At last....

Well, I seem to have let a month slip by without a blog entry. I didn't do my taxes either, so that can't be my excuse. Actually, I've been writing some software, which is great fun, and in many ways easier than prose. Yeats said he preferred composing poems to writing prose pieces. The problem with prose, he said, is that you are never done. I know what he means: if a poem is well-wrought there is a little, almost audible, click as it settles into place. With prose, though, you can fiddle endlessly.

When a program is finally worked into its—almost inevitable—shape it gives that "click", also. So I've had a series of pleasing clicks over the month, so pleasing that I forgot my blog. So how about a little fable for the upcoming spring equinox? I wrote it years ago, truth be told, but it has not yet seen the light of day, as far as I know...

The crow looked bleakly around. The thin snow swirled around him over the frozen ground, and the squirrels and rabbits and robins huddled in holes. He cawed in derision as the cold seeped through his ruffled feathers, and gobbled the shriveled meat from a burst hickory nut. A man, swaddled against the cold, hurried along the path, but the crow barely gave him a glance. It had come to this! No stores of corn to rob, no angry farmers to evade as he delighted in his cunning! Steel silos, deserted farms. Now he was just a tramp in the city, like all these other pitiful creatures. As if to punctuate this melancholy thought, a rat scuttled across the path and disappeared into some dry pondside weeds.

And the relentless barrenness! The crow knew that only he could bring the world out of this cold dark season, only he could raise the sun. But how? How could he bring on the rage of Man, that brought back the warmth? He flapped his wings until he was warm enough to fly, then lifted off and went circling about, looking for something, he knew not what. Then he saw it. It was a magnificent evergreen, glowing with colored lights, and with a great star on top. The crow knew what he had to do.

He flattened out his flight until he was skimming just at the tree’s top, and hit the star with his feet. It was whacked askew. He circled back, and hit it again. It fell, and the watching crowd gasped. Angry voices floated up to the crow. He flew away and waited.

Soon the star was back atop the tree, and the crow knew in his ebony heart that the hardest moment of his hard life had come. He cawed, almost lovingly, at the squirrel that watched him in wonder, then took off and circled the big gorgeous tree several times, waiting for a crowd to gather. He saw the man with the gun, and went straight for the star. As he hit it he heard the gun go off, then heard no more. As the crow spun to earth, he felt warm at last, and knew that Spring was on the way.Attribution...

I grow old....

Recently Nabokov heard that John Crowe Ransom, whose poetry he greatly admires, was rewriting many of his old poems at the age of 80 and dismantling their classic beauty. Vladimir turned to Vera and said quietly, Never let me do that.

(From an interview with Martha Duffy in Time Magazine, May 23, 1969)

BROWN PENNY

I whispered, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.

(W.B. Yeats from his Collected Poems,Definitive Edition,1956)

BROWN PENNY (2nd version)

... (1st stanza identical) ... And the penny sang up in my face, 'There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love That is looped in the loops of her hair, Till the loops of time had run.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.

(The version—based upon Yeats's late (1937) modification—that is given in Richard Finneran, The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol I, The Poems (2nd Ed), 1997)

Brown Penny existed substantially in the first form since its original publication in The Green Helmet and Other Poems. So it was written in—or possibly considerably before—1910. Not to second-guess the Master, but it was a perfect little poem, and its images and diction are certainly tied to that period of Yeats's writing. So why did he, in 1937, feel compelled to put forward, as his last word on the subject, this wretched replacement for the second stanza?

Well, if nothing else, the occasion presented itself. In the middle to late thirties several publishers were preparing collected or selected editions of Yeats's writings, so Yeats had several opportunities—while he was doing proof corrections— to change poems. For the most part these changes were minimal—add a period, withdraw a comma, slightly recast a line—but in a few instances they were more substantial. In 1937 he submitted the second version of Brown Penny to be included in a contemplated edition by Scribner. The Scribner book was never published, but the version Yeats rather cavalierly supplied them is his last known. So, by the ethic of the editor, it is the official version. Thus Richard Finneran, the premier editor of Yeats, included this version in The Poems, rather than the haunting, nearly perfect original, in that definitive collection.

He was stuck: he had to use the second version. In an earlier scholarly work Finneran has a perfunctory commentary on the changes:

This revision continues the dialogue already established between the speaker and the penny, in the process eliminating the awkward image of the lunivorous shadows. Moreover, the "loops of time" suggest connections with the gyres of A Vision.from Editing Yeats's Poems: a Reconsideration (1990), p.38

The passage of course is complete piffle, but perhaps Finneran had a twinge of conscience here: yes, this version must prevail, so let's see if we can justify it as better. But neither this nor any other explanation accompanied the changeling when it finally saw print, but only a bare notation of its provenance, buried in the endnotes.

[The foregoing is not in any way to disparage the work of Finneran. He was a thorough and discerning scholar and—what is more important—a true lover of Yeats.]

It was 1997 or early 1998 when I first got The Poems in my hot little hands. I perused it happily, enjoying the thought that all the poems were here, right here. Fairly soon, within a year I suppose, I flipped over to Brown Penny, just for the pleasure of reading it from that volume. But what I saw there first puzzled, then gradually, after I had ensured there was no mistake, horrified.

In a way, it was like finding that your father had a child from a former marriage—not world-shattering, perhaps, but certainly world-transforming. I had always thought of a poem as something that didn't change, as a thing. Then I find it's more like your uncle Eddie who, after an exemplary career at the bank, got arrested for embezzlement.Or, as Nabokov so wittily puts it: We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out that he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen. (from the Vintage Lolita, p265)

When I was a tender high-school sophomore I was, as is customary, forced to read poetry. But my English teacher that year was magic: she made literature seem an enchanted journey, rather than the usual forced march. We read the standard stuff, I suppose, but what stayed with me was Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci:

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering! The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, So haggard and so woe-begone? . . .

And so forth. I never had the poem by memory, except for the first two stanzas, which in idle moments I would find myself repeating. Every once in a while in after years, though, I would flip to La Belle in whatever anthology was at hand and read the whole thing out loud. After a while I noticed that the poem seemed to have changed:

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, So haggard and so woe-begone? . . .

I thought I remembered it differently, but in effect I just shrugged. I would occasionally read the official version, which seemed to involve a knight, but would still murmur to myself the stanzas that I now thought of as mine, about a wight. Recently, though, I said to myself, this is ridiculous, am I imagining these words? So I did a bit of research.

Keats's originally wrote the knight version, and included it in a letter to his parents in 1819, but actually published the wight version later that year. The wight version was the only version for all of Keats's (admittedly short) life, but later the chronologically earlier knight version started gaining traction with critics [ah! critics!], who felt that the original in Keats's hand should prevail. They hoked up all sorts of reasons for this preference, most spurious of course. The net result is that I can no longer find my favored version in print, as the "knight" forces have prevailed.

So what is to be done? Are we to be at the pleasure of critics and editors for the words we wish to say? Certainly the Keats is long out of copyright, so we can use either version, or anything in-between.O what can ail thee, Erskine-Brown, Alone and palely loitering? The law-court now is closed and dark, And no judge sits. as Rumpole might have had it... But what of Brown Penny? Given the cancerous growth of copyright in the 20th century, I have no idea when we will be free to use the old good one. Oh, sure, we'll always be able to gather in secret conclaves and speak the forbidden words, but in public—I wonder. Must we give lip service to the critically-sanctioned words, and suppress those we love? Must there be an official version of a poem?Of course, I've been able to use the old version in this essay, which purports to be a critical study. Just as a priest of the Inquisition was allowed to read heretical writings (doubtless while holding his nose) so I, as a (self-described) guardian of literary virtue may comment on official non-versions of poems, without being corrupted by them. It's a matter of character...

Well, I've still got La Belle:

All Keats is out of copyright, so I can have my wretched wight.

I Get No Kick From a ©

♫ I get no kick when I ski: to practically FLY down some mountain so HIGH, I just TRY not to get black and blue, Yet, I get a kick out of you. I get no kick from TV: though the offerings are RIFE that should jazz up my LIFE, in the end they just STIFle what's true. Yet... I get no kick from herb tea: Raspberry or PEAR, all those flavors are SCARE-y: I really don't CARE what you brew, Originally, it was I get no kick toking tea: to stroll down the LANE with that sweet Mary JANE would just turn my old BRAIN into goo; Yet I get a kick ... but like Mr. Porter himself, who later softened cocaine to champaign, I went to a more innocuous tea. This will just be our little secret... Yet... ♫

Apropos of messing around, I wrote a new verse to the classic I Get A Kick Out of You. However, just one won't do, so I wrote a couple more with the same first-line rhyme and—voilá!—here's an alternative version of the song, just awaiting its breakout interpretation. However, if you decide to vary this Cole Porter standard during a performance, as your combo is swinging through a set in an intimate club in Madison or Seattle, inserting my lyrics or even your own that satirize the mayor's new anti-smoking initiative, for example, it won't matter. The ever-vigilant ASCAP will take its cut for the song's copyright holder (in this case, Warner Bros. Music). You won't really notice it, other than feeling—financially—a little below par.I'm not sure how they collect the money. It's probably some pro-rata formula for a club with live acts, and an estimate of the proportion of standards to originals. In any event, the club pays the copyright holders, by whatever Byzantine means, so the performers get less than they otherwise would. In short, they pay.

If you're young and listen to lots of music, you may have some vague idea of "copyright" as the rallying cry in an amusing and not terribly serious game of corporations vs. citizens, the one side trying to extract rent for something that should be free, and the other—virtuous, numerous, but weak (i.e. us)—adroitly evading their grasping great paws using an ever-shifting array of technical means.Not that we necessarily understand these means: they, too, are part of that great commons we call "the Web". And it, like "nature" in an earlier day, giveth without stint.

There are lots of free things out there in Cyberland, and we have become accustomed to taking what takes our fancy. But should all these free things really be free—can whoever supplies them keep doing it for nothing? We have a sense that advertising keeps the flow going (so we are paying, by being subjected to ads!), or maybe government (which is us!). OK, that explains Google and the National Weather Service's website. But more generally, what sorts of things should be free, and for what sorts should we pay?

Big question. Should knowledge be free—isn't that what science is all about? Scientists do research, find things out, and then tell the rest of us in detail, so we can use their work for our benefit. How noble, how right.

But what about inventions? They are a kind of knowledge. Inventors are known to be in it for the money, rather than subsisting on virtue like scientists. They have an annoying habit of patenting their inventions and then charging for their use—or keeping us from making and selling them altogether, so they can do it exclusively and profitably. How selfish, how wrong.

Should books be free? They're hard to write, so the authors should get some money for them—they have to live, after all. And books are practically costless, anyway: what with libraries and cheap trade editions, for some small amount of money we can get hold of enough reading for a lifetime. So maybe copyright is a good thing for authors: we've got to encourage them to keep writingAfter all, the really good movie plots come from novels. by giving them a little something.

Where do songs fit into this? Should my Cole Porter knockoff be free for you to use in your act? Do you get to doubly impress your audience, both with your mellow voice and with your lyrical inventiveness? Or is it enough that you, in an act of ingratiating candor, simply say: "I found these verses on the Web?" Or should you—does some ethical precept buried somewhere in the fine print of our consciences, tell you to—give me full credit for this lyrical jewel? And, even more than that, should you actually pay me for the use of these lyrics? Didn't I do some work for you?

Actually, I'd love it if you paid me, but it's actually good enough if you just come clean about my contribution. I don't need the money, but even if I did, I wouldn't expect to get paid for such fol-de-rol: some things just want to be free. Or, almost free. If you take the trouble to credit me, as in, e.g., "those variations on that Cole Porter classic were penned by J.R. McCall," I'll be pleased. After all, my ego needs to eat, too.

In fact, I suppose most amateur artists, songwriters, poets, singers, gardeners, and storytellers just want to be known as the creators of the picture, song, poem, performance, flowerbed, or tale in question. Enough appreciation adds up to reputation, which is a buzz to most of us.

However, there are thousands of singers, composers, and musicians out there who make their living from writing and performing songs and music. They play in clubs or arenas, they make recordings, they write material for others to use in records and performances. They get a small cut of each sale of one of their recorded performances or for the use of their song by someone else in performance. Are we stealing from them when we download songs from a song-sharing site? Are we stealing from them when we take a selection of MP3-format songs that we have actually bought, and pass them on to someone on a flash drive—someone who may, in turn, pass them on to someone else?

Hell if I know. There are a myriad of CDs out there that have been ripped to hard disks, and the songs dispersed to the winds. Are those lost sales? Probably, but the iTunes model of selling tunes by the ones has ruined the CD market already. Speaking of which, I just downloaded (and paid for) an mp3-formatted version of an old Righteous Brothers rendition of The White Cliffs of Dover as well as Vera Lynn's wartime version of the same song. That's royalties all around that never would have been had we not had these nearly frictionless ways of buying songs.What is more, these I can't even give away, so my purchase won't be diluted.

Anyway, these are huge, complex issues.I want to return to them later, particularly in the context of open-source software. But for now, I thought I would take the copyright system out for a drive and see how it handled. I went to the Creative Commons site, in particular the place where you "license" a work. It turns out that you should have some URL referring to the work you intend to license, so I gathered the lyrics neatly into a text file, and put that on a website I run ("walk", more like), puffball.org. I also put in the file some material that indicates the kind of license the content is operating under, and some commentary. To see what I did go here. You'll see that I ask any user of the material in question to attribute it to that particular URL, which not only gives credit where credit is due, but says how one can use the lyrics by referring to the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I own the copyright to my lyrics simply by virtue of publishing them.Unless I unconsciously copied them from somewhere else and am living in a fool's paradise... I could, if I chose, demand that no one use them, that no permission to sing them in public would ever be forthcoming no matter how much money I was offered. Right. In the event, I decided to take advantage of the Creative Commons (free!) service and specify, essentially, that anyone can use my lyrics in any way, commercially or non-, as long as I am not implicated in whatever odd place they may find themselves.

But what exactly is licensing, anyway? The Creative Commons folks do not record my work's URL; they simply have a legal document that I point to, saying, essentially, that this is how I want my stuff to be used. It is up to me to chase down violators of this license, if that's important to me. What CC has done is to get their lawyers to draw up, in airtight legalese, a few different licenses that express rather simple ideas. Mine, the Attribution license, simply wants any user to give me credit. There are other licenses: the "share-alike", the "non-commercial", the "no derivative works" that other owners of material might prefer. C.C. provides nice logos and clean legal documents for them, too.

You might be asking why I should bother, since I own the contents of this blog already, according to Google. Yeah, sort of. If you look at their Terms of Service they get to display this blog as they please. Otherwise, it's mine. Well, it's just a standard default copyright, and perhaps I want to loosen things up a bit. But also, it removes that set of lyrics from the provenance of this blog: it's in here, but not of here. But mainly, it's just to try out this licensing business. It seems silly, but here goes:

For the source of—and licensing terms for—the above lyrics, see this. (And thanks, Jim!)

There. I've written something, licensed it, and used it with attribution in another work. Whew! Ain't intellectual property grand?

Sorry—was your Al Gored?

"What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common? The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart."

(Levitt and Dubner, Superfreakonomics, p.196)

In 2005 Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago (gasp! not that sort of economist?), and Stephen Dubner, a writer, published Freakonomics. This year, drafting on the popularity of that book, they published (with a self-conciously horrible title) Superfreakonomics. Both books are written in a popular, accessible style, and talk about economics at street level, rather than droning on about central banks, the money supply, the balance of payments and other such high-falutin' stuff. They give us transparent, down-home economic reasoning about ordinary life.

I skimmed the earlier book. It was fun. I could see why it was so popular: it is a revelation to many people that so many day-to-day issues can actually be grappled with—and answered—if you mind the money.And, by the way, if you happen to know about, have access to, and cleverly apply certain arcane, but suprisingly relevant, data sets.

However, in Superfreakonomics they deal with, among other things, global warming. Oops. This is a fraught topic these days, and their breezy style and agnostic approach were bound to tread on some toes.Remember poor E.O. Wilson? He wrote that last chapter in Sociobiology almost as an afterthought, and was astounded to find himself roundly censured, and even viciously attacked (in print, that is), by his own colleagues—and, for good measure, by the entire political left...

Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed Superfreakonomics in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker. She is a journalist who recently (2006) published an eloquent bookOr so legions of amazon.com reviewers believe; I haven't actually read it. called Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. The editors probably felt she was a natural to review a somewhat controversial and irreverant new book with a chapter devoted to a "solution" to global warming.

Maybe that wasn't such a good idea. In the event, she did a hatchet job on their book. The "solution" chapter of Superfreakonomics gored her ox, so she was out for sanguinary compensation.

Judging from others of her reviews, Kolbert is not normally unfair, dismissive, and insulting (see, e.g. Flesh of Your Flesh). But her 2006 book was an exhortation to collective action—a moral demand, if you will, to halt global warming because of the wrongs it will inflict on people and animals. In this she is of a mind with Al Gore: we must work together to solve this problem, because it's the right thing to do.To be fair, this is actually the prevailing attitude of practically everyone—weakly and occasionally for most people, of course. But like belief in God, belief in our moral imperative and our ability to solve anthropogenic global warming is given lip service even as people continue driving everywhere, overheating large houses, and consuming other energy-intensive goods and services just as fast as they can.

What a shame it won't work. And how unwise of Dubner and Levitt to mention that.

People say they believe in the coming catastrophes that will accompany global warming, and quite properly deplore them. Yet they carry on their day-to-day activities every bit as wastefully as they always have. They seem quite immune to the calls for collective action. So are we doomed?

Maybe, but what if we could cool the planet back to "normal" cheaply and on demand, before we ever actually solve the problem of too much CO2? Wouldn't we want to do that? Apparently, if you listen to Gore and Kolbert, no, we would not.

Levitt and Dubner pay a visit to Nathan Myrvold and his company, Intellectual Ventures, in suburban Seattle. Myrvold is a brilliant engineer, and has surrounded himself with others of the same stripe. They invent things, all sorts of things. They get patents on these things, and buy other patents that interest them. They own lots of intellectual property, which fuels their research, and allows their not inconsiderable pro bono work, which includes saving the earth.

Myrvold et al have come up with a scheme to cheaply cool the earth by mimicking what big volcanic eruptions do—put sulfur dioxide droplets into the stratosphere. They propose using a hose 18 miles long but just about 2 inches across, and held up with balloons, to pump SO2 into the stratosphere. It turns out we have great piles of practically free sulfur accumulating in Canada as a bi-product of getting petroleum out of oil sands (ironic, eh?). So, using these cheap, abundant inputs and that low-rent technology a full-blown solution, with pumping stations at a half-dozen places on earth, would cost about $150 million to set up, and about $100 million annually. Compared to the more than one trillion dollars (a year!) that such worthies as Sir Nicholas Stern have proposed we spend to avert warming, this is pocket change.

Ok, that's basically the freight of the book's global warming chapter. If one had just read Kolbert's review one would not know that. One would, in fact, probably think the entire book was about global warming, and devoted to wacky schemes for modifying the climate. One would also think that these schemes were so beyond the pale that they were not worth explaining, other than to call them "horseshit". Further, one would have the distinct impression that Dubner, the writer, and Levitt, the economist, came up with this sulfur-spritzting plan and so, in their cosmic arrogance, were seriously proposing something they were stupendously unqualified to propose."Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind." (Kolbert, from the review) It is perhaps unkind to mention here that Kolbert has but an undergraduate degree, in English. (But is is from Yale...) One would not have any idea that knowledgeable, experienced, well-thought of engineers and scientists were actually behind it. Myrvold and his engineering associates were never referred to in any way in Kolbert's review.

It's sad really. I realize that this is a case of a popular book being reviewed in a magazine more used to art and literature than science, but still. Could we at least have some civility, some fairness?What is more, in his op-ed column Paul Krugman, of all people, gloated over her abuse. Certainly, the public discourse is polluted enough by disingenuous loudmouths. I'd like to think The New Yorker provides a haven from that.

Werewolves and other Plagues

Halloween, with its werewolves, ghosts, and other species of undead, rustles nearer. Should we live through it, comes the time—from Thanksgiving through Christmas—of colds and flu, as we travel about and catch things, then come home and stew in the closeness of the Season. In anticipation of all this, my throat is starting to feel a little scratchy. And, what with the swine flu (sorry, pigs, I meant "H1N1"!) crouching, ready to spring, and vampires trolling the neighborhood for candy, my thoughts naturally turn to garlic.

One year, tired of getting every cold my kids brought home from school, I thought I would try raw garlic as a preventative. As with the advocates of cold baths or business school, there were plenty of folks out there with more enthusiasm than evidence touting the advantages of raw garlic as an immune-system booster. And I thought, why not? It's a natural food, and a traditional folk remedy, so certainly worth a try. I started daily knocking back several cloves of the raw, chopped or crushed, in soup or a sandwich (never on cereal!), and guess what—no colds! From Thanksgiving until at least Valentines Day, for several years in a row, I took my daily garlic. As far as I could tell, I had escaped the bane of every parent of small children. (Oh, I may have had the occasional stuffed up nose overnight, but nothing more.)

Cynics pointed out that, given the well-known metabolic by-products of garlic, I was escaping disease by keeping everyone at a great distance from me by means of B.O. My family members, though, were either stupifyingly polite or simply honest when they said that no, I didn't smell any worse than usual...

However, I am a scientist—by temperment, anyway. One year I didn't do my garlic regimen, and waited for the worst. It never came. I was also cold-free that holiday season. Since then I have employed garlic only in the usual culinary ways, and my rate of catching cold is quite low anyway. So what gives?

Somewhere or other I read about prisoners who were forced to clear away the bodies of plague victims in Paris, perhaps during the first, most fatal eruption of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps during a later one. The story concerns garlic steeped in wine. Wine, of course, was the staple drink, since the water was bad. Anyway, these fellows, perhaps because of the infusions of garlic, could handle the dead and dying and not succumb themselves.

I suspect this story has a grain of truth. Prisoners were certainly dragooned into the terrifying work of clearing bodies. But did garlic save them? Well, look at it this way: they were probably eating garlic and onions—the caviar of the poor—anyway, and some of them lived. (Even the BD did not kill everyone.) The story no doubt grew (perhaps much later, through an article in the Garlic Growers Association Newsletter) that it was the garlic—after all, they were alive, and they ate garlic! The dead, who might of been equally enthusiastic consumers of garlic, were not considered...

Ah, survivor bias. We forget all about the losers, and just look at the winners as if they had done something special to be winners, then go about trying to find that something, and finally mythologize its efficacy. In fact, by and large, that something is usually just luck. It is not that winners do nothing to achieve their success. Many work quite hard, and are loaded with ability. The unfortunate fact, though, is that the losers are often equally ambitious and talented. And where good outcomes are granted to only a few—rock music, politics, paradigm-busting scientific research, business, plague survival—merit, however broadly defined, gets you only so far. Luck makes the final call.

Is this all to say that you should not work hard in your chosen field, but rather just kick back and wait for luck to kick in? Not at all. As someone said: "Fortune favors the prepared mind." No, it is simply to recognize that luck often trumps merit, so the proper attitude toward your own success is humility, and that of others skepticism. (Whether you season that skepticism with envy is your call.) Furthermore, look askance at recipes for success: they might be elevating mere contingencies that simply happened to be around when Chance touched down.

Garlic was around. Did it give life, or merely bask in the success of those that chance favored? I myself have been an enthusistic embracer of the garlic myth, which these days is encased in the natural foods myth, which is itself part of a primitivist reaction to modern life. Whether the garlic kept the colds away during the years my kids were the most contagious, and my stopping it just coincided with their no longer being that way, or my immune system never really needed it, I don't know. But just in keeping the werewolves and vampires at bay, I think it was worth it.

My empty stomach is so shrunken a clove of garlic’s like a chicken. But still I live! I drink this wine and eat these fiery squabs of mine, while many others, better fed, I’ve gathered by the wagon load and trundled to their common graves. Perhaps, with only garlic cloves and vile wine to wash them down, they might have seen another dawn.

Who Could Love Me?

I just had an argument with my mother and sister about Health Reform, that baby that seems to be stuck in the Congressional delivery room. So, as with any difficult birth, we prepare for the worst while still hoping for so much...

Anyway, I should never have gotten into it with them, since it was only moments before they were trashing the health insurance industry. They were not being uniquely perverse: almost everyone blames private insurance for our country's health woes. (After all, we get outraged at our insurer who refuses to pay for a $50K surgery with a marginal success rate. Why don't we think it legitimate to ask the surgeon to lower his price?) The basic mantra is: Other countries have successful, cheap, nationally-funded, guaranteed health care. Why can't we?

I don't know. The United States is the outlier in so many ways, some good, some bad. But the plaint above has a lot in common with that of many teen-age boys (of whom I was one):

i'm covered with acne i've got bad breath so i'll never ever get a date. of course not. but still... maybe, just maybe, some girl— a pretty, pretty girl, too— could love the inner me. which is, unfortunately, kind of a horny weasel and not all that great...

So why can't we have a decent health care system, like all those other countries do? There could be many reasons. And perhaps we can change. But maybe it's just that we're ugly and don't really deserve it.

The Fire (or Ice?) Next Time...

“

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice...

”

For a long time I was a global warming cynic, but not in the usual way. Oh, sure, we were heating up the planet with our CO2 spewings. But from my perch in the Chicago area I said, "So what's wrong with that? We could use a bit of a warm-up. Warmth is life, cold is death, right?" While it was true that sea levels would rise, and various human and non-human ecosystems would suffer, with great disruptions in agriculture and many extinctions, it seemed to me that on balance, after the readjustments (by other people than me, and also other species than my own) things would be better. Siberia and Canada would offer vast new areas for farming, and more species would flourish in the new warmth than in the old not-so-warmth. After all, life was doing great things in the distant past when it was really warm.

What they were calling bad was actually good. But it was not that which made me cynical; I could see their side of things, after all: good or bad is largely a matter of opinion, and it does matter where you're standing (in Bangladesh, the Sahel), and "in the long run we're all dead" by the time those readjustments have come into play. And so forth. No, what really got me was this smarmy air-headed attitude, totally dominating the discussion, that we broke it, so we can―and should!― fix it. Thus...

We're really really sorry for having binged so long on fossil sunlight, and will never ever do it again. And, we're agreed: for the desert nomads, the sub-tropical farmers, the polar bears, the coral reef communities, the beach houses in Malibu, we have to make amends, make it better, keep the old world going in the old way...

Can do!

Crank out the cap-and-trade certs, crank up the windmills, go to Kyoto, use that bully pulpit to keep everyone on message. Keep the Africans away from their coal reserves; shame the Indians and Chinese into clean industry; put our own CO2 where the sun don't shine. And give loads and loads of dough to those that look as worried as we are about the issue...

Sounds great, doesn't it? It's a plan: multi-fronted, energetic, straightforward, technologically intensive, and environmentally on the side of the angels. Alas, it hasn't the chance of a snowball in the Jurassic.

I can hear you thinking, at this point, that I've chosen to call myself "cynic" when actually "weak-kneed defeatist" might be closer to the mark. But I can be both! Hear me out.

Whoops, look at the time! Lest I try your patience and my own powers of concentration, I'm going to call it an entry. But very soon I will re-visit this issue: after all, Global Warming and what we should do about it costs most of us anxiety, if nothing else. And maybe, in my small way, I'll be able to free up your mind, so you can spend your worry currency on something else...

You Don't Want to Know!

If you would, in your manners, be right,
and, conversing, bring only delight,
you'll not ask for the truth
(a blunder uncouth),
which just forces a fib or a fight!

So...

• Don't ask a waiter what's in a sauce.
• Don't ask your doctor how long you've got.
• Don't ask your divorce lawyer whether you're in the right.
• Don't ask your teen-age daughter whether she's had sex.
• Don't ask your teen-age son...anything.
• Don't ask your father about the war, his love life, or global warming.
• Don't ask your mother if she loves you more than she loves your brother.
• Don't ask your dog whether he's been rolling in shit.
• Don't ask your cat where he's stashed his latest kill.
• Don't ask anyone what they think of bankers, the economic recovery initiatives, or the health care system.
• Don't ask a long-time friend whether you've gotten old.
• Don't ask your spouse whether anything you do is irritating.

...and so on.

I admire the way you've used tact
to forge a societal pact:
as big fibs and small lies
are life's pleasing disguise,
you all happily take them for fact.

Mea Culpa?

"Finish all your dinner, dear. Remember, millions of people are starving in China."

(1950's guilt trip)

---

What if we actually succeeded in eating all the carbon dioxide we make, and the planet heated up anyway?

What he's saying is...

David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005, and committed suicide in 2008. The latter act has, retrospectively, given the former a significance it would not otherwise have had. Commencement talks are usually as perishable as wedding toasts, and for similar reasons―should they survive―take on ironical color over the years. This particular talk actually went viral, I suppose because of the following:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Poor DFW! Some Stephen Covey, some Anthony Robbins he is. (Whoops! Was.) Ah, the irony. Or, worse: how pathetic.

But, no, I think not. Irony is found in a―sometimes subtle―disjunction between assumptions and actuality, patheticness (yes, there is such a word) in a patent disjunction between ambition and actuality. If the Upbeat-Speech-and-Later-Suicide were an ironic arc, then DFW would have been, in the speech, an inspirational speaker who, by his suicide, showed he never took his own advice. If the USaLS were simply pathetic, he would have believed that those stretching exercises for a healthy mind could cure his.

But neither color really sticks: in fact DFW knew he was walking in the darkness, and his own case was far more desperate than these freshly-scrubbed grads would know. His advice was pretty much what it seemed to be: how can you enlarge your mind in a world that has made adulthood a series of trivial trials and petty annoyances? But remember:

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

DFW was asking these normal kids to take their perceptions out for a stroll, or even a vacation, once in a while. But he very well knew that at some point his own terrible master might make him climb Mont Blanc in his pajamas. For the moment he let that go, and simply spoke of sanity and kindness in a world that conspires against them.

The bushman treks many a dusty mile
intent upon the spoor of a giraffe.
He does not think about his weary life,
but slowly trots with an expectant smile.
However, should the missionary’s wife
have waiting by the wayside food and drink
he might just stop and munch a spicy roll,
and that subversion of his single goal
might wake him from his trance and make him think
about the empty end of all his strife.
Then all his living ties break link by link
as easily as that. The sun would sink
and throw his shadow as he stood there still;
the moon outline his figure on the hill.

Coughin' Nails

...
They used to smoke in their cars,
rolling the windows down and letting their red nails
hang out, little stoplights:
Stop now, before the green
comes to cover up your tall brown bodies.

(from My Aunts by Meghan O'Rourke)

---

Well, we know you're our niece and all, Mag:
we indulge you your rant on the rag.
But the next time you mus'
primly criticize us,
just think twice, and then light up a fag...

Soil thou art: Composting II

It's the New Frugality: instead of paying someone to haul away your grass clippings and kitchen scraps, compost them and grow your own vegetables. It combines healthy activity, wholesome food, and keeping the Great Biocycle cycling. It may even save a couple of bucks.

I used to seek composting advice, but gave it up years before the Internet. Now, as I troll the Web just to see what they're saying out there, I can't help but notice: Don't compost meat! is what they're saying, just like they've always said. True, there are farmers and slaughterhouses and so on that find themselves with carcasses and parts that they have to compost. Ok, they get to compost meat, but it's best left to the pros. For home composters the word is almost invariably that meat, eggshells, and anything the cat dragged in are no-nos for the compost.

I fretted about this for a number of years, then one day after Sunday dinner said, "What the hell!" and tossed, along with congealing mashed potatoes, coffee grounds, uneaten rolls, and soggy green beans the remains of a chicken—bones and all—into the bin, and waited for the Apocalypse.

It never came. Or, at least it didn't come right away. Oh, sure, perhaps the compost was stinkier than usual on those still summer nights. Critters would nose around more, so I began to bungee down the lid. And perhaps, now that the mix was somewhat richer with the occasional gristly short ribs or deflavored chicken or turkey carcasses after stock-making, once in a while one would see maggots. But, hey, compost-making is not pretty...

(By the way: though I suppose I'm a bit of an outlier with the if-you-can-eat-it-you-can-compost-it attitude, I am certainly not alone...)

I have always done my composting in the context of a yard. First, it was the backyard of my long-suffering roommate Tim, who owned the house we lived in. I appropriated a garden area and—to prepare the ground for planting in the spring—started in the fall collecting kitchen scraps in a bucket, and burying the bucketloads in shallow graves around the plot spot. By winter there was a certain amount of hacking away at the frozen soil (this was southern Wisconsin) to get the stuff underground, but there must have been little enough that I didn't have to do that too often. (I was a single guy: a home-cooked meal was an entire can of Campbell's Manhattan Clam Chowder, a couple pieces of whole-wheat toast with peanut-butter, and a beer. No scraps there, and I'm not sure Tim or Ralph participated much in my scrap-saving scheme...)

How did it work? Well enough: buried treasure by the following year. I worked the new stuff into the soil during the spring digging, keeping it more-or-less in the path. The next year the path became the bed, and the old beds the destination for new buryings. (I realize this elides the question of where the kitchen scraps and so forth went during the gardening season. Heh, heh.)

Clearly, such a method is discrete, produces no odors, and requires minimal equipment. However, since barely-rotted stuff is just under the soil, it better be basically vegetable, or critters will get curious. Also, since the beds are often interlarded with still-composting matter, the growing plants may be in competition with the wannabee compost for soil nitrogen (used by the composting organisms to work their magic). A method best employed, I would think, in a small yard where a compost bin—even more a compost pile—would be intrusive.

After Tim's, except for the occasional apartment stints, I had larger yards of my own to work with, and so eventually arrived at my current system (after the odd concrete-block structure or two), which I described in my previous composting entry. Perhaps this is the point to mention Ruth Stout. Her book, How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, is a fundamental gardening document. I came upon it early, and though I can't get the salt hay she favors, I have been using straw mulch forever (since I can get bales of it at the hardware store). Ruth Stout's method is weed and moisture control combined with continuous surface composting. If your planting beds are permanent, as they should be, then the worms can take care of the mixing. (Oh, all right: you can scrape off the mulch in the spring, maybe add some stuff and rough it all up with a shovel. Gardening is like cooking—lots of ad-libbing.)

One more thing: you need a tiny scrap bin on your kitchen counter—say, 12"w x 6"d x 8"h (very rough dimensions), and rectangular, not round. You want to put it against the back wall or in the corner, and a cylinder or bowl just invites missing as you toss scraps into it. It should be big enough to hold a day's worth of casual scraps: sandwich ends, fruit rinds, coffee filters, vegetable trimmings, cereal remains (with milk!), and—yes!—meat. Of course, if you have a cat or dog you might want to dump the baby bin immediately it gets meat into the big bin, otherwise you can do it last thing at night. Nor will the baby bin get smelly for several days, so there is no urgency about taking it outside if it is only half full.

This kitchen-counter baby bin may seem optional, but it is not. You have to be able to toss scraps somewhere as you generate them; without the bb I guarantee they're going to wind up in the wastebasket and garbage disposal. And thus do little things make a big difference.

Natural Sadness

“Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

(From the essay “Marshland Elegy” in A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold)

---

What shall we do for timber?
 The last of the woods is down.
...
There's no holly nor hazel nor ash there,
 The pasture's rock and stone,
The crown of the forest has withered,
 And the last of the game is gone.
(Anonymous.  Translation by Frank O'Connor)

---

No moa, no moa
In old Ao-tea-roa.
Can't get 'em.
They've et 'em;
They've gone and there ain't no moa!
(New Zealand song)

Is there anything sadder than natural history? To read, to take just a prominant example, E.O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life is delightful until just about the half-way point, when suddenly we plunge into a section titled "The Human Impact". Slowly our smile of wonder turns to a grimace of indefineable, dark urgency as page follows page, chapter chapter, detailing the contemporary catastrophe of a defenseless, precious natural world in competition with roaring, slurping, gobbling humanity.

My words, of course: Wilson is much more polite. Still, you can almost hear the catch in the throat of his writing, but bravely he finishes the book's sad catalog. And soon, weary but driven, he will start a new book...

We ordinary readers, though, don't have the heart to keep hearing this bad news. What can we do about it, after all? So we turn to upbeat stories about the latest marvelous gadgets, or open an historical novel. We try not to dwell on the gloomy fact that our children will never have what we had: a sense of a non-human world, terrible and magnificent.

Now we are rescuing polar bears from ice floes, counting the tigers in the shrinking Bengal forest, and having gathered up the last few California condors, are breeding them for release into the "wild". The few hundred—or thousand or so—blue whales, instead of simply existing as a glorious but inaccessible reality, are way too few, so must be tracked and fussed over.

And let's not even talk about the Amazon.

Three hundred years into the Industrial Revolution the world has become one big zoo, haphazardly run. The wilderness is gone: there is no place, however remote, where one might not find a soda can. And only a handful of spots are far enough from the great glow of civilization to have a night of real darkness—the night of fairy tales, the night of old.

A Read on the Wild Side

Just finished Into the Wild. The driven young man, Chris McCandless, who is the subject, and who died in Alaska after 112 days in the wilderness, is a very modern sort of hero. Superficially Thoreauvian, he actually is neither post-Unitarian transcendentalist, nor Native American on a vision-quest, nor religious mystic of any stripe. In strenuous riskiness, in the harsh wild, he seeks a secular purity that our tainted, bloated, sadly compromised culture cannot provide. Finally, though, he is engaged in an adolescent rite of passage. For a particular sort of young man this will be necessary and messy, and—if he dies—awful and beautiful. But is it worth it? After all, if he lives he'll just come back, get a job, settle down, go soft, and lose his groove. Still, though, is it right that our society's ideal is coming to be a life with no risk?

We hardly knew ye

Poor Michael. It's unfortunate that for certain artists dying is sometimes their best career move.

Say, what?

Almost anything can be read again with profit. Almost anything can be read again with profit.

Heaven can wait



If happiness is the goal, why not live in a dream:
a velvet coffin floating in a soft stream
through a warm and endless evening?

Nature couldn't know we'd ever have guessed
our node of pleasure, locus of our lust...
So can't we tickle it now, eternally,
and pray not to be rudely waked some day?

The dark side of excellence

"...Carla had a gift that had brought her pain simply because it was not a bigger gift..."—Kathryn Chetkovich in Appetites

When first you perceive you've a gift,
it gives you a wonderful lift.
But then comes the joker:
you're still mediocre,
so you know that you've really been stiffed.

Children and Oak Trees

Imagine the courage it takes these days to have a child. Or to plant a tree: I saw a baby white oak today, in it's one-inch trunk and tiny hat of leaves blithely oblivious to imminent climate change and to the lucky century it's going to need to become monumental enough to be reasonably safe from being peremptorily cut down for landscaping or housebuilding convenience.

Turn, turn, turn: the Composting Cycle

You have a bit of yard, a bit of garden, and what seems like a whole lot of organic matter going in the trash? And you have thought about composting, but the books and web sites seem to imply that successful composting is a mysterious mix of meditation and mountains of the "right kind" of green matter? Well, take heart: it isn't all that hard.

First thing: relax, because composting does take a while. I hate to haul in nature here, but did you ever notice the leisurely way a fallen tree rots back into the ground? You can step over it for years before it finally crumbles away into that soil-enriching stuff we've heard so much about.

Of course, if you grind that tree to sawdust it will swiftly decay, since so much more of it is getting attacked at once by those helpful little munchers and rotters that actually do the composting. Likewise, if you have a home compost pile or bin, chopping and turning the tasty contents will speed the process. However, what's time to a microbe? Do essentially (ah, that weasel word!) nothing, and they will take care of things in their own good time. Anyway, when I finally put compost in my garden beds, the oldest stuff in the batch has been rotting for three years, the youngest for two.

I use a three-batch system: two Smith and Hawkin Biostack composters plus a hole in the ground right behind them. I switch everything around once a year, in late October or early November (sometimes later if I'm lazy), when the garden is just about done. First, I shovel the finished (but slightly funky) compost from the hole out onto the beds, then refill the hole from the BioStack that has been sitting full but unused for a year, and cover the now-heaped hole with a bit of soil or a small leaf bin. Then I shut down the current BioStack and switch to the just-emptied one as the destination for my kitchen and garden matter for the year to come. Four or five months later, when I come back to the garden, the compost I added in the fall is sweet and ready.

That's the system in outline. There are a couple more points I'll discuss later. Watch this space!

(If three-and-a-half years seems like too much lead time for a bit of soil additive, think of it like bonsai: something—once the full cycle gets going—for your children to enjoy.)