Cultivating Keith

Golding Voyage

2012-01-02T17:35:00.002-05:00

Late last night I finally made my "big winter book" decision, and chose William Golding's To the Ends of the Earth, a trilogy collected in a single volume.

When I came across the book I felt certain even before taking it from the shelf that this would be my cold weather read.

For one thing, the work was new to me. I've never read any of the three novels. Despite the many familiar books calling out to me to be re-read, I found myself in the mood for something new, albeit by a familiar and well-loved writer. Golding, that bleakest of English novelists, has never disappointed me and two of his books, Pincher Martin and, above all, The Inheritors are books I turn to often; The Inheritors is rarely far from my desk.. I have a fondness for The Spire, as well, and of course Lord of the Flies.

Yet I had little knowledge of his maritime trilogy and was unaware until this morning that it was made into a Masterpiece Theater series a few years ago, but I never saw it, nor remembered hearing of it. I was glad of that -- I always prefer to read the original before seeing the adaptation.

All of which is well-beside the point. It's Golding. I knew I would be in good narrative and philosophical hands.

The trilogy is the story of a voyage, a journey from England to New South Wales on a vessel whose better days are behind her. The story is told in the first person -- in the form of journal entries -- by Edmund Talbot, a well-born young man bound for an administrative posting.

The narrator is no seaman (especially in the heaves of the opening pages!) and is a passenger aboard the ship, not a member of its crew. It will be interesting, I suspect, to compare Talbot's sense of life at sea -- and Golding's presentation of it -- with Patrick O'Brian's novels of professional seamen.

Finally, as I didn't discover until after I had chosen the book, and begun it, the first volume, Rites of Passage won the 1980 Booker Prize, edging out Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, one of the great novels of the last century, my favorite novels of all time, and a perennial all-season candidate for my re-read list. I almost took down the Burgess yesterday.

But it was the Golding that I chose last night, and it was the right choice..

Fittingly enough for a literary voyage, the weather began to shift here not long after I selected the book, temperature dropping, winds rising, skies graying.

Rough seas ahead, no doubt, and no doubt gloriously so.

Like the narrator, I'll send dispatches as able.

New Year's Read

2012-01-01T18:32:00.001-05:00

I've always used at least part of the long New Year's weekend to think about the books I want to read in the next twelve months. No less this year than others, and since the weekend extends through a Monday I've stretched the process, enjoying every moment of it.

My favorite part of the process is selecting the "big" books I want to lose myself in during the depths of winter. The curl-up-and-burrow-into-the-story books that make raw winter nights such excellent islands of reading. (And chilly early mornings, too, when a quick dash to fill the mug with steaming coffee or tea is followed by an equally quick dash back beneath the blankets for just a few more pages.)

Snow days are the best of all -- with sleety days only slightly behind them.

So I prowled my shelves last night both before and after midnight, and have continued to prowl and ponder all day today.

I had thought for awhile that my top pick for the winter's first big book would be a revisiting of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I haven't read in over a decade, and which has been calling to me for some time.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to save Marquez for warmer months, to read him in the shady glade near the garden on a sweltering day, maybe with a beer or two chilling in the creak near my garden chair.

So I have continued to look, considering both old favorites that I haven't read in years -- Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Oates's them, Bellow's Augie March from the century just past, James's The Ambassadors, Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma, Dickens's Bleak House -- as well as some of the big books that I have yet to read at all -- Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Bolaño's 2666, Styron's Set This House on Fire.

So many books -- so little winter!

I'll make my decision sometime tomorrow (I hope) -- and would welcome any suggestions from anyone who also shares the sense that cold winter nights and warm long books are made for each other.

Kathleen Stein

2011-11-20T14:07:00.000-05:00

There were moments in nearly every conversation with Kathleen Stein when you could sense that she was on the brink of saying something -- or not saying it -- and was weighing the words she would use, or not use to make a point or launch a critique or deflate a pomposity. Or just let things go.

Letting things go was not Stein's style. Generally, she chose to speak up, and when she did her words were always well-chosen, with attention paid to specificity if not to tact.

But that didn't matter -- she was not being rude. There were points to be made, not points to be scored, and that very crucial difference set Kathleen apart conversationally as surely as did the quality of her arguments, her insights, her mind.

Kathleen died instantly last Sunday, in a fall during one of the hikes that she loved.

Stein, during her long -- epic! -- tenure as staff writer at OMNI, became one of the very best writers on science, and particularly neuroscience, in the country. Her stewardship of the magazine's legendary interviews is the prime reason they are legendary.She followed science with the assiduousness of a good reporter, and pursued its explication for general audiences with the enthusiasm of an evangelist.

Which last is a strange, but deliberate choice of words -- Kathleen had less use for or belief in anything supernatural or mystical than anyone I have ever known. She was a rationalist and an articulate one, who did not tolerate the word "nonbeliever" because it implied that there was something she chose not to believe in. Which she knew there wasn't.

She came to science writing and editing, the old-fashioned way, working her way toward her own best metier
one story at a time, in various fields.

She was a rock journalist for awhile, and a good one, writing for Circus, Creem, and others. Lester Bangs referred to her as "Kathi" Stein, but she used another variant spelling when, as Cathi Stein, she wrote Elton John: Rock's Piano Pounding Madman in 1975, when Elton"s and Stein's careers were both relatively new.

How she hated to have that little book mentioned! But she hated it with a twinkle -- which she would deny existed -- in her fierce eyes. It was an honest piece of work-for-her, quickie paperback dues-paying by a journalist headed for other things.

Those other things could have been anything -- Stein was interested in all of it, and could write well about any of it.

At OMNI she turned her interest in everything into writing, and editing, pieces on everything -- neuroscience was her passion, but she was a grand generalist, and could write as well about the broad intersections of science and culture, as she could about the minute and minutely specific details of cortical structure.

It would be nearly a third of a century before her next book, The Genius Engine: Where Memory, Reason, Passion, Violence, and Creativity Intersect in the Human Brain and this time the byline was:

By Kathleen Stein.

Damned right -- and a damned good book it is, a careful, and carefully written, examination of the prefrontal cortex.

The last time I saw Stein in person, she joined my son and me for a beer on a gorgeous New York Saturday afternoon, four years ago this week. We spoke often -- though not, now, often enough -- on the phone, but being with Stein in person was a richer wonder, one that I always looked forward to, even when I saw her nearly every day at the office.

That Saturday it had been a few years since I'd seen her in person, but she was still Stein -- how could she not be -- and in the course of a couple of hours the three of us spoke of many, many things.

At one point, we were talking of Norman Mailer, who had died just a few weeks before, and Stein said that his death felt "like one of the foundational pillars of the universe had been removed."

I feel that way now, about her, about a universe without her.

As I understand things, it was probably an injury to the prefrontal cortex that killed Kathleen last weekend. And if so, one can imagine that final instant of her consciousness being pure Stein, observing as she died the effects of gravity upon her own cortex.

That's too facile, of course, and far too easy a search for some comfort. Kathleen wouldn't have allowed me to get away with that, were she here to glance at this piece.

But she's not.

I will miss her for the rest of my life, but I will also for the rest of my life be grateful for the pleasure and the privilege of having known Kathleen Stein.

Joanna Russ

2011-04-30T13:02:00.000-04:00

Sad news this morning, with word that Joanna Russ has died.

Although she published relatively little fiction in the past couple of decades, and was never prolific, there was a decade or so, from '68 to '78, when she was producing some of the most challenging and well-written SF in the world. Her best work included the novels The Female Man, the remarkable And Chaos Died, Picnic On Paradise, We Who Are About To, and shorter works including "Souls," "When It Changed, "Poor Man, Beggar Man,," every one of which worked beautifully as fiction and as science fiction, a tough double-act from which she never flinched.

I taught The Female Man in 1976, and can still, 35 years later, recall both the excitement and distress the students expressed, often simultaneously, at the unflinching challenges that novel offers. The richness and rigor of Russ's imagination, matched and even exceeded by her gifts both with prose and dialectic made that novel one of the outstanding accomplishments of the 1970s. It was an audacious and substantial novel then, and remains so today.

The first Russ I read were some early Alyx stories in Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies, and bought the Alyx fix-up, Picnic On Paradise when it first appeared, as an Ace Science Fiction Special in 1968. Russ and Alyux turned "heroic" fantasy" on its head even as the success of Conan reprints was beginning to spur much of heroic fantasy's long and ongoing retreat into pulp cliche and convention.

Joanna Russ was a stern and tasking critic as well, a scholar and a playwright.

But it is as a writer of fiction that I will best remember her, and it is with her fiction that I will, a bit later today, curl under a tree and do just that:

Remember her.

Blue Aronica

2011-03-02T12:38:00.002-05:00

A bit of background, in the interest of truth-in-reviewing -- Lou Aronica is a dear friend of many years. We've worked together, we read each other's work, we're open and blunt when criticism is called for, despite which we get along beautifully. I saw an early draft of Lou's new novel awhile back, and Lou nods, nicely but unnecessarily, to me in his acknowledgements.

That bit of history is not intended as a caveat: buyers of his Blue need no warnings other than to set aside a few undisturbed hours. Blue will not let you put it down.

Like all good fiction, Blue asks "What If?" Because Blue is a fantasy novel, the question carries implications larger than this reality. There are several of these questions, each carefully placed, elegantly asked, in the novel:

What role do our imaginations play in our creation of the world we live in, as well as the worlds we imagine?
Are there times when the worlds of our imagination become not merely distractions from the problems we face, but also crucial elements of our survival?
Is the appeal of the fantastic -- of fantasy itself -- dangerous? How easily a devotion to an imagined place of our creation become more real than the world we must live, and die, in?

But the largest, and most moving of the questions that propel Blue's narrative, and raise its already high narrative stakes to even higher emotional ones, is this:

What is our responsibility to our children and to both their imaginations and their understanding of the often harsh nature of the world we've brought them into?

It's a question that every parent faces, sooner or later, and most of us face it in moving, sometimes shattering, but still mundane contexts: children grow up and move away, marriages dissolve and families are separated, time passes and with its passage come changes.

Some parents, tragically, face the question more ultimately: children die or are killed, or are otherwise lost in ways that alter forever both the parent and, often, the parent's memories of the time before tragedy.

What Lou Aronica accomplishes in Blue is to take this basic, and universal, question, wed it to a beautifully realized and absolutely believable fantasy plot, and somehow explore the theme on both levels, deeply examining the natures of parenthood, loss, responsibility while also unveiling -- and deeply examining -- a wholly believable and self-consistent imagined counter-world which is faced with its own version of the questions confronting the novel's protagonist.

The treatment of that protagonist, Chris Astor, is what grounds Blue in our real world, and at the same time enables the transcendent vision of the counter-world, Tamarisk, to be equally grounded for all of its fantastica. Chris Astor is a good guy, a guy who understands the nature of responsibility and takes it seriously, particularly his responsibilities as the divorced father of a teenaged daughter. Becky, at fourteen, is the center of his life, a center from which he feels increasingly estranged. Chris knows that he can be a better man than he is, though is uncertain how to become that better self. He knows as well that he's been better in the past.

Nine years ago. Chris saw five-year-old Becky through a life-threatening illness by creating, with her. Tamarisk -- a place they could go and not have to face the world of doctors, treatments, fear, death. Tamarisk was their world, Chris and Becky's, something so special and vivid and idyllic that it took on a life of its own.

Now, after a divorce that flowed in large part from the opposite of idyllic Tamarisk -- the brutal honesty, expressed angrily out children's earshot, that a child's desperate illness and its strains can impose on a marriage -- Chris is cut off from Tamarisk and, increasingly. from his daughter. Aronica's use of that opposition is superb, as is every one of the novel's oppositions and parallelisms, which are always effective and never strained. The opening scene, a divorced father fast-forwarding through old home movies, watching time speed up even as it passes into the, well, irretrievable past, is heartbreaking and beautiful, closing with the TV screen, like Chris's life, going blue.

It's a pleasure to read Aronica's prose. He is always clear, telling his story in a style and with language that invites the reader in, welcoming them and keeping them welcome from one well-realized scene to the next, whether the scene takes place in this world or in Tamarisk. Only occasionally does Aronica over-explain or over-describe his character's feelings and thoughts, the rare missteps the more noticeable for their rarity. Most of the time his characters speak for themselves, in sharp and believable dialogue that's notable for its avoidance of the cloyingness that too often harms father/daughter stories. His mastery of point-of-view ensures that readers experience each character as a separate and memorable individual; whether that individual lives here or in Tamarisk, their motivations and insights are believable and consistent.

A pleasure as well to encounter a deeply imagined fantasy world that doesn't re-use the same old small furry creatures in Thomas Kinkade houses. Instead, Tamarisk is a refraction (sic) of our own world with its problems and challenges, as well as a reflection of Becky and Chris. Whether or not Tamarisk is real, the world becomes as real for the reader as for Becky and Chris.

That Aronica makes every bit of this seem absolutely effortless is a testament both to his obvious skill as a writer -- there are half a dozen aspects of this book, beginning with the creation Tamarisk itself, that are exceptionally difficult to accomplish, much less accomplish as well as Aronica does here -- and to the integrity he brings to, and invests in, his material.

Blue is a novel about love, love of father for child, child for father, love of life, love of imagination, love of nature.

It is also a major and ambitious fantasy novel -- that also works beautifully well for the rational among us as a serious psychological, and metaphorical, investigation of the appeals of fantasy -- that one can hope is the first of many novels of many different types.

Wherever he goes as a writer -- which is wherever he wants to, although it's hard to imagine him writing ReturnTo Tamarisk, or The Winds Of Tamarisk -- Lou Aronica has given readers a wonderful experience that can be read on many levels, but an experience that above all reminds readers of the joys of parenthood, and the ways in which those joys so often exist alongside, and sometimes exist more deeply because of, the loss of childhood that parenthood itself in so many ways and, like Blue, on so many levels, inevitably and inexorably requires us to confront.

BOB

2010-10-21T11:15:00.000-04:00

Bob Guccione died yesterday.

For six years and a bit I would see Bob several times a month, and sometimes several times a week, staying often at the homes he and Kathy Keeton created, both in Manhattan and Rhinebeck, dining with them equally often, often on Bob's pasta.

They were my employers, of course, during the years I edited OMNI, but away from the offices they were more than cordial friends, generous in conversation and eager to laugh. The many kindnesses they extended to me and especially to my wife had far less to do with business than with their natures.

Bob will be remembered always and inevitably -- and of course accurately -- as the man who reinvented and in many ways re-directed the course of adult magazines, built a great fortune and lost it, indulged his desire for both fine art and fine, in their own way, gaucheries, equally exuberant about both.

He was, I believe, a shy man in many ways. Not a hermit or recluse as he was sometimes portrayed. He simply had the resources (and how!) to create for himself environments in which he was so comfortable that there was rarely reason for him to leave.

One memorable night, though, I persuaded him to join me, my brother, Harlan Ellison, and Ellen Datlow for a meal in Chinatown. Hong Fat's, I cannot imagine, ever had a livelier table or a more wide-ranging conversation. I believe Bob enjoyed himself as much as anyone there.

He enjoyed as well, our back-and-forths over the magazine and its direction. OMNI was in so many ways Kathy Keeton's province that Bob's contributions to it, other than the magazine's at the time innovative design, have tended to be overlooked. But he was always interested in what was being covered and the covers themselves were his domain. The insides of the magazine he left to those of us who worked to assemble it every month. He and Kathy would set directions they wanted to see explored, make requests that a topic be covered (often in depth)

Even as his and Kathy's enthusiasm -- and credulousness -- for UFOs and their (they believed) occupants' purposes in visiting (they believed) Earth grew during the last few years of OMNI's print existence, they never once interfered with so much as a single skeptical sentence inside the publication.

Of course, Bob's less skeptical nature made for occasional schizophrenia when the covers and the cover lines occasionally expressed an enthusiasm for the possibility of "aliens among us" that OMNI's writers and researchers -- and certainly not its editor -- failed to share. Not the first time a publisher's packaging was designed to sell editorial material that didn't quite (to say the least) match his beliefs. It is to Bob and Kathy's credit that they understood this, and understood as well the need for the magazine to follow a more rational course when exploring phenomena. We laughed about it sometimes, and they stood always behind our editorial policies, whatever they personally believed.

Over the years after the magazine closed I remained in touch with Kathy, and had a long visit with her not long before her own death. I saw Bob around the time I departed from the company, and was touched by the appreciation he expressed for my years with OMNI and General Media, and his enjoyment of them. I felt the same way.

Bob would have been 80 in a couple of months, and while his last years saw him dealing with both health and financial challenges, they also saw him happily remarried and able, I understand, to devote more time to his own painting, which had been his lifelong ambition.

I will always see him in that fine kitchen on 67th Street, testing the pasta and his sauce, signaling that both were ready, inviting us to adjourn to the table where who knows what would be discussed.

Snow Gives Way To Spring And...

2010-05-06T12:29:00.001-04:00

Blackberries Soon!

Water Clock

2010-01-03T11:41:00.002-05:00

Lesson d: if you're going to include chronology in a frozen pipe post, make sure your blog settings reflect the time zone you live, post, and deal with frozen pipes in.

Does now.

Lesson C For Cool (I'll Say!) Clear Running Water

2010-01-03T11:35:00.001-05:00

The third lesson , evidently, is to write a post about bonehead mistakes that resulted in frozen pipes.

Even as my post just previous went live, the house was filled with the sound of running water.

Nice sound.

Pipes At Peace

2010-01-03T11:12:00.000-05:00

A quarter year since here last, and among my resolves two days ago was to better attend to the cultivation of Cultivating Keith.

This morning gives me an opportunity to do so, although not quite the opportunity I'd anticipated.

This particular post, for instance, is being written in-between sessions of thawing out frozen pipes -- pipes frozen despite what I thought were vigilant and disciplined efforts all night long to keep them clear. I ran water full out, and then left water running at a strong trickle, and made it through the night with good flow.

Then: the mistake.

Sun fully out, 8:30 in the morning, I decided to close the faucets.

Ooops.

Took only half an hour or so, but what a half hour evidently.

No flow.

So I have been warming the pipes where they join the house, and warming myself in-between sessions (fireplace helps; Wild Turkey in coffee helps more) outside.

Lessons learned late include: a) when it's this cold and you have flow, don't relax; b) when it's this cold and you don't have flow, reflect in the cold on lesson a.

Goodbye Ukrop's

2009-10-25T10:32:00.000-04:00

I made my last weekly stop at Ukrop's Friday, my shopping colored as it has been for the past month by the melancholy that accompanied the announcement of the store's October closing.

That closing took place yesterday afternoon.

Now the rhythms of my weekly trips to Roanoke will change, and I'll miss the cheerfulness and sheer pleasantness of Ukrop's. I've never enjoyed a grocery store more.

The ppostmortems exploring the store's failure have tended to focus on the chain's Sunday closings and lack of alcohol sales. Maybe so.

But what's been missing from most of those postmortems in the papers and on TV, has been the enjoyment that so many of Ukrop's customers felt when shopping there. Clearly there weren't enough customers, but those did shop at Ukrop's took pleasure in it.

Some of that was the quality of the store's food; prepared foods, meats, and produce especially stood out.

Some of it, though, was the sense I got in conversations with other customers that we wanted to be there. Many of us went out of our way to trade with Ukrop's, and for some items paid a little more (though less of a markup than at some specialty stores still in business).

I got the sense as well that the store's employees wanted to be there too. Glad to have jobs in this economy, they seemed particularly glad to have these particular jobs with this particular company.

The ambiance of the Ivy Market store played its part as well. Layout and especially lighting were warm and welcoming, softer and at the same time more illuminating than is typical of grocery stores.

That illumination shined with sadness on Friday -- so many of the shelves were already bare, and would not be re-stocked.

Over the past two years, I felt good when I entered Ukrop's and was generally smiling when, after shopping and, more often than not, enjoying a conversation with store employees and other shoppers, was smiling broadly when I left.

Except for this past Friday, when I didn't have a smile in me as I left Ukrop's for the last time.

Straight To Hot

2009-04-26T15:39:00.000-04:00

Not even a chance
To more than glance
At gentle Spring
Before Summer Heat
Settled in.

E-Trash Elimination

2009-04-18T10:58:00.000-04:00

Up early and out with 20 years' worth of electronic accumulation, now happily delivered for recycling:

11 computers (9 desktop, 2 laptop)

5 printers

18 phones and 11 answering machines (the farm was prey to power surges when we first moved here)

1 stereo

3 boom boxes

1 scanner

4 VCRs

14 keyboards (occupational hazard)

7 remote controls

1 DVD player

3 USB hubs

2 ZIP drives and an external CD-ROM drive (2x! A speed demon!)

all now deposited at our county's first (of many, one hopes) e-trash collection day.

Felt good.

Electronics are lighter today than most of boat-anchors I hauled to the recycling station.

And now my house is lighter than it was just yesterday.

A bit lighter, anyway.

No Stopping That Man Dan

2009-04-09T12:00:00.000-04:00

Dan Smith is at it again, and we're the better for it.

Having gone on at some length about his sterling qualities as writer, editor, and man (qualities absolutely undetectable at first and maybe even second glance at his... time-honored features) I'll spare the personal praise now, and say simply that if you're not reading his blog, fromtheeditr, you are missing one of the liveliest soapboxes around.

Dan's always a good writer, but I think he's as surprised as anyone at what a natural blogger he's turned out to be.

Actually, I'm not all that surprised: Blogs are just right for holding forth, and work best when you've got something to hold forth with (and do so forthwith!)

Dan's got plenty of somethings: experience, attitude, insight, opinion (and how!) and a well-developed sense of both justice and service.

He's also funny as hell.

Check out Dan Smith's fromtheeditr when you get the chance. You'll enjoy yourself and you'll make Dan's blog a regular stopping-place.

And don't miss Valley Business Front, the business (and much more) magazine that Dan and Tom Field started a few months back, and which has gone, in those same few months, from being an ambitious approach to regional business (and more) publication to being a must-read ambitious regional magazine.

There's no stopping Dan Smith, and it's fun to watch the irritation experienced by those who've tried.

Beginning Bellow

2009-03-09T12:04:00.000-04:00

As the great generation of post World War II American novelists inevitably and inexorably dwindles, the opportunity to consider careers in toto exerts its own inexorable and (for me anyway) probably inevitable appeal.

And the appeal for me at the moment is to view those careers from the inside, by starting at the beginning and working my way, book-by-book through works first read long ago, and almost undoubtedly read out of sequence of publication.

This winter I turned to Saul Bellow, and began where, in print at least, his novelistic career did, with Dangling Man.

With Bellow, the begin-at-the-beginning reader is fortunate to have the first couple of decades of his career in two Library of America volumes. Beautifully printed and bound, conveniently sized, the volumes also reflect Library of America's commitment to producing the most accurate versions of the books themselves.

With the first of its (so far, but only so far, one hopes) Saul Bellow volumes, Novels 1944-1953, I was reminded by the volume title itself that while Bellow is (rightly) considered one of the half dozen or so key American postwar novelists, his career began while the war was still being waged.

That beginning, Dangling Man, is set in the United Sates (Chicago, of course) during the war. During, in fact, the narrator's wait for induction into the army: The arc of the novel is that wait; the novel is written in the form of diary entries.

It's an effective form both for the philosophical explorations Bellow pursued throughout his career -- the narrator, Joseph, is well-read; books, their promise and their limitations (as well as Joseph's), inform many of the entries -- and for propelling a narrative that isn't driven by plot. The book is essentially plotless (like life).

Casting the novel as a diary frees Bellow from building a cohesively plotted architecture of incidents and scenes (though there are plenty of each, some memorable) and enables the focus of the book to be Joseph's exploration of his identity, personally and philosophically.

The approach works well, though some entries demand some lenience of disbelief from the reader: though Joseph is not a novelist some entries run for several pages, complete with dialogue (in a party scene, dialogue from a fairly large number of characters) and novelistic descriptions.

Re-reading Dangling Man forty years after my first (and previously only) time with it offers certain pleasures of perspective. When I first read it, late in the Sixties, Bellow's most recent novel was Herzog (1964). At least two other major novels, Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) and Humboldt's Gift (1975) and several close to major novels, not to mention nonfiction, stories and novellas and a Nobel Prize lay ahead.

That first reading of this first novel, though, came when the only other Bellow I knew was Herzog. Seize The Day (1957) and Henderson The Rain King (1959). The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and The Victim (1947) lay in my future, as they had in Bellow's when writing Dangling Man.

But even then and knowing only a few of his works I could see, nascent, many of Bellow's preoccupations, themes, and tones: Isolation, dialogues with the past and with one's self, troubles with women, engagement with and rejection of classical literature and philosophy, the costs (on many levels) of urban life, and others (though not Bellow's lively comic side: Dangling Man is, like its diarist/narrator, essentially humorless).

Looking at the book now, almost four years after Bellow's death, I find Dangling Man to be more compelling than I recalled, the diarist's wait -- not quite anticipation -- for induction and his emergence (sic) into a larger world giving a sense, wholly exclusive of the novel itself, of Bellow's own steady, day-by-day, page-by-page wait for his own emergence.

That emergence came with Augie March close to a decade after Dangling Man, and the third novel in the Library of America's first volume of Bellow. If I stick to my plan of reading may way through Bellow I will get to Augie...

Sometime. Rereading an author's work, all of it, in order of composition, is itself the work of a fair amount of a lifetime, and there are other writers I wish to approach the same way.

For now, though, I've begun Bellow, and recommend Dangling Man and its author to you, as well.

Woods, Snow, Silence, Love

2009-03-04T15:51:00.001-05:00

It's been years since our last real snow here, but the wait was worth it. I don't know that I've ever seen a prettier snow.

Three days later and the ground remains covered, though tomorrow's temperatures will see to that. Until then, though, it's lovely, and enough snow remains to muffle even the sounds of its falling from the trees.

The drive, steep and shaded, remains covered as well, which means the car remains parked at the top of the ridge that runs along the edge of the farm

Walking to and from it through the woods that cover the slope of the ridge reminds me, every time, of just how much I love these woods, this land, and just how deeply that love can be renewed by seeing the land and the forest through new eyes.

Eyes squinting, just a bit, against the glare rising from the snow.

Editor Retiring -- But Not Shy!

2008-08-01T14:32:00.000-04:00

My friend Dan Smith retired yesterday, and celebrated his birthday at the same time.

Then he got right to work on a brand-new project.

Considering how hard and constantly Dan's worked as a journalist and editor over the last four decades -- and then some -- there isn't a lot of surprise to this. He's spent the last twenty years editing the Blue Ridge Business Journal, a publication serving southwest Virginia, each page reflecting Dan's standards and integrity, providing its readers with news, features, opinion and attitude that equaled any such publication anywhere.

Every two weeks Dan produced a paper that was always lively, that took stands, that shared insights, and that reminded us that business is only part of life: Dan's book reviews ranged across everything from ancient history to contemporary fiction and most categories in-between. Rare enough for a business paper -- and increasingly, alas, any paper -- to carry book reviews, the Journal under Dan was absolutely committed to them.

He's just as committed to helping young writers become better writers. I've watched him work with dozens over the years, making the best of them better and then helping them get better still.

Dan always goes out of his way to credit the freelancers who provided the bulk of the Journal's copy; those young writers are a big part of his legacy.

Not that he'd use a word like legacy. Dan is not one to rest on his laurels, or to rest much, period. He's always looking for the next story, the next book to read, the next person to tell about that story, or that just-read book.

He's a fine writer, too; his memoir, Burning The Furniture, gives good picture of a life that in many ways promised not to last nearly as long as it has. (Dan learns from his mistakes; some of those, well-recounted in the book, were large and long-lived: Dan's ability to learn large lessons is at the heart of his own long-livedness.)

Dan's also one of the funniest people on earth. Presenting me with an award a few years back he remarked that, "Keith Ferrell is like a Marseilles whore: he comes in on time and his work's always clean." I laughed as hard as anybody -- and have taken the opportunity, more than once, to repay the favor. Dan can laugh hard at himself, too.

And he's nowhere near done with any of it. A mite too early to talk about that new project Dan's got in mind, but when the time's right I'll let you know -- if Dan hasn't gotten to you first.

And if you're in the Rocky Mount, Virginia area next Friday evening, August 8, stop by Edible Vibe ( a terrific restaurant/coffee shop in downtown Rocky Mount) come here Dan read -- he does that well, too -- as part of our 4th Annual Franklin County Library Book Festival. There willl be half a dozen writers sharing their work. You'll know which one's Dan because he's the one I'll be making the most fun of. The balloon goes up at at 6:30.

It's been my pleasure and, no exaggeration, my privilege to write a number of pieces for Dan over the past four years.

I was pretty well full-formed as a writer by the time I met Dan, but I still learned a few things from him, not least of them what a fine, fine man Dan Smith is.

I'm glad I know him.

Overview Institute Unveiled

2008-06-01T11:27:00.001-04:00

A long day in DC yesterday, making the formal public announcement of The Overview Institute, an organization aimed exploring the ramifications, implications, and the possibilities for changes in perceptual and consciousness that arise (as it were) from our ability to rise from our planet.

The Institute is named, and its concerns and avenues of inquiry and speculation flow from, the exemplary work of Frank White, whose The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution marked, upon its publication in 1987, the first sustained and consistent attempt to examine how human perception is altered (and perhaps transformed) by off-Earth experience.

Frank's book was of (groundbreaking) necessity anecdotal -- reminiscences, accounts, insights from individuals who'd been to space, all of them at the time astronauts or cosmonauts. To those anecdotes Frank brought and brings his sharp analytical intelligence and clear, focused thinking.

An indispensable book, and one that has refused to release its hold upon the imaginations and scientific curiosity of those who've read it.

Twenty-one years later and the handful of people who's been off-planet in 1987 has now swelled to more than 500, a number that will itself grow dramatically as various private-enterprise human space transport enterprises come on-line over the next few years.

At yesterday's event we unveiled our Institute's Declaration of Vision and Principles as well the other members of the Institute's Core Overview Group.

Most importantly, we called for others to sign our declaration, and join us in exploring the issues, opportunities, and areas of scientific, cultural, artistic, spiritual, philosophical inquiry raised by the Effect's effects.

As Frank pointed out in his eloquent remarks, the Overview Institute doesn't have an ideology or agenda -- the implication of his work and findings is that 500, or 500,000, or 500,000,00 people experiencing the effect in orbit might well manifest 500,000,000 different personal responses to and manifestations of the experience.

What we're hoping to apply quantitative scientific methodology to is whether or not the Effect itself exerts measurable neurophysiological/cognitive effects on the brain.

But we're also quite deliberately seeking to engage the vision of artists from all media, cultural and thought leaders, activists, and above all interested individuals of whatever stripe and profession in exploring the question of just what space means -- and can mean -- to and for us here on Earth.

In my remarks I noted that it's now close to forty years since Norman Mailer launched his magnificent (if magnificently underrated) Of A Fire On The Moon with the words:

"Are we poised for a philosophical launch?"

As I said yesterday, and believe, "Now we are."

Take a look at our Declaration and, if it appeals, sign up for The Overview Institute (it's free.)

And tell others about it.

ARTHUR

2008-03-19T12:23:00.001-04:00

The October, 1993, gathering of many of the world's leading AI and brain researchers, science journalists, philosophers and others in Cambridge, Mass., to celebrate the ongoing life and works of Marvin Minsky was an intellectual and social delight from start to finish, but one of the high points for all there was Arthur's telepresence.

He looked great, all smiles and good wishes, and it was a pleasure to pose one of the day's first questions.

I can't remember what it was I asked, but I'll never forget -- or want to -- Arthur's response as he gazed out over the packed house in full color from the big screen that dominated the stage:

"Hello, Keith, and let me begin by saying thanks so much for rejecting my latest article!"

Brought down the house.

I was at first chagrined, but realized as the day passed that Arthur's comment brought me a certain cachet -- "You really rejected an Arthur C. Clarke article?"

"Not up to our standards," I said, making sure my eyes were twinkling as I did so.

When I dropped Arthur a note relaying the fun I'd had his expense, he responded with a lovely funny note of his own, along the lines of how he was eager to help me get a good laugh.

But the best laugh I ever got from this man who laughed so deeply and well, came a few years later, after his investiture by the Queen.

Now that he was Sir Arthur, I wrote him, he could view his various wheelchairs and other devices as support mechanisms existing... Against The Fall Of Knight.

He wrote back immediately, certain that I could have heard his laughter all the way from Sri Lanka.

I have no doubt that I had indeed heard it -- and I hear that laughter now, and think of the joy and insight, the vision and inspiration, the provocation and speculation, the smiles and, yes, the groans at the puns he loved, the treasure shelves of fiction and the nonfiction.

Arthur brought all of this and more to so many millions of readers over the course of one of the great careers in the world of ideas.

And even better, one of the great joyous lives in the world of humans.

Buckley

2008-02-27T13:42:00.000-05:00

Add to your blog as infrequently as I do, and the risk is that it become a necrology. My last entry marked Norman Mailer's death; today William F. Buckley died.

What a pair of blogmarks! And what reminders of the virtues -- and rewards -- of the productive life.

Reminders as well of a time in American political discourse now long past, and long since in need of resuscitation if not outright resurrection.

They were giants in those times -- the 1950s and 1960s -- and not just in retrospect. Buckley and Mailer each perceived and understood (not the same thing at all) both the readiness in America for a revolution, and also the need for one. That each pursued his revolutionary goals with wit and bonhomie as well as intellectual audacity and literary zeal gave the era a frisson sadly missing since.

I remember my father and myself watching Mailer on Buckley's Firing Line sometime in the latter Sixties. They went at it, they did -- at one point Mailer (my memory tells me) remarking that Fidel Castro was his idea of a great man, and Buckley falling most uncharacteristically silent.

But he was never silent for long.

What has stayed with me since that night was Dad's remark that, after all the fireworks, it was easy to imagine the two of them going out for dinner together. A distance and then some from the levels of invective hurled witlessly from both sides today.

My first professional publication came around that time, a review for the Raleigh News & Observer of Buckley's essay collection The Governor Listeth. I liked the book and Buckley's writing then, I like his writing now.

Politically, I was in his orbit if not his thrall for awhile, but only for awhile.

The revolution he sought -- and that so largely succeeded, or appeared to -- seemed to me to become derailed around the time Buckley (and a substantial portion of the electorate) became captivated by the Actor (I use the term loosely, to say the least) whose depth of inauthenticity in the wake, a decade later, of Barry Goldwater's genuineness, turned out to be exactly what America, and most but not all American conservatives wanted, or thought they did.

But Reagan was electable -- and how! And with his election -- which, to hear his name invoked during this year's primaries was the Ascension made American -- so much of what intrigued me about intellectual conservatism as propounded by Buckley, most vivaciously, disappeared, subsumed by Reaganism which rested its multifold cruelties and criminalities on an anti-intellectualism so severe and yet so charming (and marketable) that even the truest and most philosophical conservatives chose to follow the tide, Buckley chief among them.

Yet I never stopped reading him -- the essays, the novels, the wonderful sailing books and the exuberant memoirs. His ferocious productivity never fully flagged, and when he was found dead today it was at his desk in his study.

Where he wanted to be.

Mailer

2007-11-10T15:19:00.000-05:00

He changed the life of his times, back when times could be changed by a writer. No writer of his generation had Mailer's ambition -- or, fortunately for his ambition and his readers, his range.

I was 13 or 14 when I first read him, Barbary Shore, whose first sentence --

"Probably I was in the war."

-- struck me then and strikes me now as a marvelous, frightening gambit, a hook that's also an existential jab, a signal that we are not embarked upon anything like a traditional novel.

Nor were we, nor was he.

The vastness of his gifts was matched by the acuity of his eye and ear: while the political writing is rightly celebrated for his sense of how things work, Mailer was also an acute social novelist and observer. The societies of which he wrote best in fiction and nonfiction -- ancient Egypt, the CIA, soldiers on patrol, the familial and social structures and strictures surrounding young Adolph Hitler, the astronaut /engineer corps in the summer of the first moon landing, marchers approaching the Pentagon, murderer and murdered in Utah, more -- were from his perspective and in his prose representative of the cosmic as well as the common, the divine as well as the bedeviled, the orgiastic and the disciplined, the brilliant and the brutal, the contemporary and the timeless.

He tried to get it all between the covers of his books, each of them different, each informed by a mind relentless in its pursuit of the ultimate, its sense of language, its adherence to the importance of writing not only well but also challengingly.

No less in the last year of his career than the sixty years of work and words that preceded it. He wrote once:

Every moment of one's existence, one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit.

His own moments now ended, his moment, that moment of history that was our times from The Naked and the Dead in 1948 to On God published a few weeks before his death, remains alive and lively, his voice ongoing in his books and his essays and all the rest, themselves though now artifacts of a time and of times when writing and writers mattered more to the culture than they do now.

Which itself doesn't matter: he did his work and did remarkable work, and through it all was engaged in an exploration the equal of any writer one cares to name, nearly every page reminding us of his commitment to a journey best described by one of his best narrators:

We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.

Dry

2007-09-04T13:04:00.001-04:00

We got a quarter to a half-inch of rain last Thursday night, the first real rain in over six weeks. Not nearly enough, and little on the horizon.

My neighbors, who farm for their livelihood, have already cut their cornstalks -- such as they were -- for what silage they can get out of them. They sure weren't going to get any corn. Their cows are already eating next winter's hay, and I've been hearing that some of the herds are about to be dramatically reduced to save feed (and money.) Some wells are starting to sputter and spit mud.

Our own well is doing... well.

As I write this, the Midwest is still trying to dry out from its floods, and Hurricane Felix is dumping up to 25 inches of rain on Nicaragua.

The hope among the farmers here is that we get a goodsized storm system that tracks up the east coast and begins refilling the land's water-coffers. Too late for this year's crops but for farmers, like so many of us, it's never too soon to begin thinking about next year.

bMighty

2007-09-04T12:46:00.001-04:00

A new site for small to midsize businesses got started last month, and I think it's pretty good despite (not because of) the fact that I write for it.

The site is bmighty.com from CMP and is relentlessly, intelligently and carefully aimed at the concerns of businesses with between one and 1500 employees. Particular focus is on the ways in which those businesses can use -- really use -- technology to be, well, mightier than employee numbers or annual sales alone might indicate.

I'll be blogging there on security issues, writing columns and occasional features. The people putting the site together know their stuff -- both editorially and in terms of technology and business. Early reaction to the site has been good.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

This has been a plug.

Mower

2007-08-15T17:31:00.001-04:00

I assembled my new high-power but low-octane mower today, and gave it a quick test-drive (test-push?)

Quick because using a reel mower seems to take only a little getting used-to: I learned within a few feet what the mower wants to do, what it doesn't want to do, and how to respond to each.

But I also learned that you're just not going to do a lot of mower-pushing in this heat. couple of quick swaths was about all I could manage before
becoming sweat-drenched.

Nor should the grass be mowed in its current desiccated state. I've seen it dryer here, but only once in the last twelve years.

The mower sounds wonderful -- whitttrrr whitttrrr -- as the reel spins, but the grass sounds like ice crunching beneath your feet. My neighbors are cutting their corn already, in hopes of cutting their losses. Twenty days or so since there's been any rain, and not much to speak of in the twenty days before that.

But when the rain does return, and the grass gets some life back in its blades, the blades of this new mower will be ready. I'm thinking of calling it Mo.

JDM

2007-06-01T09:37:00.000-04:00

Lynne Barrett and colleagues have launched a lively new site, The Florida Book Review that's worth more than a quick look, and not just because I was asked to contribute.

But I was, and did, and my feature on John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee (more on MacDonald than McGee) gave me the chance to re-visit, re-read, and reflect on a writer who was once terrifically popular and whose work once meant a great deal to me.

And still does in many ways -- other than for this article I hadn't read (or, really, been able to read) MacDonald for a decade or more. That inability was mine, as much a result of over-reading (and over-re-reading!) him for decades as anything.

But picking up a couple of dozen MacDonalds -- costiveness of production was not among his characteristics -- his virtues (considerable) and flaws (ditto) all came back in a familiar rush.

I was reminded -- not that I needed to be -- that the McGees, for all of the charms still offered by the Busted Flush, the clockspring plots, the still-sharp insights into American society and culture ca. 1964-1984, aren't the best of his work.

A half dozen or ten of MacDonald's standalone suspense novels remain about as good as commercial fiction gets, My picks: The Damned, The Crossroads, A Flash of Green, Please Write For Details, The Last One Left, Murder in the Wind, and Cry Hard, Cry Fast.

Add the best of the McGees -- the first, The Deep Blue Good-by, and the strangest, The Green Ripper -- and some of the short stories and there's a shelf of superb suspense fiction.

Superbly slick, too, every bit of it, which is one of the things I carp about in the essay.

But what do I know?

Other than that for a long time I loved John D. MacDonald as much as I loved any writer, and if that love hasn't lasted undiminished, what has?

Rachel

2007-05-27T09:40:00.001-04:00

Rachel Carson would be 100 today, but don’t look for Congress to recognize her centenary or her contribution to our world: a bill that would have done just that is currently being blocked by Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn (R.)

Coburn’s opposition rests on his assertion that Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring – which his website tellingly mis-identifies as The Silent Spring -- was based on “junk science” that turned the world against DDT, condemning tens of millions of people – many of them children – to death from malaria.

Coburn’s hardly alone in vilifying Carson, and using malaria deaths to do so. There’s been a large measure of such vilification, including plenty from Rush Limbaugh, whose loathing of the environmentalist movement which, in many ways Silent Spring catalyzed if not actually inaugurated, is all-but constant.

Tens of millions of deaths and the wholesale banning of DDT and other “benevolent” chemicals, all placed upon the shoulders of this thoughtful, graceful writer and thinker.

Whose crime was – what? The raising of consciousness, that’s what.

Despite the blogs and blasts and blather about Rachel Carson and Silent Spring bearing the responsibility for banning DDT and killing those tens of millions of humans, what she actually did was far less draconian – and far more subversive. She raised questions which in turn raised consciousness. She asked us to think.

Carson, it shouldn’t have to be pointed out, had no power to legislate or ban anything. She was a writer – nor did she in that role advocate or encourage the wholesale banning of DDT. Rather, she advocated for a more critical, careful, thoughtful, and research-based approach to the use of broad-kill pesticides in specific and our relationship to nature in general.

Such an argument, of course, requires thought on both sides. Understanding such an argument requires a careful reading of Carson’s book, as any serious book calls for care in its consumption. She was alarmed by trends that she found both in nature and in the scientific literature that had surrounded DDT for a decade and more before she wrote Silent Spring

And what’s all-but forgotten is that there was a time, not all that long ago, when a book—a book, one that you had to read! – could launch a debate, create a movement or, considering the four decades’ worth of Carson-bashing, both a movement and a counter-movement – but it could, at least back in the earlier days of television’s assault on our ability to read, which is to say our ability to think.

That ability itself seems an increasingly endangered species on, it must be admitted, both sides of the argument; on, it must be also admitted, all sides of every argument these days: all chemicals are bad versus all environmentalists are “wackos” (Limbaugh’s word not mine.)

That’s too easy on each side – and that’s why irrational invective has grown so pervasive. Harder to think – and even harder to think seriously.

As Rachel Carson did. Here’s what she had to say in one of the closing paragraphs of Silent Spring:

“Through all these new, imaginative, and creative approaches to the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures there runs a constant theme, the awareness that we are dealing with life – with living populations and all their pressures and counterpressures, their surges and recessions. Only by taking account of such forces and by cautiously seeking to guide them into channels favorable to ourselves can we hope to achieve a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”

Sound wild-eyed and fanatical to you? Me, either.

Happy hundredth, Rachel Carson – we’re all the better, despite our every effort not to be, for your presence here, and so is our world.

Store

2007-03-12T12:21:00.000-04:00

It's been about two weeks since my friend Steve Meador had to close, after fifteen or so years, the Glade Hill Quickette.

Like many independent "country stores," Steve's was as much social center as retail establishment, the place people went to for the latest news, gossip, jokes, jawboning around the heater in wintertime, on a bench out front in summer. The world's problems may not have been solved there, but they were certainly enumerated, often in hialrious and occasionally obscene detail.

I bought my onion sets and seed potatoes from Steve for well over a decade, and my daily stop at the Quickette for the newspaper and the non-print news had for years been an important part of my routine.

Gone, now, a victim of many things -- too much credit given to too many who never paid, cashflow crunches, shinier and larger competition across the street, changing times.

It's too bad, and it's more than that -- Steve Meador ran a good store, gave back to the community -- money for sports teams and fundraisers when he had it, a big smile even when he didn't -- and I suspect that in many ways he gave more than he got.

Now when I drive by the Quickette, what I get are memories. Good ones, and ones that I'll keep forever, but just memories nonetheless.

P-Man

2007-03-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

A week last night since the last time we saw our pal Pumpkin, and while I continue to hope that he's indulging spring fever and will return, I'm having a hard time holding that hope close.

A few months old, P-Man was due last week to be neutered, and the fact that he was intact gives me what little optimism I retain: maybe he has found a lady.

But the woods and thickets at this farm and the surrounding ones are home to bigger cats, bobcats, and that's what I fear Pumpkin ran into last week. While there are coyotes in the county, as increasingly everywhere, I've not seen or heard any on our property or the adjacent ones. I haven't come across any evidence of a fight or struggle, nor have I seen any scavenger birds circling.

Also, P-Man's brother Oreo's behavior changed noticeably last week -- he doesn't fare as far, nor does he stay out at night, as had been his, and their, habit. He keeps close to home now, and I can't help but wonder if the change has anything to do with Pumpkin and, perhaps, Pumpkin's fate.

P-Man, our Pumpkin, was among the most affectionate animals I have ever known, and I do -- as best as I am able -- continue at least some of the time to hope that he comes home.

Snowfail

2007-02-01T09:26:00.000-05:00

This time yesterday we had already been told for a day or two that we were on the lip of getting our first real weather of the winter -- weather that had actually been "promised" to start in the morning. I had passed a long sleepless night enjoying those hours of anticipation of snow that have always meant much to me. Do such hours -- glances at the night sky to get a sense of the clouds, listening hard for the sounds of the first flakes or pellets coming down -- mean less as a result of the marketing of meteorology?

You know what I mean: SNOWALERT4! STORMTRACK8! WINTERWATCH7! BLIZZARDBLOG12!--- whatever the names and stations in your area, the result is the same: weather turned into television, weather forecasting become another way, and in some aspects the chief one, of hyping a station and transfixing its viewership.

Ten years now on this patch of Virginia soil and trees, hills and gullies, has taught me at least a couple of things, not least among them the higher accuracy I achieve by watching the skies, the quality of light, the feel of the air against my hands and face, than I get from the exuberance -- read: keep watching, it's going to be bad and more than that it's going to be real -- weather personalities on TV.

Not their fault -- TV is what TV is, and continues to become even more so by the moment, lowering the lowest common denominator index at an exponential rate. And there are indeed times -- severe, violent, fast-moving weather -- when I am grateful for the radars and graphics and computer models and even -- less often but still occasionally -- the meteorologists (some of them) and on-camera personalities/personae (almost all of them) and their commentary.

But mostly I resent what they do, which is to set up expectations (and anxieties!) for more television -- tune in for updates -- rather than awaken the audience to the wonders of weather. In the case of this week's non-snow "event" (and there's another word they use that really frosts my French fries) we ended up, according to one of weather-things this morning with around "1/24th" (sic) of an inch... but the main commentary was about a) why the forecast had failed, b) how angry the viewers were that schools etc. had closed because of the forecast and c) even more viewer commentary about the failure of nature to live up to what television had promised them.

While I'm glad we didn't get the icefall that the TV-things began promising (almost desperately, I thought) last evening after the day's snowfall failed to arrive, I will admit to wondering about something: If the trees fall in the forest and bring down the power and cable lines during an ice-storm, does anyone know the TV weather warn-ers are still on?

Now I have to go retrieve my car from the spot up the hill and down the road, where I parked it yesterday in advance of the storm which -- walking with Holly, my Siberian, back through the forest, feeling the flakes of the first (and it turned out, only) flurries, watching the skies, enjoying the silence -- I knew wasn't going to last. There wasn't going to be much more snow than those few fat flakes for those few moments, anticipated for so many hours, and I treasured them until they passed.

Cold

2007-01-25T17:24:00.000-05:00

Real cold tonight, the first of the winter -- below 20F is the word. Not too bad up here in my unheated office yet, but will be before long, at which point I'll move back downstairs near the first and work on either laptop or legal pad.

Probably legal pad. With a pencil. And no Internet.

Heaven!

Ice

2007-01-24T17:23:00.000-05:00

What little weather we have had here this winter -- it was in the 70s ten days ago -- came a few days ago in the form of a bit of ice. Power stayed on without even a flicker, and no trouble getting up and down my steep shady drive. I had been hoping for a snow, a real snow, but so far nothing.

Last year was little better -- one good snow that was immediately crusted by ice/sleet, leaving us powderless though not, thankfully, powerless. That time my drive did freeze and stayed so for more than a week. I parked at the top of the hill beyond the evergreeens and hardwoods that shield my little valley, and came to enjoy the walk to and from the car -- about a quarter of a mile through those woods -- when I had need to go out.

It has snowed here as late as March and early April, but I'm holding out no hope this year. It will or it won't and I'll deal with either.

Ground still not frozen; have been putting in some time in the garden and vow, this year, to do a better job of cultivating it... and this blog.

Fields

2006-10-21T14:57:00.000-04:00

Not my fields, which I am slowly getting ready for winter (and should be doing more on now) or the entry-fields in this blog that I have neglected for another month, but resolve to resume (as I have before.)

This time, though, my header refers to fields of literature -- not just sf, but sf central to the argument. There is a lovely and passionate discussion of this going on at Paul McAuley's blog, from a starting rant at Lou Anders's, flowing outward and back again, with plenty of comment both sensible and incensed (sensibly so, to my taste) about sf, art, entertainment, ideas.

I'll be thinking about much of it this afternoon -- gorgeous, cloudless, mid-60s -- as I sharpen and put to use my scythe (the new one, not the still-being-repaired old one.)

Excellent reading -- not surprising, considering Paul McAuley's own centrality to what is best about the field today -- and worth... cultivating.

Fallow

2006-09-21T13:15:00.000-04:00

Summer ends soon and I have spent most of the season away from this blog, though not from its subject matter.

The garden did well, if weedily, and despite drought, severe heat, and pests continues to produce eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, squash; there are some potatoes and onions left; the herbs are going strong.

As are the tools. I have spent some of my time away from here learning how properly to sharpen and maintain them, and have managed even to be (somewhat) diligent about applying my lessons to my tools.

There remains, as ever, room for more diligence and greater consistency, both of which I seek, here as well as in the outer gardens I work.

Sandpaper

2006-05-07T10:23:00.000-04:00

I have been using a medium grit sandpaper to clean a variety of handtools I use in my garden. There's a pleasant rhythm to the work, working the rust away, then using a file and a honing stone to sharpen the tools' edges.

I re-mounted my hand cultivator on a heavy oak dowel that I shaped with a spokeshave.

These tools have been mine for years, but they feel more mine than ever now.

Magazine

2006-05-05T17:57:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons -- one of the many! -- that I stay behind in my gardening projects is that my farm offers so many nice places to sit or stretch beneath a tree and read.

One of the things I read is science fiction magazines. How long since you've looked, for instance, at a copy of Fantasy & Science Fiction? You should -- and you can take a glance and more importantly subscribe at the F&SF site where in a cool move editor Gordon Van Gelder has posted the full texts of this year's Nebula nominees from his magazine.

Find yourself a tree and read F&SF under it!

Dowels

2006-05-05T17:07:00.000-04:00

I've been using dowels for various things this week, ranging from a new roller for the reel mower to a new handle for a hand-cultivator. I learned pretty quickly to spend the extra money for heavy oak dowels than the lighter, cheaper and far less effective softwood ones.

Mattock

2006-05-04T20:52:00.000-04:00

This year I am using my mattock rather than a tiller, much less a tractor, to turn my garden. I am of course behind, and the fact that our area is now five inches behind on rainfall doesn't make it any easier.

But this year easiness is not only what I cannot afford, it's what I do not want to want.

Brush Axe

2006-05-02T21:35:00.000-04:00

In some ways my favorite of the tools, though most favored because of watching my son wield it one memorable day rather than any great attachment to the implement itself.

Indeed, the dilemma of the brush axe when I use it is that its long handle and wicked curved/hooked blade find me as often thinking of earlier incarnations of California's current governor as of the task at hand.

Conan The Bramble Clearer!

Scythe

2006-05-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

I love the idea of my scythe even more than I love the idea of my reel mower. I bought the scythe for $20 at a yard sale and have always loved it more than used it, although it has done some work over the past year.

The best day's use it got was after my friend Glenn Dillon showed me how to use it. Proper scything involves a dragging, rather than swinging technique, accompanied by frequent sharpenings of the blade. Sharpening the scythe blade is, at least, easier than sharpening -- or trying to -- the blades of the reel mower.

Now I am trying to repair the scythe, too. The rings that hold its handles in=place were loose when I bought the tool, and have continued to weaken and give.

So I am trying to tighten them, or figure a way to fashion new ones.

Mower

2006-05-01T15:14:00.000-04:00

I have spent a lot of the past couple of days trying restore an old -- at least 50 years, maybe more -- reel mower. Maybe you know the kind: cast iron workings, wood handle and shaft, heavy and awkward, no engine.

That last is what I love most about the mower, or at least the idea of the reel mower. Whatever industry and exploitation and pollution -- and craft, skill, commerce -- went ito its manhuafcture, that was it. The reel mower's supply chain is me, as is its fuel source.

Despite much of the work being done on what many -- and most of my neighbors and relatives -- consider a sabbath, I was delivered of some prime invective (creative anmd foul even for me) as I worked to loosen long-srusted bolts and sharpen long-dulled blades. Maybe you heard me.

The mower -- I may give it a name -- is closer to working now than it was or has been for the past quarter-century at least -- but is still not quite there.

Nor is my property well-suited to this kind of mower.

But I think I may be.