MACRO MICRO AND VICE VERSA

On losing my vision

2010-05-07T14:05:00.005-04:00

Today is Friday. On Monday, I will have the cataract in my right eye removed. In its place, a plastic lens will be placed in my eye. The surgeon tells me she will be correcting me as close to perfect vision as possible. The left eye will be done two weeks later.

There are hitches. Without additional surgery (slitting the cornea, ugh) I have to choose between correcting my astigmatism and correcting my nearsightedness. High school classmate Judy Burke Kraynak warned me that the plastic lens does not adjust between near and not-so-near. If you don't choose a correction that, say, lets you read your watch, you will need to wear glasses for watch-reading. Choosing a correction for close-up vision means no astigmatism correction. Which to do?

(Left: An autumn hillside at Storm King mountain.)

I agonized over this for a couple days, then I realized that seeing clearly into the faces of people I love is really important to me. Imagine, holding a baby up close and not being able to focus on its face. (Reminder: babies are fascinated by glasses and want to grab them.) So I am going for the near vision. (Continues below.)

There's another hitch that nobody ever thinks of. I have worn glasses for 57 years. About 45 years ago my prescription moved me into the category of legally blind or, as my then-ophthalmologist said, "I could get you out of the army." But it's not that I don't see anything without my glasses -- it's just that I don't see what you see.

Without my glasses I live in a world nobody knows but me. Among other things, it's a world of shimmer and of melded moving colors. Light and shade have different meanings in this world. What I see as areas of light or shade may actually be the same color as their surroundings but a different unseen texture. Movement is different in this world; a train moving across the far valley doesn't penetrate it at all. A car moving toward me could be a tank, or a buffalo. Sun glittering on waters of a flowing creek is dazzling -- there's nothing like it!

So I've been playing with images trying to approximate some of the things I now see that I will no longer see. The image to the right is something of an approximation -- although now that I look closely, the trunks of the young trees are far too clear -- I probably shouldn't show them at all. But I wanted to show how astigmatism works too. At least in my case, it's almost double vision, or a shadow vision with a similar image adjoining the stronger image.

So, by a month from now, this singular, personal, private world will be gone from me, never to return. Surely this visual world has helped make me who I am! Who is to say that the nearsighted kid who gets called weird isn't really walking in a completely different world?

I don't mourn its passing

2010-05-05T11:56:00.005-04:00

Youngstown, Ohio is featured in this month's Inc. magazine. Youngstown! The city with poisoned air, in the heart of the Steel Valley. Famous for nearly a hundred unsolved bombing murders (which more or less ended in November 1962 but which have remained alive in memory). Famous for electing bribe-taker Jim Traficant to the sheriff's job and then to Congress, and then for supporting him while he did prison time. (Left: One of a million pics of an abandoned steel mill.)

But to many of us from Steel Valley families, Youngstown also has Mill Creek Park, 4,400 acres and more than four miles long, of lakes, waterfalls, tumbling streams, glacial caves, forested cliffs, and flowered meadows. (Right: Mill Creek's silver bridge in winter -- my dad would take me there the day after Christmas to feed the chickadees, which flocked on the field by the bridge.)

Youngstown has ethnicity. Everyone knew a restaurant with something special. Carchedi's in Lowellville? Wedding soup. Cornersburg Pizza? Best pizza in the world. Kravitz's Deli? Corned beef to die for. Joseph's? A separate psrt of the menu "For Fressers Only." Yes! I did know people -- cosmopolitan types -- who sneered that "in Youngstown, even food at the Ding Ho tastes like spaghetti sauce." Well, one thing that didn't taste like spaghetti was kolachi. I just googled kolachi and what was the FIRST result? A recipe from Youngstown, Ohio! I note that the recipe keeps the fillings a secret but next time your Aunt Ann is making it, I prefer walnut.

In the Labor & Industry Museum (near St. Columba's Cathedral, left) there are blast furnaces and locker rooms lifted out of a steel mill. Locker rooms signs are in at least a dozen languages. While men of different ethnicities mingled in the locker rooms, their families didn't mingle anywhere. I have a photograph of a sixth-grade me as a finalist in the Vindicator spelling bee. Two other finalists represent St. John the Baptist school (Slovak) and St. John the Baptist school (Polish). Honterus Lutheran had services in Swedish. My college sweetheart John's family spoke Friesish at home. My friend Oksana Zayatz's dad was a Ukrainian orthodox priest (and Gayle Woloschak, one of my profs this semester here in Chicago, was best friends with Oksana's little sister).

Neighborhoods on Youngstown's west side had blood feuds going and their leaders never spoke to outsiders. For a couple years, my mother chaired the American Cancer Society's annual fund drive. She tried to get organizers in every neighborhood of Mahoning County. Nobody in a hundred blocks of the west side would speak with her -- not patients, not the priests, not the parents, not the children. Serbs here, Croats there, Ruthenians and Rumanians, Slovaks and Slovenes, all living in hostile silence in the shadows of their own, unshared saints.

And that ethnicity became something to flee. At Youngstown State, right along with their diplomas students would get a name change. Topolski became Talbott, Degli' Uomini became Degly. Why did Ozersky become Ozer, though? A Youngstown past was something to be ashamed of and left behind as soon as possible.

And it wasn't just the people in the neighborhoods of post-WW1 immigrants who wanted to get out. Pioneer families like mine, who'd settled there before statehood around 1800, counseled their kids to get out, move away, don't come back. Our generation saw people who stayed as deliberate losers. Over the years, when I sent Youngstown articles to several childhood friends, their question was, "Why do you care?"

I cared because Youngstown is a fascinating place and a life there can be well-lived. In the western foothills of the Alleghenies (which you can see now that the mills are gone from along the Mahoning River) most neighborhoods had tree-lined streets. There were dozens of cultures. Sure -- my mother's family, Ulster Presbyterians out of the Pennsylvania mountains, were a culture too (they just didn't understand that theirs was also a culture, with dialect and tribal rules). First Unitarian Church, on Youngstown's north side, was a Harvard culture. Butler Art Institute (right) in its McKim, Mead & White building, was a copying-Andrew-Carnegie culture. It was possible to live a good life in Youngstown -- if you could let go of that nagging feeling that others, people in bigger cities, people on the coasts sneered at you for being too dumb to know the difference.

I am so proud of my many cousins who've stayed around the area (or, as we say, the southeast corner of northeast Ohio). Betsy Johnquest taught at the Rayen School (which my dad, both grandmothers, several aunts and uncles, and one ex-husband attended) and preserved its 140-year history in a final Rayen Annual when the school closed. Heather McMahon and Brigid Kennedy were both in a recent selection of Forty Under Forty Who Are Making a Difference in Youngstown. Uncle Dick McLaughlin returned from a law partnership in Washington to make a difference in Youngstown. And they have.

The reporter for Inc. magazine went there looking for people who have given up. But giving-upness is old news. Black Monday, in 1977, was 33 years ago! Two generations have come and gone -- to the south or wherever they imagined a pot of gold awaiting -- but Youngstown is still there! With ethnic food, a lively art scene, doers and shakers who open their ranks to newcomers, a symphony orchestra, several wonderful museums, and an interesting and different city plan. You can have all that and encouragement for a large garden and live near a farm, within ten minutes of City Hall, at the same time. That sounds like a pot of gold to me! (Right: Lanterman's Mill in Mill Creek Park.)

I have always wanted to build a house out of Coke bottles and cement. And I'll bet Youngstown would welcome a non-standard idea like that! I have a site overlooking a glacial gorge all picked out, too.

Virginia, we hardly knew ye

2010-04-25T21:46:00.004-04:00

We approach the end of the state of Virginia’s Treason, Secession, and Shooting-Yourself-in-the-Knee Month. Bob McDonnell, the Virginia governor who decreed the festivities, has gone on to boost Earth Day by promoting drilling off the coast of Virginia!

Bob McDonnell may wish to play down his values. A day for the Earth, but a whole month for secession? But realizing that the Confederacy’s great soldier Robert E. Lee thought secession was a bad idea, I wondered whose ox is being gored so badly that Virginia needs a whole month to scratch its ancient wounds.

Do Lee descendants themselves wish to retrieve the family honor? Reputable scholars agree that Lee’s honor wasn’t and isn’t on the block here. The website for Stratford Hall, Lee’s family home (after the loss of Arlington to the United States government), has a descendants-of-Lee family tree. It’s not totally up-to-date, since the last recorded birth was a quarter century ago, but in 2003 Internet sources reported 20 living descendants.

I searched the Internet for suggestions that Lee descendants are active in the secession month movement. They are a remarkably low-profile lot. Hasseltine R. DeButts, Lee’s great-great-great-grandson and born in 1964, holds two patents. His brother William Fitzhugh DeButts’s wedding was reported in the New York Times, but the report focused more on the bride’s family and didn’t mention the Lee connection. Amelia Lee Glover, the youngest on the online tree, seems to be a recent Dartmouth grad. So Lee family muscle, such as it is, is not behind the Organized Soreheads of Virginia.

So who is Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s secesh-minded gov, anyway? His Wikipedia entry tells us he was born in Philadelphia to a family of Irish descent. His father was career military and Bob himself spent time in the military. The two McDonnells saw heavy action on the battlefields of peacetime Germany and Newport News, Virginia. Then, Governor Bob became a salesman. Not very Lee-like.

On the other hand, we all know about those fighting Irish and in fact the governor went to Notre Dame. But the Irish connection is intriguing. Many Irish immigrants fought in the Civil War. Might that be the secession connection?

No, it isn’t. The famous Irish Brigade in the U.S. Civil War was from New York. Overall, though, "About 190,000 Irishmen contributed to both sides of the cause. It is estimated that 150,000 served on the side of the Union and that about 40,000 served the Confederacy. After the conflict was over, more than 130 Irish soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor." The same source suggests that nearly 50,000 of the dead were Irish by birth or descent.

So get that. If Governor "Fightin' Bob" McDonnell is claiming that his military background puts him in a position to honor Lee -- well, why doesn't it seem likely that the great general needs to be avenged by a sunshine soldier? If the Gov is out to avenge his Irish brothers who died on the battlefield, statistics suggest that nearly 80% of the Irish dead died at the hands of the south.

But there's an even more interesting back story to Irish Bob's wrongheaded politicking. In his race to the bottom, blind to the slaveholders of Virginia as he panders to their heirs, Gov. McConnell ignores -- or more likely is ignorant of -- the hard reality that his own blood may have been slaves in the south. Lost in the centuries of agonizing over African slaves in the Americas is the story of Irish slaves sold into New England, Virginia, and the Caribbean before, after, but especially during Cromwell's time.

"In the 12 year period during and following the Confederation revolt, from 1641 to 1652, over 550,000 Irish were killed by the English and 300,000 were sold as slaves, as the Irish population of Ireland fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000," reports a history of the Cavanaugh family. [my bolding] In another brief period, at least 100,000 Irish children were taken away from their Catholic parents (who were forbidden by law to even exist and thus had no claim to their own children) to be sold into Caribbean slavery. Some sources quote figures across the entire 17th century of nearly a million Irish sold into slavery; several thousand Scots were also enslaved.

Where did the Irish go? Well, the prettier women were concubines to the planters, but children of these "unions" were also slaves. Frequently the men were more literate than their owners, and were valuable as house slaves and business managers. But their price was low -- they were enslaved to empty Ireland so the land could be redistributed to Cromwell's favorites -- and they were more likely to be beaten to death than the Africans, a luxury item. Speaking from my own pale perspective, I wouldn't be surprised if melanoma leveled many of them. Crafty owners chose to cross-breed them with Africans because their lighter-skinned offspring sold better on the North American continent (especially, of course, the women).

Montserrat alone has a population distinctive because of its mix of Irish and African. From the late 19th century comes this story. "About 100 years after the 1768 rebellion, a ship crewed by Irish-speaking Corkmen dropped anchor at Montserrat....Eventually, as things loosened up a bit, it's said the Montserratans also informed the Corkmen with good humor and a straight face 'Tá sé sin ait, ní fheictear mar Gaeil sibh' - 'That's funny, you guys don't look Irish'"

Another visitor to Montserrat reports: "And then there were the obviously Irish surnames, despite the less than obvious features that went with them: the Burkes, the Collins, the Lynches, the Murphys, the Maddens, the Mullings, the Lanigans, and the Walshes. There were the McCarthys, McCormacks, McDermotts, McDonnoughs, McGanns, McLaughlins, and McMorrises. I found the O'Briens, O'Connors, O'Reillys, O'Haras and O'Meallys -- the list is almost endless, with Madden being one of the least popular, as Madden's is the name of the main undertaker in Kingston."

What can you say about a man -- an elected official in these United States today -- who celebrates the rape, murder, and enslavement of millions of people? You can say that he is free of compassion. You can say that he is ignorant of what "America" is about. You can say that he is calculatedly pandering to a group of people like himself, who envy the perhaps "chivalrous" history of a few Virginians and are pretending a likeness, aspiring to a sort-of-aristocracy among the dead. And who, incidentally, are unimaginative, mean-spirited, and deeply forgetful about what their God intends for them to be.

What can you say about a man who celebrates the rape, murder, and enslavement of a million and more of his own kin? Who sees slavery with the face of his own mother, of his own son, and separates himself out of that image? Out of sight, out of mind, and six degrees of separation counts for naught. Virginia's Governor McCromwell has truly lost his soul.

The Marble Man, 145 Years Later

2010-04-12T23:47:00.001-04:00

It’s Day 12 of Virginia’s Bad Ideas and Treason Month. Today is the actual anniversary of the end of the Old Dominion’s ancien régime, and since any number of pallid politicos are having their belligerent say, it’s worth examining the greatest Virginia soldier of them all. (And the handsomest! Right: Lee as a young man.)

Robert E. Lee stepped open-eyed into his future. He was no fan of the Confederacy in its first stages, but when President Lincoln asked him to take command of the entire Union army, he refused, saying that he could not take up arms against Virginia, should it secede. It did secede, and he went with it, [I assume] resigning his commission in the army of the U.S.A. He ultimately commanded the Confederate forces in the east, and it’s in that role that we are most familiar with him.

If Lee had chosen to lead the Union army, it’s unimaginable that the war would have lasted as long as it did. His record at West Point was one of the best in its 208-year history, and he served as its superintendent from 1852 to 1855. Lee was an outstanding military leader during his life in the U.S. Army and did the best with the resources he had in his years with the C.S.A. (It’s worth remembering that his resources included soldiers trained at West Point and the many United States military bases built throughout the south.)

Nonetheless, I believe that Lee’s most remarkable feat — of all his life — was his surrender. What the soft-bottomed soreheads in Virginia (most of whom have no doubt visited a military base only as a tourist, just like me) forget is that Lee surrendered. He had to. He had no other option. The C.S.A. was defeated. It was not betrayed. The Confederacy lost. Robert E. Lee was the supreme commander of the Confederate army in the east and he believed the war was lost. Period, end of story. (Left: Lee as the Confederacy's great general. The portrait is at Washington & Lee.)

Lee and General Grant, head of the Union forces — and, incidentally, with a career trajectory nothing like as brilliant as Lee’s — discussed the terms of Lee’s army’s surrender for several days. There was no treaty, perhaps because Lincoln’s government insisted that the C.S.A. was not a sovereign nation. The terms of the agreement were simple, permitting every soldier to return home safely, if he turned in his arms and horse or other animal (if publicly owned). Soldiers could keep horses or other animals if they were privately owned, which was regarded as a mercy to men who had to return home, possibly to ruined homesteads, and begin the spring planting.

The paroles — the pledge of safe passage to these soldiers — were based on Lee’s word alone. In effect, the last public use of Lee’s honor came in the maintenance of the peace. Imagine what it would have been like if Lee reneged! Within the week Lincoln was assassinated, and a lesser man might have taken up arms again or encouraged an uprising. Lee did not.

I am telling a complicated story in a simplistic way. There’s a lot to argue with in terms of Lee’s choices. He was a slave-owner, although in a limited way, although he did control an estate that owned slaves. Slaves on his property did testify that he had ordered whippings. He had been shown that Arlington, his estate across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., was financially viable only when operated with slave help, and that trumped any thought of freeing them. After the surrender, Arlington was confiscated by the United States government as part of the punishment for Lee’s treason. Lee became president of Washington College in Lexington; it subsequently became Washington & Lee. (Right: The Matthew Brady portrait of Lee, following the surrender, in Richmond.)

Robert E. Lee died in 1870, but he was in the process of becoming “the marble man” as his biographer, Thomas L. Connolly, described him. The myth-making had begun.

Confederate History Month, Day 11, and Golden Tomatoes

2010-04-11T02:18:00.002-04:00

Confederate History Month continues. I am reminded of a classmate from the Virginia boarding school I attended. I visited her Norfolk home and was shown into a drawing room with a portrait of a Virginia gentleman over the fireplace. A cut in the canvas had been clumsily stitched up. "What happened?" I asked, ingenuous at 18. "Oh, a Yankee soldier stabbed it with his sword," I was told.

A few years later, I wanted some reassurance that I had not imagined the exchange. Ah, said my friend. "That's what we were told in the family!" She went on to say that her parents had taken the portrait to a restorer who examined the rip and said no, it was not the result of an intentional cut -- probably just wear, or a bump against a sharp object when being carried. That story seems to me to be a metaphor for Virginia's ill-considered new festivities. The actual history, the intent of the story, and its actual effect seem strangely, nastily, mean-spiritedly askew from each other.

Well, the small minds in the Old Dominion don't affect my life here in Chicago. Today the temperature was 72 and I had a lovely walk through Kenwood and along the lake. And I worked up a thirst, also a hunger. What would still my craving?

Too early for gazpacho, I thought, which is only adequately served with red tomatoes ripe and scented, taken from the vine in the last several minutes. I recalled reading about a golden gazpacho, with yellow tomatoes and red-gold fruit and veg. Yellow tomatoes were in the store -- ripe-ish looking, not too insulting, from Mexico of course, and I recalled that I have a huge batch of bean and kale soup in the fridge which was just too wintery for a day like this.

So: two pounds of yellow tomatoes, into the blender. Two cloves of garlic. A medium red onion. Two red peppers. It wouldn't be gazpacho without cucumbers. Olive oil, wine vinegar, ground pepper, some salt. A large handful of cilantro. And a beautiful ripe avocado! Result: smooth, creamy texture ... but a little brash (the garlic). An hour later, mellowing and even creamier, but ... boring, actually. I put a cupful into the blender and added carrot juice; sweeter but two-dimensional. A second cup, with sweet potato this time: sweeter and stiffer, no more interesting. Orange juice -- sweeter and wetter. By the fifth cup, I was still dissatisfied and tried blending in some fresh yogurt cheese I made this morning: tangier, certainly. I realized I have consumed more than a quart, which is a lot of tomatoes, and put the experiment aside until tomorrow.

A small thing, but a lot more nourishing than the sourness emanating from Richmond.

Santa Claus, is there REALLY a Virginia?

2010-04-08T20:39:00.004-04:00

I have wanted to resume blogging, but as time passed by, asked myself: what topic really deserves being the one to break silence for? But Gail Collins tells us, as kings of stupid begin to line up south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Explanation: Virginia's governor says it's now Treason and Secession History Month! Yes, indeed -- economic crisis be damned, the new south hangs on to its old garbage. Onward into the swamp, my friends.

The alternative histories are fascinating. If you agree that it would be legal for a state to secede (Lincoln's view is that secession was illegal, thus impossible) a CSA [Confederate States of America] would have been created, of states who believed they could secede as needed. So it would have been a more fragile organism to start with. Add to that the short fuse and honor obsession of the Celt (historians Grady McWhinney and David Hackett Fischer separately suggest that the south was basically a Celtic culture), and without any prodding, the CSA would be even more likely to implode or explode.

Western provinces would not have automatically assumed they would join the Union -- but on the other hand, if the CSA was combustible, or relatively poor, or did not believe in unity, why join it? Would Texas have stayed in the CSA once oil was discovered? Why? I think it more likely that Texas and Louisiana would have held their noses and allied with each other, because of oil and the Mississippi River. They would be better off doing business on their own with the CSA than joining it. The north central territories would NEVER have joined with the CSA, port or no port, but would do business through a foreign New Orleans.

But again, the northern route through the Great Lakes would have united the Union and the north central territories firmly with British Canada. I can't imagine the Union and the north joining Canada, but I can imagine the southern tier of populated Canada being ever more firmly allied with the USA. Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Ottawa, Quebec, and Montreal were already population centers by this time -- a far better substrate to build an enduring alliance than one along the Mississippi. The Chicago River might still run north!

Once you no longer have northern sheriffs being forced to observe the Fugitive Slave Act, the CSA's northern boundary would always leak. Imagine a Berlin wall stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi! Would the CSA have the leadership or the money to make it happen? If you were a southern soldier with a small-holding and a slave or two, or none, once the dust had settled and your so-called honor was no longer threatened by the Yanks, would you feel like paying taxes to Richmond or sending your son to protect that boundary? It didn't work for the British between 1763 and 1776, it didn't work for eastern businessmen in 1792, and it didn't work for East Germany in 1989. In fact, it didn't really work for East Germany between 1961 and 1989 either!

I haven't read this anywhere and I'm not spouting another author's ideas -- I've just been tossing this around in my head in the few minutes since reading Gail Collins's blog. If I can come up with such serious reasons for the CSA not to stay together in just a few minutes, I don't think it really could have survived.

The north has been subsidizing the south since the writing of the Constitution: the two-thirds compromise and the siting of the capital on the Potomac. The south has been holding the north for ransom -- almost literally, since we've been putting our military bases there -- ever since. After the late 1860s unpleasantness, it received northern industry because carpetbaggers saw a fresh wilderness to exploit. Before globalization, it received northern industry because southerners were willing to sacrifice their dignity, working without unions. The south would have been better off listening to Robert E. Lee's better angels than sending him off to fight.

(Incidentally, Lee himself did not always listen to his better angels. You can read here about how he treated his own and inherited slaves.)

Detour >>>>>>>>>

2009-08-28T06:37:00.001-04:00

One way
Chicago 790 miles
Meadville Lombard Theological School
New students this way

The entering div student's first sermon

2009-08-20T14:24:00.003-04:00

Felling the need to post something to prove I'm still here, I am posting my very first sermon ever, which I delivered last Sunday at the First Unitarian Society of Westchester.

If you've visited my UU congregation, you'll know that I usually speak extemporaneously. This was the first time since high school, I think, that I actually wrote something out and actually delivered it that way. Here it is:

Twenty-four years ago, I had the great good fortune to hear Dana McLean Greeley preach, at the Arlington Street Church in Boston. Dana McLean Greeley was a name I heard frequently as a child: he was a famous Unitarian minister, he was the last president of the American Unitarian Association, and he was the first president of the the Unitarian Universalist Association.

When you read Unitarian history, you get involved in a very limited world, the world of eastern Massachusetts. In this small region, there are dozens of Unitarian churches. Lists of their ministers bear a family resemblance to lists of Harvard presidents and heads of the Harvard Divinity School. For a couple centuries, these Harvard presidents and school heads married the daughters of their mentors, and when their own daughters grew up, kept an eye on likely young men for them. These families gave their children triple-barreled names, like
Dana McLean Greeley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Edward Everett Hale
William Ellery Channing, for starters.
And their last and middle names are on streets and college buildings throughout New England. In this tightly woven group, ancestry was important.

Dana Greeley’s sermon topic twenty-four years ago was, “The Heyday of Liberal Religion.” He mounted the steps of Arlington Street Church’s high pulpit with determination. He flashed his famous wide smile, but we could all see his gauntness. He hadn’t long to live, and this sermon was his final public statement on the denomination to which he had given his life. Punch lines being what they are, it will not surprise you to learn that to Dana McLean Greeley in 1986, the heyday of liberal religion was still to come.

Think of that. This child of New England, this leader of such a traditional group, who had been minister for sixteen years in Concord, the home of transcendentalism — he believed that the heyday of liberal religion was not in those 19th-century glory days, but still to come.

We have recently elected Peter Morales — a wise Latino — to our presidency. Peter Morales is a vibrant contrast to that old tradition. His parents were Mexican immigrants and he was born and raised in San Antonio. When he took the bus off to the College of the Pacific, he had never seen a mountain, the ocean, or been more than eighty miles from home. In the years between that bus trip and today, Peter Morales — always with his wife Phyllis — has lived in Canada as a manual laborer, fleeing the Vietnam draft. He has lived in Spain as a Fulbright professor. He has lived in San Francisco as the father of a small cancer patient. He has lived in Oregon as a newspaper publisher. He has lived in Peru as a Knight International Journalism Fellow. And he has lived in Colorado as a UU minister. He has lived many lives, actually. What do you suppose Peter Morales believes is the heyday of liberal religion?

He hasn’t used the word, but he strongly suggests that that heyday could be ours. But to get there, we need to rethink who we are. In our quest for diversity in our membership, we have often commented to each other how very white we are. Peter Morales is living evidence that tomorrow’s Americans will not primarily be descended from western Europeans.

In fact, Peter Morales has suggested that we UUs have our own ethnicity, and that ethnicity is New England, Boston, Brahmin, Harvard. And it’s not working any more.

Sixty years ago, my father — from an Irish Catholic family — embraced Unitarianism. One of his nieces, my cousin Brigid, once explained to me what Unitarianism meant to my father. He had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, in a neighborhood too middle-class to have steelworkers. Its Catholic church, St. Ed’s, was the most prosperous one in a city of Catholic churches. But Youngstown had a Protestant ascendancy, based in the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. It also had a Unitarian church too, though, that was a little out of the power structure. The Unitarian church’s members were, in fact, Harvard families; they were scholars, intellectuals, teachers, readers, scientists; they were not standard people. Cousin Brigid explained to me that when my father adopted Unitarianism, he was making that heritage his own.

But now we are more than four decades past the Civil Rights Act. Americans can go to Harvard, to Yale, to Dartmouth, and be exactly what they are. They can be any race. They can be immigrants, or their children. They can be women. People no longer need to “convert” to become who they want to be. So in New England, the old, customary connections may be as sturdy as ever, but UUs across the country have moved on and are becoming something else. In fact, here in our congregation, that model was left behind long ago.

But Peter Morales is reminding UUs that we have what Forrest Church has called the gospel of Unitarianism, the good news. He believes that hundreds of thousands of Americans want what we have. They want community. They want connection. They want to know that when they walk in the door of this congregation, people will be happy to see them. They want their children to feel this kindness, this love, this concern.

I am going to read from a speech Rev. Morales gave, using his words because they are so perfectly to the point.

A few years year ago an earth-shaking research paper was published in the American Sociological Review. . . The research sought to measure changes in the close relationships Americans have. A key question in the study asked subjects how many people they feel close enough to that they feel they can confide personal information. An earlier study, done in 1985, asked the same question.

The new study was designed to measure any changes over time. The results were so shocking that the team of sociologists doing the study withheld publication for a while. They were afraid they had made some mistake in the methodology and spent months reviewing their data and procedures. But the results were real. Here are the key findings:
• In 1985, the response given most often was having three people in whom one could confide. In 2004, the response given most often was zero.
• The percentage of people who said they had no one with whom they could confide jumped from 10 percent in 1985 to 25 percent in 2004. That means that in just 20 years the percent of people who said they have no one to talk to went from one person in ten to one out of every
four. This is simply shocking.
• Almost half of all Americans now either have no one or only one person with whom they can discuss important matters. The percent of people who either have no one or only one person has almost doubled in 20 years.
• If a person has only one confidant, chances are that the one confidant is his or her spouse.
What this means is that relationships beyond the nuclear family are being systematically eliminated.

Listen carefully. Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life–and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been. The close friendships that are so essential to us are being eroded at a frightening rate. One in four Americans has no close personal relationship at all. Zero.

... Let me throw just one more statistic at you. At the end of the Second World War about half of all American households had three generations in them. That means that about half of American children lived under the same roof with one or more grandparents. Today there are almost no three generation households left. The two or three percent of multi-generational households that exist are almost all poor recent immigrants. Today, one out of four households in American is a single person household. Let me say that again. One quarter of American addresses today has only one person living there.

You and I are relational creatures. We become fully human in a network of relationships. We desperately long to belong. We need community the way we need food and shelter. Yet, in our pursuit of a misguided sense of independence and economic opportunity, we have created a society that systematically rips apart human relationships. Yet our need for deep relationship never goes away.

So UUA president Morales thinks that our congregations can build a better world, at least for the people within them. How does he believe we can do this?

He says, by getting religion. Americans want a religious vision that can transform their lives. If they find it, they will be faithful to that vision. Now generally, our visitors know who we are. They do online research; they read what we say about ourselves, and for some, it sounds just right. Then they must come here, and be with us. Visitors must see and hear and feel our good news for themselves.

Now here is a point I find difficult. If I come here, to this small but sacred space where we spend our Sunday mornings together, I am coming for community. I am coming for kindness, and love, and to be with people who know my lumpy past and accept me as I am. I come here because I crave what I get here.

With everything I need to receive from this place, how can I find the time, and the strength, to give to someone else? It goes back to getting religion. Part of getting religion is being able to give as much as to receive. It’s being the person you want to meet. Part of getting religion is undertaking ministry yourself. I guarantee you that coming here to serve, as much as to be served, will make you happier.

Here’s what else can be done. If Americans no longer live in three-generation households, let’s make this entire congregation a three-generation household. How about finding a way to include in your own world, a person, or a family group, older or younger than you? You will share something special with them, and they will share with you. You will be thrilled by what happens. I guarantee that.

What else can we do? We can recognize that diversity can be broader than we’re accustomed to thinking. Peter Morales has commented on the sweep of immigration from the south and from across the Pacific. Not only that, but in the past twenty years, there has been sizable immigration from eastern Europe as well. The more those immigrants acclimate to this country, the more we can give them what they find themselves looking for. They will share with us and change us, and we will share what we have with them.

We build community here with our lay-led style. And next year there will be many Sundays without our interim minister. We have room to hear from other resources that have not been home-grown, which we rarely do.

Neither do other aspects of worship need to adhere to the old ways. Our music directors Diane Guernsey and Richard Slade are both interested in more rousing music. And how about dance? Americans have considered dance a spectator art instead of something prompted by the spirit. Joy has many faces, and perhaps that can be a new face of ours too. About 20 million people have viewed the viral YouTube video of Jill and Kevin’s wedding dance, and most of the commenters have felt the joy within the church. Let’s go get some of that for ourselves!

In closing, I thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak on a subject that thrills me for its potential in my new ministry. I believe that this FUSW community can embrace that vision too. The good feeling in this congregation can translate into more personal ministries for all of us. We can become the change we want in the world. And we can create a new heyday for liberal religion.

©2009 Diggitt McLaughlin

Naming names, I: News from Swaziland

2009-08-16T18:38:00.005-04:00

From Lydia: Mangalisa Maphalala is my Swazi name. Mangalisa means surprise. I requested it specially. I think my host family was somewhat perplexed about why I would request that name. Amusingly, it turns out that Grandmother Maphalala's first name is Mangalisile -- Surprised -- methinks that particular name usually goes to kids whose mothers were naïve about birth control.

Is this synchronicity, or what?

2009-08-13T12:55:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I took the #4 subway train from Jerome Avenue, and last week Bill Bratton resigned as top cop in Los Angeles. As we used to say in San Francisco, rolling our eyes and nodding meaningfully, "Oh, wow."

About fifteen years ago, I parked my car by Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and walked down Jerome Avenue to take the #4 in to East 86th Street. Afterwards with my errand completed, and just in time to get to a plant morphology class at the Botanic Garden, I returned to my car.

As I walked by the cemetery main gate, I began to see books littering the ground. Muttering tsk-tsk to myself, I bent over to look at them and realized -- in horror -- that they were 150-year-old botany books I had borrowed through the state library system ... and they had been thrown all over the ground! I rushed to the car and saw a broken window, wide open. As I gaped, a passerby said to me, "I hate when that happens."

Well, me too. I opened the car and began to paw through it. As usual, it was packed with stuff going here or there or to be used along the way. I thought the botany books were the worst: I was working on a history of plant taxonomy, using very old sources. Fortunately, titles over a few hundred years old had to be used in the Botanic Garden's library. But I gagged to see the casual mishandling of the lovely old books.

On the ground was the box which had held a camera lens I had bought the day before. But! I had immediately put it on the camera, now sitting safely on my desk. So, a disappointed vandal.

But no. I had had a thermal cold-bag containing some cycad seeds I had borrowed to take home to photograph. I swore my life away for permission to take them off the premises. They too were gone. But I brightened -- they were poison! Just let some vandal think they're a new kind of kiwi fruit, and heh-heh, no vandal.

As I went through the very back of the car I realized my greatest loss. I had been working on two 24"-square needlework pieces for a couple years. They were when-I'm-done-with-these-I-can-die projects, using 16-point canvas and 24 shades of red, brown, gold, and green silk thread. One was a variant on a 17th century Hungarian point design, the other I had drafted from a Indian rug I'd photographed at the V&A. The Indian design was finished, all 576 square inches of it, and there were only a couple square inches to go on the Hungarian design. The two pieces, all the silk, and my grandmother's embroidery scissors were together in one bag and that bag was gone. What a blow.

Forgetting my morphology class, I went back down to the cemetery gate and found a gatekeeper, and explained what had happened. "You've got to call the police," he said. He decided I was too upset to dial. "I'm calling the forty-seventh," he told me. "They're always really helpful when we need something."

The desk sawjint, um, sergeant, picked up. "New Yawk P'lice, four-seven," he said. I explained that my car outside Woodlawn Cemetery had been broken into, and stuff inside was stolen. "Whereja say the car is?" he asked. Outside the cemetery on Jerome Avenue, I explained, you turn right outside the gate and walk about a hundred yards. The sergeant was audibly relieved. "That's not us," he said, "you want the five-oh." And he gave me the number.

I called the five-oh. I explained my problem and told him the four-seven said it was the five-oh's jurisdiction. "What's he tawkin' about?" asked the exasperated desk sergeant. "The five-oh ends at the center line of Jerome Avenue. We're to the west. You call the four-seven back and tell them it's their jurisdiction."

I explained all this to the Woodlawn gatekeeper, and dialed the four-seven again. "Ma'am, I tolja it's the five-oh," said the desk sergeant.
I corrected him. "The five-oh says their jurisdiction ends at the center line. They're west of it," I explained.
"Ma'am, I know this is tough," said the sergeant, "but I'm telling ya our precinct boundary's at the Jerome Avenue eastern curb. I know this. You're not parked up on the grass, are ya?"
"But the five-oh says theirs ends at the center line," I wailed.
He paused and you could almost hear wheels turning. "Well," he said doubtfully, "maybe it's the five-two. You could try them." He gave me the number.

The Woodlawn gatekeeper looked on in disbelief. "I always call the forty-seventh and they couldn't be nicer," he said.

I called the five-two and explained my predicament. "They said what? They said it's the five-two? Where are you again?" I explained I was a hundred yards north of Woodlawn's main gate. "We're nowhere near there," he said, "I don't know what's wrong with those guys."

Well, neither did I, and I was late for class. I very much hoped the thief was sitting somewhere dead, preferably in the four-seven, with a half-chewed cycad in his mouth. As I walked out of the caretaker's cottage, off in the cemetery I saw a flash of neon pink -- just the color of the missing thermal bag the cycads had been in. Maybe my needlework was discarded there too! I hurried through the cemetery and found the cycads, still in the thermal bag, but the needlework was not to be found.

After class, I went home, stewing about the fact that I had no place to report a crime. Given the high deductible on my insurance, a police report might not be useful. But, darn it, I wanted this to be a New York City crime statistic. I decided to tell my story to Rudolph Giuliani, then a not-much-loved NYC mayor. I told Rudy the story I have just told you, then, as I licked the envelope, I thought, Why not tell William Bratton?

Bill Bratton was easily a lot of people's idea of a cop's cop, but he was also a people's cop, heading the New York police department after a career in Boston. Regional residents noted the city's falling crime rate and gave his up-to-date policing the credit. He was definitely a popular favorite, so I wrote to Bratton as well.

Within a week, I got a nice letter from Bratton's office telling me that they had determined the correct precinct and reported the crime for me. And a week later, Giuliani fired Bratton; the general view was that he was jealous of Bratton's good press. No, I never heard from Giuliani's office, nor did I hear from the precinct.

I hope that somewhere in the Bronx, an elderly mama got my needlework, accompanied by a fishy story she chose to believe, and loves it. I think of her often, as I did yesterday when I once again went to Jerome Avenue and parked to catch the #4 train. A street sign has been added: it reads "Albany next right" and it's not the allegory it sounds like; the Thruway passes nearby. I no longer do needlepoint: I knit instead.

Jerome Avenue was named for Sir Winston Churchill's mother's family. In the intervening years, of course, Rudy Giuliani has become a Sir too, and next month, Bill Bratton -- just retiring from the job of L.A. top cop -- will be created a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. So if that's not synchronicity, what is?

I mean, oh, wow.

Ancient thoughts

2009-08-11T00:10:00.002-04:00

Observe the Days that come from Zeus,
all in their right order. . .
explain them to your workers . . .
the eleventh day, and the twelfth too,
are both very good days
for shearing sheep or for reaping
the good harvest;
But of these the twelfth day is far better
than the eleventh,
for it is on the twelfth that the air-flying
spider weaves
her web in the full of the day
and Know-All, the ant,
piles her dirt-hill.
On this day a wife could set up her loom
and get her work going.
On the eighth of the month, it is time
to geld the boar and the bellowing
bull, but the hard-working mules should be done
on the twelfth day.

---Hesiod, The Works and Days

Religious Freedom Thought for the Day

2009-08-10T17:17:00.001-04:00

Probably no two lawyers in the United States understand our Constitution alike. To allow a few men to tell what the Constitution means, and to hang for treason all who refuse to accept the opinions of these few men, would accomplish in politics what most churches have asked for in religion.
--- Robert Ingersoll

On behalf of Ferrous, Eric, Popper, Sherlock, Boudicca, LeWeasel, and Tequila, I give thanks

2009-08-05T00:43:00.005-04:00

For this great news about their cousins.

Yes, yes, the domestic ferret and the blackfooted ferret are not the same. But after living with some of these wonderful animals, it was one day sobering to check out the exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History and see that the blackfooted ferret display contained animals that don't quite look like the ones we see in the news report or here.

This is because of the founder effect -- what you get in a population that comes from a single ancestor or small group of ancestors. And the blackfooted ferret captive breeding program, while successful, has created a population descended from a very few founders. That means that the variations in color that created the somewhat blonder AMNH sample are now gone from the population.

You might not want blonder blackfooted ferrets -- hey, as long as their mates approve, it's none of my business -- but you have to wonder what other, hidden effects come with that narrowed gene pool.

Blackfooted ferret pic by Arizona Game & Fish Department.

How I would defend marriage

2009-07-31T15:13:00.001-04:00

A few months ago, marriage equality was a hot topic here in New York State, and Albany UU minister Sam Trumbore's blog reports on it today. Orthodox commenters on his blog have predictably thrown up the usual blather about "logical extremes," like marriage among multiple partners, and continue the cant about "traditional" marriage.

That the traditional meaning of marriage has been between a man and a woman is, in fact, up for grabs. For most of recorded history, marriage was between a man or boy and a female of any age, including newborns, designated by their families to be contracted to that male. The participation of the female in the contract has been expected only in recent centuries in some countries. So tradition is a weak reed to depend upon in support of this argument.

Our society expects adult men and women to participate in the contract as equals. For myself and the women I've known, participating as an equal trumps every other possible variation in defining the marital contract. But once you accept men and women as equal partners, the question does arise about equal treatment of both men and women as to whom they prefer to marry.

Ethnic and religious custom does not trump civil law when civil law sets a bottom age limit as to who can be married. Why should custom then trump civil law about who marries whom? Society has already accepted having people of different races and religions marrying each other. Indeed, society accepts selling yourself into marriage, and society accepts sequential marriages with divorces in between. Custom has changed as civil law has.

I suggest that the stumbling block here comes from our acceptance of a religious contract as equal to or supplanting a civil contract. The civil contract supplants the religious one at the time of a divorce (although pious Jews and Catholics may take the extra step of arranging a religious dissolution as well).

We would take nothing away from religion if we defined marriage as the civil contract, and let the civil contract take place between two consenting adults, period. Those religious groups that choose to discriminate against individuals because of color, race, or gender preference could, because the equal protection of the civil law would be untouched.

In other words, the religious contract of marriage would have no civil value. To be legally married -- with all the privileges and duties of civil marriage -- would be wholly the job of civil authorities. Mormon clergy could continue to marry old men to their 10-year-old great-nieces but that ceremony would have no civil standing. Catholic and Anglican priests could refuse to marry whomever their bishops direct them to discriminate against, without taking away from those individuals' human and legal rights to marry those whom they love.

Is there a protest about these religions' rights to perform rituals? Perform away, I say. Do any states accept a baptismal certificate in place of a birth certificate? Does administration of last rites supersede a certificate of death? Of course not. Religions do their thing and the state handles its own documentation, and civil documentation has the last word legally.

The JK Wedding Dance Video has an Act II

2009-07-31T14:57:00.003-04:00

"Defense of marriage" has taken on a new meaning and in one of those only-on-the-internet stories, Jill and Kevin found themselves in it.

(You have surely seen pictures of the wounded Rihanna on the news, and Chris Brown -- the singer on the wedding video -- was the guy who did the wounding.)

So Jill and Kevin put up a dance video website, and you can enter there to donate money to the Sheila Wellstone Institute, to prevent domestic violence. And while you're there, you can watch the wedding video again ... and just try to keep from dancing yourself!

Advice from my dad

2009-07-28T17:32:00.008-04:00

My dad was a keen observer of my birthdays. Whatever happened on my birthday would be a great observation of it.

The year I turned 15 I received a letter from the governor of Texas, congratulating me for having been born there. When I was an ardent piano student, I got an informal pic of Vladimir Horowitz, personally inscribed to me, and the next year, the same from Arturo Toscanini. Another year there came an original Pogo strip, with an inscription to me from Walt Kelly as well as a letter from him.

At other times, Daddy would make a point of taking me someplace and introducing me to someone he knew I would find interesting. One year I was taken to meet Leo F. Grandmontagne, a geologist (I loved the fact that his first name was Leo, because I, of course, am a Leo). Leo F. Grandmontagne gave me some selenite crystals for my collection. Another year I met a taxidermist and yet another year, a man who made prosthetic arms and legs, who showed me how his own worked.

Because it was summer, some birthdays I was off at camp. And there were several tough years when my dad was in the hospital. But after I was grown up and had left home, letters came instead. One year I was told that precisely at 3.28 a.m. "...all the docs at Brooke General Hospital stop what they're doing and turn toward the maternity department and bow."

When I found the box with "old stuff" -- the one with the water pistols? and the egg? -- it also contained a letter which I received on my birthday 40 years ago today. It was the one time my dad actually gave me advice. I remembered the advice, but finding the letter itself was a thrill, because of all the offhand comments he made (most of which can't be printed here). It's too bad more parents aren't as open with their children as he was with me in this letter. After telling me that the United States would not have a violent revolution, he wound down with these comments:

Who do you like most? He might have been a
son-of-a-bitch. Who do you dislike the most?
He was probably a nice guy if you talk to him right.
St. Francis of Assisi was probably a lousy neighbor,
but he was a saint.

Danny the Red? Now that he's a tycoon with a Rolls,
he has no time for the canaille. A buck is the
best way to assuage any of the potential
revolutionaries, and as long as the economy keeps
feeding the animals, you may be sure there will
be no revolutions ...

You don't know what to do? You see everyone
doing their thing successfully? You may be
sure they have their fears and doubts just as
you and I and Adolf Hitler and Aldrin and Collins
and everyone else. Bigger ones than ours, too.

When I was your age, I fell into that trap of wondering
why everyone else seemed to be having more fun than I was.
Now, with a melancholy air, I know for a complete fact
that had I gone off to school, gotten a PhD in birds,
painted all I wanted, I would now be rich, famous, and
everything else. Ironically, I see those who I sorta envied,
completely lost just about the time I know where the hell I am,
and now, I feel it's too late.

I should have had the wonderful
fun of looking at Kennicott's willow
warblers on Adak when I was 30 ...
not when I'm 54.

So, dammit, do what you want to do most and like
best. If you can't do something and don't like anything,
then, dammit, cultivate it. Nothing invented by the
animal is anywhere near perfect much of the time
(including you).

What I loved about my birthday letter forty years ago was that my dad was giving me permission to be myself. He was of the generation that had finished high school at the depths of the depression, then gone through a war, and fear of and for the future marked many of their parental judgments.

Forty years on, I am sure this letter made me a better parent when my time came. Getting your parent's permission to displease him sometimes was a wonderful gift. Thank you, Daddy, for this and so many other things.

Gypsum var. Selenite crystal in clay matrix, crystal measures 3.4 cm (specimen Joseph W. Vasichko) Clay bank along West Branch of Meander Creek, Ellsworth, Mahoning County, Ohio.

The image of the Kennicott's willow warbler is from http://www.sofnet.org/index.asp?lev=964&typ=1

A letter from Eddie

2009-07-23T10:51:00.005-04:00

Eddie Barnes: a name from the past. I met Eddie in grade school. His dad ran the village's only pharmacy. Yes! It had a soda counter, when you could get a cherry or chocolate Coke, made step by step, where Eddie sometimes worked. Eddie was smart and talented but above all, Eddie was fun. He loved music and played piano like nobody's business, was a great dancer and managed the football team.

I sound like Eddie is no more, but Eddie's still here. He is a GLBT activist in Houston. For many years in San Francisco he was a volunteer chaplain at a city hospital. People who have not known him since grade school know him as Ed, and Ed sent me a letter I am printing here in full because, well, it doesn't hurt for us to be bitch-slapped into realizing its truth.

(Tobias Barrington Wolff was the GLBT liaison in Obama's presidential campaign.)

Dear Mr. Wolff:

I'm Ed Barnes and I was present at a luncheon prior to the Texas March 4, 2008 primaries here in Houston which you hosted for leaders of the GLBT community of Houston. In said luncheon you asked for our endorsement and to vote for "Barack" as you referred to him on a first-name basis.

I want you to know that I have given approximately $500 to Obama's campaign. I stood out in the weather for two weeks at the March 4 primary early voting center in Houston (at the West Gray Multi Purpose Center) and handed out fliers for Obama. I repeated the two weeks for the Nov election as well. I also worked election day in front of my precinct 34 here in Houston 6:30am to closing polls.

I was so impressed with your presentation of Obama and one of the things you said to us: that if Obama were elected president he would issue an executive order to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". My impression was Obama would indeed live up to his promises. This was further installed in my mind when Obama had an hour-long conference call with the board of the Houston GLBT political caucus. As you know, the Houston GLBT caucus then endorsed him.

I felt excited and elated that finally we gay people would be treated fairly. You told us you were the GLBT liaison to Obama's administration. I was thrilled for the first time in my life to be a part of a candidate's campaign.

Then suddenly, the request to use the so called Evangelist Rev Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at Obama's Inaugural. I cannot tell you how shocked and saddened I was at this action of Obama's. What an insult -- to say the least -- to GLBT people.

Secondly, I am still waiting on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" termination by his aforementioned promise of an executive order.

Tobias, I am 65 years old and have been a political activist all my life. I was hosed in Berkeley during the anti-Vietnam war protests and marched in every GLBT parade when I lived in San Francisco. Worked early voting centers for GLBT rights and Houston GLBT caucus-endorsed candidates. I've glued enough envelopes for the GLBT caucus here in Houston but thankfully the glue has not shut my mouth, probably much to your dismay.

I have lived with HIV with good health for over five years now. However, I do have a heart condition brought on by chemo with the elimination of Karposi's Sarcoma. I now, being retired, volunteer as a patient mentor at our HIV Thomas Street Clinic here in Houston.

What I'm trying to say to you is I'm awfully tired of politicians who "gay bait". Obama to me is a true picture of this now. I feel like a fool because I never spent a cent on anyone's campaign until his. I'm so saddened that I may die with my heart condition with the status quo for GLBT people still without human rights on an equal basis.

Many of us here in Houston, Texas have been fighting for rights of GLBT folks all our lives. Keep in mind that the Lawrence sodomy case came, and was set up, by GLBT folks right here in Houston.

So in effect, please tell Mr. Obama that I am just fucking pissed off with the usual "gay baiting" bullshit practiced by him and his predecessor Bill Clinton when he then approved DOMA.

I'm tired, Tobias, and have lost all faith in politics. Saddened and genuinely hurt by Obama's political promises of equality of GLBT folks. He pure and simply gay baited. Know that many in Houston's community are angry and we don't forget.

As for myself, I feel much better in telling you that you were a part of the gay baiting process or you've been duped like the rest of us. Please don't let me go out of this life feeling this way. Again I'm just so saddened and angry. Do you really think he will deliver for us? We've certainly been moved by his promises but prioritized on the back burner, which appears to not even be lighted.

Edward R. Barnes
606 Harold Street #14
Houston, TX 77006
ed1barnes@yahoo.com

Back into my MacroMicro voice again. Look, I'm something of a political animal and I understand the need for compromise. But human rights are not a place for compromise. This is first, foremost, and maybe even only a human rights issue.

The Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell are blatant discrimination against people's most inrooted, basic natures. GLBT people can no more become "straight" than straight people can become GLBT. You are who you are.

You who say you don't know any GLBT people? I say, examine your life. Someone close to you is in a closet. You are keeping that person there. Your insistence that someone fit your description of normal is denying that person's basic reality. Is that love, keeping someone else from being their fully realized human self? All the reasons you may have are human constructs. Whatever God may be sees only our perfect selves.

What makes you a Catholic if you don't accept Catholic teachings?

2009-07-20T20:19:00.004-04:00

The Talk to Action blog today discusses the Catholic Church's "art of constructive schism." Guest blogger Frank Cocozzelli writes about the ways in which ultra-conservative elements are driving out or punishing liberals and moderates in the Roman Catholic Church.

Standing at the far side of the Reformation, I have always found this issue totally confounding. Operating within the terms of the Catholic Church itself, how is it possible to be a "moderate" or a "liberal"? The Church says what it says, and that's that.

There appear to be places within Church doctrine where someone can sincerely disagree. But none of those places are concerned with infallibility. I went to Wikipedia to find the exact words to use for this, and find the distinctions so nicely drawn that it's worth a direct quote.

Catholic theology divides the functions of the teaching office of the Church into two categories: the infallible Sacred Magisterium and the fallible Ordinary Magisterium. The infallible Sacred Magisterium includes the extraordinary declarations of the Pope speaking ex cathedra and of ecumenical councils (traditionally expressed in conciliar creeds, canons, and decrees), as well as of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. Despite its name, the "ordinary and universal Magisterium" falls under the infallible Sacred Magisterium, and in fact is the usual manifestation of the infallibility of the Church, the decrees of popes and councils being "extraordinary".

Examples of infallible extraordinary papal definitions (and, hence, of teachings of the sacred magisterium) are Pope Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, and Pope Pius XII's definition of the Assumption of Mary. Examples of infallible extraordinary Conciliar decrees include the Council of Trent's decree on justification, and Vatican I's definition of papal infallibility. ... the ordinary and universal magisterium is the usual manifestation of infallibility, the decrees of popes and councils being the extraordinary expression.

In other words, and not wanting to be obstreperous, accepting infallibility of the pope and of the body of the church is part of the definition of being Catholic. If you do not accept that, by definition you are not a Catholic.

More to the point: why would you want to consider yourself a Catholic if you don't believe what the Church teaches? That's where I stumble. If you do not accept the teachings of the Catholic Church, by definition you're not a Catholic. Whatever benefits Catholics get from being Catholic are not for you. To protest that you are still a Catholic is to give jurisdiction over your life to an organization whose teachings you reject. Why the insistence?

It's obvious that many Catholics today are non-Catholics, or at least living in a state of sin, by their own definitions. Catholics get abortions and use birth control at rates slightly higher than the U.S. average. I guess the catch here is that the Church will not acknowledge that people who make these choices are not Catholics; rather it considers them as living in a condition of sin. So the Church doesn't throw these people out. If you're presidential candidate John Kerry, it may try to humiliate you by publicly denying you communion, but very few people actually get excommunicated.

Let's try these on for size:
"I'm a vegetarian but I eat meat."
"I'm a Jew but I refuse to have my son circumcised."
"I'm a Quaker but I'm a member of the NRA."
They don't work either -- and they all have more latitude within their definitions than Catholicism does. What am I missing?

Not because it was easy but because it was hard

2009-07-20T13:25:00.004-04:00

The past several days have been filled with moon landing memories. Bookstore C has displays of commemorative newspapers, magazines, and other ways to part people from their money. Mira Costa tells us of the big step she is undertaking today, and my thoughts are very much with her. And I have been reminded of what I did on that day 40 years ago.

And I must say: what optimists everyone was! Most Americans were home huddled around the television. But not I. I and several skeptical friends decided to take advantage of the fact that everyone was looking in a different direction. We went out and climbed an abandoned dry-dock in Richardson's Bay, off Sausalito.

In two dinghies we rowed out to the structure, an unpainted wooden hulk several stories high floating way offshore. Someone had scouted earlier and found decking a few feet above water level where we could tie up. Clambering aboard, we found the deck leading to a featureless wall several stories high, with one ladder up.

When the dry-dock was abandoned, part of making it unusable was the destruction of that ladder by the systematic hatcheting of every rung. In other words, it wasn't really a ladder. It was two uprights with nubs of torn wood sticking out of the two sides. We used that to climb to the top.

Which was another deck, although rotten and broken in many places, through which one could fall fifty or seventy feet, whatever it was, into the dark interior where we could hear water lapping. We picnicked there for a couple hours. I made some attempt to be in the moment, and sat apart gazing up at the pale mid-afternoon moon.

Rationally, I could accept that there were people up there. It didn't seem to mean much, though -- after all, rationally I knew there were people in Australia, but I couldn't see them either.

Getting down that ladder was worse than climbing up, but we did leave and scatter to our homes. The streets of San Francisco were still empty in the early evening, and sounds of TV dialogue leaked through open windows. And I wondered: What's this all about, that America is so pleased by this and I simply can't see the point?

At that tender age I had known the total bliss of love, and I had found thrills in various discoveries that may seem small but were big when they happened (discovering garlic, how John MacLaren seeded the dunes to build Golden Gate Park, getting a feel for the Niagara Escarpment). But what spoke to me loudest were the words of e.e. cummings.

you shall above all things be glad and young

you shall above all things be glad and young.
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love.

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time

that you should ever think, may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

One of the best photos ever taken

2009-07-19T16:34:00.006-04:00

This stunning photograph of a bubble at the instant of breaking is for real. Many, many more in the same series -- with info on how they were taken -- can be found here. If you look carefully, you will see the photographer reflected at the moment the pic was caught.

An image like this works better to persuade me about miracles than any "proof" I'll ever see about ghosts or visitors from space. As the old Beacon Street curriculum taught us Unitarian children, miracles abound.

Incidentally, Richard Heeks, the photographer, has also posted a completely unedited set of images here.

What was I thinking? Chapter 37,592

2009-07-16T21:13:00.014-04:00

Yesterday I found a stack of photographs from the 1975 dedication of the Poland, Ohio time capsule (at that time my mother was president of the Poland Historical Society). They were in a just-discovered time capsule of my own.

I am deaccessioning, because after 20 years it's time to bury my parents (No, they're not in the time capsule) so I am cleaning out my storage unit. There was a box labeled OLD STUFF. It was a big box, a heavy box, a sealed box. It was a sleeping dog I would no longer let lie.

Here are some of the things I found inside the sealed box:
The photographs from the time capsule dedication. I wonder if anyone in the village knows it exists!
Programs from celebrations at Poland Presbyterian Church in 1927.
Original membership applications for the Poland Library and Historical Society, probably from about 1924. The one shown is Mr. Steinfeld's.
Youngstown Vindicator roto section clippings about old-house tours (featuring, among others, my grandparents' house on College Street and my parents' house on Water Street) for years between 1945 and 1975.
Two half page roto section pictures from the mid 30s. One shows a group of girls, including my mother and her sisters Billie and Betsy, in Poland Woods. The other shows a group of young people, including Mother, her cousin Weedie, and other people on a horse-drawn sleigh at Zedakers' farm.
Programs from annual Junior Achievement awards dinners for my junior and senior high school years.
Programs for plays produced by my Junior Achievement company -- the only J.A. theater group in existence.
Programs for four years of high school academic awards banquets.

Six years of the Seminarian, my high school paper.
A program for the installation of new officers for the Poetry Club my junior year.
Aunt Betsy's first grade class photo from about 1927.
Letters from and newspaper clippings about a boy I had a massive crush on for years.
Pictures of me, My Hair, and Duke the Dog at the Grand Canyon during our grand tour of the U.S. and Canada.
An envelope containing My Hair. [When I lived in England, I cut it all off. The guy who did it went chop, chop, chop. I saved one hank and sent one to my ex-sweetheart, who still had Duke the Dog. I sent the third hank to my dad, from whom I received a telegram reading AWAITING RANSOM NOTE STOP]

A first-generation photocopy, on horrible paper, of a headline in the London Evening News, January 3, 1972. It appeared in only one edition, then the sub-editor woke up.
Hand-written notes on the contents of the rijsttafel at Garoeda in The Hague.
Hand-written notes on wild boar with juniper berries, after a meal in rural Luxemburg. (Afterwards I was asked to dance by two young men, Siegfried and Adolf.)
Two feet of very heavy chain.
Two empty water pistols.
One unbroken brown egg whose insides have evaporated.

I ask "What was I thinking?" because I cannot imagine a time when all those articles would ever have been near each other. Much less, why are they very carefully packed together in one box? And the chain? And the egg? Some of my past decisions have subsequently mystified me, but this leaves me beyond mystification.

Incidentally, everything listed down to Betsy in first grade is being sent to the Mahoning Valley Historical Society.

Working Latinas

2009-07-14T06:18:00.003-04:00

Latina Worker
by Doren Robbins
Then I notice through a triple-Americano-awakening moment,
in the mall food court, a young Latina cleaning around by the chrome rail
at Sbarro Pizza. Maybe a Guatemalan, possibly Salvadoran or
Honduran—

could've been Argentinean or Columbian, Chilean, Bolivian,
Panamanian—good chance a Peruvian, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Mayan,
Toltec, Sephardic, Huichol coffee plantation or U.S. Fruit Company

or tobacco company or auto industry slave labor robot or CIA-trained
death squad Guardia Nacional butchery massacre survivor.

Several tables down from mine--roughly stacking chairs on tops
of tables—cussing in Spanish, in the mall food court, she hates her job,
I hate her job.

This poem is on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac* today. Two working Latinas immediately tumbled through my mind.

As the whole world knows, Sonia Sotomayor faces her second day of Senate questioning about her fitness to serve on SCOTUS. Her appointment may not be a slam dunk, but near enough.

Not many people know of the other Latina worker whose face came to me. Eridania Rodriguez, a handsome 46-year-old, came to New York from the Dominican Republic more than two decades ago. She’d raised her three kids in Inwood, the neighborhood surrounding the Cloisters at the northern end of Manhattan. She vanished from her job last Tuesday, leaving her purse and cell phone behind.

Rodriguez cleaned offices in a Wall Street-area office building and thought her working conditions were dangerous. A man working in the building had exposed himself to her, and she was frightened enough that she planned to leave at the end of last week. She was missing for four days before her body was found jammed into an air conditioning duct in the building.

I was struck by Rodriguez’s good looks. She was an attractive, strong-looking woman, and her children have been reported as ambitious and hardworking.

She could be Sotomayor’s mother. One Puerto Rican, one Dominican, one story. Ambitious for her children, hard-working, minding her own business. A day’s work for a day’s pay, sensibly knowing that if you’re scared it’s for a reason, and dignified enough to know there are things you don’t put up with. Being responsible and working out her notice. But, being unlucky.

When Sotomayor’s appointment was announced, in the New York area it was no surprise. It’s amazing (since Hispanic surnames are everywhere) that we’re still saying it’s time. After all, these are people who have been here for generations now. Its time was years ago.

But that it’s noteworthy for two Latina workers to be in different headlines the same day? It should be noteworthy that it’s noteworthy. It’s time.

*"Latina Worker" by Doren Robbins, from My Piece of the Puzzle. © Eastern Washington University Press, 2008.

What every cat owner knows, even without knowing

2009-07-13T23:14:00.004-04:00

Now we know for sure that cats manipulate their owners. We knew it before, but Not Exactly Rocket Science has the data.

Too lazy to click on the link? Or -- let me guess -- is Hecate or Horatio lying on the mouse? Here's how cats tell you they're hungry.

Apparently you cannot hear this with your unassisted ear, but a hunger cry is hidden in an apparently otherwise standard purr. Recorded properly, it can be played back and separated out from the standard purring sounds, and when that's done it sounds like the cry of a human baby. How on earth did that evolve?

Of all sad words of tongue and pen

2009-07-12T15:04:00.002-04:00

Like every retail outlet in the U.S., Bookstore C currently has a display of Michael Jackson material -- in our case, commemorative zines. A table near the cash desk has stacks; each is different. Cover photos are all different too -- among them a close-up of the small boy Michael, with glowing unblemished skin; dancing Michael, in black pants and white shirt and socks; in a bright red uniform with lots of gold, looking astoundingly like a young, dark Elizabeth Taylor, with one random lock danging over his forehead; and an almost skeletal Michael, wearing sunglasses and beige lipstick.

Last night an African-American family came in together: Mom, Dad, big sis, little brother. He must have been about eight, and restless -- swinging off the umbrella stand, crouching under the display tables. He crawled out from under the display and stood up next to the zine with the young Michael cover. He looked from one magazine to another, and his baffled little voice piped up: "Mommy, Daddy, was Michael Jackson black?"

He was lifting one issue after another, now talking to himself. "No -- look, he was white. No --" and then his voice raised again -- "Mommy, Daddy, Michael Jackson was black. Look here -- you can see it yourself!"

A short quarter century and a long 25 years

2009-07-11T11:10:00.003-04:00

Today is Lydia's 25th birthday. It being Saturday, she went to town and ducked into an internet cafe to send a brief email.

She said, "I'm doing fine. They are giving excellent training, and although I've had some low spots I'm very glad I came. All is well, don't worry... I don't think I'll do anything much for my birthday. I might get myself something small, like a slice of cake or something, but I have no idea what I'll be able to find here." I predict that a year from now she will know the source of every sweet available in Swaziland.

A list followed. I will be scouring the internet for non-oily sunscreen in large quantities (you'd think the PC would have a source for all their pale volunteers in sunny lands). And perhaps I'd better just buy a case of Red Zinger and be done with it!

Twenty-five years ago this morning, I awoke and the presence of this other person in the room was huge. Her big dark eyes were open and she was watching, taking it all in. Many of the pics we have of Lydia that first day show her eyes open and alert. Her father and I were hushed and humble in the presence of this new intellect.

Yes! Ned Silverman's flowers arrived. And so did a nurse with a hypodermic. "What's that for?" I asked, shrinking away. The nurse uncovered my hip and started swabbing. "This is one time we know you're not pregnant," she said. "It's your german measles immunization."

What can get lost in Ürümchi

2009-07-07T22:07:00.008-04:00

War is hell on history. Destroying places in order to save them has a long, sad, dirty tradition. One of the great shames of Bush 43 is Donald Rumsfeld’s blowing off the Baghdad looting with the idle words, “Stuff happens.”

Which is why I am all the sadder to hear of mob violence in the ancient Silk Road city of Urumqi. There are treasures there — not, perhaps, fabulous treasures of the sort that vanished from Baghdad, but treasures of culture, treasures of human industry.

Treasures of fabric, woven treasure of wool is what quite amazingly has been found in [then spelled] Ürümchi. One of humanity’s earliest manufactures, woven, dyed, ornamented clothing has been found in desert caves, preserved for thousands of years. At left: Mummified three-month-old baby in elaborately made, brightly-colored clothes. The nursing bottle is manufactured from a sheep's udder. The robe on the man (below right) is also woven, but is a less sophisticated weave than that of the child's swaddling. You can't see it here, but the edges of his robe are carefully piped in a brighter red.

Just as startling as what was in those caves wearing the clothing: blue-eyed, blonde, Caucasian mummies, mummies of Turkic peoples whose descendants are still seen among the Uighur people in the region. In 2000, Occidental College archaeologist and weaver Elizabeth Wayland Barber published The Mummies of Ürümchi, about the people, the mummies, and their manufactures, dated to 1500 BCE. They are 3500 years old.

Ürümchi has long boasted of being the world’s major city farthest from the sea. For eons it was protected by that desert distance. The discovery of its mummies was the first time anyone other than China hands ever heard of the place. However, in the past decade, the Chinese government has been building up industry in Ürümchi and moving in whole communities of Han Chinese.

Inevitably there’s bad feeling between the Han from the east and south, and the Muslim natives. It’s reasonable, I think, to fear that ethnic hatred and rivalry could lead to the destruction of the materials that have been recovered from the desert’s caves, and ending their continuing exploration.

Barber hooked me on her explorations with her book Women’s Work, the First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. She examined the history of textiles and the wealth they created in early societies, not only as an archaeologist but as someone whose avocation is weaving. Because of that and her other writing, I felt partnership and immediacy. I seemed to be in the room she entered in Ürümchi, examining the garments on the mummies. Noting their dyes, noting how the brightly striped socks were not woven or felted but simply carefully wrapped inside the white boots. Barber is a terrific teacher and the care and love with which she examined the mummies, their clothing, and other tomb textiles came right through her pages. Above: 3500-year-old plaid from Ürümchi mummy tomb.

So she made me her ally in wanting to find more caves in China’s western desert, and learn more about these out-of-place, out-of-time people and their manufactures. I dread the idea that ethnic jealousies could destroy these fragile relics. And unless there are bodies of outsiders paying attention to them, that is probably just what will happen.

My demon lover, Ned Silverman

2009-07-07T20:44:00.007-04:00

My demon lover Ned Silverman might not have been a demon and was most definitely not my lover. He was also not many other things.

Long ago, in a kingdom very far away but near 51st and 1st, on a balmy spring Sunday I set out for the neighborhood park with Bleak House under my arm. When I arrived at the park, there sat neighbor Bob (from the next apartment) reading the Sunday Times. So I settled near him. Periodically Bob would read to me from the arts section and we would talk of opera and Carnegie Hall performances. People near us came and went. One fellow, about my age, looked up as we talked music and finally he joined the conversation. He was very knowledgeable.

I left and returned in a while and Bob and the other guy were still talking. Bob explained that his new friend was a conductor and composer. In those days I had an English accent, so when Bob got up to leave for a while, the fellow asked if I was English. I explained that I had lived in London for several years and only recently returned to New York. A coincidence! He too had recently returned to New York from the Netherlands — so recently that he didn’t even have an apartment yet but was staying with friends. He was a vice president of Philips and had been working in Europe for several years. He wasn’t sure about getting an apartment since he’d be spending the summer in Portland as conductor of the Portland Symphony’s summer program.

When Bob returned we continued to speak of music. The stranger was an Eastman graduate and been a fellow at McDowell. I mentioned an old friend who’d gone to Juilliard and written advertising jingles on the side. Another coincidence! He too had written many jingles, working a lot for BBDO. He sang some of his jingles, which Bob also knew. “What a great guy!” Bob said when he left. “He knows his stuff.” Bob went home, I dug into Bleak House, and the mysterious music man reappeared.

“Say, I’d like to call you,” he said to me. To my immediate and irrational panic. I was a single woman living alone in New York and this strange man might be an axe murderer! But I conquered my panic and gave him my card. Since the office was at 44th and 6th, I felt that my business card preserved my privacy somewhat. “By the way,” he said, “I’m Ned Silverman.”

A good tactician, that Ned. He didn’t call Monday, but he did call Tuesday. “I’m just leaving for Portland so I can’t chat, but are you free for dinner Thursday evening?” Well, hey — he was smart and knew a lot of cool stuff, and was nice looking and cosmopolitan. What was not to like? Of course I said yes, and (blushes with embarrassment) told him where I lived.
Just as I was hanging up the phone it occurred to me: what if something happens and I have to cancel? “Ned? Ned?” Dang — he was gone.

For some reason, knowing how to reach him “just in case” suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world … and I was stuck. But no! I called the Portland Symphony to leave a message, asking him to call and leave me a contact number.

“I’d like to leave a message for Ned Silverman,” I told the person who answered at the Portland Symphony.
“There’s nobody here by that name,” he said.
Oh, of course — the board had probably contracted with Ned and he wouldn’t be known to people in the office.
“He’s coming to Portland today — he’ll be conducting your summer program this year,” I explained.
After being connected to one person, than another, who did not know Ned would be there in just a few hours, I spoke with the executive director. “We’re not having a summer program this year,” he said.
Well, in a word, ????? Had I misunderstood? “Perhaps I misunderstood, and he was conductor of your summer program last year,” I suggested.
“I’ve never heard of Ned Silverman, ma’am,” said the executive director.

So I called Neighbor Bob. “You remember that fellow we talked with in the park on Sunday?” I asked. “His name’s Ned Silverman, and he called to ask me to dinner Thursday, and I didn’t get his number. Didn’t he say he was going to be conductor of the Portland Symphony’s summer program?”
“Well, congratulations,” Bob said enthusiastically. “He’s an interesting guy. Bring him by for a drink after dinner! And yeah — he did say he was going to Portland. You could always call him there if you have to.”

I looked out the window at 6th Avenue and drummed my fingers on my desk. What to do, what to do? So I called the alumni office at Eastman School of Music. After some waiting, I learned that nobody named Silverman, with a first name that could possibly be shortened to Ned, had any degrees from Eastman, and in fact no such person had ever even taken a class at Eastman.

Nobody like Ned Silverman had ever been a fellow at McDowell Colony either. Ned Silverman didn’t work for Philips Records, in this country or in Europe.

My last hope was Mu Murphy, who had been my aunt Billie’s roommate decades before, and who had spent her career booking various types of talent for BBDO. I explained the whole thing to Mu. “Honestly, this sounds like something Billie would have done,” she said dryly. She agreed that the world is full of crazies and you can’t be too careful and told me she would take some time after the office closed to go through old files. The next day she confirmed that Ned Silverman had not been employed by BBDO and had not been a contractor either.

I had all day Wednesday to think about it. When I got home from work Thursday, I talked to the doorman, Avi. “A guy named Ned Silverman is coming by at 7.30,” I said. “Before calling me, give him this note. If he leaves, buzz me when he’s out of sight.”

Avi buzzed me at 7.40 and I went out to the front door. “Your friend gave me a different name — I think he’s Israeli,” Avi said. “So I told him I had a note for Ned Silverman, and he said, oh, yeah, that’s me, so I gave him your note.”
“And what did he do then?” I asked.
Avi pointed to the front garden’s retaining wall. “He sat down there and read your note.”
“And?” I prompted.
“And he laughed and laughed and shook his head and said he couldn’t believe you went to all that trouble, and he went down toward Second Avenue.”

My note had told him that I had learned that he wasn’t who he said he was, and I listed all the places I had checked. However, I also told him that I would be happy to meet him for dinner, but he would have to have his passport and driver’s license and proof of employment. And so Ned Silverman disappeared from East 51st Street. Neighbor Bob was really disappointed!

Years passed. I was married and pregnant with Lydia, renting office space in Boston from A Better Chance. The ABC ladies and I often ate lunch together, and one day talk turned to Strange Situations With Men. I told of my encounter with Ned Silverman and pretty much walked off with the prize for weirdest story. Months later, several hours after Lydia was born, I was dozing when an aide bustled in with a lavish flower arrangement. “It must be from your husband,” she said. “It’s really beautiful. He takes good care of you.”

I reached for the card. “Yours always, Ned Silverman,” it read. Even with stitches where you shouldn’t have stitches, it was worth a good belly laugh. The ladies of A Better Chance remembered!

More years passed. On Lydia’s birthdays I always tell her when-you-were-born stories, and (when she was old enough) I told her about Ned Silverman, adding the coda of the wonderful flowers. Sometimes she’d ask me to tell stories when her friends visited, and the story of Ned Silverman was always a hit. A few years ago, I had surgery in Mount Kisco. Waking up in the hospital the next day, I found a lovely arrangement of flowers.

I reached for the card. “Eternally yours, Ned Silverman,” it read. Lydia in action! The card is on the fridge door even now.

So, two weeks ago when Lydia left for Swaziland and I found a lovely bouquet of snapdragons waiting at my door, my first, wildly irrational thought was: Ned Silverman! But then it appeared that the card, which read “Moms need flowers” was from Lydia’s dad. But no — it was an additional layer of mistaken identity. Having thanked the wrong person here, I want to give a shout-out to my college sweetheart Green Tanager (left), who has known me so long he used to remember my mother telling him not to wake the baby, i.e. me.

Whoever the Israeli music man might be, I have had infinitely more fun telling that story than I ever would have had if I’d gotten to know him. But inquiring minds want to know: was The Man Who Wasn't Ned Silverman a demon?

Long ago and in a kingdom far away, that thought hadn't occurred to me (axe murderers were the then-current trend). But now that I work in Bookstore C, I see all around me proof that there are indeed demons, and vampires too. I could look it up! But I like my story better, not knowing.

Bookstore update: Evolution for Dummies

2009-07-02T11:36:00.010-04:00

The customer approached me on the sales floor. "I can't find Evolution for Dummies," she explained. "You must have it, right?"
We chatted as I checked the computer inventory. "What are you using it for?" I asked.
"Actually, I'm kind of insulted," she answered. "I'm a grad student in education, and we're a classful of science teachers who have all been teaching this stuff for years. But the prof thinks we need this in addition to our other reading."
"Well, the Dummies books are generally thorough groundings in whatever," I said, thinking positively.
"I know! I'm using the one for bridge*, and it's terrific, but we were all science majors, and besides, we're also reading Origin," she replied.
She'd really caught my attention now. "What else are you reading? Any Ernst Mayr?"
"Yes," and she named a couple other writers vital to any sound discussion of evolution today. It sounded like a heavier reading load than you might expect, and the customer agreed that the prof has a good reputation and people come out of his classes well prepared.

She was right! We didn't have the book on our shelves, but I found it for her at the Bookstore C branch in White Plains. I reflected that the customer's true objection to buying the book was being told that she needed a Dummies as a text.

Dummies books are scattered through the store, shelved with others of their subject matter. I resolved not to hesitate about using them for my own classes should the need arise. There's a Bible for Dummies and a New Testament for Dummies. Probably not a UU Church Polity for Dummies, though.

*Full disclosure: from where I sit right now, I can reach out to Dummies books on Digital Photography, Photoshop 7, Excel 2003, Word, eBay, and starting an eBay business.

Swaziland update: First impressions

2009-07-01T15:05:00.008-04:00

So: Lydia is training near Piggs Peak, and Swaziland is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. She recommends Google Image and I have saved you the trouble by posting some here. SiSwati has eight kinds of nouns. The PC handbook has 38 acronyms and is missing quite a few. She misses Red Zinger tea. Above: From the Piggs Peak home page.

Image of a Swazi village by Fosters4, found on Flickr.

When do I leave? Round-trip Jo'burg is about $1k. I can hardly wait! Of course -- and these are Lydia's doubts, not mine -- first she has to complete her training. Above: Another posting from Google.Image.

Access to Water is a Human Right. But …

2009-07-01T00:13:00.009-04:00

The story of the New York City water supply is actually one of the Great True Stories. The quest for good drinking water is as old as the city (approaching the end of its fourth century) and involves Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton, banking law, Irish immigrants, transported communities and abandoned villages, wile, guile, imagination and ingenuity. Photo at left: Many homes from old Katonah were moved to a new site a mile away, to allow for the construction of the Croton reservoir.

And as a resident of Westchester County, New York City’s water comes out of my taps — and it’s probably the best municipal drinking water in the world. Why any of my neighbors wants to buy bottled water is beyond me! Our water really does come from giardia-free crystalline mountain streams and is rigorously protected, not just by the city but by the people who live in the hundreds of square miles of the watershed. NYS DEC map at right: You can be hours from New York City (shown in purple) deep in the mountains and still have an NYC reservoir nearby.

The UU Service Committee is promoting a movement for water rights in California. And that's a grand idea ... but wait a minute. What does California do with the water it's got? Does California -- do most communities in the arid southwest use water wisely? Why should UU energy be directed toward providing more water to people living in a part of the country that cannot support the population it had forty years ago, much less today?

This question has several parts. One relates to public policy about a part of the United States that has far exceeded the carrying capacity of the land it occupies. One of the parts relates to public policy that continues to promote settlement there. And a third part relates to the goals of the UUSC. Yes, I believe that access to drinking water is a human right. But before we encourage Californians to take to the streets and the airwaves to demand more of the world's resources -- and given that nobody is lying dying in a dusty Marin street as I write -- why not assess the true starting and ending points of any suggested policy change?

In the first place, why should our denominational energies go to supporting anything as unsustainable, in any guise, as development in the southwest? Here we have a direct collision of long-term goals. The western and southwestern states need a water policy that goes further than water. The UUSC should be lobbying for a clear-eyed evaluation of today's real water management in the southwest in terms of future water needs across the continent.

Here's what I believe the UUSC should be working for. 1) Acknowledgement that access to clean, drinkable water is a human right and a government responsibility. 2) Therefore, government provision of trucked-in (if necessary) water to communities that lack other access to it. 3) Making equitable distribution of existing water a first step in any water-provision plan. As long as existing water supplies are unfairly priced and inequitably distributed, no state should be looking beyond its own borders for water. 4) Making desalination of sea-water the second step in any large water-provision plan, rather than a someday step. 5) Acknowledging that the abandonment of existing communities in unsustainable locations will happen, and plan for it -- starting now -- as a rational solution.

It's been only a year since the Great Lakes Compact was finally signed. The eight states and two provinces that surround the Great Lakes agreed on their management, today and into the future. There have already been legal challenges to companies wishing to bottle water from the GL watershed and sell it outside the watershed. It's hard for me to believe that politicians in the arid southwest don't have their eyes on GL water as a solution for their own foolish overdevelopment and bad management. The Compact pledges the signers to wise management (which includes effective use, reuse, and even re-reuse) and I predict that it will come under pressure from the arid southwest. Sending Great Lakes water south and west is not good management, wise use, or sustainable. I also believe the UUSC should have, as a goal, support for the Great Lakes Compact.

Which is the story of a large international community that made a good-faith, successful plan for resource management long into the future. It's kind of like the story of New York City's water supply! And nothing at all like the we'll-think-about-it-tomorrow greed that has characterized planning in the southwest.

The English call it "bodging", Part 1

2009-06-30T00:17:00.009-04:00

ChaliceChick posted a link to There, I Fixed It, a website of unlikely repairs. It doesn't really remind me of 26 Water Street in Poland ... and yet, and yet, there are certain similarities.

When I was 15, my parents bought a house in the center of the village. Oh happy day! Yellow Creek flowed behind the house. I was ecstatic! We could walk everywhere and the property had beautiful trees. Only then did my mother warn me that the house had been neglected for many years.

My parents bought the house from Mr. L, who for three years had been living in another town with the second Mrs. L. The first Mrs. L had been very sick, bedridden, for a number of years before her death several years earlier, and the house had been unloved during her illness and afterwards.

Some of the house's issues were honestly a matter of taste. Like the silver woodwork, for instance. Yes! All the interior woodwork was painted silver. Every last bit of it including the kitchen. All the ceilings had been papered with silvery designs on white, and every room had different, dark, surly wallpaper with silver in the design. My bedroom was dark green and mustard-yellow and silver paisley (30s vintage, perhaps); the dining room was striped navy, dark red, and silver. But wait -- both rooms were papered on only three walls and the fourth wall was knotty pine paneling in its full orange spotted splendor.

Then there were issues of age. The house started out as a one-room cabin for the Methodist preacher. It was added to, a room at a time, as he married and his family grew. So every room was differently proportioned, no two doors were the same size or design, the windows had been installed one at a time, no two fireplaces matched, there were relics within the walls of abandoned structures, and each room's floor was at its own level. Of course there wasn't a plumb line or level surface in the place. And we won't mention closets.

So there's taste and age, and then there's neglect and weirdness. Take oven cleaner, for instance. Beneath the kitchen sink we found dozens of cans of oven cleaner. The housekeeper had apparently tried every brand manufactured over more than a decade, to little avail. I once ventured into the house to find my mother, aunt Billie, and Mr. B all gathered around the open oven, trying vainly to imagine what could have happened in the oven to make it like that.* Whatever had happened had happened often. Billie suggested that a baked alaska had exploded, which seemed overoptimistic considering the L family's probable cooking skills.

So that was neglect. Somewhere on the cusp of neglect and weirdness came the installation of the house's water supply -- possibly in the house's fiftieth year -- in which every left-hand faucet was for cold water and every right-hand faucet for hot. But the first truly weird thing we encountered was the kitchen cabinets.

The house was such a shambles that at first we lived partly at the farm and partly at my grandmother's, on College Street. I was the first to actually try to organize the kitchen, and it occurred to me that the kitchen cupboards were shallower than they should have been. We saw that at some point, cupboards had been built directly in front of, and screwed to, the built-in cupboards. So the additional ones were pulled away, and we found cupboards directly behind them, with the doors nailed shut. Removing the nails, we found shelves still stocked with plates, cups, baking powder, and a few other things in tins and jars. The old shelves were exactly the same size as the ones that had been added and we could never guess why they had so carefully been replaced: a totally meaningless change.

*When as a Hastings trustee I learned that the heaviest pollution on the waterfront's old Anaconda site was where a vat of PCBs had exploded in the early 40s, I saw a possible answer. Mr. L was an industrial chemist. Home manufacture of PCBs?

As you boil your bed sheets in bleach to get out the mildew, ponder this

2009-06-30T00:05:00.006-04:00

And keep pondering as you scrub the mold off your bathroom walls and maybe from behind your ears: our reservoirs are still not at 100% of capacity.

Well, the Schoharie Reservoir (at 91%) is the farthest away. Maybe they didn't get our 19 days of rain up that far north. But lookit: the Croton system, just a half hour's drive from here, is two percent empty. I'm baffled, because we can all remember when it's been full to 100% of capacity.

Delighted with Peter Morales's election win

2009-06-29T23:07:00.010-04:00

Over the weekend, the Unitarian Universalist Association elected a new president. Peter Morales — a latecomer to the UU ministry and a former newspaper publisher — was elected with about 58% of the vote. It was the first UUA election in which absentee ballots were cast, and I was happy to cast one of my congregation’s. (The UUA is an organization of congregations, not of individuals; this was specifically established at one point in our history.)

At the end of the General Assembly at which he was elected, President Morales (the UUA’s first Latino president) presided over his first board meeting. Notes from the meeting have appeared on many blogs, and it seems that relations were a little stilted. I’m not operating with any inside info here, but UUA Convener Gini Courter, who was reelected herself, endorsed Morales’s opponent Rev. Laurel Hallman, the favorite of many who might be perceived as an east coast establishment within UUism.

I am sure that the Hallman endorsers will deny that there is an east coast establishment inside the UUA. When I moved to New York from Ohio and San Francisco more than thirty years ago, I could see (and feel!) a real difference in Unitarianism in the east. And that’s not mentioning New England, which is even more different. There are sound historical reasons for these differences and it doesn’t do right by our history to pretend they aren’t there, even though congregations in the far west are just as likely to be in the eastern tradition as they are in the midwestern.* Incidentally, nobody including me is painting this as a sectional upset or anything like that.

I supported Morales precisely because he was out of the mold. The two candidates did not have opposing visions, but their emphases were very different from each other. It seemed to me beforehand that we would be defining our history to date — especially late 20th century events — by the choice made in this election. At left: Peter Morales as a Knight International Press Fellow in Peru.

Peter Morales won my heart with a speech he made in 2006, describing a study reported in the American Sociological Review a year earlier. I will spare you the numbers, but the point was that between 1985 and 2005, Americans lost relationships. That is, they went from having three people to whom they felt they could confide close personal matters, to having less than one. The sociologists doing the study were so shocked by the results that they didn’t publish for a long time, while they reexamined their data.

Or, in Peter Morales’s own words: Hear the cry of pain in these numbers. This study reveals a level of human isolation that is unprecedented in American life — and perhaps unprecedented in human history. Americans are lonelier than they have ever been. The close friendships that are so essential to us are being eroded at a frightening rate. One in four Americans has no close personal relationship at all. Zero.

At the risk of tedium, I will continue quoting. Let me throw just one more statistic at you. At the end of the Second World War about half of all American households had three generations in them. … Today there are almost no three generation households left. The two or three percent of multi-generational households that exist are almost all poor recent immigrants. … Today, one out of four households in American is a single person household. Let me say that again. One quarter of American addresses today has only one person living there. …You and I are relational creatures. We become fully human in a network of relationships. We desperately long to belong. We need community the way we need food and shelter [but]... we have created a society that systematically rips apart human relationships. Yet our need for deep relationship never goes away. Above, standing at left: Seminarian Morales with other members of LUUNA, the Latino/a UU Networking Association.

This oppressive and painful reality presses in on me no matter which of my most important hats I wear. As myself growing older, as the mother of an only child, as a student in ministry, and as an elected official, this social reality is terrible. And the future of today’s reality is even worse. I don’t believe people evolved to live the way Americans do now, and the longer I see myself as a person preparing for ministry, the worse the issue appears.

Peter Morales saw that study and he knew, from his own life and ministry, that it told a real truth. He’s within a very Anglo tradition, yet he comes to it from outside that tradition, which is perhaps why he can see it so clearly. He sees UUs as having good news and wants to lead us to a greater understanding of what we’ve lost, where we can take ourselves, and who we can be for people who need us.

*Mark Harris of Watertown, my UU history prof, told me that one defining characteristic can be that eastern congregations have communion sets. Communion sets! As an Ohioan, I was shocked.

Thinking of der Lenny*

2009-06-25T23:43:00.004-04:00

Millions of words have been written on Leonard Bernstein's magic, and the mythology doesn't need my addition to the bulk. But I remembered today an LP record my parents bought for me when I was in grade school, Leonard Bernstein and What is Jazz?

In two sides of one LP, Bernstein used the text from several of his broadcasts. I particularly recall his explanation that the blues used iambic pentameter. First he played Bessie Smith singing,
"I woke up this mornin' with an awful achin' head.
Oh, I woke up this mornin' with an aaaawful achin' head.
My new man had left me just a rooooom and an empty bed."

He appended some lines from Macbeth, singing
"I will not be afraid of death nor bane.
I said, I will not be afraaiid of death nor bane.
'Til Birnam Forest cooomes to Dunsinane."

It worked! And it must have been a good lesson for me to remember it all these years.

*As the adoring Viennese called him.

It's too easy

2009-06-24T21:46:00.013-04:00

I just can't bring myself to quote Mark Sanford's icky email to his mistress, Maria of Argentina. The point is being made that nowhere does Sanford use a feminine pronoun, so ... given the text, could it be that "Maria" is a guy? After all, Sanford is a Republican.

No, what I want to tell you about is the Ohio kind of illicit lovin'. Dr. Harding's eldest child Warren became an influential newspaper publisher in Marion, Ohio, then a state senator*, a state lieutenant governor, a U.S. Senator, and finally, President of the United States. It helped that he married well.

Wasn't he handsome? He looked like a President. Unlike a good president, however, it was said of Harding that "If Warren had been a girl, she'd always have been in the family way, because that man just couldn't say no." It must be acknowledged that when 15-year-old Nan Britton wrote him fan letters and mash notes, Harding counseled her to wait until she grew up and found a nice young man her own age.

But he didn't take his own advice! No. The Ur-Monica, minus the thong, Nan subsequently claimed to have enjoyed (I use the word lightly) knee-tremblers with Harding in his Senate office and later, in White House closets. She also claimed that her daughter, father otherwise unknown, was his.

And she produced love letters to prove it. They sizzle -- that Ohio kind of sizzle! "Oh, my girlie -- tell me my kisses don't disgust you." Show me the woman who could resist such talk! Please note that Nan Britton let fragments of his letters, like that one, out in public to prove their love. To the right: Handsome Harding, looking left, a vile canard. He'd never do that. But what of Harding's wife Florence? Some averred that she'd killed him. Alas for conspiracy theorists, he probably died of just the same thing that took William Jennings Bryan, a busted gut.

*Imagine Harding in Albany today.

Google + Blogger = censorship

2009-06-24T15:57:00.011-04:00

Censorship. What a dirty word and what a surprise.

Octavian Coifan, a leading blogger in the area of perfume and fragrance, was told today by Blogger.com that it removed from 1000 Fragrances a posting found offensive by the House of Guerlain.

Guerlain, one of the oldest surviving fragrance houses in the world, is currently owned by LVMH (stands for Louis Vuitton, Moët Hennessy), a holder of luxury brands. LVMH's lawyers apparently made a complaint to Google and Blogger.

I and many of Octavian's other fans read the offending piece a few days ago. No matter how I try to view it with marketing eyes, I cannot see it as offensive. Octavian was comparing a new Guerlain fragrance to one manufactured by another company. He compared the scent itself as well as the packaging and the advertising, and showed the two bottles and two advertisements.

It doesn't matter, in one sense, which was first; the market will choose the survivor. If the other company (named in Octavian's piece, but I forget it) believes the Guerlain product infringes on its own, it has every legal right to take Guerlain to court. Taking out a blog and blogger doesn't affect the first company's rights at all, and that company certainly has both grounds for a suit and the money to pursue it.

Fragrance blogs are what you might expect of enthusiasts about anything. The blogmeister is very knowledgeable, and many followers, equally so. Their blogs discuss the histories of fragrances, stories of ingredients and inventors and copies and names and top notes and formulations and trends, and and and. Blogger and followers blog and follow because they live for the topic! It would be the same for wine or beer lovers, model train enthusiasts, or camera-crazed photographers, Kindle users, BlackBerry users.

Like many, many perfumistas, Octavian loves the older Guerlain fragrances. Like many perfumistas, he dislikes what has happened to them as LVMH has substituted cheaper ingredients. Many bloggers discuss this. Guerlain is not the only offender, and greed is not the only cause -- the European Community is also forcing substitutions because of contact allergies among consumers. Many bloggers discuss that too. So why is LVMH singling out Octavian?

And more pressingly for the thousands of us who have blogs on Blogger.com -- why did Google and Blogger buckle under to LVMH? Followers of newspaper blogs know that newspaper business offices are excruciatingly vulnerable to pressure from advertisers. Given the difference in financial stability (etc.) between Google and LVMH, I'd have thought all the power was on Google's side, and ours.

Mike Ullman -- formerly of Canfield, Ohio -- was Directeur General, Group Managing Director, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (luxury goods manufacturer and retailer) from 1999 to 2002; President of LVMH Selective Retail Group from 1998 to 1999. I knew him when: he was in eighth grade and I in tenth, working backstage at the Youngstown Civic Children's Theater.

9.30 p.m. in Jo'burg, Mbabane

2009-06-24T12:34:00.006-04:00

Our household Peace Corps volunteer touched down in Johannesburg a couple hours ago, and I hope the PC fed her team of 10 and put them to bed after a flight that started at 5 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday.

After writing my weepy blog entry Monday morning, I did what you might laughingly call "roused" Lydia. We got out of the house in time to miss the Chinatown bus* to DC, so she got onto a Metroliner, for a much more relaxed ride. One last phone call: did I leave several checks behind? How about my Peace Corps handbook? No and yes. And another call yesterday from Dulles: is my phone charger there? No. And off she went for her two-year adventure.

Next up: three months of language training in-country. Country = Swaziland. There will be no Peace Corps blog; everyone does it, she probably won't have internet** access, and she has two other blogs to maintain if and when.

*"What is the Chinatown bus anyway?" I asked as we hit 138th Street. "The Chinatown bus" is a definite thing -- cheap bus lines that link Chinatowns around the east coast. Who knew that Buffalo has a Chinatown? $55 one way. This is not a ride that goes to a bus terminal. Look outside your nearby Waffle House, though, and you might see it. The Fung Wah bus has "longest history chinatown bus".

**One suggested purchase that did make it into Lydia's luggage was the Solio, a solar-powered charger for various electrics up to but not including a computer.

4.15 a.m.

2009-06-22T04:41:00.007-04:00

The room is only just not dark. Through the open window, the Hudson Valley sighs, a long drawn-out exhale that accompanies a single drift of rain. (Rain, entering its sixteenth straight day.)

Another long drawn-out exhale beside me, and my daughter Lydia stirs in her sleep. In the near-dark I can just see the long ripples of her hair against the lighter sheet. One breath of her Lydia mandarin-cinnamon smell drifts past me.

Somewhere not too far away, late-home revelers laugh and call out. The sound echoes through the neighborhood and is cut off as they remember that their neighbors sleep. A single car growls uphill.

I rise and go to the window, moving the lace curtains aside to let the warm-cool damp breeze into my face. Through the apple tree's ghostly branches, I know the Palisades can be seen during the day but it's dark and misty still.

4.29 a.m. The dawn chorus begins. One, two, three separate birds call out to their mates, and morning is officially underway: June 21, 2009.

Shame, scorn, and the UU quest

2009-06-18T19:55:00.003-04:00

Imagineering Faith was Rev. Christine Robinson's sermon at First Unitarian in Albuquerque last Sunday. I find it a remarkable sermon, because it examines feelings common to many UUs, and provides the first sound explanation for those feelings I've ever encountered.

As someone who was brought up in a Unitarian household (both parents became Unitarians) I am a rare bird in most any UU congregation. At least three-quarters of American UUs came to it as adults. In my own congregation of about 170, there are eight of us UUs from early childhood.

The path from being a UU child to being a UU adult is not necessarily a smooth one. Lots of our Sunday school classmates wandered off in other directions, and most of us rediscovered the religion for ourselves when we were grown. A congregation of questers and doubters, most of whom do not agree on the same definition of anything, is not likely to produce kids who ask no questions but move forward into its adult ranks.

But back to Christine Robinson's sermon. Why is it meaningful? And what's this about shame and scorn? I invite you to read it for yourself, but in a nutshell: Robinson suggests that shame is the feeling that something is wrong with you. Not that you have done something wrong: that's guilt. Shame is about who we are. Shame damages us forever.

Scorn, says Robinson, is the kind of rhetoric used to engender shame in another person. She goes on to observe that the kind of political commentary enriching Rush Limbaugh and others of his breed uses scorn as its weapon.

Robinson goes on to point out how, as children -- whether we were active UUs or simply the kind of children who would grow up to be UUs -- we were likely to be questioners, having doubts, not fitting into the sets of beliefs that those around us seemed to hold. For our friends or for most of the adults we knew, their faith was totally natural -- but we didn't have it. And what those transactions induced in us was shame.

Shame breeds anger. And that anger in many UUs and religious "liberals" is all around us. Attributing it to shame, and attributing our shame to having to deal with a world of faith when we ourselves did not have faith, seems to me to be a masterly understanding of many UUs. And that anger against people of faith -- and even people who simply use the language of (usually) Christianity -- is a corrosive element in many of our congregations.

A few months ago, my minister was absent one Sunday and his stand-in a) wore a stole over his suit, b) used the words "God" and "faith," c) prayed, d) spoke a benediction at the end of the service, and e) lifted his hands, palms out, when he gave that benediction. Some members of the congregation were unhappy; one or two were furious and rude. As my congregation's unofficial intern, I subsequently apologized for the rudeness he encountered. He said, "We must learn to be gentle with one another, and we have not always been so."

UU-ism has changed a lot in my lifetime. When I was in school, Unitarians were often WASP-y intellectuals, mirroring our early New England spiritual ancestors. Newcomers were generally escapees from orthodoxy, like my parents -- one from an Irish Catholic family, one from a Scots Presbyterian family. They admired and embraced the tradition and were relieved to have left their families' certainties behind.

Converts anywhere carry their own baggage, though. No matter what discovered universe you embrace, you are also an ex-something. Early 20th-century religion went deep into the personalities of its children, so mid-century UU congregations had large numbers of ex-Lutherans, ex-Catholics, ex-Presbyterians; being an "ex" was significant to them. Across the U.S. there was also a significant cohort of European Jewish immigrants, prosperous, well-educated, often atheists, and generally wary and in shock. Often the significant characteristic Unitarians shared with each other was the sense that they didn't belong anywhere else. This nourished anger too.

So it's no surprise to find, in the old 1964 blue hymnal, shame and anger institutionalized. I periodically return to the blue hymnal for readings no longer in broad use, but what I find are works by apologists like him who wrote "Let us cherish the state that her mighty ends may be achieved." There is little worship and praise and exaltation; there is sackcloth and ashes and guilt. Shame is just down the road. So is anger.

So how have we changed in that half century? People coming in the door now may be in a mixed marriage seeking a place to bring up their children to value both traditions. Equally often, these parents will come from families virtually without religion. They are not escaping from generalized oppression. So what is their anger about?

Here's where Robinson makes an interesting leap from political culture to religion. The Limbaughs, she notes, have used scorn as their significant weapon. We -- their opponents -- are not just wrong, we are bad. We are not just bad, we are evil. Rhetoric leaps high as the speakers' ratings must; without high ratings, these entertainers will wither and die, and shock gives high returns on investment. So the language of scorn and hatred escalates. The wounds go deeper into everyone's hearts, and even people who are not out on a theological limb feel shamed and the anger spreads.

I think we UUs have gone wrong by not acknowledging anger that lies among us and doing something about it. Our hymn We Are a Gentle, Angry People for some unfathomable reason celebrates this anger ... but does nothing with it. It simply states that we are angry, one of the most impotent statements you can imagine.

How much better off we would be, and how much better people we would be, to get to the root of this anger and do something with the knowledge. I like Robinson's sermon immensely, because she does confront the reality, she examines its meaning, and she begins the discussion.

Christine Robinson's pic comes from the Albuquerque UU website, and the offending stole is shown at the UniUniques website.

My hair #1: The golden anniversary of the man with the golden hands

2009-06-18T14:50:00.010-04:00

Admit it -- you have no idea what this entry will be about. Am I letting you into my inner kinkster? Unfortunately not.

Clyde told me this morning that he is celebrating his 50th year in the hair dressing profession this month. Last year he sold Chou Chou to Vera [Omigawd! My hair! What will happen to My Hair???] and decided to take it easy by working only three days a week as an employee.

In addition to being a genius -- and I don't use the term lightly -- with scissors and color, Clyde has had an ... interesting life. Some of his friends are famous, some are glamorous, all are smart and interesting. Clyde is not (his his words) "some asshole hair stylist." More than that, he's a good friend who lends me books (most recently, Francis Collins) and CDs (such as his old pal Stan Getz).

Are he and his intellectual wife Ervene going off into some retirement sunset? No, although their passports are waiting to for even more use, what Clyde is doing with his time these days is creating a new modern arts museum in the lower Hudson Valley. It's his story to tell, not mine, but they have a building and a scintillating board and you will be hearing more from them in surprising ways.

I will tell more about both Clyde and My Hair in the future. But you can listen to the man himself at Clyde's Corner. Clyde can still be reached at 914-478-HAIR. I know the number well.

More on Nancy Drew, Women of SCOTUS

2009-06-18T14:36:00.002-04:00

As a style item, this doesn't go with the black robe. But oooh, wouldn't you love to see The Hons. O'Connor, Ginsberg, and Sotomayor with this accessory?

I should have named this blog "Other People's Expertise"

2009-06-15T20:46:00.006-04:00

Here is a game the archaeologists are playing -- they have their own Facebook group for it, but you need not be a member to check it out. It's called When on Google Earth, and the site is self-explanatory.

But if you're too busy traveling to ancient ruins yourself to check it out, here's what it is. The winner of the last round chooses an archaeological site somewhere on earth and publishes the aerial view from Google Earth, then other archaeologists compete to identify it.

If you'd like to have a go, here's Number 46. You can backtrack through the list of previous rounds to see previously chosen sites.

The geologists, highly experienced observers that they are, created their own game -- Where on Google Earth -- first, but they don't have anything like the organization of the archaeologists and thus don't have them gathered on one site. In fact, I'm not able to figure out where they all are -- it would take days to put the series together. But they're interesting anyway.

Chris Rowan of the U of Edinburgh started What on Google Earth on his own blog. I haven't read anything other than the initial entry, but there are 63 comments -- all from geologists and other observers who (from an aerial photo) are trying to identify the cause of a geologic phenomenon visible on Google Earth. It's interesting to read through the comments, occasionally revisiting the photograph, and reading their collaborative thinking.

Sex and the single beetle

2009-06-15T15:34:00.007-04:00

Flowers change color after being pollinated, British science writer Ed Yong tells us today at It's Not Exactly Rocket Science. In fact, several hundred flowering plants have this ability. His post includes pictures of a tiny legume whose change is very dramatic. Not only does it change after pollination, but if the plant subsequently senses that it's not pollinated usefully, it returns to its original color and form to attract additional pollinators.

I was reminded of a lecture on various pollinations in one of my early botany courses. The prof showed slides, but I found even better images showing the flower's progression. The Giant Amazon Water Lily blooms pristine pearl-white during the day. That night it opens wider and lets out a scent that calls to beetles everywhere. The beetles flock to the lily and have an all-night orgy, drinking and mating and mating and eating almost to exhaustion. They haul themselves away as sunrise approaches, and after sunrise the flower has turned a tattered red-pink. But think how efficiently it has been pollinated!

If that water lily ever reminds you of yourself, and you drag yourself into work and someone says, "Boy -- you look like I feel!" tell them they should be so lucky.

The images come from the Cotswolds Wildlife Park and Gardens, where they successfully grow Amazonian flora by heating the water. Unfortunately, the site does not include an action photo of the beetles.

The simple farm boy with just one chance

2009-06-15T12:14:00.007-04:00

Hands up everyone who has seen the Rosetta Stone ad for foreign-language-learning software. By "the" ad I mean one which has run perhaps two years, showing a dark-haired lad holding his baseball cap as he scratches his head, the other hand holding the Rosetta Stone software, while the blurb tells you that he was a farm boy, she was an Italian supermodel, and he would have just one chance to impress her.

I say "the" ad because Rosetta Stone has run this ad month after month, year after year, almost exclusively. There is one other ad -- male grad with proud dad and Rosetta Stone for Chinese -- which I have seen fewer than a dozen times.

Why does this ad irritate me so much? Every time I turn a magazine page and there he stands, scratching his head, I feel like tearing out the page. I think dark thoughts and consider writing to Rosetta Stone management, suggesting they fire their ad agency.

Here's what I think is the real story. The head-scratcher is in fact Mr. Rosetta Stone. He's also the grad, and he hauled his own dad into the Chinese ad. Or maybe the ad "agency" is Mrs. Rosetta Stone and that's her son. Whatever the real story is, it's lousy campaign management. Yes, it does draw the attention of cranks like me. But will it make me run right out and buy Rosetta Stone? Hasn't yet. Isn't going to.

This morning I happened on Distributor Cap NY, a blog focused (I think) on advertising and media, and a piece about diminishing returns. The blog piece is about techniques used to market, for instance, Tide, then switches its focus to political parties*. The issue in politics is the Republican repetition of idiotic memes about both the Democratic party and the Democratic president.

*Incidentally, the blogwriter thinks it's really stupid that for the last generation, Republicans have called their opponents the "Democrat" party.

Why Blogger needs emoticons

2009-06-14T21:43:00.008-04:00

There I was shelving fiction when a pleasant-looking young guy with a beard approached. "Do you have the Sleeping Beauty trilogy?" he asked.
"You mean by Anne Rice?" I asked. "Only under another name?"
He consulted a note. "Yeah, that's the one. My friend told me I'd like it."
I took him to the R's. "Well, here's volume 1," I said as I pulled the book from the shelf.
"I'd like all three books," he said.

So I excused myself and went into the stockroom. Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy must be among the books most shoplifted from Bookstore C everywhere, and I wanted to check whether any were shelved safely in the stockroom. Unsurprisingly, I found volumes 2 and 3 and took them out to the customer.

"I thought they were all in one book," he said.
I explained that the three purchased together were the same price as the single volume.
"Well, then I'll only take the first one," he concluded. "What else can you recommend?"
"What are you looking for, exactly?" I asked, puzzled.
"Oh, a couple good books ... I'm going on vacation and I need stuff to read. Maybe some thrillers. You must know what's good," he added.
"Are you looking for more things like Sleeping Beauty?" I asked.
"You know, I don't really like Anne Rice's other books," he said, "but my friend told me I'd like these books. But, you know, whatever," he explained precisely.

"Do you know that the Sleeping Beauty books are BDSM porn?" I tried.
"BDSM? What's that?" he said, clearly puzzled.
:: oh, brother ::
"Bondage, dominance, S&M ..." I said.

Now this is why I could use emoticons right now. Because honestly, words fail me. But if I could simply run through an entire range of emoticons, I'd maybe convey what happened to this guy's face when I said that. "Smileys" are not what I have in mind. He opened the book at random and read for a minute. He turned absolutely crimson. He cleared his throat. "Well, I will take volume 1 and see why my friend thought I'd like it," he said. "What else do you suggest?"

So I took him through fiction and hand-sold a couple other books and sent him on his way. When I went back to the R's a half-hour later, volumes 2 and 3 were gone as well.

That's the cover of the Penguin paperback of volume 1.

We all know why we prefer independent bookstores, right?

2009-06-14T20:40:00.017-04:00

I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds me, but let me tell you -- as if you didn't already know -- why you should always, always, always support the indies*.

I work in one of the big chains -- hence, "Bookstore C" -- and I have pleasant stories to tell about customers and the other staff. But here's the A #1 Big Colossal Giant Supersized Humongous Capital P >>> Problem: almost every single decision about the store is made by Bookstore C Corporate.

This plays out in many ways and, given the desire to keep staffing at a minimum (and believe me, the difference does not show in my pay) it works well. For instance, every display you see in Bookstore C is designed by Corporate. If you walk into one of our stores and there's a display of, oh, bookmarks, that display will have been designed by Corporate, and is in every single Bookstore C in the U.S. and Canada that week. The sign and the spinner come from Corporate, and every single bookmark on the display was chosen by Corporate, AND Corporate will send along photos of where every single item on the display will be placed. Nothing is left to chance! Nothing.

So here we are in the Hudson Valley, and the start of the Henry Hudson Quadricentennial celebration was last week. We have a display of related titles, chosen for us, with a sign sent along for the display, but -- here's the catch -- it's missing that great little book about the Palisades that the Beczak Environmental Education Center published. Of course. Small publishers don't count, even though the catchment area for this branch of the store includes more than half of the people who look at the Palisades every day of their lives. Important note: There is no big-publisher book about the Palisades.

So where Bookstore S**, right here in Hastings-on-Hudson and now alas gone forever, carried books by every writer around***, it doesn't seem relevant to Bookstore C Corporate management that my branch has all these writers living within a few miles. Bill Holstein published a book just a few months ago, Why GM Matters. Bookstore C did not feature this local writer's book, nor did it ask him to do a program or sign books or anything else. If I sell a book by James Howe or Alyssa Capucilli or Roni Schotter or Steve Kanfer (just as a f'rinstance) I comment to the customer that the author lives in Hastings or Yonkers or wherever. Why doesn't Bookstore C promote this?

Last week I noticed a customer carrying a list and scanning the shelves anxiously. Could I help? "I'm looking for books by Helen, Helen, um, Helen Bar--, Bar-- oh golly," she said, "let me check her last name. I keep getting it wrong."
"Helen Barolini?" I hazarded.
"That's it!" she exclaimed happily. "Do you know her work?"
"Not only do I know and love her work, but I'm having dinner with her tonight****," I said.

The customer was just about overcome. She took my hand. "Tell her I love her," she said. And -- since Helen's wonderful books are not big-publisher books -- we went to the computer and she ordered Chiaroscuro, A Circular Journey, and Their Other Side. The book of Helen's that had created such devotion? Umbertina, which of course Bookstore C doesn't carry either.

Here's the other side of the picture. My first day at Bookstore C, I noticed a stack of Ann Coulter books on the front table. In the section, the newest and second-newest Coulter books were in double stacks face-out as well. In the several months since I started working there, there have been stacks and double face-outs of Bill O'Reilly's latest book. Currently the front table has two huge stacks of something with Ronald Reagan's name on the front cover, and also of two Glenn Beck titles. One day I was cleaning shelves near the Coulter books and my hand-held personal computer terminal beeped when I scanned them. Unsold, they'd sat on the shelves so long that the central computer told me to return all but one. That very day, another dozen of the same title arrived.

Well, hey -- has Bookstore C Corporate noticed that New York is a blue state? That Westchester County is a blue county? That my branch of Bookstore C is located in a town that has virtually no November election because if you win the Democratic primary, you get the job? It's not relevant for Bookstore C Corporate. Those unsold books by Reagan and O'Reilly and Beck and Coulter sit there gathering dust; personally, I have not sold one of them. These books adorn best-seller lists, which don't take into account what will be mammoth returns from Bookstore C. If our local managers selected books, these stacks would not be here.

I did not look for this when I started working at Bookstore C. It just became apparent to me after a while.

Umbertina cover from the Feminist press CUNY edition.

* Friend-from-ninth-grade Jane, who was at Copperfield's in Santa Rosa for twenty years, insists that she can never work at a chain for these reasons.
** Bookstore S = sui generis, Good Yarns Bookshop
*** Is there a lesson here? In order to survive, must bookstores ignore small publishers and local connections? The answer seems to be yes.
**** The Literature Club's 100th Anniversary dinner

More about the Spokane floods

2009-06-14T16:56:00.008-04:00

A blogger at Highly Allochthonous gave a perfect description of the Spokane Floods I blogged about last month. Anne Jefferson, of the University of North Carolina, has been on the ground all over the region and took very descriptive photos of the landforms. Her image of the "high-water marks" left from ancestral Lake Missoula is terrific. If you thought the brief piece I wrote was interesting, go read Anne Jefferson's. I definitely need to go back to the Pacific Northwest to spend more time on the ground. No, there's no explaining this passion to go looking at landforms.

Sotomayor and the New York State Senate -- win/win for the Republicans

2009-06-12T13:43:00.008-04:00

Has anyone noticed the Puerto Rico link between the New York Senate Flying Circus and SCOTUS nominee Sotomayor? Plot out the story arc and see where it goes.

Up in Albany, we have a few Democrats -- who happen to be Puerto Ricans from the NYC boroughs -- crossing the aisle to put the Republicans back in power, with obvious quids-pro-quo. These PRDs happen to be [flounders for word which will not put me in court] accused of various election and campaign fund frauds and assault (one of them has charges pending for assaulting his girlfriend with broken glass). Despite the fact that these two guys are really, truly unsavory, and their path to power is out for all to see, the Puerto Rican caucus is with them all the way.

And over here we have Bronx-raised Latina Judge Sotomayor, whom the Republicans are looking to paint in the darkest of colors.

What a party the Republican leadership must be having this week! With the most public of payoffs, the state party has retaken the state Senate and ended all hope for action on anything for the rest of the session. As a side benefit, they will manage to tar Judge Sotomayor with an implication that this is what it is to be Puerto Rican in the Bronx.

Bronxite Roy Cohn has crawled out of his grave and is dancing around the cemetery.

Raymo, the gentle giant

2009-06-04T23:15:00.011-04:00

High school classmate Ed e'd us all today to tell us that Raymo had a massive stroke and is on life support. It's strange to be with someone daily for twelve years, then never see them again. Ray and Eddie and I were classmates for twelve years, which then, seemed like forever; which it was. Ray was 6'3" and a bear of a guy, but he wasn't called Bear, he was called Raymo, who knows why.
His mom died when we were perhaps in our early 20s; she sat in the bleachers through every basketball game he ever played in. It was a tossup whether our team was as good as its record, or maybe Raymo's mom scared the opponents into losing! She put body English and every other kind of English into her fandom. Despite her ferocity, Ray was far from ferocious, he was a good sport and a good sportsman. He followed in his dad's footsteps as an ob/gyn, practicing in North Carolina after med school at Case Western Reserve and a residency at Mayo.

I had a real affection for Ray after a bad sixth-grade day. It was right before the end of the grade period and we had a substitute teacher. One of her tasks was to check our reading lists. On a separate notebook page, we had to keep a list of each book we read, one book per line. Most kids had at least a couple of books, some had ten or twelve -- I had six pages filled with books. One by one, we went to the teacher's desk to show her our lists. She looked at mine, pushed her chair back and stood up, her face grew crimson, and she yelled, "What is this? What are you trying to do?" Clearly she thought I was trying something on. The rest of the class fell silent. Then Raymo raised his hand and volunteered, "Oh, she read those books -- Diggitt always has book lists like that!" and then the rest of the class started to agree with him and spoke up too. Sometimes I have wondered what the sub would have done to me if Raymo hadn't spoken out. Unlike certain other alpha males in our class, Raymo was almost protective of me, even though we didn't know each other in anything other than a distant, across-the-classroom way. That's just who he was.

Follow-up: Raymo died Friday, June 5. The 6th was our graduation anniversary.

Wow! Randy Newman! Randy Newman. Wow.

2009-06-04T22:35:00.002-04:00

In a blog about the antivaccine hysteria, what did I find but It's Money That Matters by Randy Newman. Always a good concept to keep in mind when you speak of the credulous.

But what put a smile on my face was Randy Newman. Randy Newman!

I will never forget the very first time I heard Randy Newman, 39 years ago. Have You Seen My Baby? Late afternoon sunlight slanted into the Dolores Street kitchen in San Francisco as I fixed dinner. I was listening to KMPX. KPFA? The DJ was a woman named Dusty Street, with the sultry stoned voice all cool SF ladies had then. She played the song. She said, "Oh, wow." She played it again. She said, "That's really far out." She played it again. "Mmmm, wow," she said, "let's hear that one more time." She played it again.

All thoughts of dinner forgotten (well, I turned off the stove) I left the apartment, walked quickly over to the J Church streetcar, transferred on Market to the Hyde cablecar, and went straight to Tower Records on Fishermans Wharf to buy the record. Twelve Songs. Oh, wow. Wow.

When I went to London I left my records behind because after all, I was only going for a few months. Then, I got my first one-year work permit and knew I would be staying, so I bought another copy of Twelve Songs. God forbid that I be without Randy Newman. When CDs happened it was probably the first CD I bought. Wow. Actually, I think I now own a couple copies of that CD too ... and let's not even think about his other ones. A dozen? Eighteen? I have them all.

Whatever alienation I was feeling in May 1970 abandoned me long ago ... but there's something about Randy Newman's words and his music and his attitude that takes me someplace otherwise unfamiliar but strangely, weirdly comfortable. Wow.

Full disclosure: I wrote this last month on the actual anniversary of hearing RN, then forgot to post it. Today I sat in endless rush hour traffic outside Yankee Stadium(s). I punched the button for WFUV just as It's Money That Matters started up. A sign!

Fraud Watch: Elsevier makes an announcement

2009-06-04T21:32:00.012-04:00

Last month I wrote about the sci-tech-medical publisher Elsevier: how it had "published" several more-or-less fake journals in the service of Merck Pharma. Elsevier now acknowledges that those publications "should not have been called journals" and that it "... will review practices related to all article reprint, compilation or custom publications and set out guidelines on content, permission, use of imprint and repackaging to ensure that such publications are not confused with Elsevier's core peer reviewed journals and that the sponsorship of any publication is clearly disclosed."*

Elsevier's corporate position could be no other than this. They're demanding that we presume their innocence.

Since the fraudulent publications [those identified so far] were published between 2000 and 2005, negotiations leading up to publication probably began in the late 1990s. Thirty years ago, several STM publishers were already making arrangements with pharma houses although so far as I know, none sold their souls quite so blatantly. Hard to believe that in those decades, nobody within Elsevier looked enviously at those big bucks and said, "I want me some of that." Hard to believe that in any well-run company, project after project came and went, and nobody at any level from freelance copy-editor to the president stopped to wonder about the rules they were edited by, or who the editors were, or the niceties of production, or where the money came from for manufacturing and who approved those budgets, or why journals never had any need for order fulfillment, or where those numbers on the bottom line came from, or what they meant. Nobody ever wondered.

Controller: "Now this, this $500,000 -- what's this half million in income from?"
Random Elsevier Employee: "Merck bought a half million dollars worth of copies of a journal. That's so cool."
C: "What journal? We have to keep track of these things!"
REE: "Um, Journal of House Finch Cardiology, March of oh-one, I think it was."
C: "Journal of House Finch Cardiology? We publish that? I never heard of it. Does it have an outside owner? Is it a nonprofit? Do we own it? Do we pay the editor-in-chief any kind of stipend? We never had any start-up costs that I recall. How many editorial and production employees are assigned to it?"
REE: "I'm not sure. There's a lot of freelancers out there."
C: "And subscribers? We don't have any subscription income coming --" shuffles through papers "-- in from JHFC. Are we claiming a subscriber base when we sell advertising? Because it's illegal to claim subscriptions if we don't have any. We can be audited, you know."
REE: "I don't know. That's above my pay grade."
C: "Ah! That's all right then."

That conversation never happened. Anywhere inside Elsevier? At any time over the past twelve years? Honestly, that doesn't sound like the people I know in STM publishing, who are some of the most intelligent people in publishing, and who are often the first people to notice that the king is buck naked.

*It was reported at TheScientist.com today.

It's a Youngstown thing, Part I

2009-06-04T20:57:00.003-04:00

Pyrohy, pierogi, pirohi ... I could go on. There's at least a dozen more names and subtle differences, depending on which side of a hundred-year-old border your family came from. This shows the team of pyrohy (Ukrainian) makers at Holy Trinity (Ukrainian) in Youngstown.

:: sniff :: Personally, I always bought pirohi at Holy Trinity in Struthers. Looking around, I see that St. Stanislaus (Polish) has sauerkraut-filled pierogi. Now those are the best. Yum.

When, at age 20, I finally got my driver's license, I spent literally hours every possible day on the road exploring the area where I'd grown up. Wherever I had seen a curious sign or an interesting-looking building, I'd go search it out. These central European dumplings were a part of the scenery, produced by the church ladies for meatless Fridays. In those innocent days I deep-fried (or at least fried) them and served them with very hot mustard.

Thank goodness Lord Peter didn't kill off Mr. Campion

2009-06-04T00:29:00.006-04:00

In today's ChaliceBlog, ChaliceChick connects to a piece of copyright law and the example it refers to.

This reminded me of comparisons that have been made between Margery Allingham's Mr. Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey gets his own Wikipedia entry and Sayers was a more successful writer, but Allingham's character is just more interesting -- at least to my eyes.

Both men were of about average height, slender but decently muscled -- well, Wimsey was probably more godlike, I admit -- blue/green/grey eyed, blonde/sandy/straw-colored hair, spectacles, and a generally witless look. Both were good dressers, although Sayers went into greater detail on clothes in general. Both men were younger sons in titled families: we never know Campion's real name but we meet all of Wimsey's family and they figure in many books. Both men are trusted (in unspoken ways) by the governments of their day. Both men are rich and clearly do not worry themselves about money. Both men live in Piccadilly: Wimsey at 110A Piccadilly, Campion at 17A Bottle Street.

They have their differences, though. Lord Peter drives a Daimler, Mr. Campion a Lagonda. Lord Peter was damaged by his participation in France in World War One, Passchendaele, perhaps? Mr Campion's service was interesting, high-level but unspecified.

Both have a lower-class sidekick: for Lord Peter it's the ever efficient Bunter, who saved his life during the war, is an excellent photographer and good cook, and is at least nominally a butler (he announces guests too). You would never, ever expect Magersfontein Lugg, Mr. Campion's man-of-all-work, to buttle, however ("all-work" doesn't go that far) and I don't think he cooks, but he probably does a good fry-up. Lugg has his ear to the ground in criminal territory and may be an alumnus of Wormwood Scrubs. He sneers a lot, and Mr. Campion sometimes refers to him (to his face) as "Mother Lugg's little boy"; they are mock antagonists.

Their ancestry is different too. Wimsey's ancestry goes back to the Norman Conquest and the ancestral property, at Duke's Denver, occasionally figures in a plotline. Campion, on the other hand, is either named Rudolph or his older brother is, which signifies something non-English, even if it's not clear what. He may be royalty. Wimsey is C of E (as aren't we all?); Mr. Campion attended St Ignatius College, Cambridge, which, although non-existent, is clearly Catholic (and Campion is the name of an English saint and martyr) BUT Cambridge is right in the middle of the Fens, with Cromwell's home of Ely not far away, so the clues go in several directions.

Their choice of free-time companionship is subtly different. Wimsey has a good relationship with Detective Parker, who becomes his brother-in-law Charles. He has male friends, some of whom are even Jews, which undoubtedly signified the cosmopolitan in London during the 1920s. Sayers's own stamping grounds, in a London ad agency and Oxford, provide Wimsey's friends. Well-born women, sometimes of puzzling morals, are in the background and it's acknowledged that he has kept mistresses. (Not in so many words! He has bought clothing for women.) Mr. Campion's choicest friends, who do sometimes assist him, in small ways, include people with names like Guffy Randall, whom we later learn is a lord. Oates and Luke are friendly acquaintances in Scotland Yard but neither man marries his sister Val, a famous fashion designer. Mr. Campion's heart was broken by Biddy Padgett.

Which brings us to their women.

Harriet Vane is as famous as Wimsey herself, even before she becomes Lady Peter (and the nicety of the naming is noted) ... She is a possible ... murderess! who attended Oxford, and is a writer, and ... has lived in sin. Check Sayers's entry in Wikipedia and you will see why Harriet might have killed her lover. Wimsey's mother approves of Harriet; it's a deft touch that given her public past Harriet chooses to be married in cloth of gold, referring us back to Wimsey's Norman ancestry.

I just adore Lady Amanda Pontisbright, about as pleasing a female character as I have ever encountered. Mr. Campion becomes acquainted with her when he is about 30 and she, 16 or 17. She is red-headed, dressed up in a garment she made from old curtains, and wants desperately to rent him a room in the mill house where she lives in penury with brother, sister, and American cousin. Amanda is fascinated by electricity and hydraulics and possibly Mr. Campion -- at one point she asks him bluntly, "Do you ever think about Biddy Padgett?" (indicating that although she's a kid in the sticks, she has connections) -- and he admits it. After the bad guys are disposed of and the excitement dies down, Amanda falls asleep, having asked Mr. Campion to wait for her to grow up. With affection and amusement, he watches her sleep, and there ends Sweet Danger. Incidentally, Amanda does grow up and becomes an aviation engineer and if you want to find out what Mr. Campion did about it, you'll just have to go read some Margery Allingham.

I bring you this analysis because ChaliceChick's blog links to a copyright case about ownership of two very similar characters, and Allingham always claimed she hadn't read Sayers. In her defense, the Wimsey/Campion type is not a literary device. Those guys really exist -- not as detectives but as types. Sometime I shall blog on Sir Peregrine Henniker-Heaton as proof that those people really can be witless in the extreme.

Several months ago, housebound for several days and out of fresh mysteries, I fell back on a dust-covered stash found after a desperate search. Back-to-back, I read Sweet Danger and The Nine Tailors, and I found the latter so imponderable -- and Harriet's not even there to dull it down further -- I wondered what prompts the Wimsey addicts into their addictions. My conclusion on Nine Tailors: Sayers had an affair with someone who was into ringing changes and, feigning interest, she took good notes. What other reason could there be for page after page of change-ringing lore? (Wikipedia is hardly a match for the pages she takes up with this stuff.) Sayers was the daughter of a C of E clergyman and the picture she paints, in the C of E clergyman character, is Dickensian, the fuss-budget to end all fuss-budgets, and perhaps revenge on her father.

There's no question: Sayers is the better writer. Everything about the Lord Peter books is more richly done. She's great at presenting that time and those places and people like that. But it's often suggested that Sayers fell in love with Lord Peter -- though she always denied it -- and she lingers over him and his life in ways that make me itchy. (There is a brief bedroom scene where Peter and Harriet make love in Latin. Well, I probably would too, if I could.) Who can read about Harriet without feeling Sayers's longing to be Harriet? Ick.

But the Allingham book was much more fun to read. Just plain fun. if Sayers had tried a copyright suit against Allingham, it's clear to me that the end products are so different, subtly but adding up to two characters instead of one, that a judge wouldn't have found for Sayers.

He wore a button reading Trust Women

2009-06-02T22:42:00.011-04:00

I am trying, trying to find the sense of reason and justice in this piece from spiked, of London. Brendan O'Neill, its author says, "..the best way to make the case for the right to choose is not to criminalize the speech of the anti-abortion lobby, but to inject public debate with more and more convincing arguments for abortion rights. In short, we need more 'extremely vivid' speech, not less."

It's true that George Tiller, who wore a button reading Trust Women, was murdered by a nutcase. The world is full of them. We now accept that psychosis is responsible for John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy -- murderers like that. And yet, those guys were predators. When the urge to kill was upon them, they found someone who fit their (usually) physical requirements of a victim, and killed. Gacy and Bundy and Dahmer may have had voices in their heads. They did not have cable shows, websites, and talk radio -- much less sweet-faced old ladies on street corners and allegedly Christian preachers -- telling them that killing that specific person was A Good Thing. There's a difference.

George Tiller wore a button reading Trust Women. It's interesting that the radical right is working so hard to make empathy an obscenity, because their lack of it -- person by person -- prompts their politics. None of them, from O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Gingrich down to the picketing women, seem to have thought what it would be to be another person. Empathy: none.

In me there is a universe. There's a universe in you. My intellectual and religious positions are that your beliefs are as deeply considered and as deeply felt as mine. You know your truths as surely as I know mine. At a not-so-deep level, the view of the ultra-conservative is solipsistic. Your personhood and mine are not real to them. (Empathy: none.)

Because you cannot believe in the personhood of the fetus and not believe in the personhood of the pregnant woman. Down deep, the pro-lifers must not believe in either, because the inverse is not true. It is possible to recognize the pregnant woman's personhood and not believe in that of the fetus. I can't possibly extrapolate your beliefs from mine, nor your experience from mine. I know what it was to have a happy pregnancy with a dedicated partner, to be healthy and to have a healthy outcome. I can't imagine what it would be for those factors not to be present but if they weren't, I would sure not want the government, or leaders of any religion, or a bunch of lobbyists , to decide what will happen to me and my body in that horribly stressful (and possibly fatal) time.

So that's why I keep thinking how George Tiller wore a button reading Trust Women. Because nobody else can know what's best for you. I have a hard enough time making my own choices; I dare not assume the right to make them for another person. What I can imagine is the panic, the desperation, the crushing despair to come if all is not going well with a pregnancy after you've bonded with your baby. Why would the grief be any less than that of the mother whose newborn dies in her arms?

Imagine being surrounded by that grief, despair, panic, dread, every working day. You could not go on if you did not have faith in each woman to be the own best judge of what's right for herself. I am sure it wasn't the career path he'd set out for himself, for who would choose it? But he accepted the burden.

If you also trust women, go to Planned Parenthood and make a donation in George Tiller's memory. What better way to make it sacred and preserve what he died for than to underwrite Planned Parenthood's goals? You can direct your donation locally, nationally, or internationally, and choose the services it will provide.

I'm sharing this with you because I like you

2009-06-01T23:35:00.001-04:00

A blog about leeches. And it has links!

Blood on his hands

2009-06-01T22:31:00.003-04:00

There are lies, damned lies, and people damned by their lies. One of the latter is Bill O'Reilly. Watch him here. The man makes more money with every word he speaks, and in this video not one of them is honest.

Call me narrowminded, but ferrets are as far as I can go

2009-06-01T21:17:00.010-04:00

The Scientist tells us that geckos (which I thought was spelled with a double-k) have hit Philadelphia. Interesting though they undoubtedly are, they're not cuddly and I want cuddly animals around me.

I never liked snakes. Family legend has it that my grandparents moved back to Poland, Ohio, after settling in Micanopy, Florida, because Grandma Lydia didn't like snakes. I had a grudge against snakes because when I was eight and away at camp, I was startled by a snake, fell, got a bad gash, and got stitches instead of a picnic; I also found my all-time favorite rock, which got stolen years later, which just goes to show.

When my daughter Lydia was a baby I decided that I didn't want her to be, you know, a girl about snakes (like me). Her room had big posters of snakes, and I got inflatable snakes, and carved wooden articulated snakes*, and best of all, at the Boston's Institute for Women's Work** I found a stuffed crocheted multicolor snake to wrap around baby Lydia's crib bars. Its head leered at her as she slept.

When we visited our friends Ed and Julie, Lydia stayed in his daughter Liz's room, along with Slither the Snake. Lyd really liked Slither. Lyd liked all snakes. When we went to Star Island every summer, she'd head off to the marine lab just to meet the new snakes. I'd find her down there between organized activities, maybe with a green snake wrapped along her arm. It's refreshing to learn that something you planned about your child actually worked.

I finally got off the bus when she came home from a seventh grade weekend in the Catskills. Someone had had a boa constrictor and Lydia brought home a photograph of herself with it wrapped around her shoulders, going up the back of her head through her hair and coming down in front inside her glasses. I don't know where that photo is and I don't want to know. I'd rather deal with gekkos.

*To prove that no good idea goes unpunished, people seeing these snakes assumed that I really liked them, and gave me more snaky things.
**It closed long ago but was on Boylston Street diagonally opposite the Public Garden.

Statistics now prove that Mother was wrong. You can look it up

2009-06-01T01:13:00.004-04:00

Today’s NY Times tells us there’s a 100% correlation between women nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court and having read Nancy Drew as a kid. Yes! Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg and now, Sonia Sotomayor all read Nancy Drew when they were grade-schoolers.

In my family, it was a given that Nancy Drew was trash, a waste of time, and … something only badly-bred little girls read. To prove the point, Mother would draw on her sister Betsy, director of circulation for the Youngstown Public Library System, to confirm that none of the libraries in the system bought Nancy Drew books. Or for that matter, the Hardy Boys or Judy Bolton either.

So my memories of reading all those series are of books smuggled from friends and also from the libraries of older residents, people who had bought the series for their children who were now grown up and moved away. The series books I read were the oldest ones, all published by Grosset & Dunlap, of course, with covers barely hanging on and loose yellowing pages, musty smelling.

The most powerful memory called up is of visiting the Wynn family. Across US 224 from our farmhouse, a lane headed straight north for about a mile. Near its end, it dropped into a small grove of trees and there the Wynns’ ramshackle farmhouse squatted. Its lawn was full of rusting tractor parts and cars on blocks, and the front screen door was missing its spring, but I went back and back and back because I was always welcome to draw from their vast library of Nancy Drews and the others.

With my mind full of hardened criminals anyway, the walk to and from Wynns' was scary. Flat Ohio fields stretched away on both sides, and as the summer sun baked down, the only sounds would be the endless buzzing of bees, the occasional caw of a crow over the fields, and a far-off tractor. The sound of highway traffic would mute before I was halfway there. But I’d brave the silence and the solitude because the walk home with an armload of Nancy Drews was such a pleasure.

Mario Puzo meets the Hudson River Almanac

2009-05-31T19:59:00.002-04:00

5/22 - Staten Island, New York City: If I were a different sort, I might have worried about the catbird's head, left neatly clipped from its torso and lying at the driver's side door of the superintendent's sedan at Fort Wadsworth. Perhaps some Staten Island peregrine falcon was making me an offer I couldn't refuse.
- Dave Taft

Search the Hudson River Almanac archive here.

Jack Reacher, surrogate father

2009-05-29T11:22:00.004-04:00

Lee Child’s latest detective novel was published last week. At least 50 have sold at Bookstore C, and our store is the chain’s smallest in the region. I was eager to read it myself but we’d sell out each day before I could grab one to borrow. In the meantime, I discussed the book with customers as I rang up the sales.

Here are sample customer comments:
“Jack Reacher is my dream man!”
“My daughter says Jack Reacher is her surrogate father.”
“I got a first printing, first edition of the first Reacher book just by accident and ever since then I’ve made sure to get a first first. I love the guy.”
“Jack Reacher is the coolest hero going.”
“I love Jack Reacher.”

Well, Reacher is a unique character, I grant you. He’s a military brat and grew up mostly on American bases overseas (his mother was a Frenchwoman his dad met on an early posting). Reacher had one brother, now dead. Reacher went into the service, enjoyed weaponry, and was a military policeman, but was downsized with full retiree benefits after the Cold War ended. Here’s where it gets weird: Reacher has no fixed abode and owns nothing but the clothes on his back.

So our hero: speaks fluent French and has a working knowledge of several other languages. Knows weapons well, even loves certain ones, but owns none. Is smart and well educated, with a trackable past, an income, and ongoing medical benefits. No wife, no ex-wife; no children; no parents, no siblings; no profession or credentialing or ambition or investments; no house, apartment, furniture, entertainment system or passion for Coltrane, books, garden, lawn, church or temple, neighbors, car or other vehicle, dietary fads, interest in cooking complete with recipes, or collection of arcana. Whatever I’ve left out he doesn’t have anyway.

Something I like about Child’s writing of Reacher is that there are no dei ex machina. Unlike Nancy Drew, he didn’t just take a course in scuba diving — he always knew just as much about diving as he needs to for the moment, and it’s marginally more than you and I know. Unlike the unbearable Cornwell’s unspeakable Kay Scarpetta, there is no niece Lucy in her helicopter with the latest in spook gear. Unlike Lincoln Child (no kin to Lee that I know of), Katherine Howe, or a dozen others, no mysterious and inexplicable “force” that appears toward the end and changes the whole equation. If Reacher needs another garment, he gets it at Wal*Mart, an army-navy store, or Goodwill. If he needs something more up-to-date, there’s a Radio Shack or place that sells batteries nearby, wherever you are.

What Reacher does have is: a decent education, a somewhat-but-not-too heroic past, a family upbringing, discipline, honor, and a reputation. People never forget him. In every book he meets a smart, clean, woman-who-asks-no-questions and they have very pleasant (undescribed) sexual interaction; she leaves smiling and so does he. Like Dickens, Child wraps up every plot device tidily. Each piece of equipment that attached itself to Reacher during the book — someone’s leather jacket on a cool day, that Glock he likes — is back in the hands of its owner or otherwise specifically disposed of. If he’s been in trouble with the authorities in the course of the book, he will have embarrassed them enough that they’re just willing to forget him. In the last chapter or two, he will have found a place to shower and shave and change into freshly bought cheap clothes, dumping the dirty ones. You know he’s going to hit the road. And the book ends there.

Child’s prose is brisk or he has the same good editor book after book. I admire his construct. It’s simple and clean. No extraneous characters to follow (no Henry Pitts and his brother William and Rosie the Hungarian restaurateur; no Italian mother who died too young leaving behind a love of opera and some good crystal; no baby Michael who was killed falling out of the crib). No sidekicks — no Doctor Watson and his wandering wound from a jezrail bullet, no Hawk talkin’ ghetto, no ditzy rich mother-in-law Laurel, no drunken pussy-whipped Clete. Just Jack Reacher.

The only loose end is outside the book. What do we think about a young woman who says that Reacher is her “surrogate father”? The books don’t leave me wondering about anything, but that response sure does.

Words from Jimmy Carter

2009-05-29T09:36:00.003-04:00

My cousin Tom Kerrigan signed me up for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, which I receive in my email every day. These lines from Jimmy Carter -- yes, that Jimmy Carter, I was surprised too -- led off today's mailing.

ABAB CDED FGHG IIJJ is a little idiosyncratic. Couldn't dance to it either. But I like it anyway.

Progress Does Not Always Come Easy
by Jimmy Carter

As a legislator in my state
I drew up my first law to say
that citizens could never vote again
after they had passed away.

My fellow members faced the troubling issue
bravely, locked in hard debate
on whether, after someone's death had come,
three years should be adequate

to let the family, recollecting him,
determine how a loved one may
have cast a vote if he had only lived
to see the later voting day.

My own neighbors warned me I had gone
too far in changing what we'd always done.
I lost the next campaign, and failed to carry
a single precinct with a cemetery.

"Progress Does Not Always Come Easy" by Jimmy Carter, from
Always A Reckoning, © Random House, 1995.

We are indeed

2009-05-27T00:20:00.007-04:00

The Woods post on language brings up a point that several people made to me when I lived in London: Americans seem to live in a more physical world than the British do. (I don't see how that can be true of farmers or doctors or engineers, but it was part of the stereotype.) Since I lived and worked with Brits, I rarely had contact with Americans, but a frequent American visitor was my parents' friend Mr.B.

Mr.B was an MIT graduate, a chemical engineer, had the earliest MBA of anyone I'd met, and was in the OSS during WW2. He was a carbon factor, which means ... well, the way he put it, "Let's say you have some low-sulphur coal in Australia and I know someone in Italy who needs low-sulphur coal. I introduce the two of you and you both pay me."

Growing up around the steel industry, there were lots of engineers in the community. They were people of high intellect, a high level of inventiveness, and a lot of involvement in physical reality. I must have been 30 before I realized that those were not by definition characteristics of grownups in general. I thought everyone's dads were great at figuring stuff out! Mr.B was one such intelligent, inventive person -- great fun to be with, and I often traveled with him out of England.

My London friend Roland had taught Latin and Greek several years at two well-known public schools and was studying for the bar. He, his father, his sisters and his mother were all Cambridge-educated. His father was a prominent civil servant decorated by the queen. They lived in a town house with an embassy on each side. Anyway, I thought, Roland is smart and connected, Mr.B is smart and connected, I'll introduce them. So I took Roland along to Claridge's to pick up Mr.B and go to dinner.

Mr.B had just spent several weeks in Egypt and described the hotel he'd stayed in, a 19th-century palace. As a constant tourist, I was used to carrying a tape measure and sketch book, because you never know when you'll look around a bar in Delft and want to know what size those bricks are. Anyway, Mr.B launched into a discussion of the way the palace stairs sat in the hotel lobby, their location, configuration, and sweep. The height of each riser and the curvature of the lip (sketch book out). The color of the marble and the different marble of the railing, and the railing's bevel (sketching). The shape of the balusters (sketching). The design of the inlays and the colors of their stones (sketching, a look around the room to find a matching color). While he drew in my sketch book he was using his hands to trace designs in the air. It was delightful. This was the way he and I always interacted.

And Roland? His face was shining -- glowing with excitement -- as he listened. He watched me and Mr.B, his face radiant with discovery. "My God!" he burst out. "You Yanks are such artisans!"

Incidentally, on that trip Mr.B brought me a kilo of saffron, welded into a tin. For my artisanal cookery, I guess.

Wanted: an easy synonym for hermeneutic

2009-05-26T23:45:00.005-04:00

After reading James Woods’s piece on language, which was recommended to me, I want to throw up my hands and declare that English exists at at least a hundred different levels of familiarity. I cannot possibly hope to rank them. Is it a matter of knowing more words enough to define them for your SATs, to use them into everyday speech, or to use them in formal writing? Presumably some words outrank others. But since most unfamiliar words are unfamiliar because they are, to some extent, someone else’s jargon, not knowing these words truly indicates only that you haven’t had reason to encounter them. There’s nothing in the language Woods describes that marks the user as a better person, a smarter person, or even more of a poet.

You can see where this leaves William F. Buckley, Jr., the pompous prat.

Well, I went through Woods’s piece and made two lists: words I know and will actually use if the need arises — which it rarely does because these are not everyday concepts for most people — and those I did not know before reading his article. Here are the two lists, and those italicized are not recognized by Word spell-check.

Words I know and might actually use: litotes, recrudescence, concupiscence, threnody, quondam, hieratic, florilegium, nonage, echt, oriflamme, gravamen, cathexis, obtund, dyslogistic, saponaceous, benthic, oneiric, deracinated, coruscating, albedo, abscissa, rincon, scree, sastrugi, arête, moraine, cuboidal, copasetic (I’d spell it copacetic), terrazzo, rebar, spavined, withers, sacerdotal, samsara, scrim, fungible, flocculent, aigrette, boiserie, facer, finial, matutinal, moue, ogee, ormolu, scalpel, caryatid, loggia, narthex, parterre, pilasters, squinch. My list suggests interests in architecture and glaciology, which is what I meant by one group’s jargon. Thanks to Christine for sastrugi, which she used recently in her blog. Full disclosure: I have been married to someone who uses gravamen in casual speech.

Why do you suppose Word recognizes terrazzo but not rebar? Terrazzo is out of fashion but rebar is used everywhere.

Words I don’t believe I ever saw before: sabulous, immund, nates, macrobian, venenate, kerf, obelize, eirenicon [google says that there is no such word, but I do know “irenic”], protreptic, barrial, sesquipedality, epyllion, bajada, zugunruhe, banausic, collet, foederati, gammadion, gonfalon, sumpter, sérac.

I have been excoriated (q.v.) for using in general speech milieu and in situ. The latter is in my head because of years as a medical editor, and as for milieu ... well, what other word means the same thing?

"Let's do the time warp!" offers The Accretionary Wedge

2009-05-24T23:04:00.012-04:00

Where and when would you most like to visit to witness and analyze an event in Earth's history? Suppose you have a space-time machine to (safely and comfortably) watch an event unfold; which event would you most like to see? Why? What do we already know or hypothesize about that event that appeals to you, or that you would like to test? What would be the result, the upshot, of knowing more about this event?

The question is asked by The Accretionary Wedge, a flying circus of geology hosted intermittently on different blogs. You need not be a geologist to enter! (And how many times in your life are you going to hear that, eh?)

To see results of earlier questions, go to The Accretionary Wedge. The rules for this one await you here.

I know, I know -- many of my friends and readers are not versed in geologic arcana. but think of this as mental play. I mean, clearly I have a great yen to see the Spokane floods actually happening -- I've blogged about it, walked the empty land alone, dragged my family to Washington State's high desert for no other purpose,and sometimes mull over google's aerial views of the land and marvel over the hard work of heroic geologist J. Harlan Bretz.

Bretz lived much of his professional life before aerial photography. He went against the then-current gradualist grain of the geology establishment to create the flood hypothesis. He did his thinking walking the land, measuring, measuring. Year after year, his entire family moved to the desert for the summer and he set his kids tasks to help him build his theory. He was 96 years old when the Geological Society of American admitted "We are all catastrophists now," and gave him its highest award. He told his son he had outlived all his enemies and had nobody left to lord it over!

I would also like to see what happened when the rising waters of the Mediterranean broke through at the Dardanelles into the Black Sea basin. Bill Ryan and Walter Pittman at Lamont Doherty -- just across the Hudson from where I sit, so I feel kind of cozy about them -- have examined the likelihood of the Black Sea's being created like this. They also persuasively suggest that this particular flood out-flooded every other flood people could ever imagine and thus became the floods of Noah, Gilgamesh, and a dozen other literatures. Just imagine being able to watch it. How did it happen?

It's actually difficult to imagine. There had to be a moment when a land barrier existed between the two bodies of water -- then there had to be a moment when it gave way. Of course there were trickles; trickles happen. But trickles don't last for long. Generations must have watched the level of the Med rising; it was pouring in from the Atlantic through the Pillars of Hercules. Stories must have been passed down in families about the way it used to be, when the coastline was far off and waters were friendly. But how did it change? That's what I'd like to see. Did the land shake for years? How long was it before everyone left the area and it actually gave way -- um, they did leave, didn't they? What did people where Odessa is today hear, what did they see, what did they think, what did they do?

This is a subject of active debate among geologists, and it doesn't matter to me what actually happened. If itdid happen this way, I'd like to watch.

Time machine graphic from Gotham Schools blog. Bretz photo from University of Chicago, where he received his doctorate and was on the faculty.

The 21 Pianos of Neko Case

2009-05-24T17:01:00.001-04:00

Singer Neko Case was featured on WFUV recently. It was the first time I had heard her music (which by the way, I really like). In the course of the interview she mentioned that one of the pieces on her new album, Middle Cyclone, was accompanied by 21 pianos!

Where do you find a recording studio with 21 pianos? In this case, it was Neko Case’s Vermont farmhouse. Yes, she has 21 pianos there.

She explained that she noticed, on Craigslist, many people giving away pianos. Most of them are given away for the price of “Just-get-the-thing-out-of-here!” So she kept acquiring pianos, and taking them to the farmhouse, and there they are. She actually owns more, but 21 are tunable.

The sound of 21 pianos is lovely. Lush, magical. Since we’re accustomed to musicians accompanying themselves on multiple tracks, the sound isn’t unexpected. But there’s something in knowing that 21 pianos were played simultaneously — and recorded! — that’s quite wonderful.

It started me thinking about free pianos, though. When I was mismarried to Peter I, we settled into an apartment just downhill from where my Grandma McLaughlin was closing down her house. She had a piano. I was used to having a piano. It was an easy choice, for her and for me. Lubricated by a couple six-packs of Rolling Rock, Peter, his brother Nick, and some other friends got the piano downhill and then up the steps into our apartment.

Grandma dropped by once to visit her piano! Since we had a harpsichord in the living room (Peter had built it), Grandma’s piano was in my office, but that was okay. She knew it had a good home.

Then I left — Youngstown and the marriage — for San Francisco, to join the revolution. The piano certainly wasn’t going to go into my suitcase or my parents’ basement. No family members stepped up to take it. A friend from church, whose husband was an architect in Peter’s firm, said she had always wanted a piano. So off went the piano to the west side.

My dad mentioned a few years later that he had visited Grandma’s piano in its west side home. By then, of course, it was Mary’s piano. Grandma did mention once that she was unhappy that I had disposed of her piano so cavalierly.

When I was older I came to understand just what her piano meant to Grandma. Owning a piano, and seeing that your children took lessons, was to know you had arrived somewhere important. More than that! Grandma’s piano had participated in singalongs and parties. It had been played during wakes. Certainly children and grandchildren had banged on it, but she could also steal time playing it, and take herself someplace very special to herself, and private. Many happy memories had accumulated around that piano. When she passed the piano to me, she was passing custodianship of a precious part of her past.

So when I heard of Neko Case’s 21 pianos, I thought of Grandma’s piano and multiplied its story 21 times. That’s 21 families missing part of their heritage! What a sad reflection on family lore, and the ownership of stuff, and the passing down of value(s).

On Being Asked for a War Poem (Yeats, 1928)

2009-05-23T13:39:00.004-04:00

I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

My personal wall
Bill Bobbitt, Viet Nam
Michael McLaughlin, Iraq
Baird Mitchell, World War Two
Ken Nervie, Viet Nam
Bill Smoyer, Viet Nam
Jimmy Spencer, Viet Nam
I speak their names out loud so that once again, if only for a second, the earth echoes with the sound: they were here.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
From: For the Fallen, by Lawrence Binyon

Rare book or curiosity?

2009-05-23T10:49:00.003-04:00

A Hastings-on-Hudson individual owns W.E.B. DuBois's own copy of The Souls of Black Folk. It's inscribed by DuBois to Hastings resident Kenneth Clark, and by Clark to his daughter. It's an early edition of the 1903 classic -- almost small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, with simple, sinuous ornamentation on a dull cloth cover. And here's the tragedy: smoke and water damage. The owner tells me it's worthless.

Moose Murders and rare books

2009-05-23T10:26:00.004-04:00

Thinking a bit more about Louisa’s question, I realized I made the error of assuming valuable books = first editions. Not so! It doesn’t matter what edition a book is, if it’s scarce and the marketplace decrees that it’s valuable. The view of the marketplace is important. There may be only one copy extant of, say, the 1910 Kenyon College yearbook (I have old Mr. Steinfield’s, which is why I bring it up) but if nobody’s going to pay me a lot for it, then it isn’t valuable just because it's rare.

So clearly scarcity counts more than firstness. Thinking of scarcity brings me to Moose Murders, the legendary play that closed on its 1983 first night to some of the worst reviews ever to appear in the English language. (There was something about the play that encouraged hyperbole; critics were trying to outdo each other.) The morning after the night before, Not-Yet-Lydia’s father and I encountered Frank Rich’s Times review and one of us read it to the other.

I have wondered, how many people in New York City today claim to have been at that first night performance? Probably at least twice as many as the theater could have held. A month after that first night and his first night review, Frank Rich wrote another review, which contains this comment: What makes certain bombs into legends? It's hard to say, precisely - they don't wear fur coats. Once it was a mark of distinction for a play to close in one night, but in these troubled times even that phenomenon is a sad commonplace. Some theater people define legendary bombs by the amount of money that went down the drain, or the high caliber of talent expended, or the extravagant foolhardiness of the esthetic mission. Others let Joe Allen, the theater district bistro, be the final arbiter: that restaurant has a whole wall bedecked with posters from a select group of famous turkeys. Whatever the definition, it can't be quantified - a flop just must have a certain je ne sais quoi to rise to legendary status. But what I do know is this: the only Playbill I've saved thus far in this decade is the one from ''Moose Murders.''

So: what remains from Moose Murders is that program. Ten or so years ago, I did see a rare book dealer advertising one for more than a thousand dollars, so clearly notoriety helps too. If Mr. Steinfield had been a mass murderer instead of a kindly Ohio antiques dealer, that Kenyon yearbook might be worth something.

I have read that if all the people who say they voted for JFK in 1960 actually had voted that way, he would have won the election with 80% of registered voters instead of by <.1% of votes cast. Perhaps the ranks of opening night attendees of Moose Murders have swelled the same way.

Speaking of rarities: I could not find John Simon's review of Moose Murders online. Maybe his language scalds the electrons of the internet.

What lies ahead for the Steel Valley

2009-05-22T11:15:00.007-04:00

The I Will Shout Youngstown blog has a trailer for a film being released this fall about Youngstown and the Steel Valley.

The trailer moved just a bit too fast, I think -- I'd prefer two or three fewer images and a half-second more to linger on each. Does an outsider register what she's seeing, or do you have to be a native to read each image?

These are dates on which the Steel Valley lost steel company jobs: 8/77: 150 at Sheet & Tube headquarters; 9/77: Sheet & Tube Campbell Works 5,000; 11/79: U.S. Steel Ohio Works and McDonald Works 3,600; 12/79: Sheet & Tube Campbell Works 1,400; 1/82 Republic Steel 2,600; 8/86 300. Bill Lawson, executive director of the Mahoning Valley Historical Society, uses the figure of ten thousand jobs eliminated between 1977 and 1981, with unnumbered tens of thousands in related and dependent industries also being lost.

Between 1977 and 1981 the number of personal bankruptcies in the region more than doubled. Alan Auerbach, reporting for the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimated a loss in regional real estate value during those same years of a billion 1980 dollars. Chamber of Commerce hopes that the laid-off workers would be hired by companies moving into the area found some new employment but at markedly reduced wages. In the same report, Shleifer and Summers [that's our friend Lawrence Summers, by the way] comment that these losses to stakeholders did not represent gains to steel company shareholders. In other words, these numbers represent a net loss of wealth to the national as well as regional community.

Even though the economic blow was devastating, there was another, equal loss. Auerbach reports psychological losses. First, individuals lost a sense that there was any real value to working hard for an employer -- because why trust an employer? Second, there was a loss in community as families and neighborhoods split apart in job searches that moved them thousands of miles, away from Youngstown and away from each other. This was not just the case with shift workers. People in suburban schools tell how their social groups shattered as management families were also moved around the country (and note the passive verb -- top management moved heads of family like so many chess pieces).

I know people who believe that no individual has a right to community. No individual has a right to live in Youngstown, to live near family. No individual has a right to live in that house there. And at the level of "that house there" it's an issue thousands of families face today with the mortgage crisis: if you can't pay for that house there, you shouldn't live in it.

And in a perfect world, that's a reasonable argument (in the sense that you can follow it even if you don't agree with it). But in today's mortgage crisis, a lot of the downside has no upside. New houses are being bulldozed because nobody can afford to live in them at the same time that families are being left homeless. And being told, "You do not have the right to live in the same community as your family" raises the question of "Who has the right to create a situation where I can't?" Looking back at the destruction of community that accompanied the collapse of Youngstown's steel industry -- and knowing from a generation down the road that there was no creation of wealth on a scale to approach that loss -- has made me reassess the underlying worldview here.

The excuse for huge economic dislocations has been that overall the greater community benefits by the creation of greater wealth. There is a rising tide that lifts all boats, and even those who are dislocated benefit, perhaps massively, in the long run. For most of us, time moves only forward. We assess our lives today with the thought (perhaps unspoken) that we are 100% alive today, and back then -- whenever then was -- we had a less than 100% chance of getting this far, so by definition we are ahead. We make countless calculations, without defining them or even noticing their existence, that argue overall today is better than yesterday. So future benefits stack up against today's damages, and future benefits win.

Tomorrow's valuable first editions

2009-05-22T00:15:00.008-04:00

Blogging about rare American books for Riverrun, Louisa asks: What relatively common books should we be tucking away in our attics to delight the book collectors of 75 years hence?

Oh, what a different world we live in! I have American firsts, with dj, of three Francoise Sagan novels, from the '50s, and they're not worth much. Maybe ten bucks on a good day. If you visit Gordon Beckhorn's bookstore -- just around the corner from Riverrun at the end of the bridge in Hastings -- you'll find "valuable" firsts of in-print detective stories. Somehow the very idea of making this appraisal, and putting dozens of books away in cool dry storage, reminds me of buying, you know, Franklin Mint "investments." Who has enough cool dry space to set aside for 75 years?

Here are some mystery or sci-fi authors, first editions of whose first books are, I predict, gaining in value. James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Neil Gaiman, Sue Grafton, P.D. James, John Lescroart, Laura Lippman, Terry Pratchett, Ian Rankin, Peter Robinson. I'm specifying firsts only of the first, because subsequent titles for those authors would have had much larger first printings. Sue Grafton is translated into 26 languages!

I read somewhere that Terry Pratchett's books used to be the most shoplifted books in Great Britain, and I always tell people that when I am trying to hand-sell them. I would be intrigued by having books signed by both James Lee Burke and his wife, since his hero, Dave Robicheaux, kills off his wives like crazy. Or would Burke be like Roger Tory Peterson? Peterson dedicated his first book to his wife X, his second book to his wife Y, and subsequent books to "my [unnamed] wife" or others.

Firsts by Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and E.O. Wilson will probably appreciate. Wouldn't it be cool to have their books inscribed to each other? Same with some of those detective writers. Robert B. Parker and Linda Barnes give shout-outs to each other's characters in their Boston-based books. Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini's detectives also refer to each other in their respective series, but Muller and Pronzini are married to each other. Those would both be nice double inscriptions to have, but now that I think of it, all the shout-outs come in later novels that have huge first printings and so probably will never be worth much, inscriptions or not.

I doubt that memoirs appreciate: the first printings are too big. The first time I ever ran a used book sale, there were a half-dozen copies of A Long Row of Candles by C.L. Sulzberger. At least two were inscribed -- the sale was at All Souls Church at 80th and Lexington, lots of well-connected east siders. That title showed up for years at used book sales and remained unsold. There was also a longtime surplus of The Little Drummer Girl -- a stinker by John LeCarre. However, here's a first of the U.K. edition (Gollancz) of LeCarre's Spy Who Came in from the Cold: $3250. It probably helps that it's widely thought of as the best spy novel of all time.

What a pleasure this turned out to be!

2009-05-21T22:18:00.008-04:00

An appointment this evening took me near Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale's, and Neiman Marcus, so I decided to visit their perfume departments to sniff some scents I had been reading about. It's May, but reviews of Black Cashmere were really tempting. I am told that my taste in scent is skanky, and skank seems to be a significant part of Caron's Yatagan, so I was looking for that too. And while I was there I knew I would buy Je Reviens, which I used to wear constantly although it's not a bit skanky.

Je Reviens was an expensive, even exotic high-end perfume when it was first given to me at 18. (For most 18-year-olds, it competed with Tabu and Ambush, of course, and about which, yuck.) Then about twenty years ago, Je Reviens was repositioned as a drug-store fragrance. Same scent but different marketplace! Then just a few years ago it was repositioned back upmarket ... still the same perfume, although ...

The "although" is because European guidelines are forcing the reformulation of many old fragrances to eliminate some natural ingredients that allegedly stir up allergies. Perfume scientists now can isolate specific scent molecules and create artificial analogs; doing that can eliminate the allergic response, but noses are noticing that it can also eliminate the characters of some scents. But new reviews of Je Reviens say it's the same wonderful smell, full but light enough to wear during a Bookstore C workday.

Well, I didn't find any of them. Since I love/adore/will kill for old Guerlain scents (Shalimar and Jicky especially, sometimes Mitsouko) I went by the Guerlain counter and -- memory having failed me, and what I was looking for being unavailable -- tried a spray of Samsara, which has not interested me in the past. Omigod! Maced? Well -- hit in the face with something hard and sharp and mean-smelling, lemon, maybe? and tarragon. I walked around the store, taking time to see how the fragrance would develop, and finally thought, This is just ghastly, I have to go home and wash. It's a warm night so the car windows were open, and on the way home I noticed the loveliest of scented breezes playing near my face. Could it be the Samsara? It was. It took about 30 minutes to get past that opening blast, but now -- three hours past that spritz -- I am all but typing with my nose welded to my arm where that luscious scent sits.

Oddly, with food I can pick out the ingredients in a smell, but I am not very good at it with perfume. But there's now a base note in this scent that seems a bit old-lady, and I recognize that as the one significant flaw in Guerlain's classic scents: some people identify them with old ladies. Well, it may be that like my Shalimar-wearing Cousin Ethel, they were kick-up-your-heels flappers once and this was their perfume then as well as later. Mmmm, it's not so old-lady as it is sumptuous home with oriental rugs, heavy draperies, and stained glass shades on copper lamps -- also like Cousin Ethel. The base note could be sandalwood. Costly, luxurious, sensual. Also like Cousin Ethel? You heard it here first.

Smells -- even most "bad" ones -- have always delighted me. (There's that skank business again, and speaking of consonants, I can savor, briefly, a skunk smell.) When I was a little girl, I loved -- as what little girl doesn't? -- sniffing the perfume bottles on my aunts' dressing tables. Betsy had White Shoulders (I gag on the memory), Tabu (what was wrong with her?), and Emeraude (that's three strikes). My mother and her sister Billie both wore Joy -- it's a total classic, very green, and I cannot abide it.

Grandma Lydia wore Arpège; I love the stories about Jeanne Lanvin and her beloved daughter. I have read that the little child in the Lanvin trademark is Jeanne's daughter, and this link says that Arpège was created for the daughter's 30th in 1927.

Hmmm ... by 1927 my grandmother was the mother of four daughters; I wonder when she started wearing Arpège, and why. Colette called it the "thoroughly modern" fragrance, and in fact, Grandma Lydia was a thoroughly modern woman.

Are the neighbors complaining about crow entrails? Thoughts on auguries

2009-05-21T13:43:00.003-04:00

In Lydia's LiveJournal today, she examines the role (and validity) of child sacrifice to the Greeks and other Mediterranean cultures of the time. Contains astute commentary on parenting practices, role of prophesy in domestic affairs.

Admit it. You've always wondered about cicadas

2009-05-18T20:26:00.003-04:00

Why do 13- and 17-year cicadas live on those cycles? Wired Science today tells all. Yes, 13 and 17 are both prime numbers, and that could be part of the story. Very interesting. Did a divine hand do it or did the cicadas evolve that way? (Or was it ... both???)

Do you believe in God? I’ll take either side …

2009-05-18T19:45:00.014-04:00

Actually, this isn’t me speaking. It’s an eager UU teenager looking for a discussion! So maybe when I was a teenager, it was me. Now I sit back and listen to the shouting. As an official theology student, I find that the believers accept me as one of them, and I have lost status in the eyes of unbelievers. What interests me about both sides is their total certainty. Which is nothing new for believers! They’ve been killing unbelievers for centuries because they’re so sure of the rightness of their beliefs. In the past, to stay alive, atheists weren’t quick to broadcast their unbelief, but they’re as convinced as believers. In fact, they’re very like each other in their faith.

The faith of the atheist? Sure. Any atheist worth his or her salt will explain, will prove that God does not, cannot exist. Prove. And in fact, so can any Jesuit … and then the Jesuit can turn around with just as many proofs of God’s existence.

So what is this proof business? No matter which way you jump, faith props you up. Both sides often use the evolution of a fly’s eye to prove their points. “It didn’t happen by chance,” say many believers. “No, it evolved that way,” say many unbelievers. (Inset image: Drosophila eye, by Shirin Pocha.*)

In such an exchange, to these unbelievers, evolution excludes God, Q.E.D., and to these believers, God excludes evolution, Q.E.D. Why? Both sides assume definitions, and definitions by definition are limits. To a believer in this scenario I ask: if God can design a fly’s eye, why can’t God create evolution? Of an unbeliever I ask: what, exactly, about evolution excludes God? Each side draws an arbitrary line in the sand. Each side excludes the other — and it’s all based on faith.

*Shirin Pocha took the scanning electron micrograph of the Drosophila eye while a Ph.D. student at the University of Bristol, and wrote, "The structure of the eye, similar to many other insects, is termed a compound eye and is one of the most precise and ordered patterns in Biology.")

Reckless and indecent

2009-05-17T22:08:00.011-04:00

This just in. One of the treasures of You Tube! Thanks to Mark for sending it. The camera does not linger long on Roy Cohn but for several seconds you will see his malign youthful beauty. It's one of life's greatest justices that he grew up to be this creepy-looking guy, whose face would terrify small children. What's the saying -- after 30, you have the face you earned?

Remembering John

2009-05-17T20:59:00.008-04:00

A very convoluted process led me to thoughts of John Koning, a college boyfriend. John was hands-down the most intelligent person I have ever known, and also one of the nicest.

John studied physics on full scholarship at Case Tech, back before it became attached to Western Reserve University. After a couple years, he left Case and moved back in with his parents, for reasons that were not clear to me at the time. He attended Youngstown State, having completed his physics major, and thereafter accumulated majors in math, political science, and economics. A standard course load was five classes — John routinely took nine or ten. His accum was higher than 4.0. He was, at various times, assistant editor of the newspaper, editor-in-chief of the yearbook, a member of student council, and fraternity president. The faculty was in awe of him, but he also had the gift of not leaving other students feel condescended-to.

It’s hard to pick something about the world of 2009 and say “John would have loved that.” John would have loved everything about 2009! He would have been a computer nerd extraordinaire, a wizard online. He would have done good, trustworthy things with hedge funds; alternatively he could have been secretary of the treasury. Better than all that, John was such fun to be with: he was funny, with humor that worked at levels both simple and very sophisticated. He was fun-loving and wicked and sweet.

John died in 1974, but despite that, I got hits when I googled him. For one thing, there’s the John Koning Award for players of the game Diplomacy. (The first two Diplomacy Cons were held in Youngstown, in John’s parents’ back yard on South Belle Vista.) He was passionate about Diplomacy, obviously, and created The Youngstown Variant and several rules which are apparently followed even today. (I wonder if it's still a valid tactic to get an opponent drunk and lock him in a closet? It was in the 60s.)

From his mid-teens, he was an energetic sci-fi fan and published a couple zines. For you nonfans (or as they were then called, non-fen) zines were like blogs, only they were sent through the mail. He was the publisher of sTab and a founder of OOPSLA, which apparently has thrived. His copies of the Ring trilogy were first editions.

My parents sent me John’s obituary. He earned a Ph.D. in economics and taught at Northwestern, but apparently he returned to Youngstown to die. John had childhood onset diabetes, and for someone born in 1942 to be diagnosed before 1950 — let’s just say he didn’t make retirement plans.

He was the adopted-after-20-childless-years son of a Dutch Calvinist couple. The Konings lived in a fundamentalist community of siblings and cousins, and the only book his parents owned was a Bible. But they turned the entire top floor of their house over to John, who slept on a cot in the narrow aisles of his own personal library, which filled the entire space. His father and mother protected him, assuring him of years to be exactly who he was, and if one of them could have given him a pancreas, it would have happened in a heartbeat.

John almost reached the age of 32; he outlived the predictions by four years. If he had been born the year he died, he could anticipate a normal life span. For the diabetic born now, "normal" can include not just long life but children. It's our loss that the world didn't get more John Konings.

The Story of Sand: Ripples large and small

2009-05-17T16:28:00.009-04:00

Today’s Through the Sandglass blog shows some cigarette cards from about 90 years ago that told the story of sand. Imagine thinking of cigarette cards as the blogs of their day! But since manufacturers were always looking for interesting gimmicks, a series on the history of sand would do. Inset picture: Cigarette card showing ripples from Through the Sandglass Blog.

In addition to being an adorable picture, “Ripple Marks” brought a tantalizing memory. We have all seen ripple marks just like those. At the beach where water has briefly stood, or even at the foot of the driveway when we’ve washed the car. The ripple marks I recalled were those near the “channeled scablands” in eastern Washington state, where water covered the land during and after the Spokane Floods.

The Spokane Floods! As briefly as I can tell it: after the last glaciation, melting glaciers left a vast deep lake, today called ancestral Lake Missoula. At the west end, a plug was created by a lobe of a glacier. During a thaw cycle, lake water would reach a depth of about 2000 feet, and the glacial plug would become weak enough that the flood would push it out of the way and race westward … at about 65 mph (also described as a force greater than the combined force of all the world’s rivers). Inset: a NASA photograph of a mountain wall in the Missoula valley, showing lateral wave lines left by varying water levels in ancestral Lake Missoula.

Freeze-thaw cycles turned every couple decades, and geologists reckon this cataclysm happened fifty or so times. The water’s journey depended on where glaciers currently blocked gorges. Everywhere it ran, it stripped at least a thousand feet of rich topsoil off the underlying rock and then carved the rock. From Spokane to the southwest, the water moved, down the Columbia. It flooded the Willamette Valley, leaving the rich soil behind before finally escaping to sea and carving the river’s deep entry into the Pacific.

I first read about the channeled scablands about twenty years ago and wouldn’t rest until we had taken a family vacation there. It would include four days of Lydia and her dad being bored to tears, while I had perpetual chills down my spine from viewing on every side the true force of nature. The trip’s final thrill came on the flight back, viewing the ripple marks below and recognizing in their hugeness the same energy that creates the small ones, grain by grain, at the beach. Inset image: from Google satellite, showing ripple marks in southeast Washington state. The dark area at the top left and around Rock Lake, bottom right, is scarred by the floods and has no topsoil remaining.

Mother meets Tom Sawyer: Old enough to ... iron

2009-05-15T00:00:00.015-04:00

Mira Costa blogged about ironing. Ironing -- what great memories I have of ironing! I had my own little iron and ironing board when I was four or five. Can you imagine? The iron actually plugged in and warmed up. Mother set it up and plugged it in next to her when she ironed. Imagine parents today letting their kids -- um, their daughters -- have something to play with that plugged in and heated up. I thought I was so lucky. My mother kept it tucked away so I couldn't use it unless she set it up for me.

When I was eight or so, one day my mother looked at me appraisingly and muttered (as if to herself) "I wonder ... are you big enough ...? No ... you can't be old enough ..." Her voice trailed off.

"Old enough for what?" I asked eagerly.

"Oh --" (airily) "I was just wondering to myself if you're old enough to learn to iron, but --"

"I'm old enough!" I protested. "And besides, you showed me how to iron when I was little."

She seemed doubtful. "But ironing is hard ... you have to be very careful."

"I can be careful!"

"Well," Mother still hesitated. "You could burn yourself. Or you could burn the clothes!" She warned me that what was burned could not be unburned.

I begged her to let me learn to iron. So right away she started me practicing. That very day I was allowed to let the iron heat up to wool. And I ironed my father's socks. She warned me not to do any ironing when she wasn't home. The next Saturday I reminded her that I was supposed to learn more about ironing.

That second time I was allowed to heat the iron to cotton. But first I set it at wool and ironed Daddy's socks, then let it heat to cotton and ironed my own. I also ironed my underwear, of course, being careful not to iron on top of the elastic, which could burn. Mother showed me how to stretch the curves of the underpants and undershirts over the end of the ironing board so I could reach the narrow parts.

The third week, I did all that and Daddy's undershirts. And the fourth week ...

Ah, the fourth week, I was allowed to do my own dampening! I sprinkled Daddy's handkerchiefs with hot water and folded them up together so I had my own little bundle of dampening in the fridge. I ironed everything else on my list and then pulled the dampened handkerchiefs out of the fridge and turned the iron all the way up to linen. Mother showed me how to pull the edges taut so that the handkerchief stayed square, and never to iron the folds in place, because it would weaken the threads of the fabric.

Some time later she taught me to fold them differently each week so that the fabric didn't get weak, which is what would happen if they were always folded along the same lines. That was probably when I was taught to iron pillowcases. First pillowcases were dampened and held in the fridge, then they were slipped over the ironing board so that the fold would not be ironed in. You do not lay a pillowcase flat on the ironing board and iron two layers at a time because that weakens the fabric at the creases.

Mother and I had embroidered McL on all the pillowcases in a padded satin stitch. The way to make a padded satin stitch stand out is to iron it on the wrong side ("on the wrong side" sounded so grown-up, I loved saying it) face down into a thick folded cloth like a diaper. You want to use a folded diaper and not, say, a terrycloth towel because you do not want to iron the marks of the terrycloth into the pillowcase fabric. (We always had diapers because they were absorbent and lint free, great for dish towels and dust cloths, as well as tack cloths when you refinish furniture. Mother bought them by the gross.)

I had been ironing about a year when I was finally ready to iron a shirt. Mother started me on my own few shirts. Dampened, into and out of the fridge, iron on cotton. First, the collar; iron it in one piece with the collar band, pulling it taut so creases aren't ironed into it. Second, the yoke. Third, the shirt cuffs; make sure that the tip of the iron goes under the buttons. Don't iron on top of the buttons because a) plastic buttons will melt and b) it makes dents in the fabric. Fourth, one sleeve, then the other. Fifth, the front placket -- pull it tight so there are no little creases and then iron the back of it so that's smooth too. Then the button band, and don't forget to iron beneath the buttons. Then the two fronts, and finally the back. And hang it on a hanger. And button the collar so it doesn't droop.

I ironed my own shirts for months before I was allowed near my dad's. And here I met a new mystery: starch. I had really looked forward to starch because it was a pretty light blue and had to be mixed with water in a bucket. The proportions were precise. Mix the starch, get the shirt thoroughly wet, wring it out -- of course, into the bucket -- and hang to dry. Then dampen.

Shirts were really a two-day job because of the starch. But oh -- the expertise that was called on to do them right. By the time I was ironing my dad's shirts, I was about the proudest girl on Poland Center Road. And the pleasure of having all those oxford cloth shirts hanging on hangers around the kitchen! I even ironed the inside of the yoke so the labels would be flat. My dad's shirts came from Brooks Brothers, J. Press, and for some reason, Milton's Clothing Cupboard in Charlotte.

It's amazing to think of the ironing that went on. Not just the socks and the underwear and the handkerchiefs and the shirts and the pillowcases -- but hand towels, kitchen towels, and sheets. In the cellar of Grandmother Findley's College Street house was a mangle. Grandmother would sit at the mangle and do all the flats -- sheets for four beds, eight pillowcases, all the towels and dishtowels. However -- as my mother explained to me -- the folds were ironed in, which meant that the fabric got weak! Believe me, pillowcases in the McLaughlin house lasted a long, long time.

Talking heads tell us that people are going to embrace the old ways. The economy is really changing us down deep, it's claimed. Somehow -- given the invention of polyester and rayon and spandex -- I doubt that ironing will ever again be a skill to celebrate.

But -- I cannot tell a lie -- I do iron my pillowcases. There's a deep sensual pleasure in sleeping on pillows with crisp ironed cases. It's just ... delicious.

Selling out a grand old name

2009-05-13T15:20:00.017-04:00

The science blogosphere is buzzing with shock horror disgust about the discovery that publisher Elsevier published a half dozen fake journals. These purported to be genuine, peer-reviewed scholarly journals but were in fact prepared at the behest of drug house Merck as pure propaganda. Found out, Elsevier is said to be conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices.

Thirty years ago I was an acquisitions editor at a prominent sci-tech-medical (STM) publisher with many journals. This publisher created many of its journals -- which meant it was the copyright holder, and owned the journal name -- and then would look for scholarly societies to adopt that journal.

One key reason for creating, publishing, or owning a journal, especially a multidisciplinary journal, especially one sponsored by a scholarly society, is the calculation of how many products could be advertised to how many markets in its pages. Anything relating to pharmacology automatically has some success because all drug companies are ready to put money into journals. "Journal" implies unbiased peer review.

This was back in the early days of targeted marketing. I created mailing lists of product managers of specific products at drug houses. If I had a peer-reviewed journal article on (for instance) calcium channel blockers, I'd peddle reprints to calcium channel blocker product managers; if their product was mentioned favorably in the article, the company might buy 10, 20, 30, thousand reprints of that article. Income went straight to the bottom line.

We were approached by a pharma company asking us to gather a group of experts for a two-day discussion of X disease. Pharma told us that any fair discussion of preferred treatment for X would automatically feature drug Y, on which it held the patent. After the gathering, we could use the recommended authors to put together a book on the subject, which would sell competitively in the open textbook market but which that Pharma could also buy and give to leaders in that treatment area.

It was win-win for us in other ways. We now had friendly relationships with a dozen leaders in disease X, which had not previously been a house strength. What did the specialists get out of it? They were flown first-class to New York, put up at the Waldorf-Astoria for three nights, ate at terrific restaurants, and met other world-famous specialists. Of course they liked us, and it didn't bother any of them that Pharma underwrote it all.

But consider the ambiguities I describe here. The specialists were specialists because they were knowledgeable. The discussion was guided only in that it focused on treatment of disease X. I did some preliminary research and found that the Pharma was right: any discussion of effective treatment of X necessarily promoted drug Y. And no up-to-date text existed in the field. I (and our company's owners) felt that a clear line existed between what we were doing and having our name -- and integrity -- be bought by Pharma, and that we were safely on the clean side of the line. If the project had not been underwritten by Pharma it wouldn't have happened, and it was a necessary project with a legitimate market.

This is not, of course, what's being alleged about Elsevier. The allegation about Elsevier is that the "journals" were fake, existing only to be Merck giveaways. Well, thirty years have come and gone, and this particular propaganda style has burgeoned and at last been found out. Pharma and leading doctors have been implicated in shading or concealing many difficult truths about treatments and medications. In fact, if you follow the links above, you'll read that the truth about the Elsevier/Merck product came out because of an Australian court case.

Medical consumers (that's you there, with the prescription bottle in your hand, and me) have lost faith in doctors as well as the FDA. Some members of Congress and the Senate are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Pharma. It doesn’t much help to be an educated consumer, because if your education is tainted it might as well not exist.

Why do I say "selling out a grand old name"? Because for a long time there was something of a class system in STM publishing. STM houses whose founders were still alive were the new kids on the block, and there was a little bit of snobbery about them. On the one hand, they tried harder. On the other hand, trying hard might mean they were ethical sellouts.

But, Elsevier! Elsevier was founded in 1880. It took its name from the House of Elzevir, a publishing family during the three preceding centuries. Elsevier did not have a reputation to make, Elsevier was ... Elsevier. Having followed personnel moves in STM publishing for a couple decades, I would like to know who and how many people inside Elsevier were implicated in this ... and I would like to know whether anyone, anyone at all, tried to change some minds. I'm also curious as whether anyone who might have tried to change minds is still inside Elsevier or did management find a way to get rid of them.

"Internal review"? C'mon. This was deliberate management policy, set at the highest levels, with an eye to the bottom line ONLY and in the belief that the hoax wouldn't be found out.

The whole world is in my hands

2009-05-13T14:05:00.003-04:00

Yes, there is no end to my power. I have a Blendtec blender!

Last summer, Cousin Manda’s sweetheart bought her a top-of-the-line blender. I’m not sure what brand, but oh! The soups, the purees, the smoothies she turns out with that blender.

During the fall and winter, I twice destroyed the blade in my Waring -- which is fifty years old, but the blades are new. One evening Lydia called, distressed because she had tried to make carrot juice in a food processor and, of course, turned out something fit for the compost heap. She never noticed that I have a juicer too, for carrot juice, with two separate filters to be scooped out and cleaned (more compost), wasting significant carrot fiber.

I yearned and yearned and finally, I decided that even if I have to go about in shoes with holey soles next winter, I really, really want a powerful blender. I studied blender websites assiduously and finally settled on the Blendtec HP3A [1500 watts! 3+ peak horsepower!], which arrived 45 minutes ago.

The Blendtec will make carrot juice (added water is necessary, says the instruction book). It will puree — wait for it — avocado pits! (Do I really want fiber that badly? Am not sure … it seems a little extreme.) I happen to have two avocados on the kitchen table … but I am in no hurry. My banana peach blueberry cherry strawberry almond smoothie is soothing all the rough edges, and I am at peace.

Devil’s Walking Stick or Hercules’ Club? Does it matter?

2009-05-12T23:48:00.014-04:00

Not to your average person walking in the woods, no.

Today I explored a Westchester woods I hadn’t been in before, near Pleasantville. About 300 feet off the highway, I encountered this tree. I hadn’t seen one for a couple years, at least — and it's a tree to have nightmares about.

It’s definitely odd looking. A single trunk, at this point less than two inches in diameter, rising to a crown that’s a spray of compound pinnate leaves somewhere higher than six feet off the ground. Fully grown, it might have a whole clump of trunks and rise well over thirty feet. At this stage, it resembles an umbrella.

But it’s one thing you wouldn’t want to grab in an emergency! There are two very similar trees, both called Devil’s Walking Stick or Hercules’ Club. One is a cousin to both rue and citrus (Zanthoxylum clava-herculis), the other (Aralia spinosa) is cousin to ginseng. This far north, the tree is probably Aralia. Both can hurt you!

Look at those thorns! In another months, each of them will be more than an inch long. Yes, they’re on the trunk, too, ringing it in many places. They also grow out of the spines on the leaves and the veins on the leaflets. Wherever you touch this tree, there’s probably a skin-ripping thorn.

Some gardeners actually import this tree into their gardens. In the autumn, leaves of the Aralia — the ginseng — can turn bronze. But it spreads underground, its blossoms are unremarkable, and birds love its berries so it spreads that way too. And as the tree ages, the bark can grow over the thorns, so the trunk becomes horribly lumpy and looks diseased. What’s to like? Aralia creeps me out so much I’m not sure I want to revisit that woods.

A new mother is born, continued

2009-05-11T23:27:00.006-04:00

Ever since finding the Osho quote I used on Mother's Day, I have been thinking about the creation of the mother. Since I was an only child and so is my daughter, I don't know this for sure, but I will bet every mother is a different mother to each child. How can that not be true?

A woman of my acquaintance, who was Catholic Mother of the Year, was asked by another acquaintance, "Tell me, if you had it to do over again, would you have eight kids?" And her grim reply was, "No, and I know just which ones I wouldn't have."

When you have a child who coos happily and goes to sleep, aren't you likely to feel different, and be different, from the you whose child is cranky and colicky and wakeful? And that's only the beginning. There's the child whose independence scares you and the child whose dependency bores you. The one who wants to be with you and the one who refuses to be. The one who loves what you love and the one who can't stand it. The one who looks after the baby and the one who leaves him bruised. The one who reads books on how to be an effective babysitter and the one who reads Gossip Girl. The one who breaks bones and the one with unexplained fevers. And on and on.

I recently reread Grandma McLaughlin's autobiography, for the first time in at least twenty years. And it brought home to me how much she loved her children, and how much she knew her children -- even the ones she admitted that she didn't understand.

William & Warburton: Wistaria

2009-05-11T15:05:00.010-04:00

Every year I vow that I will photograph my downhill neighbor's wistaria. This family has an extraordinary garden, and bordering it is a wistaria that towers at one end and is trained along the uphill-running fence.

This year, because of rain and fog, the perfect day never came ... and I just realized its time is passing. So here's this year's wistaria before it disappears for good. Soon the Rose of Sharon bushes (currently green blobs along the fence) will bloom up and out and swallow it all!

Ferrets, otters, and sliding

2009-05-11T14:34:00.007-04:00

This was on Small Animal Channel:
The ferrets love their tube run more than anything. Each day I wake up and go to sleep hearing little paws running and dooking sounds in the tubes.

The funniest part of the tube run ended up being the 11-foot slope. Every time the ferrets finish in the run and decide to go back down to their cage, they enter the top of the sloped tube and flip over onto their backs to slide all the way down the tube, gaining quite a bit of speed in the process.

When friends and family see the tube run, some think it’s great and others just look at me strangely. To the latter, I just smile and tell them, 'It’s a ferret owner thing.'"
— Todd LaFaille, Connecticut

The bit about the ferrets flipping over onto their backs to slide? It's exactly what otters do -- and otters are big cousins of ferrets. Practically anyplace in the northeast or north central states where you have muddy or icy banks going down to a big enough creek or river, you will find an otter slide. Minks -- another member of the family -- do it too.

Entire otter families will maintain their slides. It's just about the only animal activity known that exists for the pure fun of it -- there's no connection to food, reproduction, or anything else related to survival. Just fun!

A mother's birth

2009-05-10T21:17:00.021-04:00

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. The mother is something absolutely new. ~ the religious leader Osho

Today was Mother's Day, and I lit the chalice in today's services with this quotation. It focused on a part of motherhood that is often overlooked. It's overlooked in all the sentimentality around Mother's Day, and it's overlooked in the now-you're-going-to-have-a-baby books. I cannot imagine a woman not being changed by becoming a mother. It certainly changed me, and I didn't expect it at all!

Friend-from-kindergarten Marty told me that when she was pregnant, a mother she worked with assured her, "It's like falling in love with a stranger." Not really, Marty herself concluded. "It's like being mugged by your best friend."

In the talkback following today's service, Eric spoke about the birth of his twins. It was very premature, following an extremely difficult pregnancy. Eric and his wife didn't actually know each other all that well when they became parents. And yet, out of nowhere, his wife, the babies' mother, found reserves of psychological, emotional, and physical stamina to be at the hospital every waking hour and to make him do it too. This new mother became an entirely new person because her babies needed her to be that person. And in fact, the children's health today (in their late teens) speaks to the astounding care they received from her during those months in the neonatal ICU.

As new mothers, most of us do not face demands so drastic. The "normal" sweep of new emotions and crushing physical changes is hard enough. A quarter-century into motherhood, what I find miraculous is that mothers are changed most of the time. I believe most mothers do the best we can, and fortunately, most of our children forgive us for what we didn't do well.

My mother and grandmothers had struggles different from each other, and I don't really think my mother ever truly came to grips with motherhood. Nonetheless! Let me repeat the names of my three mothers, and my mother's three sisters, because each became someone different for me: Margaret and Lydia and Elizabeth and Nancy and Betsy and Billie. Inset photo: Unfortunately, a double exposure taken against Florida palm trees on December 25, 1916 -- Will and Lydia one week before Margaret's birth.

Fenway Park still stands

2009-05-10T20:32:00.013-04:00

The debacle of Yankee Stadium is — not surprisingly — making waves in Boston, too. Here’s baseball writer Sarah Green in the Harvard Business School Press blog.

Several months ago I was lamented to an old friend, a Yankee fan, about what a pig’s ear the Yankees were making of the stadium move and the prices. I objected — as who in the real world hasn’t? — about Yankee prices, especially given the support the Yankee Organization has received from the taxpayer.

My friend actually denied that the Yankee Organization got any taxpayer money at all. Huh? Blogger Jason, from It's About the Money, Stupid, wraps up a list of woes and includes credited photographs showing the empty expensive seats.

Unlike Sarah Green or Larry Greenberg, both of whose love of baseball and grasp of its minutia are things to marvel at, I am not a Fan. But baseball is the one sport I actually pay attention to. I suspect that's true in many American households. Come to think of it, as I contemplate a move to Chicago's Hyde Park, I have actually been looking at the White Sox website. Chicago has plenty of scandals, but at least the taxpayers don't get their noses rubbed in municipal follies at every game.

I am happy that Richard Brodsky, my local state assemblyman and one of the smartest people in politics, is ruffling Yankee and Bloomberg feathers with his ongoing investigation of this scam. Brodsky doesn't need to invent targets when the city, the state, or an organization as massive as the YO is this blatant. Mike Lupica, an excellent old-time reporter for the Daily News, writes about Brodsky and what the Yanks are doing with our money and our land. And, folks, it IS our money -- and it WAS our parkland -- that the Yankees took.

Loving animals

2009-05-08T12:16:00.014-04:00

Loving animals was not a significant part of our household as I was growing up. Oh, we had a dog -- a high-strung puddles-on-the-floor-during-every-thunderstorm cocker spaniel. Her name was Lochinvar, because my mother's ancestrally Scottish family had dogs named Lochinvar for 150 years. But Locky was really my mother's dog, despite having arrived under the tree "for little Diggitt" when I was three.

Duke the Dog accompanied me when I went off in 1970 to see America before it burned, and lived with me on West 81st Street until I moved to London. Katie Cat lived in my London house and gave me my first real experience of an animal's idiosyncracies.

But I am indebted to Lydia's dad for insisting that we get a ferret so our little girl could have a pet. In a household with allergies, cats and dogs were out but he had read that ferrets were allergen-free. So following up an ad in the Pennysaver, he and three-year-old Lydia met some strangers in a parking lot and for $50 received a cage and Ferris (whose name was immediately changed to Ferrous, in honor of the Steel Valley). Inset picture: postcard ferret that looks a lot like Ferrous.

Over the next ten years, we had seven ferrets altogether. Once we started we just couldn't stop! The only thing cuter than one is two. The only thing cuter than two is three. The only thing cuter than three ferrets is four ferrets! Lydia and I used to drop into a pet store in Central Avenue just to look at their ferrets -- as if when we were out on errands, we needed a ferret fix.

The owner asked me one day, "Don't you already have a ferret?"

"Actually, we have four," I answered.

He fixed his eye upon me. "I hear they do best by fives," he said.

Dr. Tepper, the local vet, said to me one day, "You're not the kind of person I would expect to have ferrets, " he said. I asked him what he meant.

"Oh, ferret owners tend to be ... you know, anti-establishment types," he explained. He was too nice to say, you know, trailer trash. Ferrets are not found in upper-middle-class households; probably the stench of the poacher is on them, from Europe, and will never go away.

Ferrets can always be found in the pockets of Dan Mallett, the poacher/detective in Frank Parrish's short-lived (alas!) series of detective stories. Except when he "be thieven or wenchen," as his mother would say. Dan Mallett is without a doubt the most attractive good-and-bad guy in all of detective literature; in the books no woman can resist him and goodness know I couldn't either. He loves his little guys although so far as we know, they are nameless.

The etymology of ferret is Latin or maybe Anglo-French, but whichever word it comes from, the meaning was thief (same root as furtive), and in fact many of our stories about Ferrous, Eric, Popper, Boudicca, LeWeasel, Tequila,and Sherlock come from their thieving. Thieving or not, all our stories relate to their curiosity or sense of fun.

Fun? Once, on the Friday that spring break started, our neighbors were to leave for Paris but a blizzard hit. They couldn't get to the kennel, so they asked us if we could take Charlie the Yorkie overnight and deliver him to the kennel the next day. So Charlie came for the night to a house with four ferrets. They had a field day with Charlie! One after another would creep out with a clear "Let's play!" message. The ferret would run, Charlie would chase, and the ferret would dash into a hole at the bottom of the couch. Charlie would run around to the back of the couch. Then he'd reappear with a great big question mark over his head. Then another ferret would appear and chitter at him, and it would start over. Finally Charlie caught on that somehow ferrets went to a place he couldn't get to ... but it was clearly fun for the ferrets while it lasted. And it lasted for nine days because we never took Charlie to the kennel ... it was just a hoot having him around.

So why do I bring up small animals? Because of this article about veterinarian Dr Chris Carskaddan, whose mission is clearing for entry into the U.S. the pets that our soldiers have adopted overseas. It acknowledges so much: the big acknowledgements are the humanity of our soldiers and the need for us all to be in touch with animals.

And the post several days ago when I included the video of the laughing rats? Terry responded saying that's a good reason for being vegetarian like she is. I'm working on it, folks. Most of the time now I don't eat anything with a face either. I'm not proselytizing; eating lower down the food chain is a greener way to live as well.

Rainy day in Newfoundland

2009-05-08T11:58:00.006-04:00

If you haven't visited Bitstop -- a blog dedicated to a photo a day from Karen Chappell, a St. John's photographer -- I encourage you to look at today's offerings.

I love Newfoundland for its land-out-of-time mystery. I could write about it forever and have taken thousands of photographs there myself, which is why I have her link on my own [Hudson and Mahoning valleys] blog. Today's rainy day photographs show that aspect of Newfoundland.

Power Along the Hudson, and Pete Seeger

2009-05-06T11:07:00.011-04:00

Pete Seeger’s big birthday party last weekend reminded me one of the best environmental history books I’ve ever read, Power Along the Hudson (E.P. Dutton, 1972) by Allan R. Talbott.

Sadly, its fascinating study was told too soon — before the environmental movement really broke loose — and ends a little too soon, so PAtH is not only out of print but unreviewed on Amazon and almost unavailable from used book dealers. Because the book ends before its actual story concludes, it’s unlikely to be picked up and reprinted by Purple Mountain Press. But if you ever see it forgotten in a bookstore — grab it! Talbott is a talented storyteller, and it’s a spellbinding story.

By “power along the Hudson” the author means, literally, power, as in financial and political power. But that kind of power was largely controlled by the magnates who controlled the supplies of power: of coal, gas, oil, steam, the railroads and shipping lines, and finally, electricity. By the end of the book, financial and legal power have lined up against an expansion of electrical power, as the Rockefellers and their allies, through the creation of Scenic Hudson, challenged ConEd in the Storm King case.In only 244 pages, Talbott tells first the story of how New York (City, mainly) was powered. Where did coal and water come from? [New York City’s water has its own wonderful history.] How did households and businesses manage power? Waste? Coal ash? How did the gas companies move into the cities? Where was oil used? These histories should take many hundreds of pages but Talbott moves economically through them all. Robert Fulton and Commodore Vanderbilt and Robert Moses come and go.

Finally, there’s room for a brief history of Storm King itself: the brooding mountain north of West Point, called Boterberg (Butter Hill) by the Dutch. It was inspiration for generations of poets and painters. Even during the busiest industrial shipping years of the mid-19th century, artists flocked to paint and draw Hudson River traffic at Storm King’s feet.

In 1963, considering New York City's long-term power demands, Consolidated Edison proposed an upriver project. It would create a reservoir on top of Storm King and drill out the core of the mountain for water shafts and turbines; some power lines would tunnel beneath the Hudson and others would line the Valley itself.

Led by some of the Rockefeller brothers, Hudson Valley landed gentry mounted a legal battle again ConEd. It was back and forth through the courts throughout the 70s and ConEd finally abandoned a smaller version of the project in 1979, which is why Talbott’s book ended too soon. The 17-year-long court battle ended with the Storm King decision, now considered the beginning of U.S. environmental law. It was groundbreaking because it gave individuals the legal standing to speak on behalf of the environment. Before that time, natural entities had no legal voice.

A ConEd advocate once jeered, “There never would have been a court case if the place were still called Butter Hill.” Perhaps. But during the 1920s, New York State built a highway across the face of Storm King, which for some years was considered one of the world’s engineering marvels. The Storm King Highway, which takes the driver along the edge of the United States Military Academy at West Point, is a breathtaking drive, although the road is often closed entirely during the winter. There’s something about the mountain’s majesty that transcends its name — although the name doesn’t hurt! Nor does the fact that it faces Breakneck Ridge across the river.

So in its final pages, Power Along the Hudson is the story of the first dawn of the new day of American environmental law. Pete Seeger’s role in it is a whole nother story. Happy birthday, Pete!

Rats laugh too

2009-05-06T00:15:00.008-04:00

This brief video is on a blog called This Lively Earth. The video is so incredibly charming I sent it to several friends but think it deserves a home here too.

The transponder used to translate rat sounds into sounds we can hear was designed for bat hunters. Sometimes, during the summer, naturalists down Broadway at Lenoir Preserve have bat nights. They'll take a crowd of people out to the meadow overlooking the Hudson and bring out these gadgets. In the dark silence, suddenly the howls and screeches and hissing of the bats wheeling overhead comes through. It's eerie to think that these almost invisible creatures are darting about overhead surrounded by a racket only they can hear.

Of course, you have to like little mammals to be really sympathetic to the rats (and I can't say my previous acquaintance with rats has been friendly). But when Lydia was growing up, our household had ferrets -- never more than four at a time but over the years, seven or eight. And they definitely laughed and giggled when their tummies were tickled.

Adding "A Mauritanian Minute"

2009-05-05T23:49:00.006-04:00

Off to the right, you'll see that I added the blog A Mauritanian Minute. Teresa Winland, the daughter of my cousin Betty Kerrigan Winland, is in the Peace Corps in Mauritania and this is her blog.

Teresa graduated from college a year ago, having worked in women's projects, and went off to Mauritania shortly afterwards. Her PC assignment is specifically to create a center for educating girls. It looks like she's being successful!

Teresa's uncle Tom Kerrigan told me that at first, the girls were very hesitant about coming. Now they are out in the community teaching other girls what they've learned.

Adding the Mannahatta Project to the links list

2009-05-04T20:22:00.011-04:00

You'll see the Mannahatta Project link to the right. It's one of the most exciting geophysical projects I can imagine: the recreation of Manhattan Island as it was in 1609!

Mannahatta creators started with the 1782 British Headquarters map of Manhattan island, now archived in the U.K., and worked with GIS to (in a sense) superimpose that map on today's city. It's reckoned to be accurate within 40 meters, which I find just brilliant, given that the amount of 1609 Manhattan never built on in four centuries probably comes down to a matter of square yards.

A reminder to people here in Westchester County: since geologically Westchester and Manhattan are one unit, what you learn about Manhattan will generally apply to our own turf as well. Today there's a one-agricultural-zone difference between the two -- that's why it will be snowing here and raining in the city -- but observations about native plants, animals, and fish will apply here too.

Big Bend fandom

2009-05-04T15:58:00.007-04:00

Today's Clade piece is about hiking at Big Bend. Interestingly, Nevada Barr's newest mystery, Borderline, is set in the national park at Big Bend.

The Clade piece is written by Bill W (presumably not the same Bill W who founded AA). Lyrical writing, and another person struck down by love for the desert. Who wouldn't fall in love with a place where both plants and animals have spikes?

Barr's newest just doesn't grab me the way some of her earlier books did; I read A Superior Death (1994) alone in the house, and it ranks right up there with Life's Creepiest Experiences. AND: One of life's creepiest experiences, and containing a thorough explanation of the formation of adipocere, and set at Isle Royale, yet another reason to revisit Lake Superior.

Snark, smirks, and the Great Lakes

2009-05-04T12:40:00.007-04:00

This week, the Great Lakes Town Hall website has a quick quiz about the Great Lakes. Biggest, smallest, longest shoreline, etc — just what you’d expect. But it left out one amazing fact about the Great Lakes. I won’t tell you what it is until I finish this diversion.

The anthropologist Ray Birdwhistell (a student of Margaret Mead’s, among other distinctions) called himself a kinesiologist, studying movement in context. You can study movement in context by watching TV or a movie with the sound off, and decipher the unfolding story through the actors’ movements. Birdwhistell argued — contradicting the body language people — that a movement has meaning in context, rather than an absolute meaning.

In other words, yeah, maybe the person who folds her arms as she speaks to you is shutting you out. But that movement could have a different meaning if you look at the entire scene: all the movements being made by all the participants.

Birdwhistell was also a student of faces. He got five minutes of fame on late-night TV explaining his observations, and manipulating his own face into regional configurations. For instance, people who grow up on the southern Great Plains do this and this and this — and, wow: there’s Eisenhower (from Abilene, Kansas). An upper-class Englishman does that and that and that with his eyelids and nose and upper lip, and wow — there’s the Tory then-prime minister of Great Britain. Before the world had heard of Jimmy Carter, Birdwhistell showed us the toothy, ever-smiling face of the southerner.

One night, long ago, with friends in Poland, Ohio, we watched Birdwhistell go through this performance … which he concluded with the face of people “in states bordering the Great Lakes.” The key to the Great Lakes states face, he said, is that “people there smile with their mouths closed so you can’t see their teeth.” We looked around the room at each other — and we were all smiling without showing our teeth! Suddenly the roomful of friends had turned into an anthropological experiment. And I remembered specifically being taught (by my mother and aunts) to not show my teeth when I smiled.

I’ve thought of Ray Birdwhistell often, especially during the last eight years of snark about W’s smirk. I too am at a loss to understand that look (although I associate it with certain upper-middle class women, and it blows me away when I see it on Christmas card pictures), and wish that Ray Birdwhistell were still around to decode it.

Incidentally, in Belles on Their Toes, the sequel to Cheaper by the Dozen, Mrs. Gilbreth is interviewed by someone who refers to her making a “deprecating moue.” “I’ve never made any kind of moue in my life,” snorts Mother.

Leaving the admiring bog behind

2009-05-03T23:38:00.007-04:00

We will miss Justice Souter.

Most justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are articulate people with keen, well-educated minds, but some just sound better than others.

Justice Souter wrote the dissent in Bush v Gore. It’s so simple.

Not very much has been written about the man. He’s very private. What a google search will tell you about him is this: His parents’ names and his birth date and place (but not whether he had brothers or sisters). His grandparents’ farm in Weare, NH, to which his parents moved the household when he was 11 and where he still lives, when not in Washington in an undecorated apartment (but no photographs of the house or the apartment). He drives between Weare and Washington in his own car, rarely flying. He hikes in the New Hampshire mountains and reads history as recreation (no long interviews in which he expounds on history). He has yogurt and an apple (which he eats completely, including the core) every day for lunch. He was once engaged (no further info ... in any direction). He went to Harvard undergrad and Harvard law, was a Rhodes Scholar and has two degrees from Oxford. He’s an Episcopalian. He was a trustee of Dartmouth Med School. [Subsequent edit: today's Times has an actual article about Justice Souter -- but except for the photograph, there's only one additional piece of data about him. All the rest is embroidery.]

Now think about any random celebrity — think of Bill Clinton! — and recall the mass of data about any of them that you cannot escape. What an extraordinary amount of grace and dignity lie in not inviting the world into your underwear drawer.

The smells of two families

2009-05-03T19:22:00.009-04:00

After many years of not wearing scent, I have re-entered the world of fragrance. It’s such a primitive sense that I stopped wearing perfume the day Lydia was born. I wanted her to know and bond with my smell, and I didn’t want anything artificial intruding between that sense and me.

I’d had the idea for years before her birth, but during pregnancy my own sense of smell was so exaggerated that I said to myself, I have to do this. My baby will need to know who I am. When I see dogs outdoors after a rain, scampering after scents here and there, it reminds me of how I was bombarded by smells during those months. This food or that became totally noxious, totally rotten, totally disgusting when nobody else knew what I was talking about.

You've heard the jokes about pregnant women and pickles? I can recall craving cucumbers, but pickles would do. The taste, the texture, the smell. I can't explain why a cucumber smell is the same as a pickle smell, but both were ... oh, just spectacularly wonderful. Smelling and eating a pickle would just ease all the frayed edges. Even as I recall the experience, I can hear the crisp crunch of a good cucumber or really excellent pickle ... even the memory is soothing. (Just writing about it is sending shivers down my arms.)

Now we know about the vomeronasal organ, which perceives the information we might (or might not) recognize as a smell. Microscopic molecules of a substance reach the inside of our nose, reaching small “pits” there — and that’s how smells are interpreted.

Sometime when I was first married to Lydia’s dad, I rolled over to his side of the bed when he wasn’t there — and realized how much he smelled like my aunt Betsy! (in whose bed I had often slept as a child). Along the line I noticed that Lydia herself carries the same scent, a little bit cinnamon, a little bit burned mandarin. I guess we come from toasty orange families.

Garlic mustard: eat it today, kill it tomorrow

2009-05-01T11:51:00.009-04:00

It's garlic mustard season. Actually, around here, it's garlic mustard season twelve months a year.

Garlic mustard is an non-native invasive that grows along every Westchester pathway you walk. It's on hillsides too, especially rocky ones where nothing else grows. If it has its way, nothing else will share that pathway or hillside, because garlic mustard kills other plants underground. If you have it near your garden or yard, pull it out! Get the roots and everything underground, because that's how it will spread.

However: "Wildman" Steve Brill identifies garlic mustard as a favorite edible woodland plant. Some people find the leaves bitter, but in the spring the bitterness is less of a problem, and it goes away anytime if the leaves are cooked. Brill substitutes the leaves for basil in pesto. They can also be mixed in with milder greens in a salad or used in a stir-fry. Incidentally, the leaves survive under snow, so if you are a determined forager you can find them in the woods all winter -- but they will need cooking to remove the bitterness. You won't want to eat the stems.

Wildman Steve says that the roots are like horseradish. Them I have not tried, but will bear the idea in mind. So here's how to solve this environmental conundrum: take a bag with you on your next walk. Pull up lots of garlic mustard, making sure to get the root. Eat the leaves. Save the root if you're curious and like horseradish. But whatever you do, don't put any part of it on your compost heap, and do not save the seeds for next year. There will still be plenty left in the woods no matter how much you pick.

Incidentally -- you do not want this in your garden no matter how much you like the taste! It's leggy and the flowers are boring. Trust me -- there really, truly will always be enough for you and your dinner party of twelve. Just walk along another ten feet and there it will be.

What bookstore employees REALLY think

2009-04-30T14:00:00.013-04:00

I used to tell a story about the time I decided to read Dorothy L. Sayers's translation of The Inferno. I went to a chain bookstore (not Bookstore C) and asked the young man at the service desk. Full admission: I expected him to say, "Dantay? Do you have a last name?"

So I was pleasantly surprised when he said, "Sayers translated it too? I didn't know that. I prefer the Musa translation myself." Then we passed another store clerk, who asked if he could help, and my first helper explained, and the second clerk said, "Well, the Ciardi translation reproduces the original rhythms of the language and is really beautiful to read out loud." Musa? Ciardi? I wondered where the heck such scholars had been when I was in college, pursuing studies of handsome blond lifeguards.

When I started working at Bookstore C, I had fully two weeks of training. One thing I was told over and over was not only that "This is the Bookstore C way of shelving fiction/checking inventory/tidying the newsstand," I was warned that People From Corporate Might Visit Anytime -- clearly a way of keeping employees on their toes.

A few months ago I saw a customer standing in the Religion section looking baffled, and I asked if I could help. "I'm actually looking for Journey to the West," he said.

Wow! One year my Literature Club project was Journey to the West, and I personally happen to be steeped in Monkey lore. "Do you mean when Monkey traveled to get the ancient Buddhist scriptures?" I asked the customer.

"Why, yes," he said, "and I hope you have it in paperback."

I stopped in the middle of the aisle. "Gee, the paperback edition was published in 1987 and is out of print, "I explained. "We don't have the hard cover edition in stock but I can order it for you and, hmmm, it would be here in three days."

So we had a nice little discussion about Wu Cheng-en and Tripitaka and Arthur Waley and Monkey and Piggsy. I am certain he went home stunned and told his friends that Bookstore C sales staff are amazingly knowledgeable. Not knowing, of course, that he was speaking to one of the five people in Westchester County who ever heard of the book in the first place and who, in the second place, figured that he was A Person From Corporate Who Might Visit Any Time And Take Names.
Incidentally! There is actually a Journey to the West blog! Wouldn't it be cool for someone to do a blog of the journey itself? It could go on for years. Unhappily, that's not what that blog is -- it's a blog about producing the television show. The image above of Monkey and companions is from Wikimedia Commons.

“I would visit my mother’s grave and feel sorry for myself”

2009-04-29T14:38:00.010-04:00

One of the first things Lydia’s dad told me about his family was that his mother’s mother — his Grandmother Brooks — had died in the flu epidemic of 1918-19.

All of us are descended from people who died. But sometimes there’s something in a death that makes it different from other deaths. Death in the Great Flu Pandemic was such a death.

Mae Bickford was born in 1887. She married Edwin Brooks and died, sometime before the first birthday of her third child Elizabeth, who was born in early 1918. My mother-in-law Betty never knew her birth mother and was close to six when her father married again.

When I used to meet single women lamenting because they couldn’t find a husband, I would think of Laura Benedict, that singular woman who married Ted Brooks, a widower with three little kids, and became from all accounts a wonderful mother to them.

What I found notable about Mae Brooks’s death was that I heard about it in the early 1980s, and I had never before talked with anyone who spoke of a connection to the great flu pandemic. I grew up in the Ohio village where five generations of my family had lived, and I knew century-old gossip about this local family and that — but no stories of the Spanish flu.

Where had it been hiding? I once walked through the Riverside Cemetery in Poland, Ohio looking for the tombstones of young adults who had died in those years and didn’t find anything remarkable one way or another.

Where the Spanish flu hides in Ohio’s folk legends I still don’t know, but a really interesting story is that of the virologists who found the virus, H1N1. Toward the end of the 20th century it became something of a hidden treasure, sought in exhumed bodies buried in the permafrost of Norway and Alaska. Medical detectives pored over old records looking for forgotten graves. That they found the virus is a scientific miracle!

My mother-in-law Betty confessed to me once that when she was a young teenager visiting Rochester, she would sneak off to the cemetery to mourn by her mother’s grave. “I don’t know what I was mourning for! I loved Mother [Laura Benedict] and it seemed disloyal,” she confessed.But now that I have seen my own daughter grow up, I can certainly mourn for Mae Brooks, who never knew that joy. In 1986, Ted and Betty and I took toddler Lydia to Mae’s grave during a visit to Rochester.

Youngstown’s bishop to go back where he belongs

2009-04-27T10:04:00.012-04:00

The I Will Shout Youngstown blog reported today that Bishop George Murry of the Youngstown (Ohio) diocese has decided to move — wait for it — into Youngstown.

The bishop is taking two important steps. He is giving up a house on 2.5 acres, with five bedrooms and two family rooms. In terms of sustainability, a single man living in such a place is insupportable. While a bishop by definition has neither wife nor children, I suppose he has some sort of corporate ménage … but five bedrooms? Two family rooms? In a prestigious public school district? C’mon.

An equally praiseworthy step is: Bishop Murry is moving back into the city. The bishop’s home has been in Liberty Township, north of Youngstown in a different county. Many of the tycoons who once lived on Youngstown’s north side (within the mile immediately north of the cathedral) moved their families to Liberty Township years ago.

The bishop's new home will be on Gypsy Lane, the boundary between Youngstown and Liberty Township. Most Gypsy Lane houses look across a wide, tree-shaded street at a municipal golf course. I note that Bishop Murry rides a bicycle, and while it's something of a walk from Gypsy Lane to St. Columba's Cathedral, it would -- will! -- take no time at all for a cyclist.

Now comes the BUT. But -- wouldn't it be less symbolic and more real for the bishop's home to be truly in Youngstown? Gypsy Lane is, after all, as far away from the city as you can be and be in the city.

Wick Park, about a half mile south of the bishop's new home, is a glorious area of green that survived the worst of Youngstown's downturn. It has many grand houses and institutions surrounding it -- admittedly, grand houses that have seen better days -- but who better than the Diocese to take on the project of restoring a mansion to LEED standards? Imagine if the Diocese of Youngstown created a green rehabbing training program. It would put the energy of a large, rich institution, and the charisma of Bishop Murry (which I understand is considerable) into a job-training program that would be invested not just in Youngstown's future but in the whole country's future. It could be a model copied around the United States!

Nobody understands better than I how a person can hunger for green, open space. And rank hath its privileges. But rank hath its responsibilities too … and in my humble UU view, this bishop, any bishop, belongs close to the cathedral, in his city.

Youngstown is not a splendid diocese. It may be that the Liberty Township home is Youngstown’s diocesan equivalent to the treasures of the Vatican. But Youngstown (like Flint and Detroit and Buffalo and Erie and Cleveland) has been struggling since the 60s with the butchery of urban renewal programs that ripped out their cores. Quality lifestyles wait in those cities for people to go claim then. The Catholic Church in action can be an amazing force for good, and I hope that its enlistment in this battle is as meaningful as it seems to me this spring day.

And that 2.5 acres? It’s too much to hope that the diocese will turn it into a market garden. But Liberty Township is fairly flat … and imagine a diocese-wide composting program. Oh, the possibilities of it!