a few hours scheduled on Monday to start to work through some of Daniel Chipman Linsley's reports. I'll also check in with Abby Maria Hemenway, and see if she collected any good early stories related to Figure.
By the end of January, I want to have visited both the Woodstock and Randolph Historical Societies and gone through what they have on file. I'll also start fleshing out and fact-checking the timeline I've put together from various sources. I'm finding more and more, as I think about and read about this, that there's a lot of received wisdom and not a lot of double-checking. (See also my investigation into whether Figure was used as a parade mount for James Monroe.)
I'll be reporting on my progress as I go along, and checking in at the beginning of February to report my next goals & things to tackle.
Onward!
Showing posts with label d.c. linsley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label d.c. linsley. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
The Ultimate Insult
D.C. Linsley took his defense of the Morgan breed very seriously. In response to one anonymous criticism of the breed, written by a self-described Vermonter and excellent judge of horsemen, he goes line by line through the criticism and "proves" how false it is. It's an emotional and highly charged defense during which he honestly offers no real facts; it's one man's opinion against another. Halfway through the rant, Linsley delivers the ultimate insult, which had me giggling in what was supposed to be a quiet research space:
(Linsley, p. 76)
Not a word of proof is offered, and the assertion leads one to think that the writer is neither a horseman nor a Vermonter, and that he has only borrowed the name of our little State, to have a good place to write from about Morgan horses.OH SNAP.
(Linsley, p. 76)
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses
I have, to be honest, not a lot to report right now on my research. I'm in a reading-and-thinking stage, in which I'm taking in large quantities of information and and taking lots of notes - mostly about other things to find, or look at.
I've gotten about 100 pages into Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses, which was the first concerted effort to document and catalogue the history of the original Morgan, Figure, and to properly establish the Morgan horse as a breed.
It's an interesting thing: Linsley spends almost a hundred pages setting up his book, by way of a world tour through different breeds of horses, then an American tour of the types of horses that are used in various regions of the country. He spends a long time describing the type of work a horse in American ought to be able to do, and then he spends pages and pages detailing what he thinks is an objectively perfect conformation for that work. In utterly exhausting detail.
At the end of that - after he has defined what makes a breed and then described his ideal horse - he concludes that Morgans fit all these characteristics. Then he spends a dozen pages or so utterly trashing one or two people who happen to have evaluated Morgans and not been wild about them.
Only then is he ready to begin to discuss the origins of the breed, which he does in his trademark exhausting manner. On that, more later.
Linsley's book is like so many others about the Morgan breed. It has a thesis. He sets out to prove that Morgan horses are a distinct, valued breed, and that they are moreover the best possible American breed. He fuses the work he is doing in trying to establish Morgans as a respected breed with a sense of regional (Vermont) and national (American) identity.
He is not the first, nor will he be the last, writer to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible that he set up a storyline for writing about the Morgan that is still very much in play today, both in fiction and nonfiction writing about the Morgan horse.
I've gotten about 100 pages into Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses, which was the first concerted effort to document and catalogue the history of the original Morgan, Figure, and to properly establish the Morgan horse as a breed.
It's an interesting thing: Linsley spends almost a hundred pages setting up his book, by way of a world tour through different breeds of horses, then an American tour of the types of horses that are used in various regions of the country. He spends a long time describing the type of work a horse in American ought to be able to do, and then he spends pages and pages detailing what he thinks is an objectively perfect conformation for that work. In utterly exhausting detail.
At the end of that - after he has defined what makes a breed and then described his ideal horse - he concludes that Morgans fit all these characteristics. Then he spends a dozen pages or so utterly trashing one or two people who happen to have evaluated Morgans and not been wild about them.
Only then is he ready to begin to discuss the origins of the breed, which he does in his trademark exhausting manner. On that, more later.
Linsley's book is like so many others about the Morgan breed. It has a thesis. He sets out to prove that Morgan horses are a distinct, valued breed, and that they are moreover the best possible American breed. He fuses the work he is doing in trying to establish Morgans as a respected breed with a sense of regional (Vermont) and national (American) identity.
He is not the first, nor will he be the last, writer to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible that he set up a storyline for writing about the Morgan that is still very much in play today, both in fiction and nonfiction writing about the Morgan horse.
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