Category: Culture

He’s back …

800px-Scott_Card
Orson Scott Card, right. Source: Wikipedia

If you’re at all familiar with science fiction and with movies, then you know that Orson Scott Card is a controversial writer of science fiction who won both the Nebula and Hugo awards in 1985 for Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game has finally been made into a movie, and it will open Nov. 1, starring Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield.

For years, Card wrote a weekly column for a small conservative newspaper in Greensboro, North Carolina. He frequently aired his controversial political views in the column, ensuring that he stayed in trouble with the literate intelligentsia, who don’t take kindly to right-wing thinking. That run of columns ended in April when the Rhino Times closed. But this month, the Rhino Times resumed publication with a new owner, and Card’s column is back. Here’s a link to his new column.

So far, Card has avoided controversy in the new column and has written mostly about food. No doubt the folks in Hollywood have asked him to avoid controversy, because some groups are already organizing boycotts of the movie version of Ender’s Game.

Though I totally don’t get Card’s politics, or his religion, I can’t be too hard on him. He’s an old friend, and we got to know each other back in the 1980s when I operated a computer bulletin board system named Science Fiction Writers Network. At the time, I was located near Winston-Salem, and Card was in Greensboro. So we were practically neighbors. I and some other local fans threw a big dinner for Card at a hotel in Greensboro to celebrate Ender’s Game winning the Nebula and Hugo awards. Also, Card was a guest for dinner at my place at least a couple of times.

Some other time, I’ll talk about the golden age of computer bulletin boards (early 1980s). I was in the thick of that golden age.

Anyway, I’m not going to criticize Card here. I still greatly respect his views on literature and storytelling. And because he influenced my own views so much many years ago, I’ve assimilated more than a little of Card’s literary DNA.

If you haven’t read Ender’s Game, it’s a classic. By all means read the book before you see the movie.

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The title page from my autographed first edition of Ender’s Game

2 major TV appearances by Ken

Ken has two major television appearances coming up in the next week. On Thursday, June 20, he’ll be on CBS This Morning. On Monday, June 24, he’ll be on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The scheduling of the Tonight Show appearance may change because of the NBA playoffs, so check the Tonight Show web site if need be. He’ll be talking, of course, about his new book, Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road From Debt to Freedom. Ken wrote this book here at Acorn Abbey, and I helped with the editing.

Needless to say, I am very proud of Ken and very excited about the career push he’ll get from this. I’m also proud of his connection with Acorn Abbey and the interesting work that has gotten done here — much to my surprise, really, because I never imagined that my retirement would be so busy and so rich.

If you enjoy Ken’s television appearances, you’ll get some idea of how much I enjoy Ken’s conversation at breakfast and dinner each day.


Ken Ilgunas

Maintenance. Ouch.

When you install an amazing musical instrument like the abbey’s Rodgers 730 organ, you also take on the sacred responsibility of maintaining it. It’s a complicated being, and it’s 20 years old. Though nothing serious has ever gone wrong, little things go wrong, and it’s best not to let those little things mount up. Also, there are not many organ technicians around, as you might imagine. So I wait until the nearest technician is going to be in the area so that I can share his travel charges with other customers. Today he cleaned the key contacts (a couple of notes were stuttering), replaced some burned-out lamps in the pistons, and answered, as usual, my stream of nerdish questions.

What young'uns used to eat


The school cafeteria staff, circa 1960. Mrs. Martin is on the left.

When I was in elementary school, we called the school cafeteria “Miss Martin’s Slop Shop.” Mrs. Martin has gone on to her reward, but we all owe her such an apology.

I have often thought about Mrs. Martin’s made-from-scratch cooking and how lucky we were to have it. I remember many times walking in line with the other kids, outdoors to avoid making noise inside the school building, to the side door of the cafeteria. The wonderful smells wafting out the open windows of the cafeteria would hit. I particularly remember Mrs. Martin’s scratch-made rolls (I always had seconds and thirds), her amazing vegetable soup, and her apple crisp.

An alumnus of the school recently put out a book of old photographs made between 1927 and 1967. I cannot find a single overweight child in this book, and certainly not an obese child. We did have snack foods in those days — chips, Moon Pies, and all that. And all kids got snack food and candy, though never at school. We had ice cream in the afternoons. And desserts. But everyone was lean.

I’m not going to get into a rant about our industrialized, de-localized, factory-driven food system. But here’s a plug for cooking from scratch…

By the way, the scraps that the kids didn’t eat were collected into a large container, and a farmer in the area fed the scraps to his hogs. Nothing went to waste, either.


The serving line at Courtney School, circa 1960. Courtney school is in the heart of the Yadkin Valley.

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.