Against the Grain

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 2017. 312 pages.

Why did human beings abandon their hunter-gatherer livelihoods, build the first towns and cities — and therefore create the first governments? This book uses new findings from archeology, epidemiology and climatology that may radically change our views on this radical period in human history that completely upset how we live as human beings.

The long-prevailing view was that farming and sedentary human communities were a great advance in human wellbeing and comfort that led to rapid advances in human cultures. But maybe not. Farming and pasturing actually were harder work than hunting and gathering and took more time and labor. Crop failure and famine were frequent. Sedentary people were sitting ducks for raiding. The greater density of people and domesticated animals, not to mention their wastes, brought all sorts of new diseases and epidemics. The diets of sedentary people were far less varied. Settled people weren’t nearly as healthy as hunter-gatherers. Grain was easily taxed. Elites arose to lord it over the peasants. Walls were built not just to keep raiders out but also to keep the peasants in. People actually liked their hunter-gatherer lifestyles and did not necessarily take up farming eagerly. Slavery was already well known, but slave labor was especially needed to keep the towns and cities running. If a town went bust (as frequently happened), the survivors would return to hunting and gathering. The move from wild to domesticated living was not a sudden and permanent switch. There was a lot of back and forth for centuries.

The only environments that were rich enough to support the early towns and cities were the mouths of rivers where the rivers slowed and spread into alluvial plains where the soil was enriched by siltation. Water was plentiful and provided transportation as well as irrigation. But all sorts of things could go wrong — floods, droughts, war, epidemics, environmental degradation and soil exhaustion, and natural changes in the climate. It was a risky, dangerous life. Child mortality was easily 50 percent.

The author has so much to say about taxation and the oppression of states that I was afraid I was being set up for a libertarian message. That did not happen. Scott, who is at Yale, is too good a scholar for that.

Part of the beauty of this book is that it sheds so much new light on how our Paleolitic and Neolithic ancestors lived. Their lives were not unappealing! They were free, they were bigger and healthier than city people, and most of them preferred a wild life to a life as a domesticated human, which was not all that different from the life of a domesticated animal. When cities and their governments squeezed the people too hard, people would often flee back into the wild. Returning to the frontier, Scott points out, was easier than revolution.

The sad thing is that, today, we have run out of wildness and frontiers. We are all domesticated now. We all are subjects of states. Though it’s terrain that this book is not concerned with, nevertheless these two opposites — wild vs. domesticated — beg some thought experiments. How can we do as much for ourselves as possible and disengage as much as possible from domestication and corporatization? To our overlords — who are now stronger and richer than they have been in a hundred years — we are just livestock. They exploit our surplus. They abhor us, but they also are afraid of us because we outnumber them and we are the source of their wealth and power. In that sense, nothing has changed in 10,000 years.

Merlin’s neck rags

Why is it that, though warm around-the-house winterwear is easy to find in the form of henleys and waffle-weave undershirts, nothing ever has a collar? Necks get cold. Sure, I have turtlenecks and even fleece neck-warmers that I keep in the Jeep. But the collarless winterwear needs a supplemental collar. The TV series Merlin (a guilty pleasure), suggested a solution.

The linen drawer in the kitchen always contains cotton muslin flour-sack towels, which can be bought on Amazon. I use the towels chiefly for drying greens and lettuce. I put the greens into the towel, which is 28 inches square, gather the corners of the towel, and then go out to the deck and sling the water out. It occurred to me that the flour-sack towels would make great neck rags. They work perfectly well in their natural white, of course, though they look a bit like spaghetti napkins. I got some dye and dyed them.

There you have it — cheap, effective, and easy to make. But they’re also like berets. Don’t dare be seen out in public with one.

Let’s just talk about the truck


The flag on the back is the Christian flag, which is commonly flown in King, North Carolina. Also note the bumper stickers in the lower photo.

We could talk about why a surplus military vehicle belonging to the Pfafftown (North Carolina) militia, a right-wing paramilitary group, showed up at the polling place for the Nov. 7 municipal elections in King. We could talk about how, in the previous two elections in King, assault charges have been filed because of encounters between members of the conservative majority and the liberal minority. We could talk about how Republicans and churchgoers are upset because an atheist is running for the King town council. We could talk about how it’s part of my duty, as a local political operative, to be concerned about what happens at the polls on election days. But let’s don’t talk about any of that. I’m burned out on tomfool right-wing drama. Let’s talk about the truck instead.

Because I’m a nerd with a Y chromosome, I find these trucks fascinating, just as cool machines. It happens that, only a couple of months ago, in writing book 3 of the Ursa Major series, I needed a truck like this for a fictional military operation. I had never seen such a truck, so I had to do some research on military vehicles. I never just make stuff up, when stuff must correspond to reality! I do whatever research is necessary. I found the army’s operator’s manual for the truck, which is 452 pages long. I admit without shame that it was fascinating reading, and that the truck almost becomes a character in the novel, the way Jake’s Jeep did in book 1, Fugue in Ursa Major.

I believe the truck in the photo is an M923A2 dropside cargo truck. These trucks come in about 30 different configurations, including dump trucks, wreckers, and vans. It has a Cummins diesel engine, all-wheel drive, and all sorts of cool features that harden it for military use. If you like fine machines (from aircraft to communications apparatus), you’ve got to love military specs.

The driver said he bought this truck for $10,000 a few years ago. I’m sure he drives it to church and to watch people vote. But I shudder to imagine where else.

Two-course breakfasts?

The French conceive of breakfasts in two categories — sweet and salty. I suppose we Americans do, too, though I don’t recall anyone ever asking, “Would you prefer a sweet breakfast or a salty breakfast?”

Usually we choose. But this morning the cool, gray weather — and the devil — led me to do both. The three-day-old sourdough bread called out for pain perdu. And the hens are laying so many eggs that I can be as lavish with eggs as I want and still have lots of home-laid organic eggs to give away (or to trade for things like the apples and the local greenhouse tomatoes that I traded for yesterday).

It also was an excuse to try out the strawberry syrup that I bought last month. It’s made by Fogwood Farms, which is located one county eastward in Rockingham County. It’s sold in the storefront operated by our county arts council in Danbury. The storefront sells local artwork and handmade items. It’s also a coffee shop and performance space. If you live in this area, look to the opposite side of the street when you pass the old courthouse in Danbury.

Grilled tomatoes, by the way, are a winter standby. The gas grill is on the deck and just a few steps from the kitchen, and I use it all the time. I’m saving the local tomatoes that I got yesterday to use raw (except for the green ones, which probably will end up in a curry). The tomato in the photo came from Whole Foods. The quality of winter tomatoes, I think, has improved. Of course winter tomatoes are never good enough for sandwiches, but they’ll usually do for salads. And they roast very well into a nice breakfast vegetable.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I couldn’t eat all this. But the chickens got the leftovers.

The troubles of the 4th Century


Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarians. Edward Armitage, 1875.

Julian, by Gore Vidal. Vintage International, 1962, 502 pages.

On the Gods and the Cosmos, by Sallustius, mid 4th Century.

Paganism’s last stand occurred in the 4th Century. Early in the 4th Century, the Roman emperor Constantine established Christianity as the state religion. A few decades later, the emperor Julian did his best to reverse it. Julian did not succeed.

I think it would be fair to say that the pagan intellectuals of that era did not see the conflict as a competition between the old gods and Christianity. Rather, they saw the conflict as a rational and living philosophy versus lifeless doctrine and dogma. These pagan Romans spoke Greek. Julian was trained as a philosopher at Athens. To them, Christian doctrine was (to put it bluntly) hickish and childish.

I have found it remarkably difficult to read up on the 4th Century. The 4th Century is covered in many general histories, of course, but I have been looking for sources that are limited to the 4th Century in particular. There are some new books by university presses, but they’re very expensive and narrowly focused (for example, on the city of Rome as an urban center). The old references — Gibbon, for example — are outdated. There are oodles of biographies of Constantine. But I’m not very interested in Constantine. After all, we now live in Constantine’s world. I couldn’t figure out what to read first, so I settled on Vidal’s novel.

Vidal is a good writer, in that, unlike so many people who write for a living these days, Vidal has an excellent command of the English language. But Vidal is not a good storyteller. He seems to lack a sense of drama. It’s as though he’s just dutifully writing up his research. That’s a shame. I can’t help but compare Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, or Mary Renault’s Alexander novels. Yourcenar and Renault bring their subjects to life and make them human. Vidal is just not good enough as a novelist to do that.

Vidal, however, was a formidable intellect and a fearless heretic. I wonder if any other writers have ever really dared to write about the formation of Christianity as the cultural castastrophe it actually was in the eyes of philosophers such as Julian — the triviality of its texts; the depravity of its early bishops and theologians; its expropriation from the pagans of anything the Christians found useful; its lust for wealth, property and dominance; its habit of violence, persecution, and inquisition; its tendency toward quibbling and schism; its self-delusion about its absoluteness; the hypocrisy of its carnality vs. its other-worldly posturing; its imperial usefulness as a tool for subduing, pacifying, and, as necessary, exterminating the masses. “No evil ever entered the world quite so vividly or on such a vast scale as Christianity did,” says Vidal’s Priscus.

Gore Vidal died in 2012. I don’t think that we now have any public intellectuals who are quite like him or who can take Vidal’s place.

For a short, sweet read on how the last pagans saw the world, you probably can’t do better than Sallustius’ On the Gods and the Cosmos. Sallustius was a trusted friend and military leader in Julian’s army. What stands out in Sallustius’ writing is his sophisticated use of reason. He understands perfectly well that the pagan gods were myths and that the meaning of the myths had to be teased out with the tools of philosophy. Reading Sallustius, one becomes aware of how reason was smothered for centuries by Christian doctrine and didn’t get its head above water again until the Enlightenment. In many ways, it seems to me, this 4th Century conflict is playing out yet again.

Foo yung to the rescue

I hadn’t made egg foo yung in many years. In fact, I hadn’t even thought about it in many years. I recall that, thirty years ago before I moved to San Francisco, egg foo yung was a popular item in Chinese restaurants in the South. And yet I don’t recall ever seeing it on menus in San Francisco, where the Chinese cookery is much more authentic.

In any case, I am covered up with eggs (each hen has been laying every day), and I can’t figure out what to do with them all. It seems as though half of my driving these days is taking eggs to friends. This afternoon, foo yung popped into my head like a vision, and I was so enthusiastic that I immediately went down to the kitchen and made myself an early supper.

No Chinese vegetables? No problem. I used shredded cabbage, onion, and thinly sliced celery.

It’s the sauce that makes the foo yung. Without the sauce, you’re just eating an omelet in which the cook forgot the cheese. The sauce needs as much zing as you can get into it. I used vegetable bouillon in the liquid in addition to the soy sauce. A teensy touch of sugar and vinegar gives it a slight sweet and sour spin. Garlic powder helps, along with lots of pepper. Cook it well. Make it foam.

By the way, someone recently told me the price of eggs at Walmart these days. If I’m not mistaken, it was something absurdly cheap like 46 cents a dozen. How can that be? Is it that they’re importing eggs from China now? What scares me about egg prices that low is what the chickens are fed and what miserable lives they must lead. In the best of all possible worlds, the animals that help provide us with food would live behind our houses. And they would have names.

Domesticated muscadines

From my years as a young’un, I have clear memories of picking strawberries by the gallon. Mama made strawberry preserves. Mama also made grape jelly, but for some reason I don’t have recollections of picking grapes wholesale for the kitchen. Wild muscadines, though, grew in lots of places at the edges of the woods, and I have climbed trees and foraged for them often enough. I rarely see wild muscadines anymore, but lots of people cultivate them.

I have never made grape jelly, maybe because I’ve never had enough grapes, and grape jelly isn’t my favorite. So what do you do when you have nice mess of grapes but not enough to preserve them? Answer: You eat them raw.

Muscadines are seedy. The only way I know to seed them is to squeeze them until the skin bursts. Unfortunately, most of the pulp comes out with the seeds. The skins are delicious, and no doubt the healthful qualities of grapes are where the color is — in the skins. If you then put the pulp in some cheesecloth and squeeze, you’ll get some juice. Lacking any method of squeezing the pulp really hard, too much of the juice is wasted.

Still, it was a nice breakfast.


The above grapes produced only a shot of juice.

Eggplant bacon?


A homegrown organic eggplant

Two days ago, a friend sent me a Facebook video on making vegan bacon from eggplant. The next day, when I took a dozen surplus eggs to friends (among the few superb gardeners in the county who can outgarden the abbey when Ken is in residence) they gave me eggplants, green peppers, and fresh-picked native muscadine grapes. I took the eggplant coincidence as a hint that, now that the weather is cooler, it’s time to get back to experimenting in the kitchen.

Eggplant bacon seems to be a vegan staple. My version of it was very tasty — smoky and nicely seasoned — but I just couldn’t get it crisp. If you’d like to try, here’s a recipe.

For this recipe, I got out the kitchen implement that I despise and fear the most — the mandolin. But, much as I hate the mandolin, it did an excellent job of making the 1/8-inch slices of eggplant. The seasoning and marinating are a snap. Baking the eggplant is no big deal. But even though I baked the eggplant 15 minutes longer than the recipe requested, the bacon was still flabby. Still, it was tasty enough that I may try it again. Next time, I’ll probably extend the drying part at 225 degrees. Then I’ll spray on some olive oil, turn up the heat in the oven, and make it sizzle. Another option might be taking the bacon to the flabby stage in the oven, then finishing it off in a skillet with some oil.

This is a short post, so I’ll digress into a lifestyle question. One of the cool things about rural agricultural counties like Stokes County is that — though most people long ago gave up gardening — some people still do it. As I’ve mentioned before in previous posts, you want to get to know the agricultural extension folks in your county. The gardener who gave me the eggplant is retired from the agricultural extension service. Once you’ve built a network of gardeners, people trade or give away their surpluses. I remember how it was when I was a child. We’d give people strawberries. They might bring us corn. It’s a nice way to live.

Now if I could only locate some wild abandoned apples to trade for some organic eggs.


Ready for the dreaded mandolin


Marinating


Ready for the oven


A vegan supper: Tofu scramble, eggplant bacon, and sourdough toast. The chardonnay is off-camera.

The kraken vine

Last year, a friend sent me a gift from his garden. He called it a squash, I called it a little pumpkin. Save the seeds, he said. Plant in early summer, he said, feed it well, give it lots of room, and it will become a kraken plant. The vine will spread like kudzu, and it will eat you alive if you don’t watch out, he said. They’re still blooming! The photo is of two baby kraken with a teacup for scale.

These little things are outrageously magical. They mature just before Hallowe’en. They’re probably winter squash. Like winter squash, they like to be cured, and they keep for ages. But in a pie they taste just like pumpkin.

Next year, I’d like to have a lot more of these things and do a better job of cultivating them. A good crop of them probably would last for most of the winter.

Update: The friend who sent me my first little pumpkin identifies these as “Long Island cheese pumpkins.” Here’s a link to some history. They’re an old variety, rescued by an heirloom seed project in the 1970s. He bought his first one at a farmer’s market, he says. Nothing could be easier than saving pumpkin seeds, by the way.

Wintertime table lighting


W.T. Kirkman No. 1 “Little Champ” oil lanterns

For many years, I have been weird about how the table is lit for supper. Electric light is not allowed. It’s not just an affectation for when there is company. It’s an everyday thing, even when I’m having supper alone. During the summer months, supper is over well before dark. But as the days get shorter, it was time to rethink table lighting yet again.

For years, my solution was ordinary tapers of the type that can be bought just about anywhere. But they’re too small. They don’t last long enough. And I don’t much like tapered candles. A year ago, I ordered a box of church candles. They’re very expensive, but they’re great candles. They’re 50 percent beeswax with a nice, straight, ecclesiastical shape. They’re 7/8 inch in diameter and 12 inches long. One box of 24 candles lasted all winter. But the price rose from $50 per box for the first box I ordered to $89 per box now. That’s just too much. All candles gutter and sometimes make a mess. Removing the drippings from the candleholders and replacing spent candles is an unpleasant chore.

My next idea was to try the little blown-glass oil candles made by Firefly. I thought about it for a long time before I ordered a pair, for safety reasons. Flammable liquid inside a glass vessel with a wick is the very definition of Molotov cocktail. What if one of them hit the floor and shattered? But eventually I ordered a pair and tried them out. I hated them. They produce a tiny little dot of light. I should have realized that before I bought them, because the wick is tiny. They are useless, except perhaps as votives, and I’m not a very votive person.

My next idea was an oil lamp, or chamber lamp, of the type that was very common in the days before electrification. They burn kerosene, and they’re easy to find today, both new and antique. But they, too, are usually made of glass. I made a new rule for myself: No glass oil lamps.

Then I admired the yacht lamps and miner’s lamps made of brass, often plated with stainless steel. But they are extremely expensive, and they’re often poorly reviewed as not being well-made enough to be worth the cost.

So then, the last option was oil lanterns.

Obviously there is still a thriving market for oil lanterns. Many people buy them, I believe, as backup lighting for power failures, which makes a lot of sense. They’re made of metal, and the larger lanterns have nice big wicks that are 1 inch wide. As I read reviews of lanterns on Amazon, I finally settled on lanterns made by W.T. Kirkman. Kirkman lanterns get the best reviews and were said to be better made. I ordered two of the Kirkman lanterns from Amazon. Here’s a link to the Kirkman web site. Kirkman sells several models and options in its lanterns, but not all of those models and options are available on Amazon.

I settled on the No. 1 “Little Champ” cold blast lantern. It’s 12 inches high with a 5/8-inch wick. So what does “cold blast” mean? It has to do with how the flame gets its air for combustion. It’s a clever bit of 19th Century technology. In a cold blast lantern, the air is taken in at the top of the lantern and travels down through the side tubes. This is said to give a whiter, brighter flame. Also, cold blast lanterns are said to self-extinguish if tipped over. I’m not going to try that out, but I’m glad to hear it.

The lanterns burn clean and aren’t affected by drafts or blasts of air. Once they’re lit and glowing, they look more domestic and less like something you’d see in a barn. They’re brighter than candles. And they give off a certain warmth (1,100 or 1,400 BTU per hour depending on the model) which should be very welcome in the wintertime.

Kirkman also makes a larger lantern, 15 inches tall with a 1-inch wick. I might just get myself one of those for outdoor use. All the lanterns are galvanized steel. Options include a black enamel finish, round shades that reflect the light downward, and globes in several colors of glass including red, yellow, green, blue, and frosted. Lantern technology is alive and well! You also can buy kits to electrify the lanterns, including with LED bulbs. But why would you want to do that?

When I was a young’un, my grandparents had an oil lantern that they had had since the days before rural electrification. I used to love to play with it. Though I suppose it’s a bit eccentric to have oil lanterns on the supper table, I’m pretty sure that will be my method hereafter. I’ll save the pricey church candles for special occasions.

My grandparents also always kept a 5-gallon tank of kerosene. These oil lanterns will, of course, burn kerosene. But these days most people use the newer lamp oils, which burn cleaner, make less odor, and are said to be safer.


A box of church candles