Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
The first squash are in. The tomatoes will follow soon. Everything in the garden is blooming copiously, and last night a good rain fell. I’m hoping for a good garden year.
As for the figs, it’s highly likely that the squirrels will raid the orchard and get to them first. The fig wars should begin in a few weeks.
As for the deer, these two no longer make any pretense of living in the woods. They live in the front thicket, and this year they ate every last one of my day lily blooms.
What could be more thrilling than the first of the summer pesto from just-picked basil?
The first tomato sandwich from the first-picked tomato, that’s what. But the tomatoes are still about a week away.
These days we take bridges for granted. We seldom think about what travel was like when getting across rivers was a big deal. The earliest solution, of course, was to ford the river where the terrain was suitable. Then came ferries, and then came bridges. In one of my visits to Paris, I wondered aloud to an English friend why the most important city in France was built seemingly in the middle of nowhere in the interior of the country. The answer was obvious to him, but he indulged the ignorant American with the answer. It’s because, he said, the site of Paris was a natural bridging place for the Seine. Oh. I get it.
Rockford, in colonial times, was a travel hub. It sits on a hill above a ford across the Yadkin River. It used to be the county seat for Surry County, and the old courthouse still stands, though it is dilapidated. Now Rockford is in the middle of nowhere (though many Yadkin Valley vineyards have sprung up around it), and most of the old buildings are in varying states of dilapidation.
When I see an old church with carpenter gothic windows, I usually stop to take photos. It’s interesting how that one feature — gothic windows — makes a huge difference in whether a building is seen as worth preserving or whether it is allowed to fall into ruin. This old church in Rockford could use some maintenance, but it’s holding its own.
The enhanced value provided by gothic windows makes me think of my own home. I like to think that this house will still be standing two hundred years after I’m gone. The gothic windows can’t hurt.
Oratorio in Ursa Major will be released July 1. Between now and June 15, 2016, I’m offering signed advance copies of Oratorio, hardback only, at a discount, through this blog.
The cost is $25 per copy, which includes shipping by priority mail. The retail price of the hardback will be $29.99, so this is a nice discount, with free shipping. I’m afraid I must restrict this offer to the U.S. only because of the high cost of international shipping. Readers in Europe: Oratorio will be available for sale from Amazon in Europe starting July 1. Bookstores will be able to order Oratorio for you as well.
To order your copies, please email me before June 15 at david@acornabbey.com with this information:
1. How many copies?
2. How would you like to pay? The choices are PayPal and by mailing a check. If you choose PayPal, I’ll send you PayPal information. If you’d like to mail a check, I’ll send you the address.
3. Would you like a particular inscription? If so, please specify.
4. And, of course, please include your mailing address.
Reviews will be appreciated! You’ll be able to review Oratorio in Ursa Major at Amazon and Goodreads starting with the July 1 release date.
Here’s the blurb:
A global catastrophe has returned earth to the Iron Age and killed six billion people. Even the billionaires were tricked and eliminated. An Oxford intelligentsia have taken over the planet. Can such smart people rebuild the world in a better way? With help from the galactic federation, perhaps there is hope. But first, earth’s new elite must retrieve from the past some things that were destroyed long ago — ways of thinking and living that can avoid a fatal reawakening of the delusions bequeathed to us by Rome. Jake Janaway — young, modest, handsome, and scared — is selected for a dangerous mission into the pre-Roman past. Jake has no idea why he was chosen. Jake has a lot to learn. But perhaps no one in the galaxy ever had better teachers, or was more loved.
For eleven months of the year, blackberries are terrible neighbors. They come up everywhere. If you get anywhere near them, they reach out and grab you with their briars. Their stems are as tough as Kevlar, and it’s very difficult to cut them back.
But for one month of the year, blackberries pay you back with — blackberries. May was a good growing month, so June promises to be an outstandingly good blackberry month.
There will be pies.
The spider in my window was having a stink bug for lunch. Way to go, spider.
It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.
In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.
For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.
In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.
And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.
When I was a young’un in the rural South, we called these doodlebug holes. There is much folklore about doodlebug holes. The version I learned as a child was, “Doodlebug, doodlebug, come out, your house is on fire.”
A little Googling reveals doodlebug holes to be the sand pit traps of antlion larvae. As for the adult antlions, I’ve already found one of them in the house this spring. I caught it in a jar and took it outside.
Wikipedia commons
I believe it was four years ago that a gardener friend urged me to go to Tractor Supply and get some of the cherry bushes they were selling. The potted bushes were very small — not more than two quarts, as I recall. I have never known a bush that is so hardy and grows so fast. The bushes have been heavily pruned at least twice, and once again they’re starting to block the path from the garden to the orchard.
As for the fruit, I wouldn’t say that it’s the best fruit in the world. But it has the virtue of being very early and very prolific. The pit-to-fruit ratio is not all that great. But who can turn down fresh cherries in May. Bush cherries would make a fine, fast-growing hedge.
The muffins are whole wheat, sweetened with maple syrup and honey.
Watch out for pits!
The 2016 apple crop is coming along great.
Someone told me recently that the abbey is looking shaggy. Oh well. Better shaggy than barren.
For as long as I have been politically conscious, there has been a strong taboo against using certain words in public discourse. One of those words is the H-word — Hitler. (Nice people lower their voices when they say the name.) That taboo led to what we call Godwin’s law, which posits that if any online political discussion goes on for long enough, it becomes almost a certainty that someone will use the H-word. Another one of those words is the F-word — fascism. Again, I lower my voice. These are words that nice people don’t use.
The moment one uses either of these words — I like to call them rhetorical bludgeons — he is deemed guilty of rhetorical excess and automatically loses the argument. The assumption underlying the taboo is that this is America, we’re better than that, and that American democracy could not possibly ever fall into fascism or produce a demagogue like, you know, the H-guy.
But, just as a thought experiment, what would happen if the F-word ever became the right word? Our public discourse and therefore the front line of our defenses would be paralyzed until we came to our senses.
And so I am encouraged to see the F-word increasingly finding its way into print as the Trump phenomenon grows. Andrew Sullivan used the F-word in a long article in the May issue of New York magazine. Yesterday, Robert Kagan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, used the F-word in an op-ed in the Washington Post, “This is how fascism comes to America.”
We have always known that, if fascism ever did come to America, religion would be right in the middle of it. From the very first colonists, American religion has always had a strong stink of evil in it.
For far, far too long — decades, actually — Republican politicians and the vilest of preachers have gotten away with incendiary rhetoric. Older Republicans have been imbibing this rhetoric for almost 40 years now. Who are these people? Matthew MacWilliams, an academic who studies authoritarianism, published an article back in February that said:
“A voter’s gender, education, age, ideology, party identification, income, and race simply had no statistical bearing on whether someone supported Trump. Neither, despite predictions to the contrary, did evangelicalism.
“Here is what did: authoritarianism, by which I mean Americans’ inclination to authoritarian behavior. When political scientists use the term authoritarianism, we are not talking about dictatorships but about a worldview. People who score high on the authoritarian scale value conformity and order, protect social norms, and are wary of outsiders. And when authoritarians feel threatened, they support aggressive leaders and policies.”
Yep. We all know these people, the authoritarians, pretty much synonymous with the word Republican. Preachers and Republican operatives have made sure that the authoritarians among us always feel threatened. But now the Republican Party has lost control of the machinery it created to angrify and harness authoritarians for political purposes. A rogue moved in and took over. It’s really that simple. And there’s a word for it.
Update:
The New Yorker uses the F-word, the H-word, and the A-word — fascism, Hitler, authoritarian.