On writing, from an interview with the poet Chris Abani:

Percival Everett took me to Barnes & Noble. He walked me over to the fiction section and said, “Pull out every tenth book and read the first two pages….separate the books into three piles based on the following questions: Which books are important and inevitable? Which books are good? Which books are bad?...”

[When] I was finished, I realized that I had about four books in the “important and inevitable” pile. These were books that just had to be in the world.
…
And so at the end he said, “What you should be asking yourself is not Will I get published?...What you should ask yourself…is, Can I write something important? Can I write something… inevitable?” Well, I asked Percival, “So how do you know?” And he said, “You will know what is important and inevitable because it’s the story that keeps you up at night. It drives you crazy. It makes you angry. It makes you despair. It makes you depressed. Because all of that will pour into the book and go into the world, and people will read it and say My life has been changed.”

In the next room Porter is cracking up Nico with some nonsense.  It reminds me how Nico's first laughter was brought on by four-year-old Porter's clowning.  Porter would make a face or clap his hand to his head and Nico just thought that was the funniest thing he was ever going to see.

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Most of our work is about giving communications advice to non-profit advocacy groups.  Some of that disappears into the bowels of organizations never to be seen again.  So it is satisfying to catch it when it actually emerges out into the world.  Our work on the "ripple effect" that the arts have has been getting a good deal of circulation.


Last year we did research for the Union of Concerned Scientists to help with their efforts to move the US away from its reliance on factory farms.  (Actually, one of our recommendations was to not use the term "factory farms" at all, but instead to use the technical term, CAFO.)  A letter to the editor in today's New York Times is a perfect encapsulation of the kind of message that we helped them craft -- to reach the audience that they need to persuade.


The letter was in response to an appalling editorial about how we should deal with the cruelty of CAFO's by engineering animals that feel less pain.


To the Editor:
Given that our current system for producing meat inflicts pain on animals, the sensible response is to change the system, not the animals.  Adapting food animals to an admittedly cruel system is a poor use of advanced scientific knowledge, especially since we are not “stuck” with the confined animal feed operations, or CAFOs, that dominate our current system.  Smart pasture operations raise cows on pasture, which is what they are built to eat. The same pasture operations that make for contented cows also protect air and water quality, sequester heat-trapping carbon and don’t undercut the efficacy of valuable human antibiotics. Eventually the price differential between CAFO and grass-fed cows will decrease as pasture-intensive operations scale up.  Instead of engineering animals to adapt to pain, we should focus on moving now toward food production systems that are good for people, food animals and the environment.

Mardi Mellon
Director, Food and Environment Program,
Union of Concerned Scientists
Washington, Feb. 19, 2010

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Porter turned twelve today and blew out the candles on a plate of lemon bars.

Here is part of a poem he wrote last year (with a little help from Judith Viorst):

If I were in charge of the world

I'd cancel tomatoes

Wednesday afternoons

Gross medication, and also

A certain middle-schooler.

If I were in charge of the world 

There'd be visible leprechauns,

Smarter guinea pigs, and

Ladder trees.

If I were in charge of the world

You wouldn't have ouch.

You wouldn't have dirty.

You wouldn't have bedtimes.

Or, "Time for lights out!"

You wouldn't even have lights.

If I were in charge of the world

Coffee ice-cream 

would be a vegetable.

All video games would be E

And a person who sometimes forgot to eat,

And sometimes forgot to think,

Would still be allowed to be

In charge of the world.

At age 40 I could say I was half-way to 80, but turning 45, to say halfway to 90 seems overly optimistic.  So somewhere there I crossed that half-way point.  Still you never know.  The family tree is knotted with tough old Puritans and Scots farmers who lived well into their 90s.


We went out for breakfast at the Whistlestop cafe so Nico could watch the trains go by as he had his pancakes.  The crossing gates were coming down even as we pulled up in the car - so he and I got out to grip the chain link fence and we squinted through the ferocious wind and roar that Amtrak's Northeast Regional threw back at us.


A simple strawberry shortcake, split among the four of us served as my birthday cake.


In the evening we went over to Charles and Patty's and got in their way as they cooked us all a wonderful dinner of Indian food.  Beer was drunk; laughter was laughed; commensality ensued.  It was good.
.

I saw a woman with a Modigliani face in a silver SUV waiting patiently, maybe mournfully, to turn past the little graveyard on Route 1 where the Dennison sea captains and their dead children lay 10 generations buried beneath stones engraved with weathered, winged skulls.

hiatus

Phew, a month has passed as the blog has sat fallow.

I was off in Los Angeles for 10 days at the end of January -- doing ethnography for one of the unions trying to organize grocery workers, and managing a couple of other ethnographers, a videographer, and another anthropologist doing on-going phone interviews for the same project.  That set us hip-deep in data that we're still chewing through.

It was good to see Anna, Esperanza and Alberto, and I used Glendale as my base of operations.  They fed me well.

As that California project slips into the write-up and video-edit stages, I'm running point on the next phase of research, interviewing Walmart employees. (More on that later.)

In Rhode Island and Connecticut, unsettled weather has brought snow days and school delays.  Nothing like the blizzards they've gotten further south and inland, but Monica and the boys have been exploring the local ski slopes.  A few warm days have thinned the snow cover and it's patchy on the sunniest spots.  The rivers are running high.  A bluebird showed up yesterday morning, poking around in Nico's birdhouse.  The juncos hopped around looking at it as though it were an apparition.

I introduced the boys to GURPS, the role-playing game, and it became an immediate obsession.  Their characters bonded in their first tavern brawl - an important rite of passage in gaming.  And now they are starting out on a campaign to free some captive wizards in hopes of getting some magic items in reward.  Porter has a cat-man with powers of stealth and invisibility as well as a woman knife-fighter who teleports.  Nico has a red-headed fencer who shape-shifts to a fox and a female elven archer.  I'm running a pyromaniacal dwarf and a magic user to balance out the group.  It all waits on Porter getting ahead on his burden of homework.

Monica's been emailing back and forth with Clara settling the details of March's trip to Costa Rica.  We're getting antsy for travel.

Haiku from a winter's walk

Chill sun on limn-frost

dormancy of elements

broken by a breath

In snow-crusty wood

My steps crush weathered track of

 mink and deer and fox

We shall not cease from exploring
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

---- T. S. Eliot

Skiing Pancieri's Field

The pursuit of truth is like picking raspberries.  
You miss a lot if you approach it from one direction.

-- Randal Marlin.

This is a poem of Denver's that I forwarded to Monica,
because Neruda alway makes her pause . . . .


this is Pablo Neruda Avenue
she said
and unbuttoned the top button
of her jeans


may I walk along it?
he asked


only if you bring me
a line by Pablo Neruda
she said


he was silent for a moment


and then he said
The memory of you emerges from the night around me


whisper it
she said


and he whispered it
as evening fell
on Pablo Neruda Avenue

Bridget and Aunt Monica go sledding

East Germany, April of 1986

Ruins of the Frauenkirche, Dresden, April 1986

photo A. B. 

Last night I watched the film "Lives of Others", (Das Leben der Anderen) about a East Berlin Stasi operative who gradually loses his way in a surveillance operation over a playwright and his lover.  


The atmosphere of the film brought me back to the couple of weeks that I spent there in 1986.   It makes me wonder what my own Stasi file looks like.  I have to assume that there was one, though I have no idea how interested they were in a handful of undergraduate students on an art history tour.  Did they note my wandering off into the countryside outside of Weimar that one afternoon?  The scruffy man ranting about the state in the cafe?  Is there a description of Margaret's and my tryst in the woods outside of Dresden?  The students who proudly avowed that if they ever got a visa west they'd never come back?  How much had the Stasi unravelled by 1986?


One night I remember in particular.  Georg was our tall, dark and handsome art history professor, and the force behind the whole journey behind the Iron Curtain.  Early in the trip he had seduced the young East German woman who was our keeper, earning himself some extra latitude in the bargain, I think.  In any case itineraries became uncertain and the two of them would disappear at times -- hence my wanderings through the villages by Weimar.  Georg had a friend in Leipzig and he and Frank (the hen-pecked assistant for the study abroad program) and myself conspired to escape (to whatever extent) the gaze of the Staatsicherheit.  I'm not sure how it was arranged, but the three of us strolled away from the hostel, and when a car suddenly pulled up alongside us, the street entirely free of other traffic, we quickly hopped in.


The driver was the wife of a painter and she brought us to their large apartment.  I remember that we drank white Hungarian wine and talked of politics.  The apartment was filled with artwork, because the painter was not in the good graces of the state and could neither exhibit nor sell his work.  A lot of the work I found unlovely, dark and with twisting rats and birds -- but I can recall vividly one bright painting entitled something like Icarus afraid to fly.  It summed up the frustration that idealistic East Germans felt about their rigid and corrupt government and the dreary society it nourished.  I could see why the state censors didn't appreciate it.


In the film, set a year or two earlier than my trip, a rigidly controlled Stasi captain, suggests to his superiors that an apparently loyal playwright ought to be watched.  His request is granted, though not because the man, Dreyman, is a threat to the state, but because a minister covets Dreyman's lover, an actress, and wants him out of the way.  The elegance of the movie is in the way the loyal Stasi interrogator and the unheroic playwright are pushed into sympathy by their common antagonist - the corrupt officials who run the system for their own benefit.  The lusciously detestable officials and the actress they destroy aptly represent the depressing (and intimidating) spectacle of the East Germany state that artists, young people, idealists and patriots had to confront in living through that time.  I remember how it permeated the conversations I had there that spring.


The thing that makes the film bearable ultimately is the fact that the dismal trajectory -- of progress deferred and betrayed -- which in 1984 and still in 1986 was assumed to stretch endlessly into the future -- collapsed suddenly and thoroughly only a few years later.

oracles . . . .

Yea, though the asp and the bonobo shall entwine themselves in the ribbons of dying typewriters, there shall be milk upon the golden collars of the salarymen -- and distillations of childhood shall scald the nostrils of the Great and unyet Fallen.

View out the front door . . . .

In Baltimore we went with Chris to the Walter's Museum, to meander through the marvelous collection that Henry Walters and his father assembled.  What an eye for quality they had!  Nearly every piece in there is worth spending time with.


Afterwards, we stopped at a shop and I bought a Tibetan singing bowl.  It is black and embossed with lettering that I don't understand.

I stacked my father's firewood 7 feet high and when I was done, the whole construction, every last stick of it, fell over with an earth shaking crash.  How embarrassing. 


Chastened, I stacked it again 5 and a half feet high.

Day after Christmas and we were dragging.  I took a nap, which I hadn't done since an eye doctor's appointment back in November had so disarranged my schedule that I'd forgotten to drink coffee.  Monica took a nap at 11 a.m.  Cathie was considering her second nap when Monica figured out that the coffee she had brewed said "DEC" not because it had something to do with December, but because it had no caffeine.  Everyone was appalled.  Proper coffee was brewed.

christmas 2009

A Holiday food journal . . . .

On Christmas eve Monica cooked her roast pork.  Rubbed with olive oil, breadcrumbs, garlic and rosemary, cooked in it's own juices; baked red potatoes with butter or with the juices from the roast; asparagus and sauteed dark mushrooms; unsweetened apple sauce on the side; red wine and cider.

Anna had sent tins of homemade Christmas cookies from California and Cathie and Eric's neighbor had sent chocolate truffles.  Peppermint tea and egg nog.  Chocolate from Lititz.

On Christmas morning, the boys can loot their stockings as soon as they get up (this year at 6:45), but the opening of the presents happens after breakfast.  Fred had brought in bagels and lox cream cheese from Brooklyn with him.  Chris had made banana bread.  Cathie cut open a pannetone she had made with white raisins.  There was black coffee and hot tea.

For Christmas dinner Mom prepared a 21 pound free-range, organic turkey -- and lunch was the platter of turkey meat, mountains of mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, Chris' sweet potatoes and baked apples, Monica's green bean casserole, Cathie's creamed corn, rolls, pickled beets - glasses of red wine or an airy Belgium beer that Eric uncorked; sparkling grape juice for the boys.

For the desultory grazing that served as supper, Cathie baked fresh breads and laid out several wonderful goats' cheeses that she'd made.  Chris produced a rich camembert.  The cookies, breads, pannetone from earlier all re-emerged.  Cathie's gift to me, a bottle of 15-year old Laphroaig, was opened.