Category: Culture

Crimes against coffee


Wikipedia: Note the color. Note the small, heavy china cup.

Finally, someone who can be considered authoritative on the subject of coffee says it: black-roasted coffee is wrong, and disgusting.

Let me hasten to add that it’s also wrong of me to refer to someone being authoritative on coffee, because that’s part of the problem. It ought to be self-evident whether coffee is good, without our needing to know what the authorities think. Then we would just take a sip, spit it out, and know that over-roasted coffee is terrible, that coffee drunk from paper cups is terrible, that milk (as opposed to cream) in coffee is terrible, and so on. But I fear that people get their attitudes about coffee in two basic ways. They either like and drink what everybody drinks in their local culture (like the pale, dreadful stump water swill that is drunk around here). Or, aspiring to a higher (or at least more costly) level, they think that the black-roasted stuff sold in places like Starbucks is good. It’s supposed to be fancy, so it’s got to be good, right? Wrong.

Though I have experimented with cheap coffee, to try to keep the coffee bill down, I end up back at Whole Foods. But even Whole Foods doesn’t get it and goes with the fads. Most of the coffees they sell have been roasted black, burnt to a crisp. They dropped one of the two medium roast coffees they’d carried, the one I happened to buy. I had to talk nice to (and try not to talk down to) the coffee captain to get her to start carrying it again. I made a point of saying that all the rest of this stuff is roasted black and has been turned to charcoal. I’m sure she thought I was an alien, or a hick. Doesn’t everybody know that black-roast coffee is all the rage these days?

Starbucks? I won’t drink that stuff. It tastes like charcoal, and you can only get it in paper cups. I was horrified when I first learned that in a Starbucks you don’t even have the option of a china cup. I had been spoiled by the San Francisco coffee houses.

One more rant about coffee, then I’ll shut up and stop trying to be a coffee authority. Throw out your automatic coffee maker if the decanter sits on a hotplate. I don’t understand the fetish for coffee that is boiling, scaldingly hot. It’s too hot to taste (maybe that’s the point). After coffee is brewed, if it is heated from the bottom it blackens in the pot. Or, to say it another way, heat your water, but never heat your coffee. I brew mine by slowly pouring hot water from a kettle into a simple filter cone, from which it drips into a Thermos-type coffee decanter. Then sit down and stay sitting. Relax. Don’t go anywhere. The only other acts you are allowed to indulge in while having your coffee is reading, or talking with someone whom you like to talk with. Drink your coffee out of a heavy china cup or mug that holds no more than 6 or 7 ounces. Then pour another cupful. If you possess a mug that holds more than 6 or 7 ounces, smash it. Don’t give it to Goodwill; that will just keep it in circulation.

There. I got that off my chest. Now go smash your coffee mug and start searching eBay for a decent coffee cup. Institutional cups, the kind they used to use in hotels and restaurants before the big-mug era started, work great. If you buy coffee in bulk, as I do, smell the beans. The scent should be rich and bursting with coffee flavor. If you smell any hints of charcoal or ashes, look elsewhere.

Extreme self-reliance, in Siberia


The hut

This article at Smithsonian.com is fascinating. It’s about about six members of a Russian family who fled into remote Siberia to avoid religious persecution. They lived there for 40 years, surviving on food that they could forage and what little they could grow.

I find this story inspiring. It shows just how adaptable ordinary people can be, and how little little we can live on.

BBC World Service on your phone

It was a sad day when, on July 1, 2001, the BBC World Service ended its shortwave broadcasts to North America. You can still get it if you want to pay for satellite radio (no way), and some public radio stations carry bits of the BBC’s news.

To help fill the gap, the BBC makes the audio available with a phone call to 712-432-6580, which I believe is in Iowa. Back when both my phones had limited minutes, that didn’t help me much. But when I got the iPhone 5, I also switched to a Verizon plan with unlimited minutes. Unlimited minutes are mostly wasted on me, but the BBC helps burn some of them off and get more value out of the nasty sum I pay to Verizon each month.

The BBC World Service broadcasts in English 24 hours a day. Normally I don’t listen to radio news, including NPR, because broadcast news is mostly useless and moves much too slowly for me, nor do I spend much time in a car. I can absorb information many times faster by reading. But there is something special about the BBC. It has been in operation since 1932, and it is one of the best news operations in the world. London calling…

At certain times of day, when radio propagation conditions are right, you might still be able to pick up the BBC’s shortwave broadcasts aimed at Western Africa, if you’re in the eastern U.S. But it would be hit or miss. You do have a shortwave receiver and a decent antenna, don’t you?

High school's permanent marks and scars


Reynolds High School, N.C. Department of Archives and History

A story in the Winston-Salem Journal this morning refers to “historic” R.J. Reynolds High School and mentions that the school is 90 years old this year. Not many high schools make it to that age, at least as still-operating schools, or make it to the National Register of Historic Places. No doubt most of us remain haunted by high school, for better or for worse, but there’s something about Reynolds High School that gets — and stays — under your skin.

Even in this era, 46 years after I graduated, I find myself driving by the school when I’m in the area, to see if it has changed (not much) and if the cherry trees are still there. It always feels a little crazy to be so drawn to a place, given how miserable I was there. But anyone who went to Reynolds will understand. We were constantly reminded how privileged we were to go to Reynolds (even though it is a public high school) and the word “tradition” was heard almost daily. My readers in Britain, where schools are hundreds and hundreds of years old, will think this funny. But we Americans, of course, measure our history on a shorter scale.

In these parts, if you went to Reynolds High School, you leave it on your resume no matter your age or other achievements. One of North Carolina’s senators, Richard Burr, graduated from Reynolds in 1974, and this fact is mentioned on his Wikipedia page.

The school does have an interesting history. It was partly tobacco money that paid for the school and its rather grand auditorium. Katherine Smith Reynolds, widow of R.J. Reynolds, donated land for the auditorium in 1918. The school opened in 1923, the auditorium in 1924. One of the traditions of the school is that the ghost of Katherine Smith Reynolds still haunts the auditorium. And in fact it is the auditorium which haunts me to this day, more than the school. The auditorium seemed as grand to me then as Carnegie Hall does today, and it was similarly a temple of music. Winston-Salem, partly because of cultural advantages handed down by its Moravian settlers, and partly because of the patronage of old money (Hanes, Reynolds, and Gray), punched above its weight musically. I even had the stage to myself once in 1966, when I gave an organ performance during the annual Key Club Follies. The orchestral and choral music I heard in that auditorium were critical to my early music education. My high school music theory class sometimes met on the stage, when we needed access to the big Steinway.

But of all the music that haunts me from that era, it’s one thing in particular that stands out — the school hymn, “Her Portals Tall and Wide.” It was written in 1933 by a student whom the older teachers remembered, B.C. Dunford Jr. It was generally sung a capella in clear four-part harmony by the school chorus, with the chorus located in the upper balcony for the best acoustical effect, and always with the lights dimmed. Sometimes the members of the chorus held candles. It was more than a tradition; it was a sacred ritutal. This hymn is always mentioned in histories and reminiscences, but I am unable to find a single recording of it. I must put that to rights and record it at the organ. No doubt the current chorus teacher (I hope they still have chorus teachers) could provide me with the score.

P.S. to the current principal: The fourth floor was still used in the 1960s. I had Spanish classes up there.


Reynolds Auditorium, N.C. Department of Archives and History


That’s me in the center, a photo of the yearbook staff in the 1967 yearbook. Did I ever do anything other than publishing? I guess not…

The abbey's literary output so far

It has been only three and a half years since the lights first came on at Acorn Abbey, but I think its literary output has been respectable in that time.

Ken’s first book, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom, will be released May 14. Here is a link to the Amazon page. It tells a story that many followers of this blog already know: how Ken paid off a sizable student debt in only a few years, then went on to get a master’s at Duke University, living in his van to keep his expenses down. But there’s more to Ken that readers of Ken’s blog or this blog know yet. That is that Ken, like Thoreau, is a natural born philosopher. Ken, aware of his tender age, is very modest in asserting this philosophical inclination. But in this book, for the first time, really, we witness the early stages of a transformation from a hockey-playing frat-boy type into an heir of Thoreau. Ken wrote the book here at the abbey. It’s in the final stages of production now. In fact, at Ken’s request, I’m reading the final page proofs this week.

And there is a second book that has come out of the abbey. Last year I did the editorial and prepress work for People Skills Handbook: Action Tips for Improving Your Emotional Intelligence. This book is now in print and is available on Amazon. There are four co-authors of the book, all of whom are professionals in management training, as well as a psychologist, a counselor, and educators. It’s a good book if I do say so myself. It’s priced high for the corporate market, it’s a bit long at 450 pages, and it’s not exactly meant for casual bedtime reading. But for those who work with people or manage people, it contains some good advice, nicely organized.

And of course there’s this blog, which, at five and a half years, is one of the older blogs around. I started the blog before I left San Francisco.

There will be more. Ken is planning to write a book about hiking the route of the Keystone XL pipeline, which he also has described in his blog. The book, I’m sure, will go much deeper than the blog, and perhaps we’ll learn what’s been going through that philosopher’s mind of his as he walked, and walked, and walked.

If I were more disciplined, I’d get off my butt and finish the apocalyptic novel I started a while back, not to mention my memoir. And I sometimes think about writing a book about Acorn Abbey, a kind of guide on how to downsize your life and get away from it all. But frankly I don’t have Ken’s discipline. He will sit squirming in his chair and write for eight hours at a stretch, setting goals and then reaching them. Whereas I in many ways am still recovering from career burnout and the accumulated stress of corporate and urban life. I go easy on myself and take plenty of time to putter, to read, to smell the flowers, to pet the cat, to tend the chickens. My whip-cracking days are over. But we’ll see. I’m a fast writer when I put my mind to it.

Though I was being fanciful when I started calling this place an abbey, it has turned out more like an abbey than I had hoped.

And don't bother coming back, Gérard…

Let us all now ridicule Gérard Depardieu, who has accepted Russian citizenship as part of his protest against paying taxes in France.

The man has ruined more movies than anyone in history and has made French cinema unwatchable for 20 years. The only exception I’d allow would be “Jean de Florette,” in 1987, in which he appropriately played a hunchback farmer. I will not forgive him for his fat, slobbish portrayal of Edmond in “The Count of Monte Cristo.” And how dare they let him into the same frame as the incredible Catherine Deneuve.

I call him Gérard Depar-diable. I never understood what the French saw in him. Now they’re probably wondering themselves.

Sir Walter Scott

I have had a heck of a time finding reading material this winter. Though the iPad and the Kindle app make it extremely easy to acquire and sample books, I generally start three or four books for every book I finish, just because most books aren’t worth finishing (to my tastes, at least), and I won’t waste time on them. After a brief digression into nonfiction, I settled on Sir Walter Scott.

Clearly Sir Walter Scott is very rarely read anymore. This is odd, since he was a best-selling author in the 19th century and inspired a generation of writers. Universities have very little interest in him, outside the University of Edinburgh. It would be interesting to try to dissect why Scott is so neglected. Could it be because filmmakers have not adapted any of his works for a blockbluster, creating a new literary market? Is it because he is hard to read, with his thick, erudite prose and heavy doses of hard-to-parse dialect? Is it a shortage of romance? An excess of untranslated Latin and French? Rare would be the modern high school student or even college student who would be able to navigate Scott’s prose without lots of notes and professorial assistance.

But I am finding that Scott has all the ingredients I like. As I have frequently mentioned here, I have very little interest in here-and-now fiction. What use are stories about people just like us, living in places just like the places we live in, grappling with the same modern existential issues that we grapple with? No, I want fiction to take me far away, to a real or imagined place very unlike the present world, the world which I read to escape. Scott does that.

He was considered a historical novelist. He wrote in the early 1800s, but most of his stories were set in the past. Whether his history is good history or bad history is of very little interest to me; this is fiction, after all. Scott likes strong Gothic elements and an undercurrent of magic — ruined abbeys, hidden passages, the sea crashing against the rocks, strange victuals in ancient kitchens, haunted houses, old folk tales woven into the narrative. His characters are as vivid as Dickens’, and his conversations snappy (but long). What’s not to like? I have started with The Antiquary, one of the Waverley novels.

In doing some Googling about Scott, I came across a broadside criticism of Scott by Mark Twain, blaming Scott’s novels for the “jejeune romanticism” of the American South. Who knew? And you’ll find lukewarm conversations about whether a Scott revival is merited in the book blog at the Guardian. A persistent Googler may even find some discussion about Scott’s influence on Tolkien.

Unless Hollywood comes out with a Sir Walter Scott blockbuster, I wouldn’t look for a Sir Walter Scott revival. But lovers of English literature and the British Isles who’ve not yet sampled Scott will certainly want to do so.

The illustrations are from The Antiquary.

Goodbye, Professoressa


Corriere della Sera, Milan

I was very sorry to read today in the New York Times that La Professoressa — Dr. Rita Levi-Montalcini — has died at age 103.

I posted about La Professoressa back in 2009. Periodically I have checked to see if she was still living. I believe she was going strong until the very end. In several interviews after she turned 100, she said that her mind was sharper than it was when she was in her 20s. She went to work in her laboratory every day. In some interviews, she credited the sharpness of her mind to the substance she shared a Nobel Prize for discovering — nerve growth factor. In Italy, I believe this substance is available in eyedrop form and is sold as a treatment for certain eye ailments. I believe it has not been approved for sale in the United States. A little research reveals that there are supplements available that may naturally stimulate the production of nerve growth factor in the body. One is an Asian mushroom called monkey’s head mushroom. The other is a derivative of an Asian moss called huperzine A. Here is the Wikipidia article on huperzine A.

By all accounts, huperzine A is safe. Whether it’s effective or just another way to spend money on useless supplements is not really known. However, I could not resist trying the stuff, and I ordered some of it a couple of weeks ago. I’ll post something about my experience with huperzine A after I’ve used it a bit longer. It’s interesting that many of the Amazon reviews say that it stimulates dreaming. As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on that, but it seems possible.

Meanwhile, farewell Professoressa. You were an inspiration.

People I may know??

Facebook flatters and amuses me sometimes with the people it thinks I may know. Helen Mirren? Not hardly. And today Facebook thinks I may know Susan Sarandon. I have no idea why. I don’t think she shops at the same grocery store I do.

Facebook seems to think that I know pretty much all the San Francisco city supervisors and political muckedy-mucks, and even a few muckedy-mucks and pundits in Washington, like David Frum. That’s no mystery, though. I know a lot of journalists, and journalists — who ought to be keeping their distance — are “friending” their sources. Tsk. Tsk. I did once get an angry phone call from Tom Ammiano after he didn’t like an op-ed I wrote in the San Francisco Examiner. My former boss at the Examiner was married to Sharon Stone. That marriage has ended, but I can see on Facebook who he hangs out with these days. Hi, Sean. I don’t think I know you…

As for Helen Mirren, I’m friends with two writers who obviously know her and other Hollywood types. I frequently get pictures sloshing over of Laura Linney, or Ian McKellen. Unfortunately I never met them, nor would they be interested in being Facebook friends with nobodys like me. Susan Sarandon? I have no idea what the connection, if any, that Facebook is finding might be. But I do see enough material sloshing over from our social superiors on Facebook to know that they are on Facebook, they all know each other, they don’t know us, and they have way more fun than we do.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

There are no spoilers in this post.

Yesterday I went to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” I went to the full IMAX 3D version, $12.75 for a matinée. It would be silly for me to try to review it, because I can’t think of a single meaningfully critical thing to say. In fact, most of the reviews I’ve read have been silly, as the reviewers strain to come off as more knowing and more gifted than Peter Jackson. Jackson is a genius. Tolkien was a genius. It would be a criminal act to miss this work of genius while it’s still in IMAX theaters.

I had never been to an IMAX film before, or to a 3D film. The effect was stunning. It gave me vertigo at times, and I had a headache for the rest of the day, but it was worth it. And by the way I very rarely have headaches now that I’m retired. Headaches are for the awful world of work. But it’s a strain to stare at a screen for three hours, neck locked most of the time. When the camera was at a lofty height, looking down, and spinning (imagine yourself in the clutches of a giant eagle), I got vertigo. But that’s probably what the director intended.

I like to try to take stories apart to try to see what makes them tick. Part of the genius of Tolkien’s work is that his stories resist this process. One alternative is to try to look at Tolkien’s life for clues. As most people know, he was a professor of language and early literature at Oxford. He was affected by both World Wars. He was deeply distrustful of modernity and industrialization. A long hike in the unspoiled Alps when he was a teenager apparently inspired his mountain settings and his long treks. He loved languages, and in particular he loved the English language.

Anyway, this is not a review. It’s just a reminder to go see “The Hobbit” on a big screen.