sixty-four strings

sticking my neck out

2011-03-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

It seems like once every year or so something has to be done about the mess I've made of my spinal cord, and the result is long absences from work, play, and yes, the web. But like a turtle, I'm ready to venture forth and stick my neck out again.

The three weeks away from any demands on my time have been alternately boring and delightful--who can say no to sleeping in every morning? But I'm now working again--only 15 hours a week, but very tiring hours--and I'm getting off the evil pain meds and the fuzziness they bring is almost gone. (I'm always mystified by people who love these drugs and become dependent on them, since they make life sketchy, slow, and hardly worth living.)

One thing I did manage to do was start another multimedia mosaic project. I'm a little ambivalent about the quality of my results, but I do dearly love the feel of the polymer clays, the stamps, paint, beads, glass, and paper. This is so-called hobby that is rapidly turning into a major obsession.

This book got me started but now I've veered off in a truly weird direction. Of course it's not at all like real art--my real art is about writing, but I now remember why I went to Pratt Institute out of high school, truly thinking the visual arts were going to be for me.

Fortunes told and untold

2011-02-10T05:22:00.000-08:00

Think we're over-regulated in the U.S.? Think again.

The Associated Press reports that about a month ago Romania's witches and fortune-tellers had to start collecting taxes from customers, and now Parliament is thinking about going one step further: If the witches's predictions don't come true, they could be fined or put in prison.

"Superstition is taken seriously in Romania," says the AP, "and officials passed the tax bill in a effort to increase revenues. The new bill would also require that witches have permits and provide their customers with receipts." They would also be banned from plying their trade near schools and churches, apparently to protect both the pious and the innocent.

The witches and fortune-tellers counter-argue that they are not to blame for the failure of their tools: "They can't condemn witches; they should condemn the cards." We all know the truism about the bad workman blaming his tools, but this takes it to a whole new level.

First they mess with the zodiac, and we have this new and unpronounceable Ophiuchus, and now this. Where will it all end? Will poltergeists need social security cards?

In the meantime, Romanian officials are almost certainly laughing all the way to the bank.

The tile factory

2011-01-28T07:34:00.000-08:00

Our house looks the same as always on the outside, but over the past couple of weeks the inside has been transformed into a modest tile factory. I have no idea what I'm doing--if you know, please contact me right away.

This all began when I decided that a recent kitchen remodel wasn't really complete until I had some fancy-dancey bit of decorative tile as a final (if expensive) touch. We're both modern shoppers, so we turned to the web and, after a lot of surfing and squinting, we finally found something that we think will work. We bought it and it's coming, but apparently by slow boat from a workshop in Beirut.

But all that shopping--not a normal activity for either of us--triggered a sudden, overwhelming desire in your correspondent to make tiles of my very own. For the past two weeks, once my day job is over, I have started rolling, stamping, painting, glazing, and fooling around with polymer clay while I watch the news. This stuff does not require a kiln--you stick it in the oven of 15 minutes and tiles come out almost exactly as planned.

Now I've reached a stage where the tiles have veered a long way away from the square, straightforward norm and pretty much anything goes--I've been adding little bits of costume jewelry, glass beads, and any number of small household items whose usefulness is no longer obvious.

In case you're wondering, July 16, 2005 is the day Vince and I got married in our back yard by Barney Bloom, a local justice of the peace; Barney is an old friend with a very large beard. Our wedding cost $57, but it seems to have stuck. And maybe by July I'll be able to figure out how to use these tiles productively to celebrate a worthy anniversary.

the joy of packaging

2011-01-14T11:41:00.000-08:00

My sister Caroline likes to preface the Christmas season with a warning against greed by saying, "We're all on a budget, so it's no good asking for a pony." Every year I ask for a pony. This is how families operate.

This year she finally came through, and my delight with this object knows almost no bounds. This is, according to the package, an official "Grow Your Own," the "sixteenth in a series."

The instructions on the back (in what looks like four-point Franklin Gothic) say that the pony will reach full size (600 percent!) if you put it in some room-temperature water and leave it there for three days.

Three days is a long time for a toy to become fully operational, and the instructions also concede that when you take the pony out of the water, "it will slowly shrink back to its original size."

But this is not a problem--it's a feature: "Your grow item can be grown again and again!!" I relish the weird sexual subtext and the sheepish guilt implicit in those two exclamation points. Bang! Bang! I have a longwinded screed about the misuse of this blob of punctuation, but we won't go there. Not today.

Still, it's partly true, as the package says in on the front, that "Your new pony is the best pet in the world. He is very easy to care for and will love you very much." The love part is silly, but he's certainly easy for me to care for, since I never intend to take him out of the bubble pack. My only challenge is figuring out where display him until regifting; my sister will appreciate her own joke just as much when it returns to haunt her.

But wait--why is the pony a "he"? Is another one of the sixteen in a series a mare or a filly, or is the Chinese manufacturer restricted to a production line of geldings? That sounds like something I didn't mean, but this creature is definitely not a stallion. No stud worth his salt would consent to living inside a drinking glass for three days.

Other features explained on the package include, "This pony can live in your house," "Grooming is unnecessary," and, somewhat redundantly, "Your growing pony never needs to be fed, only watered."

Sometimes if you jumble up a platitude it comes out true--small things can come in good packages.

The news from St Kilda

2010-12-29T11:17:00.000-08:00

From Atlas of Remote Islands, Judith Schalansky

St Kilda

Uninhabited; evacuated in 1930.

Last case of neonatal tenatnus in 1891.

"There are sixteen cottages, three houses, and one church in the only village on St Kilda. The island's future is written in its graveyard. Its children are all born in good health, but most stop feeding during their fourth, fifth, or sixth night. On the seventh day, their palates tighten and their throats constrict, so it becomes impossible to get them to swallow anything. Their muscles twitch and their jaws hang loose. Their eyes grow staring and they yawn a great deal; their open mouths stretch in mocking grimaces.

"Between the seventh and the ninth day, two-thirds of the newborn babies die, boys outnumbering girls. Some die sooner; some later; one dies on the fourth day, another not until the twenty-first. Some say it is the diet: the fatty meat of the fulmars and their eggs smelling of musk that make the skin silky smooth but the mothers' milk bitter. Or that it is the result of inbreeding. Yet other say that the babies are suffocated by the smoke from the peat fires in the middle of the rooms, or that it is the zinc in the roofs or the pale pink oil that burns in the lamps. The islanders whisper that it is the will of the Almighty. But these are the words of pious men.The women who endure so many pregnancies and bear so few children who survive the eight-day sickness are silent.

"On 22 June 1896, one woman stands on the deck of a ship that is bringing her home. Like all the women of St Kilda she has soft skin, red cheeks, exceptionally clear eyes, and teeth like young ivory. She has just given birth to a child, but not at home. The wind is blowing from the north-east. Long before she can be seen from the shore, she lifts her newborn high in the air."

This book makes me envious and greedy.--HH

A place among the arts

2010-12-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

Vince gave me a book for Christmas, the "Atlas of Remote Islands," by Judith Schlalansky, subtitled "Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will."

According to the colophon, the books was voted the most beautiful German book for 2010, and I believe it; the author not only wrote it, she set the type, drew the maps, and did the book design.

Under the doctrine of fair use, I quote from the entry for Lonely Island:

"Loneliness lies in the center of the Kara Sea in the northern Arctic Ocean. This island is worthy of its name: it is cold and barren, trapped in pack ice all winter, with an average annual temperature of -16 degrees; at the height of summer the temperature sometimes rises to just over freezing.

"No one lives there. A former polar observatory has sunk into the snow and abandoned buildings doze in the belly of the bay, facing the narrow spit of land beyond the frozen marsh.

"A prehistoric dragon's skeleton was found here."

Pete the Moose redux

2010-12-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

Vermont's governor-elect, Peter Shumlin, has made it clear he intends to right a wrong--the issues described in the longwinded tantrum I engaged in last July are about to be addressed and reversed. This makes me glad I voted for Shumlin, although I admit I did it holding my nose--I wanted Doug Racine, who tied Shumlin in the primary but lost on a recount.

The Burlington Free Press reports, "Key lawmakers and Governor-elect Peter Shumlin are ready to reverse a 2010 law drafted in secret and passed at the 11th hour that gave an Northeast Kingdom farmer ownership of wild deer and moose on his property, an action that provoked an outcry among hunters.

"A bill already in draft form restates the longstanding principle that wild animals belong to all people of Vermont. It requires the wild deer and moose trapped inside Doug Nelson’s elk hunting park to be removed, probably through hunting. It also allows for protection of young Pete the Moose, an orphaned resident of the park."

I object to this "orphaned" designation--it's false--but at least the smarmy, disagreeable behavior of Susan Bartlett has been dragged out into the open. Bartlett engineered a cheesy, behind-the-scenes deal to allow a single wealthy constituent, Doug Nelson, to claim de facto ownership of the native wildlife that were accidentally or deliberately enclosed in his fence--a fence put up so that unfair-chase hunting could bring him a bit more dough. It was junk politics at its very worst, and not how we normally do business in this state.

The real back story on this moose is that some dogs, unrestrained by leashes, injured a moose calf; the owners of these dogs then decided they would rescue the calf by appropriating him and taking him to an unlicensed rehabilitator, who then turned the animal over to Nelson. The moose wasn't orphaned--to be accurate, the cow was scared off by dogs and people, and the dogs did what dogs do when not properly restrained, and then the people did what people sometimes do when they fail to grasp the difference between a wild animal and a domesticated one.

I personally don't care one way or the other about "saving" Pete--he's toast no matter what. He has been petted like a dog and fed all manner of junk food, and he's been deprived the the environment he was designed to live in (or die in, as the case may be). He's gone a long way past the point of redemption. But the key doctrine--that wild animals are held in public trust and cannot be domesticated or owned by any individual--has been confirmed and reinstated.

Temper tantrum over.

Deck us all with Boston Charlie

2010-12-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,

Walla Walla, Wash, and Kalamazoo!

Nora's freezing on the trolley,

Swaller dollar cauliflower, alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,

Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?

Trolley Molly don't love Harold,

Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,

Polly wolly cracker and too-da-loo!

Hunky Dory's pop is lolly gaggin' on the wagon,

Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,

Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!

Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,

Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

sweet potatoes baked with apple butter

2010-11-24T10:43:00.000-08:00

Sweet potatoes are all very well, but this time of year they need all the help they can get--there's a lot of competition around the holidays for truly festive food. So here's what I'm doing with sweet potatoes this year.

Get yourself bunch of sweet potatoes (I have a big family, so I've got eight monsters lined up).

Boil gently until the spuds are just tender, maybe 20 minutes. Don't overdo it or you'll get mush, which will mess up the next step.

Let them cool off just long enough so you can handle them, or wear mitts, and peel the skins. They will usually just slide off the sweet potato with very little coaxing.

Slice the partially-cooked spuds about 1/4 to maybe 1/3 of an inch thick

Use some of that Pam-for-baking stuff or your usual shortening to grease a deep baking pan, and then put a layer of slices in there. Salt lightly, sprinkle maybe a quarter-teaspoon of lemon juice around, maybe a bit of pepper, maybe some nutmeg, and then top with a fairly thin layer of apple butter. Use the thick, brown, yummy kind.

Repeat the layering and sprinkling until the spuds are gone. Top with pats of butter (don't get too carried away) and bake about 25 to 35 minutes at 325.

You can make this the day before the feast and reheat it in a 300 oven until hot clear through. It may look a little messy on the plate, but it's yummy.

A hole in the water

2010-11-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

The mountain, unmoved

Ever since early October, the so-called music room in our house has been filled with deck cushions, boat hooks, charts, logs, cruising guides, throw life rings, chafing gear, dock lines, bumpers, life vests, deck brushes, fishing gear, electronics, and even a large non-skid mat that normally covers the floor of the pilot house.

It gets worse. Underneath all these items is a very large blue plastic chest, a sort of monstrous Tupperware container the size of a Shetland pony. I don’t remember what it’s full of and it’s too late to find out now—there’s too much stuff piled on top.

This minor mountain has been sitting there six or maybe seven weeks, ever since a big Nor’easter came through and forced our boat (and many others), out of the water and up onto what’s known as “the hard.” (I’m charmed by this usage and deploy it in a showoffy way whenever I can. Like now, for instance.)

Of course we talk every now and then about putting this great tangle of gear in the loft of the barn where it belongs, but we can’t seem to do it—for some reason we like it right where it is.

It’s said that a boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money, and maybe that’s true. I have to add, though, that a boat, once purchased, costs quite a lot less than a horse, and the boat hardly ever goes lame or needs shoes more expensive than the ones I wear, and mine don't wear out every five to seven weeks.

I’ve also read that, when people are asked to name the one purchasing decision in their life that made them utterly miserable, buying a boat is invariably at the top of the list.

I understand that—boats make you work hard, and you are often wet and anxious, sometimes hungry, and always a long way from any sort of internet connection. Boats also attract insects at the dock and repel bass when you’re away from it. We have a fish finder, so I know this to be true. This instrument displays fish with great accuracy as they light out for the territories, and these vanishing edibles show up on the instrument display looking exactly like those little Pepperidge Farm cheese snacks; all that’s missing is the little baked-in smile.

And yet we cannot move this pile of gear.

It’s not laziness—we’re talking about two people who spent most of the past summer moving things in and out of storage boxes and up and down steep stairs to accommodate a major kitchen renovation. And it’s not sloppiness, either—my husband is as tidy as a cat, and the sort of person who unplugs toasters, alphabetizes sheet music, and folds laundry so swiftly and neatly I’m shamed by my lumpy halfwit efforts. (I do cook and wash dishes, but it seems inadequate penance.)

Here’s the honest truth: This mountain fills a hole in both of us, and the dimensions match almost exactly the length and beam of Clancy's Jig. It seems likely that the mountain will not move until the boat comes off the hard and displaces the clean, sweet water of Champlain again.

The Ziggy experiment

2010-11-12T11:57:00.000-08:00

Haflingers are a breed of horse named for a village, Halfling, that's now in northern Italy, although it used to be in Austria and most of the people who live there speak German. Things like this happen in Europe--I read once that the Dutch national anthem, "Het Wilhelmus," declares allegiance to the king of Spain.

Anyway. I bring this up because, for the past three weeks, I've been doing groundwork with a rugged, clever Halflinger named Ziggy, full name Sigmund Freud. Ziggy is a school horse, and like a lot of school horses he has some issues with the way he is ridden and handled--he is nibbly, pushy, a pain to lead, and unfortunately knows his own strength, which he uses to snatch at hay bales and get in some unsponsored, stubborn grazing. Even for fairly skilled people, he's a major pain in the neck to handle, and a few years ago he dragged an inexperienced handler out the barn door and broke her collarbone.

His endless, anxious chewing means his reins are a slimy, toothmarked mess, and he's probably munched any number of cross ties down to a frayed nubbin. Plus sometimes when he's asked to pick up the right-lead canter he runs away, very fast, and scares the bejeezus out of his rider.

But I can't help it. I like him. He is obviously intelligent and has figured out how to make his life easier with his rapid-fire resistance and his heavyhanded leaning and shoving. It's hard for me not to admire his resilience and his commitment to results, since one of the main outcomes is that no one really wants to ride him. He gets to loaf, which from his perspective is a pretty good arrangement.

But there's also more to Ziggy than I knew: Groundwork has let me feel and see his ferocious anxiety about whips and his defensive posture toward people in general, but at the same time I can also see he wants to trust, wants to be a contributing partner in a horse-to-human relationship. I think maybe he trusted once and still remembers--when I use ground exercises the right way and can get his attention and admiration, he becomes soft and yielding and instantly beautiful. We trot together, halt together, pivot, back up, set our safe boundaries, fool around with poles on the ground, and generally talk about what to do with pressure and how to make pressure go away. He's in the game and interested; I am convinced that Ziggy sees the point of the experiment and the value of what I'm trying to explain.

Today, about halfway through my session, my groundwork coach, Betsy, suggested that I could try gently manipulating Ziggy's tail while he was resting between exercises. I've never really monkeyed much with any horse's tail except to braid, so I carefully felt under his dock and noticed right away how tucked and stiff his whole tailbone was. With help from Becky, I slowly loosened the muscles around the bones so his tail actually arced slightly away from his haunches. As soon as this happened, he dropped his head, mumbled, and then made that little flutter noise that horses make when they have let go of something that worries them.

Good boy.

talking to imaginary friends

2010-10-23T12:28:00.000-07:00

One of my longstanding bookmarks takes me to a plot bank--this is a collection, not really of story lines, but more like a random, weedy compilation of prompts that might trigger a story.

I go there when my head feels unusually empty--I like to scroll down the list and just pick something more or less at random to write about for an hour. It's a low-stakes game but one worth playing: If the writing stalls out it's not my fault, and, if it flies, I'm a genius after all.

Today, though, I started getting interested in the list itself, not as prompts but as legitimate discourse that just happens to be in random order.

Listen:

Back from prison with some new vices,

there's more to him right now than meets the eye.

Grandma is convinced he's in some kind of cult. These days,

it looks like he lives out of his car.

He sees the face of Christ in a anthill

and tries to make the car into a work of art;

He says, "The fumes from the new asphalt are too much,"

and starts assuming the role of a dead sibling.

Then he starts confessing to old sins, and we all notice,

that the puppet show plot is very close to his real life.

This is what it is like when a family disapproves,

and when a close friend begins talking to an imaginary one.

Selections from Hatch's plot bank, reconfigured.

handy dandy

2010-10-17T13:54:00.000-07:00

I have just finished sweeping up after yet another kitchen catastrophe--I dropped a favorite mixing bowl while making stuffing for fish.

That's probably the third glass bowl--I got a set of them as a present--and all three go into the same debit column as the two wine glasses, the blue-and-white creamer, and the nicer of my two teapots. And then there were all those Christmas ornaments last year, some of them old and lovely.

It's always the right hand, and I suppose that's the upside--I'm left-handed--but where does it end? Will I soon be typing with a little stick taped to the end of my nose?

A good hurt

2010-10-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

Today, for the first time in a very long time indeed, I rode a horse.

The back story: In 2005, I had an accident that injured my neck and spinal cord; this led to a botched surgery in 2005, a corrective surgery in 2007, and, just last fall, a third surgery that we hoped would improve my grip and balance and ease at least some of the chronic pain. As you can perhaps imagine, I am heartily sick of doctors, neurologists, and pain specialists, although I love my surgeon, a rider herself, who has coached me and motivated me through the worst five years of my otherwise fairly cushy and comfortable life.

None of that matters today. It's not behind me, but it doesn't matter.

This morning I rode Prince, the lead character in my book, Conversations with a Prince, and, thanks to a set of adaptive reins and a patient teacher, I was able to produce an almost-acceptable twenty-meter circle. This doesn't sound like much, I know, but Prince is a squirmy, amiable mess, so this was an accomplishment.

At first I couldn't find the the sweet spot--I felt like I was hovering in the right general vicinity of a real seat, but my crooked, weakened body would have none of it. My coach Jeannette talked me through that part in her way, and Prince talked me through that part in his. Slowly, I was able to balance on my seat bones and get my midline in the middle of my horse; I doubt there is anything nicer than that quiet moment when you feel yourself find physical harmony with a strong, trustworthy creature who speaks a little human and you speak a little horse. And using my cripple reins--reins I could actually hold onto--I felt for the first time in a long time that light buzz of contact electricity that, for me, signals the arrival of complicated joy. I rode at the walk and rising trot for half an hour.

Now everything hurts--neck, shoulders, arms, and (weirdly) the bottoms of my feet. But it's a good hurt. I am also dirty, covered with a sheen of silvery-yellow hairs. But this is good dirt--after I got home I spent several minutes just smelling my ratty black schooling gloves.

I've seen dogs show this same kind of focused, olfactory interest in my riding clothes, so dogs and I agree--horses smell nice, a complex mix of ammonia, dust, sweat, and something else--cardamom? Marzipan? I've never been able to identify the sweetness, but it's something you would gladly put into a batch of cookie dough.

The musical horse

2010-08-29T13:35:00.000-07:00

One of the unexplicated mysteries in riding is why horses like human music and why so many horses have specific tastes in music.

Big Band for a big horse

I had a big spotted mare when I was growing up who was a fearless jumper but who otherwise unpredictable and often quite cowardly. Scatty, unfocused, and prone to panic, she liked Bach--I found this out quite by accident one year when I was teaching at a summer camp and brought her with me. The only station we could get on the radio there was a sort of light-classical mix, pure mayonnaise, but each Friday morning from ten to noon they played Bach. And, as it happened, Fridays morning was when I would usually work her on the flat, with Bach in the background. She would settle into the music and stay on tempo, her ears flopping to the sides like a donkey's, completely relaxed. She was my first horse.

My last horse, before all these neck surgeries put a stop to riding, was a huge Dutch Warmblood gelding (above) who had nothing whatsoever going on between his ears. This was nice sometimes, when a spectacular lack of imagination made my life easier, but it also made schooling him up both boring and frustrating--we could work on transitions and brightness off the leg on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he'd simply forgotten everything we'd talked about. It was as if he'd done a full system dump overnight, and all I came back to was a blank screen and a blinking cursor.

He liked big band--String of Pearls, Parade of the Milk Bottle Caps, Walkin and Swingin, stuff like that. And like the spotted mare, he set himself inside the tempo, flopped his ears, and danced. And the four horses I have had in between all did exactly the same thing, once I stumbled over (and learned eventually to hunt for) the music that liked best.

It's easy to dismiss this phenomenon and say of course horses like music because music is beautiful. But that assumes that horses share our opinions about beauty, whatever beauty is, and these's no real evidence that this is true. I've never seen a horse admire a painting or get caught up in an interesting movie or play, for example, and I'm quite sure that the stories horses tell to themselves and to each other are very different from the stories we tell about them or, for that matter, the stories we humans find beautiful and describe as literature.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and wonder if musical preference in horses is linked to their individual body music--their natural tempo and their individual nuances of gait. One of the things that make horses so interesting is that they are all so different--they trademark themselves, and elaborate along a consistent theme. They know who they are in a purely physical, very specific way, and their reliance on tempo is far more advanced and complicated than a cow's or or a pig's or any other domesticated barnyard creature. Pigs are very intelligent, and I'm a fan of pigs, but horses trump every species but our own in this one dimension.

True Confessions: Why I love The People's Court

2010-08-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Milian

Over the past five years I've spent a lot of time loafing around the house waiting for surgery to heal or for some chunk of neck hardware to settle in, and one result is a secret, intense passion for the television show, The People's Court.

Featured in Rain Man and often referred to in the olden days simply as "Wapner," after the then-presiding judge, this semi-bogus show walks like a courtroom, quacks like a courtroom, but is actually a session of binding arbitration between plaintiffs and defendants who have agreed to appear on the show in exchange for an appearance fee and relief from actually paying any sort of judgment that's handed down.

In our household, this show goes by the alternate title of My Boyfriend Owes Me a Thousand Dollars, since this accurately summarizes what about a third of the cases are about. Couples in love fall invariably fall out of love, then use the court system to wrangle over broken cell phones, gifts that have morphed into loans, and bail paid out when the lover-turned-defendant got picked up for DWI. But there are also fender-bender cases, dog bites, home-improvement squabbles, and landlord-tenant disputes over why a security deposit is being withheld.

I like watching people argue, and when the argument is proceeding within the structure of the law, it's even more compelling. But I also like Marilyn Milian, the Latina judge who has been around since 2001. Unlike that other television benchmeister, Judge Judy, Milian cares about the law and is interested in explaining how it works; Judy Sheindlin scolds, vents, insults, and humiliates, and the spectacle is not edifying.

"See, here's how it works," says Milian. "You can make that decision, but it comes at a cost. You signed this contract. I didn't sign it--you did. And you can break it or ignore it or use it as a doily, but you have to understand there are consequences to those kinds of decisions. And you certainly aren't allowed to make money off that kind of decision."

It's fun to watch the body language of the losing parties as it slowly dawns on them that being hopping mad is not necessarily grounds for legal action. Their eyes narrow, their shoulders come up, and they cross their arms defensively over their often ample bosoms. There are rules, and the rules are real, and the rules are not working in their favor. This gives me an intense pleasure that I find very difficult to explain.

But fairness--and especially structured, evenhanded fairness--is important. Each new case seems to reinforce this essential concept, whether we're squabbling over a puppy, a broken windshield, or a slip-and-fall with injury resulting. And this fairness relies on proof--Milian reminds both plaintiffs and defendants that talk is cheap but real documentation, credible evidence, is what gets the job done. Often, when a plaintiff or defendant claims they have proof of something but forgot to bring it, she asks, "So, are you saving that for some other judge?"

I admit I'm a little bit ashamed of my liking for this slightly cheesy show, and I never would have gotten started on it if I hadn't spent so much time hanging around the house with nothing to do. But now I am well, and yet I still knock off work at four each day to watch Marilyn Milian do again what she did yesterday--demonstrate the essential beauty and logic of civil law.

So now I've confessed and actually feel better for it. Just for the record, though, I have no appetite for soaps. I tried them, and it's no go--the people on soap operas never seem to have anywhere they need to be in the middle of the day and they spend way too much time talking behind each other's backs. That's distasteful, and all the chatter leads to crisis after crisis but never any real conclusion--I'll take the gavel and the final ruling any day.

The hind leg off a donkey

2010-08-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

My husband's sister has just decamped after three solid days of nonstop talking--we listened to hundreds of hours of pressured, pointless, controlling, and profoundly boring discussion of unrelated minutiae, one incoherent topic chained tightly to the next.

She told us about every single plant in her garden, the weave of the carpet on the stairs of an apartment she rented in her twenties, the many things an old boyfriend spake unto her, the provenance of a specific stone on an ankle bracelet, the mysterious mixing bowl with the flowers on it, how many times, exactly, she went to the store and why and who she took with her, the names and individual habits of her three hermit crabs, and the night she spent at the Red Roof Inn and why the Red Roof Inn is superior to the Comfort Inn and Motel Six.

She was so busy talking it became impossible to do anything--when we finally got her dislodged, after many overt prompts and signals, to, say, go for a ride on our lovely boat in perfect weather on the bright blue waters of Mallets Bay, she just kept yakking away, so utterly absorbed by all the unsaid things that she couldn't even notice her surroundings.

Now that she's gone, I can uncoil long enough to understand that this strange affliction is probably a kind of mania and not her fault. But it feels like her fault--the woman can talk the hind leg off a donkey.

Of course I can be intolerant and uncharitable, but my husband, in contrast, is amazingly polite, always willing to make other people's comfort a priority even if it means being excruciatingly uncomfortable himself. Yet even he had had enough when he had to listen to a lengthy disquisition on how she calculates her car mileage in this certain specific way.

What kind of life is that? Is it a life that someone would choose? Of course not. It must be torment for her as much as it is for the people around her, but she cannot simply stop. What's that old joke about the twelve-step program for manics? Alanononononononon.

I'm glad she's gone, and of course now I feel guilty in that gladness, but the peace that descended as soon as she left was blissful beyond description.

Kitchen Musician

2010-07-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Loomis Street Irregulars

I just spent a couple of hours poking around through CDs and on line, looking for a version of "The Home Ruler" that's slow enough for me to hear and learn from--I can play well enough, at least some of the time, but I can't for the life of me figure out sheet music. (And for those of you who can, spare me the instructive lecture; I spent a year trying to learn and my neurons just don't fire correctly.)

I play only by ear, and I only play tunes I actually like--this explains why I know only one polka. I learned "Maggie in the Woods" early on in my dulcimer career and found it deficient and glib. Polkas, for me, are like squid: Once was enough. And I think I was attracted to the hammered dulcimer, at least in part, because it's basically impossible to play "Proud Mary" on it, although now that I've said that I'm sure someone has tried and probably posted a video on You Tube.

I was thinking, as I piddled around, about the pleasure that comes of having absolutely no musical ambition. I don't even like to perform because it makes me nervous, and being nervous isn't what music is for. Once a week, five of us gather and play--my friends Art, Tracy, Carol, and Michael, plus yours truly--and in a weird way this has become an anchor, or maybe the pivot, that the rest of my life revolves around. Sometimes we will play a potluck or a community gathering, like in this photo, and Art and Michael just did a very nice guitar duet CD, but in general, as a group, we have no ambition.

For me, music is the opposite of writing--I've never seen the point of diaries or other private scribbling, except perhaps as practice for work written for other people to read. But music is different; it seems to exist in its own right. It's enough to just play, and it doesn't seem to matter (or at least not to me), that no one else is listening. Because it's this internal, self-sustaining quality that keeps me interested, and what motivates me when I spend two hours looking for a version of "Home Ruler" that I can pick up by ear.

In my travels around the music sites on the web, I've found and bookmaked a place called the Kitchen Musician, and there I can listen to midi files all afternoon--"Crabs in the Skillet" and "Lost Farm Waltz" and "Pigeon on a Gate," this last tune being, as far as I can tell, made up of spare parts from every other reel ever written. Or perhaps, conversely, it's the first reel ever written, and it has spread its parts out over all subsequent ones. Sadly, they didn't have "Home Ruler," but that's okay--I found a version on a CD by Susan Sherlock that will probably do.

I'm about to go learn this tune, but before I do that, I want to say that I just now decided that I really do have a place in traditional music, despite my many shortcomings, right down to the purpose-built hammers I need because my grip is so sketchy. Because even though I actually play in what is supposed to be, in my house, the dining room, I think I'm really a kitchen musician. The room is just a technicality.

Candy from away

2010-07-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

This little bit of candy was a gift from a local Thai restaurant. We've gotten friendly with the owner, and this was a freebie add-on to an order of rad nah and plah sam rod--the names of what you can eat at this place all look like that, as if the vowels and consonants have been sucking on a bhong.

Here's the thing--we tried the twin of this one (he gave us two, with a giggle and a little flourish), and it tastes almost exactly like a dog yummy. Remember those? We do, because we both ate dog treats when we were little; maybe a lot of little kids do. Kids are always hungry and always curious.

When I was small I ate a lot of crayons, candle wax, and dirt, and it looks like my palate has gotten a bit more sophisticated since then. But apparently this is legitimate candy if you come from Thailand. Which raises a question--what do their dog treats taste like? And would I like them?

Politics and Pete the Moose

2010-07-06T06:22:00.001-07:00

See the nice lady pat the moose? Tell me: What's wrong with this picture?

About two weeks ago the Vermont legislature played along with a last-minute, back-room deal that allows a private individual to fence native moose and deer in a game preserve in our Northeast Kingdom—this despite a longstanding doctrine that wild animals are held in communal public trust and can’t be converted to private property. This game preserve is run by Doug Nelson of Irasburg, and Nelson charges a hefty fee (from $2,000 to $7,500, according to local media) to people who want to hunt inside the fence; this violates another longstanding hunters' principle called “fair chase.” Nelson has been in conflict and negotiations over this preserve since it was established in the 1990s; he stocks it with imported elk.

This story heated up when hikers, out with their unleashed dogs, came across a month-old moose calf; apparently these dogs injured the calf, and the adult promptly vanished into the woods with an uninjured twin. These misguided animal lovers appropriated the injured calf and gave him to David Lawrence, a wildlife rehabilitator who has a history of coloring outside the lines when it comes to wildlife policy, which clearly states that wild animals are wild and belong only to themselves. They cannot be taken in, domesticated, or converted to pets or private property.

And where did the young moose eventually end up? On Doug Nelson’s elk farm, along with the other native species that he illegally trapped inside when he put up the unethical (and illegal) fence.

Just when you’d think an unattractive story couldn’t get much uglier, this tame moose, who has since learned to eat doughnuts and Snickers bars, became a media darling, and when Fish and Wildlife officials made it clear that there were policy and biosecurity issues with the interspecies contact and the continuing violation of public doctrine, Pete got a Facebook page and a silly and sentimental following of people who couldn't tell the difference between a wild creature and a domesticated one.

“Saving” Pete has now became a politicized rallying cry, mostly coming from the throats of people who fail to see that he was doomed from the get-go—first by dogs, then by his removal from the environment he was designed to live or die in, and then by being hand-fed junk food that isn't good for people, much less a creature designed to live on browse. And, as you can see from the photo, he has also lost any adaptive, necessary fear of humans.

As the chair of Fish and Wildlife put it, “This is just wrong in so many ways.”

Beyond the story of Pete qua Pete, a lot of so-called animals lovers can't seem to grasp a second issue, which is that there are real risks to putting cervids—deer, elk, and mule deer—into enclosures, since this concentrates the risk of a certain transmissible spongiform encephalopathy called chronic wasting disease, or CWD. These diseases take a lot of different forms—scrapie in sheep, mad cow disease in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans.

CWD was first identified in 1967 as a disease in captive mule deer at the Colorado Division of Wildlife Foothills Wildlife Research Facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, and it has since spread, mostly through exports of captive elk, as far east as New York and north into Canada. There is no treatment, and the disease reaches critical levels quickly when populations of cervids are concentrated and enclosed—from 50 to 90 percent in research and unfair-chase game reserves in places like Nebraska and Colorado.

To my considerable delight, one of the behind-closed-doors legislators mentioned earlier, Susan Bartlett, has opted to run for governor, and this has given your correspondent the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to write grumpy letters to the editors of the statewide newspapers and also write large checks (for me) to the Fish and Wildlife Trust Fund. I’m also watchdogging a possible constitutional challenge to this action, and will probably separate myself from a bit more money to help pay for that as well.

This is all about politics, Pete is toast, and I’m very clear in my own mind about who’s to blame.

Is it Eggs McMuffin or Egg McMuffins?

2010-06-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

Forming a satisfactory plural can be harder than you think. Is it Eggs McMuffin or Egg McMuffins?

One the one hand, it looks like a crossover from eggs Benedict--a French construction, I think, like attorneys general. And since it's taking that borrowed form of putting the noun first and the adjective second, then that Frenchy rule should probably apply. And I think it's clear that the egg is a kind of McMuffin, not the McMuffin a kind of egg.

But then on the other hand it seems like the whole item, Egg McMuffin, is tightly glued together, and may actually be a compound noun that is inseparable despite the misleading space--so maybe it's *not* like eggs Benedict and needs to be Egg McMuffins.

So I write them both on a piece of paper and look at them for a long time, and I even go to the McDonald's web site to what Ray Croc (may he rest in peace) thinks it is. The McDonald's people avoid the plural as much as possible, but when they use it they say Egg McMuffins, which doesn't mean it's right, it's just what they say, and in the end I can't decide. But it's an interesting accidental fold in the language, since the two ways of doing it are equally clear and equally valid. That's rare.

(Oddly, the number of eggs in this plural is immaterial--it's always "scrambled eggs" or "eggs Benedict" even if there's only one egg in there. But then when you have eggs for lunch, the rule seems to change--egg salad, for example. That's interesting too.)

I concede that Eggs McMuffin (Egg McMuffins) are weird and oily and not good for your insides, but I had more fun with this chain of thought than I ever have with the web site I manage at work or worrying about whether the hundred-pound gloss I'm using for a print handout is better than the flimsy card stock that costs about the same. This also tells you more about how my brain works than anybody needs to know.

Killer transportation

2010-06-11T08:26:00.000-07:00

In January of 2001, a young man named Eugene Hunter shot and killed his mother in their shared home in Wells, Vermont, population about 1200, near the New York border and south of Lake Champlain. The back story was sad--the savagery of the matricide aside, it was obvious that Eugene was nuts at the time of his mother's death. His sister told police that her brother, 23 at the time, thought the Mafia was looking for him. He was afraid to go outside, and when he wasn't holed up in his room he would often roam the house searching for enemies he was sure were there, hiding.

Eugene was arrested and immediately put in the state hospital--there was little question he was both guilty and psychotic.

Then, as often happens with stories like these, a whole lot of time goes by. In late winter your correspondent and honorable husband decide it's time to upgrade the kitchen, which means spending a lot of money, and we decide to sell a handsome Nissan pickup that we bought in 2005. We've never used it as much as we thought we would, and, since we both work most of the time at home, we don't really need a second car. The ad runs in late May, both in the local papers and on line.

Eugene Hunter calls from a place that caller ID pinpoints as Copley House; he's interested in the truck and wonders if it's been sold. We run through the usual stuff--the truck's condition, the age of the tires, the mileage, all that stuff. An unremarkable transaction on every level except for one minor point--he can't just come over and look at the truck because he will need to arrange a ride. "I'm not sure when that will happen," he says, so I give him directions and explain that someone is here almost all the time--I tell him to call ahead just to make sure the truck isn't out trucking around because I'd hate to have him waste a trip from Morrisville.

Eugene calls again that evening and talks again to honorable husband. As far as I can tell, the call is a near-perfect clone of the first call, except it's Vince doing the explaining.

Eugene calls again two days later to say he hopes he can get a ride on Thursday; I give to phone to honorable husband since it's his truck after all. The next day, Eugene calls again and we learn that Thursday won't work after all.

By now I've had enough incoming calls from this Copley House whatever-it-is to be curious, and a quick web search reveals that this is a group care facility in Morristown that looks like it was built at the turn of the century--it has a lumbering turret and a massive porch and three different kinds of exterior shingles. All the pictures and copy indicate it's a place for old people who have dementias, and I figure Eugene is on staff. On the phone he sounds sort of young, and Vince and I decide he may work in the kitchen or in maintenance or something and walk up to work from town.

But I am nosy. I Google people who attract my attention for some reason. Often this leads to uninteresting results, but not always, and this is how I learn about Eugene's past and about his mother. I also learn that, back in November, Eugene was ruled competent to stand trial and released from the state hospital to an undisclosed secure location. There's a black-and-white photo of Eugene's mother with the story and she looks nice, pretty but a little tired at the same time. She took care of her hair.

Our decision point on Eugene Hunter passes almost immediately--Vince and I don't think there's any obvious problem with selling a pickup to a psychotic murderer, and that he seems a nice enough fellow on the phone. "Just don't piss him off," I joke, "and don't imply that someone is following you or anything along those lines." Vince has five or six years of mental hospital staff work under his belt, plus a degree in psychology, and he explains that Eugene will probably be fine since he's got keepers and medications. The meds, he says, really do control the symptoms but also flatten the person out and make them seem off, disconnected, and tired. We spend half an hour talking about how devastating schizophrenia can be, how painful it is for the person who has it, and the people we've known whose lives have been ruined by it.

Fast forward about four days: Eugene arrives with a driver-cum-keeper. He's a stubby fellow who looks older than his mid-thirties, with a large beard and a habit of looking mostly at the ground. But he really looks at the truck, carefully, and he likes what he sees--his keeper retires to the car they arrive in and lets Eugene talk to Vince on his own.

After just a a few preliminaries, it becomes obvious that Eugene wants this truck--he has no plans to look at any other vehicles once he's seen this one. He doesn't have his license, just a learner's permit, and says he wants Vince to test-drive the truck for him while he sits in the passenger seat.

Off they go, but on an unfortunate route--they end up clogged up in a road-repair mess on the Paine Turnpike, sitting for many long minutes while a stretch of paving gets rolled flat, and Vince says it was a little bit uncomfortable but my husband is very poised. They fill the time talking in a general way about mileage and winter handling, and Vince runs an orange light just going to red on the way home. He makes a joke about breaking the law and sort of regrets it later.

When they finally get back, Eugene looks at the ground and looks at the truck, but he doesn't make eye contact with either of us. But he clearly covets the truck, and reluctantly accepts that he must shake hands with us to put the first seal on the deal. Then he asks if we can keep the truck in our driveway until he can get it registered and insured and pass his test and actually drive it. We say sure.

Two days ago, Eugene came (with a keeper) to the house to deliver the check; it's for the full asking price, and oddly there was never any discussion or haggling on this point. It's also a treasurer's check, the reliable kind. Eugene's driver explains that, while they're in Montpelier, they will get insurance and go to the DMV, so they may have new plates by the close of business. Would it be okay if they came back then and switched out the plates? And then, once Eugene has his license, they will come and get it.

I have an idea: "What if we bring it up to you once the plates are on? It's no big deal to do that, and it just seems like once you've paid for it, it's yours, and you should have it. Would that work on your end?"

For the first time since we've been face to face, Eugene looks at me, then Vince. "You'd do that?"

"Sure. I mean we're happy to store it for a while, but if you have it at your place you can practice driving it on your permit and take your test in it. Or just sit in it and listen to the radio or something."

"You'd do that?" he asks again. He has brown eyes, flat and lusterless, and gray streaks in his big beard.

"How about this evening? If you've got plates by then, there's no reason not to."

Eugene and his keeper exchange a look and the keeper gives a short little nod.

Eugene says, "Thank you." It's a short, strange moment--my radar tells me that this change in plan gives Eugene an actual moment of power over something in his life. He looks at both of us again and, once we confirm the timing and the details, he willingly shakes hands. He doesn't offer to, but he's willing.

As I follow Vince in what is now Eugene's truck to Morrisville, I try to think about what it might be like to be Eugene, and my imagination fails me. I just can't do it. I am heartily sorry for Eugene's mother, but my prayers are for Eugene. I am suddenly worried about whether Eugene will be required to go to trial now that he's been judged sane. He should be tried, our society requires it, but for a lot of complicated, confusing reasons that I can't locate, I'm bothered by the thought of all those courtroom people looking at him. Guilty as I'm sure he is, he hasn't earned that.

A few bricks short of a load

2010-06-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

The past four days have been gobbled up by the technical support service at the University of Vermont, the medium-sized land grant where the USDA program I work for is housed.

The adventure begins in March, when my work desktop, which I didn't use much because I mainly work at home, died after one of those automatic updates corrupted something important. I swiftly decided that even if the six-year-old desktop could be fixed (not a sure thing), this was the right moment to get a dedicated work laptop--I've been struggling because it's very hard to keep my files in sync when I move around from place to place.

I looked through what the campus computer depot had for sale, and went many times around the barn with them about wanting a CD drive. They told me I didn't want one, not really, and I said that I did, really, since I routinely install at lot of graphics and layout software and tend to save out very large files to CDs for transport and output and safekeeping.

"But," I was told, "you can download all the software you need from our archives!" I looked in the archives, which offered all the usual Microsoft stuff, an Adobe Reader, and a web browser with an e-mail utility laid on.

"You're kidding, right?" I said. "Please--I just want a laptop with a CD drive. That's not a strange thing to want."

"But you don't need one!" they said.

I finally persuaded them to order me what I wanted and paid for it. Seven rather long weeks go by.

When the laptop finally arrives, I pick it up and bring it home to load my stuff--my graphics and layout software--only to learn that I don't have the administrative privileges needed to do that. Or anything else for that matter--I couldn't even delete the cutesy beauty shots of campus the computer gods installed and made into a little slide-show-cum-screen-saver. I sent an e-mail asking how to walk around this and was told I could download all the software I would ever need from the archives.

"So," I said, "who is in charge down there? Could you please put that person on the phone?"

"I don't like your tone," she said. "I'm just trying to be helpful."

"It's not good enough to try," I said. "Succeeding is what matters."

After a half a dozen more plaintive calls and e-mails, I was grudgingly told by a person the next rank higher how to walk around this issue by switching users and using the serial number of the machine to act as an administrator--cumbersome but better than nothing. I spent half a day loading my software, getting rid of some of the junk that was pre-loaded, and deleting the silly slide show.

I then brought up Word to work on a document, only to be told, to my amazement, that the pre-installed and pre-configured Microsoft Office that was part of the purchase wasn't activated. It was useless.

Another call: "You need to be logged into the campus network," I was told. "It will authenticate itself as soon as that happens."

"I am," I said. I was.

"Well, it can't be a wireless connection."

"I'm logged in over a DSL line."

"But you're not on campus. You'll have to come to campus and log in from here."

I hadn't quite realized there were magical properties to the campus lines, so off I went to Burlington, 40 miles away. The activation didn't work from my tiny, windowless office, so I took the machine into the computer depot and hitched myself up to one of their magical DSL lines (superficially identical to the DSL line I use at home), and finally got authenticated. But while I was at it, I perversely decided to delete all the university administrator accounts, leaving only myself in charge, and left. I figure if the computer ever needs any intervention from tech support, it will be their turn to call me.

Four solid days.

Redefining cruelty

2010-05-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

For more than 50 years, the Heifer Project has worked to feed humans by distributing animals—-chickens, rabbits, cows, guinea pigs, sheep, and other creatures—-to needy individuals and families. In terms of spreading the misery of animal agriculture around the world, the Heifer Project is a champion. ...

First, as with all animal agriculture, the process of creating a pound of edible flesh involves feeding many more pounds of plant food and grain to the animal before he or she is slaughtered. It’s hardly an efficient method of producing food.

Second, the animals are not raised on factory farms, so they often graze in the neighboring area, which results in the loss of habitat for nondomesticated animals and furthers the extinction of other animal species.

from: http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/heifer-veg.html

Well whaddaya know.

Is it categorically bad for humans to eat meat? In some ways, this is a little bit little bit like wondering whether it's bad to have an abortion, and whether one life should be treasured above another. But the similarity is actually superficial--relations among members of the same species is very different from relations among different ones.

A lot of ink, both real and virtual, has been spilled around this and a few adjacent questions, and often the vegetarian argument hinges on the conditions found on farms. People--invariably people who have not spent much time on commercial farms--announce that these conditions are bad: They fret over mud or crowding or cage construction, and because I work in an agency that serves the farm community, I know some of those concerns are not just legitimate but urgent. Self-interest alone should galvanize us to focus on animal health--when we don't, we risk salmonella, e.coli, giardia, and mad cow disease.

But a lot of these concerns are sentimental and projective. Cattle, for example, are herd and prey animals, and if you watch them carefully you see that they don't react badly when they get squished together, especially when they're uneasy--the lion is less likely to eat a given individual when there's a large and potentially dangerous group as opposed to a vulnerable individual. This reaction probably has adaptive elements in common with schooling behavior in fish.

But because humans don't like being squished, most humans assume that squishing is unpleasant--the underlying assertion is that all creatures have the same standards of comfort and discomfort that we do. (I can't resist adding that one common result of raising "cage free" eggs is that removing the cages makes room for more chickens per square inch. Since I don't know a whole lot about chickens, it's hard to be confident about the chickens' position on this purported improvement in their living conditions.)

We make the same category error when managing non-farm animals, sometimes with very bad results. Is it cruelty to feed a dog human food? Since dogs have digestive systems very different from ours, I think it is--some dog owners poison their much-loved companion animals because they think chocolate is a key food group and the dog is missing out if it's not on the menu. And to make matters worse, most dogs like sweets for the same reasons we do--they offer access to compressed calories.

But choloate also contains theobromine, which is a neurotoxin in canines, and even a small amount can trigger heart arrhythmia and seizures. The even wider human habit of feeding table scraps to dogs not only encourages begging, but inserts in the dog the processed, sweet, salty, and nutritionally ambiguous foods we humans often eat. Yet this is never labeled for what it is--animal cruelty.

The Heifer Project is one of my favorite charities--it opens doors of self-sufficiency and boosts the human enterprise by giving third-world farmers access to improved strains of domestic livestock, selectively bred--in humans we call this eugenics--to produce a more edible product and more technophilic offspring. And is that cruelty? No, it's not.

PETA piper

2010-05-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of PETA people outside the Westminster Dog Show back in February, all dressed up to make a really good impression.

The message, as I half-understand it, is that dogs shows are bad, but the symbolism here seems ambiguous at best. I wasn't there to pick up one of the flyers--I lived in New York long enough to know I won't be going back--so it's not at all clear who the Klan outfit is directed at.

It's apparently not all that clear to PETA, either--according to their own news release, the Halloween outfits are meant to convey the idea that the AKC sounds the "death knell for many beautiful, healthy, and loving dogs whose lives end at animal shelters. Shelters do their best to help the millions of animals dumped on their doorsteps every year, but life in a cage is no life for a dog, and euthanasia becomes a sad necessity."

But wait--if that's their position, doesn't it follow that the white sheet and hood are on the wrong side of the door? Aren't the people on the inside of the building the oppressors, the sworn enemies of shelter dogs everywhere? Something's gone horribly wrong here, unless--let me see--could this actually be about a photo op, and the siren allure of getting above the fold of tomorrow's paper?

Which worked: The story made USA Today, the LA Times, and NBC, to name a few.

But, to be frank, launching ad hominem attacks on the people who are involved with PETA is just too easy--we can chant in unison that Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, is personally responsible for killing 23,000 shelter animals in a single 18-month period, while finding homes for eight.

Or we can point out that PETA has gotten into legal trouble in Virginia for illegally dumping dead shelter animals.

Or we can laugh at the PETA initiative to rename fish "sea kittens" on the theory that people won't eat a creature with a cute name.

But if we want intelligence injected into the debate about right relations with other creatures, PETA has not earned a place at the table. And, if my poking around on both sides of the story is accurate, the supposedly more middle-of-the-road Humane Society of the United States hasn't either.

My point here is that throwing stones at tempting targets (this is code for "people I don't agree with"), is pointless--name-calling only freezes people more firmly into their positions, even if they know those positions are illogical and untenable, sea kittens on dry land. I'd much rather focus on the disagreement itself. Like the snappy little dog described in an earlier entry, that is where the rubber meets the road.

once bitten

2010-05-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I was waiting for something else to happen and watched a woman with a small dog get her wrist bitten. She deserved it--people who get bitten generally do--but what was interesting about the transaction was her complete surprise and her apparent inability to see life from another creature's point of view.

Here's what happened: The setting was an urban (well, sort of urban) campus, and it was a warm day between classes--the sidewalks were very full. Even from about 500 feet away, I could see the little dog was signaling a lot of unambiguous anxiety about the crowding, the feet, the bicycles, and the periodic outbreaks of humans running with Frisbees. Whenever some new alarm was raised, the dog would flatten its ears and half-lower its rump, pulling backward on the leash, and the human on the other end would pull the dog forward. They progressed at a snail's pace down the block, slowed by anxiety on one end of the string, exasperation on the other.

When the pair came to the crosswalk, the woman reached down to pick the dog up and presumably carry it safely across the busy street, and this is when the bite occurred--just as she moved to get one hand under the dog's ribcage while the other hand was flapping around, busy with winding the slack of the leash around her palm. Suddenly a balky, worried little dog became a biting dog, a frantic bundle of defensive rage. The dog latched on to the woman's wrist, just for a second, but with the momentum of sheer panic. I'm sure it hurt, even if the dog was diminutive, and this hurt escalated when the dog got thwacked fairly hard for misbehaving--an event that probably reinforced the original message that humans do unpredictable, hurtful things with their strange appendages.

Why does our species find it so easy to disregard clear signals from other creatures? Episodes like this are a form of cruelty that seem to be off the radar of people active in the animal-rights movement, perhaps because so many people in the movement don't seem to know very much about canine or other species behavior. Yes, PETA, puppy mills are bad, and you can take a picture of how very bad they are, but I argue that this is worse.

If a dog has rights, then one of them is to be understood, especially when the dog is yelling at us, as loud as possible, at the top of a pair of tiny lungs.

a slave in the fields of the lord

2010-04-17T09:18:00.000-07:00

"This is interesting that you say farmed animals 'enjoy' a relationship with man... As if they are willing subjects to the enslavement and eventual permanent end/use of their bodies. And while the goal might be to 'protect them from predators' we forget that man is the most 'successful' predator of them all."

--comment posted here, April 11

Domesticated animals are not slaves--slavery is a purely human construct. They are animals of various species who have chosen the path of technophilia--otherwise, they would be impossible to domesticate.

Not all technophiles are domesticated--rats, mice, certain wasps, raccoons, bats, white-tailed deer, and that endless parade of carpenter ants in my back shed all feel the pull of the man-made environment, but they aren't domesticated. Instead, we classify them as pests. Are they to be classified as slaves as well? Seems like some very loaded and disapproving language to use for creatures who have a liking for human waste, human food, and human infrastructure.

As predators go, man is barely adequate--we don't stack up well against lions or sharks, that's for sure. But predation is morally neutral, and in many species an absolute requirement: Most predators have digestive systems that requite they eat meat and nothing else. What's difficult, and not neutral, is the real root of our species' success. We are omnivores, with scavenging and predation in the mix, and this has helped nurture our apparently endless flexibility. It is this flexibility that has gotten us into no end trouble--it's our chief adaptation and our default behavior, and lies at the heart of a lot of very hard problems.

"For me, the crux of it is that killing/eating animals is not necessary for human health. Indeed the more we learn the more it's understood we can thrive on a plant based diet. So the question becomes... If we don't 'need' to place 10 billion animals inside of warehouses and slaughterhouses... Why do it at all?"

--same comment, same date

Does it really matter whether people can get adequate nutrition without eating meat? I don't eat meat, and I don't think it matters. It's not a moral position for me, although others sometimes use vegetarianism as a propellent for their self-regard. And it's not a question of doing or not doing something--it's a question of understanding that having right relations with other creatures requires thought, humility, and an understanding of evolutionary constraints and evolutionary behavior.

What does matter is that almost everyone I have engaged with in the animal-rights movement seems to be amazingly short on hands-on, in-depth knowledge of how different species behave, react, and are profoundly different from each other. This includes an ignorance of how the human species really operates, since we, too, are animals.

To speak broadly of "animals" as a class that includes any being that isn't us is morally unacceptable. We're in this together--bears, dogs, bees, elephants, menhaden, rats, grasshoppers, penguins, and humans--and we need to be able to tell each other apart.

more than one kind of difference

2010-04-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

"What place should non-human animals have in an acceptable moral system? ... [P]ublic outrage is strong when knowledge of 'puppy mills' is made available; the thought here is that dogs deserve much more consideration than the operators of such places give them. However, when it is pointed out that the conditions in a factory farm are as bad as, if not much worse than, the conditions in a puppy mill, the usual response is that those affected are 'just animals' after all, and do not merit our concern."

--From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Boy. For a fairly snooty academic web site, it's hard to believe you can run across something as airheaded as this.

The status of puppy mills versus factory farming has nothing compelling to with the conditions as conditions, but has much more to do with the fact that dogs and people have signed a mutual aid contract that is durable, complex, and weirdly symbiotic. So yes, a puppy mill, by definition, is far more alarming to people than a factory farm. Farm animals enjoy a very different kind of arrangement--they are normally raised, and protected from predators and illness, just long enough to be milked, have their eggs stolen, and then be killed and eaten.

There's something implicitly wrong with the a phrase like "non-human animals," as if the only thing that's knowable or important about the many species sharing our planet is that they aren't like us, thus rendering all animals basically the same. It's an appealing construct because it lets us be lazy--now other creatures can be talked about generically, as if a raccoon and a blue jay were interchangeable.

But it doesn't take much real-world, hands-on experience to know how bogus this position is. Because not only are different species animals different from us, they are also wildly different from each other, and, what's more, the difference between a raccoon and a blue jay is a different kind of difference than the difference between that same blue jay and and a Great Dane.

The more I read what the ethics community writes about our right relations with other creatures, the more I think that having an advanced degree in philosophy is a serious impediment to coherent thought. I'm not anti-academia, not at all--I'm ABD in literature and treasure the many important things I now know about how language works. What I don't treasure, and feel a need to fight, is the complete absence of clarity in the animal-rights train of ideas.

The earworm of the Easter Rising

2010-04-03T13:05:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning vaguely aware that Easter is tomorrow, but the truth is that Easter has very little traction for me--I like biting the heads off peeps with Nick, but after that Easter's over. But that song, that terrible, beautiful song about the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin has haunted me all day.

One of the most damaging, thrilling, and upsetting renditions of "Foggy Dew" is by Sinead O'Connor--the tune is borrowed from "Foggy Foggy Dew" (yes, there is a difference of exactly one "foggy") and the lyrics were written by some fellow named Charles O'Neil, at least according to the stuff laying around in the music room.

I don't know from Charles O'Neill, but he wrote wonderfully well about what happened in Dublin during that Easter week, and in particular what the conflict sounded like. He says:

As down the glen one Easter morn to a city fair rode I
There armed lines of marching men in squadrons passed me by
No pipe did hum, no battle drum did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus Bell o'er the Liffey's swell rang out through the foggy dew.

I like that--the muffled secrecy of the advance, the treachery and secrecy, followed by the tongue of the bell, the call to decency, faith, and prayer. Later on he says:

Oh the night fell black, and the rifles' crack made perfidious Albion reel
In the leaden rain, seven tongues of flame did shine o'er the lines of steel
By each shining blade a prayer was said, that to Ireland her sons be true
But when morning broke, still the war flag shook out its folds in the foggy dew

Sinead left this stanza out of her version, so I didn't know it even existed until today, but reading the lyrics confirmed that this lament is all about what was heard as much as what happened. Think I'm making this up? How about:

Oh the bravest fell, and the Requiem bell rang mournfully and clear
For those who died that Eastertide in the spring time of the year.

There's that bell again, but not the Angelus this time.

So "Foggy Dew" is today's earworm, that song that will not leave you alone, and it's time to just accept that it's going to play in the background for the rest of the afternoon, perhaps into the evening.

Here's an odd, contradictory detail: I know that the Angelus is the thrice-daily prayer that faithful Catholics say to remember the incarnation, and I'll add quickly that, for a Quaker, I seem to know more than I should about Catholicism, but we'll leave that problem for some other day. And here's the contradiction--I have another idea that the Anglus isn't actually part of the prayer cycle during Holy Week. (Where do we learn these things? From novels? Probably The Nine Tailors, but sheesh.)

The song ends with a rewind, with the narrator going home once the carnage is over--

Back through the glen I rode again and my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men whom I never shall see more
But to and fro in my dreams I go and I kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, when you fell in the foggy dew.

Happy Easter.

losing my grip

2010-03-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

About six years ago I started losing my grip in a perfectly literal way--I began dropping things and wrestling with can openers and fasteners, and using my teeth on what seemed to me excess and impenetrable wrapping. Like these creepy, individually wrapped bananas (courtesy of treehugger)it seems like the packaging is meant to define its contents in what is sometimes an unhealthy way.

I found out later that the underlying issue with my grip was neurological, but that's not the point. Isn't there something a little weird about a culture that seems to value packaging above what's inside? And no, this isn't just another consumer tirade about bubble packs, although they are horrid. Because what I realized, as soon as a package morphed into a serious barrier to use, is that we actually use consumer wrappings to accelerate desire and simultaneously inspire dislike for a new purchase.

It's a strange dynamic--you buy something, presumably because you want it or need it, but by the time you've penetrated the protective shell, the new thing is sadly diminished. Partly it's the extra work, but it's also the resentment that the work is necessary--I mean, you paid for the thing, so why should it be inaccessible? Frustration poisons the reason for the purchase, and you (by this I mean me) begin to have doubts about individual judgment. And it's chiefly this false sense of weakness that triggers another purchase.

Color me stupid

2010-03-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

I recently got an e-mail from someone who disagrees with me about PETA and is genuinely, relentlessly upset about the plight of the New York City carriage horses. She cited last year’s comments from New York Governor David Paterson, who advocates banning the practice of using horses in the city. He said: “These animals are kept in stables that are too small, often they're cold, they work long hours and they don't have time off. … There was a horse about three months ago that got his foot caught on a parking meter and had to be destroyed—it's awful.”

Yes, it’s awful, and yes, I’ve seen horrible accidents involving horses, sometimes with death resulting. Sometimes riders die as well, and I am firmly in the Jim Wofford camp of doing everything we can think of to make equine sports safer for people and animals—three-day eventing makes racing on the flat look downright benign, and the chief difference is that eventing accidents tend to be on the radar of people who spend a lot of time managing, training, and participating in the sport—in a nutshell, people who may or may not be ethical but who at least have their heads wrapped around what the transaction called eventing consists of.

PETA says, “An animal’s inability to understand and adhere to our rules is as irrelevant as a child’s or as that of a person with a severe developmental disability.”

This raises the legitimate question, never asked by PETA, of what the rules are and who makes them in the horse-human relationship. Horses are not helpless, nor are they children with a developmental disability. They are horses. They are very strong. Anyone who thinks that responsible training between horse and rider has any relationship with coercion has clearly never tried to bully a horse, because it can’t be done—I’ve been handling horses all my life, and know firsthand that man proposes, horse disposes.

PETA also claims, based on no evidence I can see, that “animals are not always able to choose to change their behaviors, but adult human beings have the intelligence and ability to choose between behaviors that hurt others and behaviors that do not hurt others.” I reject this—domestic animals choose, refine, and selectively deploy different behaviors all the time. When I can’t catch my horse, I know my horse is expressing an opinion that I need to internalize and repair; when my horse approaches me apparently willingly but in a too-straight line (horses always travel in arcs, and so do good handlers), then I need to spend time on building our partnership and our mutual cooperation.

Color me stupid, but I submit that the governor of New York knows nothing about the species and what triggers certain behaviors. This doesn’t mean he’s not wrong about any individual carriage horse in the city, who may be poorly housed or not kept in good condition, but it does mean that a horse that got a foot caught on something is a horse with a catastrophic problem. Horses are prey animals, and this means they are obsessed with the status of their feet; when their feet are in danger, they are programmed to do everything in their power to find a remedy, even if it means they die trying. But the other side of the ledger is that they also hand their feet over willingly to us people for trimming, picking, shoeing, and routine inspection; this insight seems to be something outside the understanding of the e-mailer, the governor, or people who claim to know something about interspecies ethics.

agnosia, aphasia, and adventures in Chicagoland

2010-03-19T06:23:00.001-07:00

I just returned from a longish visit to the suburbs of Chicago and my eyes still hurt from so many days of having nothing whatsoever to look at. Downtown Chicago interests me, and Oak Park really interests me, but once you get out to places like Romeoville, where we were, there's simply nothing but nonstop generica.

It struck me that all the directions anyone gave us seemed to involve turning left (or right) at a CVS. And all the CVS installations looked exactly like this, and they were all, invariably, across the intersection from a bank that looked suspiciously like a CVS, and one of these banks was named, in consummate generica-speak, the "Third Fifth Bank." No fooling.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation defines sense of place as "Those things that add up to a feeling that a community is a special place, distinct from anywhere else." This distinction is what gives us identity; the tragedy of the Chicago suburbs is that the gobbling-up of farmland for CVS-style development has resulted in an endless, interchangeable strip of nothing at all.

I'm not exaggerating, not even a little: This sameness has penetrated and overtaken everything, to the point where there are not even place names that offer any traction to the mind. They all seem to come from some depraved developer database that combines words and ideas in a kind of weird, Prozac-induced interchangeability: Bay Meadow, Meadowlark Run, Woodlands Glen. Give these a good shake and all you get is more of the same: Meadowlark Bay, Woodlands Run, and Meadow Glen. And the bay has no water, the run has no path or rill or any feature other than a flat, straight access road, and as for glen, forget it.

At one point we drove past a structure with a flat roof and a shortage of windows that was named, alarmingly, General Memorial Hospital. I don't want to criticize, but I have to--for a species that supposedly named all the animals, we've fallen very far indeed when we evoke a general memory of hospitals and think we've done something meaningful. It made me eager to come home to Vermont, where we have a Frog City, a Tommy Squatter, a No Nothing, and a rocky, infertile, useless lump on the landscape known as Government Hill.

I'd walk a mile

2010-03-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

Another friend, Sophia, sent me this picture. That's a poodle, in case you're wondering.

The poodle's owner says on her web site, "For those who are overly concerned about the dogs emotions. Cindy loves the attention. She will prance around and expects your attention." I don't mind that this owner can't punctuate--so few people can--but I refuse to play along with the assumption that a "prancing" dog is by definition a happy dog. It's a dog in motion.

About ten years ago, I locked horns with an animal-rights activist who didn't approve of my tendency to ride my horse at every opportunity. He said it was coercive and artificial; his working definition of animal rights seemed to be that humans should have no contact with animals at all--a position born of ignorance.

Horses were first domesticated on the Eurasian steppes in about 4000 B.C.E. Domestication, always, is a contract between two species, and it's only a certain small number of species who are willing to sign on. And domesticated animals are, in a broad sense, all technophiles--they tend to adapt to and even seek out human environments.

Of course not all technophiles are domesticated--if they're not, we call them pests. A rat is profoundly technophilic; skunks, bears, and deer are also great admirers of human infrastructure, especially vegetable gardens, dumps, and bird feeders.

When we work or live around domesticated animals, we enter a different moral realm, where we have an obligation to understand the contract and know where interests intersect. The animal is there for a reason, and so are you, but these reasons don't always align perfectly; horses are herd and prey animals who will bargain away quite a lot to escape a tiger, but they are unwilling to cast off their options to kick, bite, or vacate the premises as needed. A thoughtful owner concedes these points, internalizes them, and works with them. A really thoughtful owner celebrates and studies the horsiness of horses, always on the lookout for new points of agreement.

Dogs actually occupy a singular niche in the human moral scheme, since there is good evidence that we didn't domesticate them at all--they domesticated us. This interesting point aside, the ligature between dogs and people is durable, complex, and ancient: A burial site in Germany called Bonn-Oberkassel has joint human and dog interments dating to 14,000 B.C.E. To put that in context, there were still mammoths wandering around Great Britain at about the same time, and we've been revising and attaching addenda to the contract ever since. But we still have an absolute obligation, despite the long connection, of internalizing the dogginess of dogs--they aren't camels, and when they fidget or show discomfort they are not "prancing for attention."

I'll stop now, but it won't take much to get me fired up again.

decorate your dog today

2010-03-05T07:54:00.000-08:00

My friend Bob Frost sent me this picture after my temper tantrum about the costume class at horse shows last month. This picture, and maybe twenty others of the same stripe, not one of which assured me that pet ownership is headed in a good direction.

According to the breed standards for beagles from the AKC, beagles are trailing hounds whose purpose is to find game. "All phases of work should be approached eagerly, with a display of determination that indicates willingness to stay with any problem encountered until successful. Actions should appear deliberate and efficient, rather than haphazard or impulsive."

Maybe we need breed standards for humans--this certainly qualifies as haphazard and impulsive, although the expense and obsessiveness required to do this does indicate a certain willingness to see a project through to the bitter end.

I resent and dislike the PETA people--it's clear from what they say and do that most of them have had no direct experience with handling, training, or communicating with animals. Worse, most can't tell the practical or moral difference between a wild animal and a domesticated one. I can, and this is unethical.

I'll take one of everything

2010-02-26T11:09:00.000-08:00

This morning I drove east and south to Corinth, Vermont, to continue my hunt for the beams we need for a major kitchen renovation. Tillotson's, an architectural salvage operation on the left side of the road heading toward Bradford, made me weak with pleasure; I've never seen so many doors,windows, floorboards, grilles, knobs, hinges, doodads, you-name it, all in one place.

Customers are allowed to wander through what seems like an infinity of buildings (although I learned that this spring they are erecting yet another storage barn), each with its own category of surprises--this section is all fascia and trim (several miles of it), over there are the windows, clear and stained, in here plinths and columns, around the back the wide floorboards and the fire surrounds, to say nothing of the sinks, the boxes of hardware, and enough beadboard to finish off a medium-sized colony of summer houses.

I found and bought my beams but couldn't leave, and the longer I was there the happier I got--I wanted to take one of everything and cobble together for myself a shed, a gazebo, a fence, a funky, drafty greenhouse. I even wanted the doorknobs for pete's sake already-- even though as far as I know I have the right number of doorknobs at home.

All this abundance is surrounded by the default but trademark Vermont silence--the only sounds were the ones I was making as I slithered between piles of window trim, shutters, and newel posts. The anxious little patter song that seems to run forever in my head simply stopped, along with my sense of elapsed time; I got there about ten and emerged in the early afternoon. I'm already looking forward to going back to Tillotson's--it's been a while since I have been so thoughtlessly happy, caught up in an unmediated and uncomplicated joy in the things we make that are poised to be used again.

my first haircut

2010-02-21T10:33:00.000-08:00

What do we know when we are in first grade?

Here's what I knew at about the time this picture was taken: My mother and father liked to drink, mostly to excess, and that they each had streaks of cruelty running through them, though of different sorts. My father was a pedophile, and this was back when that kind of behavior wasn't challenged--what a man did to his children in his own home was a man's business. My mother was at once timid and neglectful, trapped between my father's predatory sexual desires and the demands of having produced four children in two and a half years. She didn't have the energy or the sobriety needed to protect even herself, and most of my early memories of her seemed to be marked by her walking away, turning away, driving away, or just being away, inaccessibly drunk.

She was around for my first haircut, though. As you can tell from the picture, I started first grade with pigtails, and one of the household chores was untangling yesterday's braids and putting in today's. I knew, the way children do know, that she disliked the task of brushing and rebraiding, and disliked me for being the source of so much useless, repetitive labor. I didn't help matters much--I tended to squirm and whine from the start of this ritual until the bitter end--and one morning about halfway through this process she took by the wrist me into the kitchen, got out the blunt, all-purpose scissors used for snipping up chives and opening packages, and simply cut the two braids off. "There," she said. "I guess that settles that." She put the amputated, unraveling ropes of hair into the trash, showed me her back, and went on with whatever mysterious things adults did during the day. I went to school, surprised by the lightness of my new head and mostly unconcerned with my appearance. And I am unconcerned to this day.

We don't know very much in first grade, and I think I knew less than most other first graders, but this transaction bothered me.

hearts in the frozen north, again

2010-02-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

We get a fair bit of snow, and we by-gum know what to do with it. The goal, it seems, it keep us cheerful until Town Meeting Day.

Valentine Phantom in Montpelier

2010-02-14T08:36:00.000-08:00

This annual tradition of plastering hearts all over the capitol makes me love the city a little more each February 14. Nobody knows who's responsible --it's a secret guerrilla operation and we hope it stays that way.

It's a lovely mystery, on a par with the presents left for Edgar Allen Poe, although we hear he didn't get his roses or his cognac this year. We got our red hearts, though, and the crosswalks of Montpelier are filled with people wearing smiles.

Auden and Breugel

2010-02-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

It's possible to be bullied into reading too much poetry--you learn not to care. And it worked because for the most part nobody does, except intermittently.

Still, the first time I read any Auden, it happened to be, "Faces along the bar/Cling to their average day:/The lights must never go out,/The music must always play."

These forgettable-unforgettable lines have traction: Auden is interested in automatic pilot, and neglectfulness, and the soothing and empty properties of doing today what we did yesterday. And yes, today we did what we always do--changed the sheets, did the food shopping, listened to to that junky NPR cooking show on the ride up the hill to the market--all the while wondering privately what kind of catastrophe, exactly, was lying in wait. We are both worried, although I think about slightly different things. When I got home I took the trouble to look up and re-read:

"In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

--Musee des Beaux Arts

it pays to be peculiar

2010-02-07T06:33:00.000-08:00

If you want to live a long time, there is a line of research that hints that it helps to be peculiar. Eccentrics—a rare and perhaps dying breed of humans—go to the doctor once every eight or nine years and have a tendency to live healthy and prolonged lives. These lives, according to an elderly and rumpled back issue of Psychology Today, are free from stress and full of diverting adventures. The symptoms of eccentricity are insatiable curiosity, obsessive but curiously happy preoccupations, the constructive use of solitude, and an absence of that modern plague, stress. Other people almost certainly tell eccentrics to floss, be on time, and chew with their mouths closed, but the eccentrics simply do not listen.

There was once a librarian at the British Museum during the 18th century who was an overcommitted angler: to outwit the fish, he designed a costume “to make himself look more like a tree.” Which makes the reader wonder how much he looked like a tree to begin with; his name, we are told, was Birch. A modern eccentric, Alan Fairweather, is a potato inspector for Scotland’s Department of Agriculture. He lives for potatoes—he talks about them incessantly, eats nothing else, and takes his annual vacation in Peru, the homeland of the potato, so he can study the potato’s, um, roots. Henry Cavendish so disliked having to talk to his domestic staff that he sent them letters; upon meeting a maid accidentally on the stairs, he ordered another whole staircase built. But Cavendish was the same useful citizen who determined that water was not an element but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen.

Clinical neuropsychologist David Weeks sought out and interviewed more than a thousand eccentrics for his 1995 book, Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness. In it, he finds that the incidence of “classic, full-time” eccentricity is only about 1 in 10,000, and that there is an inexplicable concentration of eccentrics in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Or at least he finds it inexplicable; folks in Minnesota would probably blame the weather, which they blame for just about everything, and which is frankly a lot like the weather here.

The health of eccentrics, Weeks thinks, is directly linked to their peculiar brand of happiness—they are marked by resourcefulness and engagement, and follow their impulses without fretting over all the possible consequences. This makes them unpredictable and at times downright annoying, but it also makes them surprisingly tough: Chronic stress, which damages the immune system and triggers depression, is largely absent in eccentrics. And they also have what Weeks calls “positive forms of stress, such as those associated with sex, exercise, and the intellectual excitement of new ideas.” These, he says, tend trigger the release of slightly higher levels of growth hormone, and it is growth hormone that counteracts many of the diseases associated with aging such as osteoporosis and muscle atrophy. “Growth hormone,” he writes, “has also been shown to have a good effect on memory, and eccentrics even tend to look younger than their biological age.”

Because his collection of contemporary eccentrics were all still uncompromisingly alive, Weeks turned to the historical record to investigate longevity. His historical sample of oddballs, which was drawn broadly from 1551 to 1950, revealed that all lived to 60 and beyond—even, and perhaps especially, during the periods when live expectancy was hovering around 35. If it’s true, it’s a remarkable finding—it must be added that Weeks has been criticized for the softness of his data and his tendency to rely on small samples, impressions, and anecdotes. Undaunted, he has gone on to write Secrets of the Superyoung, which explores why some people can show up at their 25th reunion looking wonderful while the rest of us are plump, droopy, or taller than our hair.

The criticism doesn’t really mar the central finding Weeks insists on—a happy breed is a healthy breed, and people who don’t worry about conforming never suffer the side effects of angst. Of course, they may trigger it—living with an eccentric is no doubt exasperating. They hate electricity or love insulation or write long, crackpot essays about clown college or nematodes or tropical fish; the inventor Nikola Tesla had a deadly fear of women wearing pearl earrings and the painter Salvador Dali ate mountains of soft-ripened cheese to enhance his dreams, which is not only eccentric but expensive.

But the bad news is that eccentricity—true eccentricity—is apparently diminishing. It helps to be the first born in a family, upper middle class, and a voracious reader, but despite living in a culture with smaller families, more money, and more books, the breed declines. Or, perhaps, they are merely perfecting their disguises; for all we really know, Mr. Birch may well be thriving, after 300 years, in the English countryside.

Robert Frost once defined a civilized society as one that “tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity”; using this as a yardstick, it’s hard not to wonder if we really are civilized or whether we have decided instead that a little medication will settle everybody down. But to be settled is not always to be happy—or healthy—and too often “settled” means eating cinnamon toast in front of the television. We should cherish our eccentrics when we find them, or when they allow themselves to be found. Fancy cheese is a small price to pay for a Dali; I’ll take the truth about water in exchange for an unnecessary staircase.

the rules of the game

2010-02-05T05:51:00.000-08:00

It's not my place to criticize football, since I don't understand the rules. And I like it that way--every now and then someone decides to correct this defect and begins the Lecture, but I don't listen. I'm 58, and life has gone pretty well up to this point without understanding football. Why risk it?

But I've been on a little jag lately, looking at the things people do to their animals that do not need to be done, and I'm disturbed by this. I do know enough about football to know that they are a common target for a well-placed kick. This outfit has a subtext.

I am not now, not have I ever been, a member of PETA--from reading what the PETA people write, it's obvious that most of them have never had prolonged or meaningful contact with the animal world, and most have no grasp of the important difference between a wild animal and a domesticated one. The difference matters, but we won't go there--it's a good idea not to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the gallon.

It's tempting to wonder, "What were they thinking?" But the real question is "What were they not thinking?", since putting a football outfit on a dog is more about mindlessness than its opposite. People who do things like this invariably insist, sometimes over and over, that the animal "doesn't mind." But the lack of minding isn't coming from a compliant and dependent dog, but from an owner whose neurons aren't firing correctly. After the requisite Super Bowl beers have had time to work their magic, what's the outcome? And what's the dog's position about that?

call me old-fashioned

2010-01-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

I hope this isn't the start of an obsession, but it could be. I mean, if you have a perfectly nice pony, why cover her with cotton balls and pretend she's a sheep? Or a dragon you are setting out to slay?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think horses are fine the way they are, and don't really need much decoration.

a sight for sore eyes, part two

2010-01-30T03:36:00.000-08:00

I've spent my entire life around horses and have never once entered, or understood, the costume class. It's a bit like a cake wreck sung in a different key, in that it seems to evoke hopefulness and wrongheadedness in about equal proportions. And a fashion sense that's just a tad creepy--this picture actually scares me.

ask again later

2010-01-30T02:20:00.000-08:00

Jen Yates, the author of the blog Cake Wrecks, made the metaphorical milk come out my nose this morning with her depictions of what happens when baking and professional sports collide. "Is this a football?" she wonders aloud below the picture to the right. "Ask again later."

Yates has written a book by the same name, and I'm going to buy it--this is one of those topic areas that shows zero promise until someone with the right weaponry aims and fires; life may not be hugely better but it's definitely stranger after you've spent some time looking at the foot-shaped cakes she found, one fully equipped with greenish toenail fungus. Yes, it's gross, but it's also a compelling demonstration of how much thought and attention can be expended on a bad idea. Icing becomes transcendent; or, as one of her followers comments, "Why, why, why do wreckerators do such horrible things with chocolate frosting? I used to like it. Now I just think of poo."

What pleases me most about this particular mess of a cake is the packaging--it's clearly going retail, complete with a price tag. Somebody, somewhere, thinks this is alluring and yes, even purchasable.

death's little brother

2010-01-29T11:01:00.000-08:00

I was trying to read my way through the Atlantic last night--this is one of my substitutes for sleep--and because the Atlantic is often dull I began to think instead about all the stories where sleep is the trigger for transformation. Often not a very nice transformation, but what do we expect? Sleep itself is problematic--it isn't the opposite of wakefulness so much as a dress rehearsal for death.

I have a neurological disorder that is often misunderstood as a sleep disorder, and misunderstood further because it has a stupid name: restless leg syndrome. People who haven't experienced it tend to think it's trivial, but it's not; it's torture. Even with all sorts of nauseating medications, originally developed for people with Parkinson's, I average two to five hours of sleep a night. I once had a sleep study done and the poor sleep-lab tech wore himself to a frazzle re-gluing wires and coping with a squirming, kicking, bumptious subject who produced, according to the report, a whopping 67 minutes of non-REM sleep. Never got to REM because I hardly ever do--apparently I'm not much of a dreamer.

I don't bring this up to snivel, but to notice that in stories sleep tends to be linked with danger--it's when you let your guard down that the slasher intrudes or the spell activates or the golden key gets stolen. These kinds of stories are truthful, and their truthfulness is most apparent at 4:15 a.m.

waiting for the asteroid

2010-01-23T12:50:00.000-08:00

A near-Earth object hurtled past us on Wednesday, with 80,000 miles to spare—this is only about a third of the way between us and the moon. The news reports about this were uniformly reassuring, in that we were told that if it had hit us it wouldn’t have done a huge amount of damage, but I admit I’m just a hair jittery about it—the object was discovered only two days before it came a little too close for comfort.

Space in general gives me the heebie-jeebies—it's big and it does things with physics that I don't understand. I still remember how, in 1994, all sort of things started crashing into Jupiter. Back then, many of us watched this spectacle on the evening news—the comet in question, Shoemaker-Levy 9, disassembled itself into 21 fragments before plummeting into the substantial flank of our largest neighbor, and the explosions spread across the planet like a ghastly string of pearls. The largest piece sent up a plume of crud 1500 miles high and left behind a dark discoloration, a planetary bruise that the newscasters assured us was larger than the Earth. The pummeling went on for six days and became a kind of astronomical TV miniseries—it was hard to tell whether the spectacle was amusing or horrible, but we all wanted to see how it was going to end.

But apparently it hasn’t ended, and won't, and among our many other worries we should probably include a fresh worry about whether something is going to crash into us. If it can happen on Jupiter it can certainly happen here, and the only real question is whether worrying about it will change anything. Probably not: After learning about Wednesday’s near miss, I had a curious impulse to start baking pies, which is lame, but it’s what I’m going to do--if I’m going to get vaporized, I apparently want to do it with flour dribbled down my front.

English as a second language

2010-01-22T08:19:00.001-08:00

This sign raises more questions than it answers. Among others, who the humph is Vicky?

you figure it out

2010-01-22T08:07:00.000-08:00

Here's another sign from Ireland. At first glance it looks like "trick-or-treaters crossing," but what's with the briefcase, the red stripes, and the too-big heads?

You figure it out.

an Irish preoccupation

2010-01-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

We spotted this sign in Ireland and decided it told us a little more about the national driving habits than we needed to know.

avoid at all costs

2010-01-22T07:56:00.001-08:00

Another warning that seems unfair. Is the message "don't mistake the door handle for a wheel"?

unfair warning

2010-01-22T06:56:00.000-08:00

There are plenty of entertaining road signs drifting around in cyberspace, many of them confusing or just stupid, but this one is actually different--it warns of of something that might happen, but no amount of driver diligence can prevent it. If the airplane is going to ricochet off the roof of your car, then that's what the airplane is going to do, and proceeding with caution is not going to change that.

This clearly falls into the category of unfair warning.

the silent record, or things January is good for

2010-01-17T11:20:00.000-08:00

January, according to Chase's Calendar, is Innovative Thinking Month, National Hot Tea Month, and Oatmeal Month, and frankly I'm not seeing much in the way of observance out there. Who among us has stirred the bowl, poured the oolong, and come up with a really cool idea? Of course it's also National Careers in Cosmetology Month, so maybe we've been busy with eyebrows and hair weaves; it's just not possible to do everything at once.

But January is also home to Silent Record Week, which commemorates "the (50th) anniversary of the invention of the silent record, which was played on Detroit jukeboxes." A problematic statement from several angles--if it was silent, then how do we know? Chase goes on to explain, without actually explaining, that in 1931 a "Silent Record Concert and Recording Session featured emcee Henry Morgan, Soupy Sales, and the 120-piece Hush Symphonic Band."

Puzzled, I Googled "silent record" to get details, and learned that a band called the Fiery Furnaces recently announced that they are planning to release a silent album as a response to increased file sharing and downloading, and that the record will come with "musical instruction and sheet music so fans can perform and record their own versions of the songs." Which is innovative, in a millennium-slacker way, and will no doubt inspire the publication of a new wordless book that comes with a plot storyboard and a ball-point pen.

It's a conceptual art thing, and if you don't understand it then just remember--this is not about you.

Leafing ahead to January 17, we see we're not done yet. Today is the anniversary of the 1992 freak gas explosion that rocked a six-block area of Chicago's River West neighborhood and killed four people, and also the date of the 1966 Palomares hydrogen bomb accident over a village in Spain. Kaboom on both counts--so much for the Hush Symphonic Band and all those jukeboxes in Detroit.

And tomorrow, just in case anybody is wondering, is "Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day." I will never again say that January is a month good for nothing but waiting for February to arrive.

my wife lies weeping in the next room

2010-01-16T04:43:00.000-08:00

The past eight mornings there has been a single, often slightly ominous sentence dangling in my forebrain upon waking. This morning's entry was, "My wife lies weeping in the next room and there is nothing I can do."

These are first sentences to a new story, and when they appear I can see the playing cards pop up, all in a row, depicting all the kinds of stories a sentence like this might generate. There's the obvious--the battered woman, the woman in a cage, the woman who has lost a child, the woman poised for flight from comfort and good circumstance. Yesterday's morning entry was, "No one could remember the last time someone came out of the Harrison house, so there was a lot of local excitement because someone was going in." The popped cards on this one all have an odor of decay--we all know, without being told, that disturbing the innards of the Harrison house will be a terrible mistake.

It's amazing how the human instinct for how stories are structured can take a fragment of prose and map out, almost instantly, the narrative consequences--we take this for granted when in fact it's a minor miracle. I think it was A.S. Byatt who once pointed out (in a story, of course), that all stories have already been told and it's a matter of retelling them--although now that I've said that I'm not entirely sure it's true. Her character was at an academic conference about stories, and the topic was Patient Griselda (see upper left), and I think that was something that was said--the point of Griselda is that she outlasts all, that she is immovable in her willingness to wait. The only thing that can defeat her is the story itself, which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

This is the consequence of abandoning a story of my own--one I was caught up in but couldn't control. It's as if my own instinct for story, now left with nothing to do, still spins relentlessly while my back is turned. This is another minor miracle, that the human brain can generate madly without any prompting. But I bring this up because today, for the first time, I had a flash thought about my abandoned manuscript, A Calendar of Saints. Could it be that I understand every sentence I write as the first one, and this is why writing fiction is a hopeless task? That I can't manage middles and ends because I only understand the grammar of beginnings? It's seeing the cards pop that brings me the most satisfaction, and maybe this explains the creepy, careening, shapeless narratives that seem to be the only kind I can write. I don't want to retell, as Byatt describes. I'm lazy. I want to offer a book of first sentences and have the reader do that work for me.

And in the meantime, someone's wife lies weeping in the next room.

the defenestration project

2010-01-14T06:28:00.000-08:00

I've always liked the word "defenestration"--it's so Latinate and dignified, but it points to throwing something annoying out a window. It was coined in 1419, when seven town officials (selectmen to you and me) got tossed out a window in Prague (see engraving, left). This triggered the Hussite War, which had something to do with church reform and Bohemia and a bad-tempered Holy Roman Emperor. I don't understand the whole back story and don't want to.

To substitute for this amazing lack of curiosity, I just now made a short list of items that could and should go out the window and into the Vermont snow. At the top is a certain printer in my employ that does pretty much everything except print things; instead, it sends me little error messages about its various digestive issues. After replacing a few parts and cartridges, I've resigned myself to letting it sit and blink (Alarm! Alarm!) and occasionally letting it deliver up a handful of smeary pages folded like a badly-made accordion.

Next out the window is a certain co-worker, who ought to land with a very satisfying thump. Without going into a lot of unprofessional detail, I can say that as I get older my tolerance for poor work performance has worn thin. It's even thinner when a poor performance in one office means a lot more labor in another, and it becomes the blade of a small, sharp knife when I see a poor performer claiming credit, directly or indirectly, for work done quietly and competently by someone else. Out you go.

The last item for today's defenestration is a manuscript, running about 22,000 words, that is without question the worst thing I've ever written. And more's the pity--after four months of messing with it, all I've accomplished is to use up four months I could have spent braiding a rug or polishing the silver. It appears I'm not capable of writing fiction--not because I love writing the truth, but because I'm a really horrible storyteller. I get distracted; I go off on weird tangents; I let my characters do things without authorial permission. The household fantasy that I will write a potboiler murder mystery suspense horror action romance novel that will sell a lot of copies (none my nonfiction books have made much dough) is today officially toast. No satisfying thump with this one; instead, the pages should flutter upward, spiral through the winter air, and scatter artistically. All I want at this point is for the pages to be picked up, one piece at a time, by the mystified citizens of Montpelier.

Rest in peace, but rest on the sidewalk, O Calendar of Saints.

are police logs literature?

2010-01-11T05:09:00.000-08:00

Every Thursday the local daily publishes the police report for Montpelier, and I'm getting in the habit of keeping them around as a sort of accidental local poetry. I can't figure out whether the log reflects the mind of a small-city beat cop or whether it reflects the broader psyche of the whole city (which is not really a city, with only 8,000 people). Either way, the reports are well worth the time it takes to read them.

Suspicious activity: Caller received an automated phone call about his credit card.

Car hit a deer on Sherwood Drive; deer still alive.

Someone was choking on Barre Street, but recovered.

Caller heard someone walking up the back stairs on River Street.

Horses in the roadway on Main Street.

Man possibly pounding windows on State Street.

Found: red-colored miniature Pinscher on River Street.

Water running from light fixtures on Cityside Drive.

Woman concerned about a child in front of City Hall.

Dog on Loomis Street barking off and on for about three hours.

Candle burning in an apartment on Cummings Street.

Horses in the roadway on State Street. Same horses.

Female sitting on a curb on State Street rocking back and forth.

Neighbor on Jay street calling someone names; an ongoing problem.

I read these and wonder what kind of literature they are. Maybe literature of a very low order, but so what? I confess that I'm worried about the deer and amused about the horses--these were the draft horses used to pull the Christmas wagon we all got to ride around town in during December. They were definitely in the roadway, but they were supposed to be there. Who called this in? The barking dog is deeply familiar to me, since it was barking barking barking next door, but I never once thought it was something I should refer to the police. Who did?

Animal incidents aside, there really is something rhetorically interesting about someone "possibly" pounding on storefront windows downtown, and something downright creepy about water pouring from streetlights on Cityside Drive. I want to know who got choked on Barre Street and is now feeling better, and I'd also like to know who, exactly, is in front of City Hall--woman or child? Is this deliberate ambiguity? I'm a little worried about that woman sitting on the curb.

I sometimes think a decent novel could be constructed entirely out of police reports--it might be a little spare and sketchy, but it would have a kind of puzzling charm.

the Loomis Street Irregulars

2010-01-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

For the first time since Thanksgiving the Irregulars are coming to play, and I'm worried that I will play dismally. I tuned the dulcimer (sixty-four strings, again) and tested my memory with Coleman's March into Callum's Road. What a mess.

It seems I've lost my speed and my ability to cross the bridges without losing my place, and even Swinging on a Gate, which I should be able to bang out in a coma, sounded choppy and off tempo. This is lack of practice, but it's also the end result of the past couple of months of being trapped in a body brace.

For a lot of reasons I do not want playing with my friends to turn into a chore, or to be one more thing I need to worry about. Music is meant to be shared and joyful, and right now there's all this stuff about adequacy is getting in the way. (I keep telling myself that it's only seven weeks post surgery, and that I'm expecting too much, but I don't believe that.)

This picture reminds me that there was once a time when I played very nicely indeed, and I'm going to post it and enjoy it and try try try not to worry.

Stephen Huneck--a very sad goodbye

2010-01-09T09:49:00.000-08:00

I found out this morning that Stephen Huneck, the remarkable Vermont artist, killed himself while sitting in his car outside his psychiatrist's office. Stephen was best know for his wood sculpture, often misidentified as folk art, and for his books like "Sally Goes to the Beach."

I went to high school with Stephen and we shared a suite of art rooms at school for many years. For two years we shared a studio class with Bud Madru, that unforgettable and not always entirely predictable teacher. I wrote at some length about Stephen in my second book, A View from Vermont, a story adapted from a review and interview I originally wrote for Burlington's arts and comment weekly, Seven Days.

I won't pretend I know him well, but I loved and bought his courageous and curiously schmaltzy work--I have one of his angels over the fireplace in the living room, and I was hoping to one day afford a life-sized Labrador. His work was driven by a deep trust in the human-animal bond, which is an important thing to make art about--I wrote a whole book about it, in Conversations with a Prince. Stephen mattered.

When he was young, he was studiously silent--he seemed partially frozen but his work was always fresh and good. I once bought one of his water colors because it seemed happy, and happiness was something he had only in short supply. I don't know what when on at his house, but it wasn't good.

Later, when I interviewed him and we reconnected a little, I was amazed to find him incredibly talkative--"In 1965 Huneck was inward and impenetrably silent; now his heart is often on his sleeve and he won't shut up," I said in 2005. And now Stephen is gone, and I feel a light has drained away. He took the great risk of learning to love, and now we can no longer love him back.

going forward

2010-01-08T11:16:00.000-08:00

I go to meetings where the tag line "going forward" erupts spontaneously whenever the speaker is signaling that the utterance is serious and ignored at the listener's peril. In the span of a few days I heard about how urgent it was, going forward, that we understand our mission, and that decisions made here should be recorded going forward. At one point I was even told, going forward, that it was time to break for lunch. The usage is everywhere, like an outbreak of the measles.

What does it actually mean? As an intensifier it doesn't have the slacker charm of "totally," or the gum-snapping resonance of "y'know," but there must be something about "going forward" that satisfies, maybe because it seems to sprinkle the speaker with the holy water of the future, a thing which the speaker understands and the listener does not. Is it a sly insult? Or just a jumped-up, self-important reload of "you betcha?" At the most recent gathering that was going forwarded to smithereens, I notied that the people who use and love this expression tended to work inside the Washington beltway.

why sixty-four strings?

2010-01-08T09:29:00.000-08:00

When I got my first instrument, a 12/11 Dusty Strings, I tried to tune it by ear using a piano and, later on, an electric keyboard. This was the wrong moment to learn that my ear is just a tad sharp, and when I tried to play with other people they made faces like they smelled something bad.

Thus chastised, I bought a real tuner with the little dial and the light and the clamp that goes on the tuning peg, and didn't need that sharp ear any more, and in a few years I moved up to a bigger James Jones. Which, I have to add, cost serious money on a writer's pay, but it made a swell racket and turned out to be exactly right for jigs, reels, and (my favorite) schmaltzy waltzes. My Jones has 64 strings, all of them with an opinion, not all those opinions the same.

If you're not familiar with the species, a hammer dulcimer looks like a piano that was parked overnight in a bad neighborhood. It sounds like a cross between a roomful of banjos and a classical harp--sweet, complicated, percussive, happy, and a little jazzy.