A rumbustious concurrence
After David posted about the delight of hearing the word rumbustious on a podcast, I found it myself within days. In Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Edward Carpenter, we meet the older Walt Whitman.
By 1877 he had buried his earlier self, the rumbustious Brooklyner who hung out with tough, street-wise New York 'b'hoys', recasting himself as a sagacious 'good grey poet' and democratic patriarch.
And yesterday I read a review of Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, which Doug Ireland says recreates "those heady, joyously rambunctious" early days of the movement.
Now all I need is a robustious.
I'm enjoying Carpenter very much. Rowbotham tells us that when his prose poem Towards Democracy first appeared with lines like
I look upon him who makes all things.
I sit at his feet in silence as he lights his pipe, and feel the careless resting of his fingers upon my neck.
I see the fire leaping in the grate; I see the nodding of grasses..."
one wag called it "Whitman and water."
--Julian
