Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
So far in September, six inches of rain have fallen here. That has made a huge difference in the cool-weather crops. The peppers, which merely survived during the hot, dry, summer, have become very productive and are even still blooming. The turnips, mustard and kale also are doing extremely well.
I couldn’t ask for better soil. It’s all about water.
Of all the many creatures that come up out of the woods and make themselves at home, the ugliest by far are the wild turkeys. Actually, come to think of it, they’re the only ugly creatures in the woods.
Two of my Rodgers FR1.7 speaker cabinets, with the 8-inch drivers newly restored
Until three or four years ago, I didn’t know that those classic speakers that appear to be blown out can be repaired. The problem isn’t as ugly as it looks. To keep an airtight seal between the front and back of the speaker, the outside of the speaker has a plastic foam “surround.” These surrounds have a life of 10 to 20 years before they must be replaced.
When speakers have blown-out surrounds, it doesn’t mean that they’ve been abused. It’s just that the foam gradually decomposes from exposure to the air.
The repair job involves carefully removing the old surrounds, cleaning the glue and foam residue off the surfaces, and gluing a new surround onto the speaker. Surrounds can be bought on-line. I bought my from Parts Express.
If you want to undertake the restoration of a speaker, you have some research to do. First you need to determine the correct surrounds to order. And though the restoration kits come with instructions, it’s a good idea to watch some YouTube videos of the process.
The abbey’s new organ, a Rodgers Cambridge 730 built in 1992, came with eight Rodgers FR1.7 speaker cabinets like the those in the photo above, plus two very large subwoofers to support the low pedal stops. Four of the FR1.7 speakers needed repair, a job that I’ve finally finished. Now as soon as I assemble some more speaker cables I’ll have the full complement of 10 speaker cabinets. That’s 500 pounds of speakers, almost equal to the weight of the organ console. That’s a heck of an audio system for a heck of an organ. I used to hesitate to call myself an audiophile, but I think I’ve earned the title, considering how much excellent (but vintage) audio equipment I have in the house. And now that I’ve been through the rite of passage of repairing speakers.
I was pleased to see that the 8-inch speakers in the FR1.7 cabinets are Peerless speakers, made in Denmark. It made me realize how few Danish imports most Americans have. I love Denmark, having been there on two business trips. So I’m proud of the Danish speakers in my Rodgers organ. Rodgers organs, by the way, are made in Oregon. They are sometimes referred to as the Rolls-Royce of electronic organs. They use digitally sampled pipe sounds. When Rodgers organs are installed and adjusted properly, even organists think they’re listening to a pipe organ.
An 8-inch speaker with a blown-out surround
What the new surround looks like before it’s glued in place
A restored 8-inch speaker
There was a once-upon-a-time when the chickens and groundhogs were wary of each other. Now they have daily grazing parties in the orchard.
I wish I had some idea what my groundhog population is. I’m pretty sure I have two separate families. The fence that keeps the chickens out of the garden also keeps the groundhogs out. Mostly the groundhogs seem to want my grass, and I’m fine with that. So I leave them alone. It’s the voles that do most of the damage, but the voles feed the foxes.
It makes me think of George Bernard Shaw’s preface to his play about Joan of Arc:
The saints and prophets, though they may be accidentally in this or that official position or rank, are always really self-selected, like Joan. And since neither Church nor State, by the secular necessities of its constitution, can guarantee even the recognition of such self-chosen missions, there is nothing for us but to make it a point of honor to privilege heresy to the last bearable degree on the simple ground that all evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct. In short, though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance, or the recognition of the fact that the law of evolution is Ibsen’s law of change.
And so it is, I think, with Mother Nature, and groundhogs, and voles. I try to tolerate them to the last bearable degree.
The Irish Times
There are two dangers in not owning a farm: the belief that heat comes from the furnace and food comes from the supermarket. — Aldo Leopold
The Irish Times started a three-part series today on how family farms are making a comeback in Ireland’s depressed economy. In fact, farming is one of the most promising areas of the economy. Young people now see farming as an option. This, of course, is relocalization — a return to the land after people saw what the globalization of the economy got them.
What puzzles me is why that doesn’t seem to be happening here. Compare the story from the Irish Times with the link I posted yesterday to a New Yorker story about economic deterioration in Surry County, North Carolina, the county just to the west of Stokes County, where I live. Young people continue to move away, both in Surry and Stokes, while many old family farms sit more or less intact, but fallow. All too many family farms, however, have been chopped up into subdivisions during the past few decades, if they were near a population center or a main road.
I am speculating, because I don’t have nearly enough information to make such a judgment, but it is as though most people here are at an earlier stage in a process. They have perceived the downsides of the boom and bust and waste brought to us by globalization. But they’re not yet thinking much about what they could do, largely by themselves, with the resources that are close around them. I don’t know if it’s the truth or an urban legend, but one regularly hears that some children don’t know that French fries comes from potatoes. If that’s true, then the cultural connection to the land has been completely severed. Not to mention that education has failed. Maybe things never went that far in Ireland.
Snappy Lunch in downtown Mount Airy
It isn’t often that urbane institutions such as the New Yorker find themselves in places like Mount Airy, North Carolina. In the September 12 issue of the New Yorker, George Packer has a must-read piece on how the United States has deteriorated — in almost every way — since the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The article is “Coming Apart: After 9/11 transfixed America, the country’s problems were left to rot.”
This piece is available on the New Yorker’s web site to non-subscribers, here.
This article is not in any way condescending toward Mount Airy. It’s hard to nail down the gist of an article this long and thoughtful, but these two paragraphs come pretty close:
While the media were riveted by the spectacle of celebrity wealth, large areas of the country were—like Surry County—left to rot. The boom had been built on sand: housing speculation, overvalued stocks, reckless deregulation, irresponsible deficits. When the foundation started to crumble with the first wave of mortgage defaults, in 2007, the scale of the destruction became the latest of the decade’s surprises. Hardly anyone foresaw how far the economy would fall; hardly anyone imagined how many people it would take on the way down. Even the economic advisers of the next Administration badly misjudged the crisis. The trillions of dollars spent and, often, misspent on wars and domestic bureaucracies were no longer available to fill the hole left by the implosion of the private economy. Reborn champions of austerity pointed to the deficits in order to make the case that the country couldn’t afford to spend its way back to health. And, like the attacks that were supposed to change everything, the recession—which was given the epithet “Great” and was constantly compared with the Depression of the nineteen-thirties—inspired very little change in economic policy. Without effective leadership, the country blindly reverted to the status quo ante, with the same few people making a lot of money, if a little less than before, and the same people doing badly, if a little worse.
This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But events on the same scale, or nearly so, no longer seem to have that power; moneyed interests may have become too entrenched, élites too self-seeking, institutions too feeble, and the public too polarized and passive for the country to be shocked into fundamental change.
I have an old friend from the 1970s who is now in federal prison after being convicted on federal tax fraud charges. It was a messy case, with accusations of bilking investors, money laundering, perjury, and obstruction of justice. A former chairman of the North Carolina Republican party and former aide to the late Sen. Jesse Helms also was swept up in the case. How did my friend get there? He came from a very rich family — his family owned a Southern textile company — and he never lacked for anything.
When I knew him he was in his late teens. He was reading Tolkien and wearing funny hats. But after Tolkien, he read a lot of Ayn Rand. It changed him forever.
His father was an old-fashioned textile magnate who believed that his company had a duty to the community. His son — let’s call him Powell — acknowledged no such duty. Powell, aided by the family fortune, I assume, set up a textile business in Haiti, then the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with annual per capita income of $360. Powell was lionized in a 1987 article in the Washington Post, which saw in him some kind of heroism for doing business in Haiti. “If unions come, I go,” he is quoted as saying.
In 2002, he wrote an article calling the Bahamas “a Libertarian paradise.” The business that was caught up in federal fraud charges was operating out of the Bahamas. While in federal prison, he wrote a manifesto about the corruptness of the American justice system. He believes that he was set up and that he is a victim of the government.
I’d give credit for the following quote if I was sure who wrote it. It was a blogger, I believe, who goes by the name Kung Fu Monkey:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
There you have it. Kung Fu Monkey also shows much insight in contrasting Tolkien with Rand, because their fiction has had pretty much the opposite effect on culture.
And now along comes a study from the University of Buffalo which found that reading fiction increases empathy. Young people who read Harry Potter books identify as wizards. Those who read vampire books identify as vampires. But here’s the gist of it:
The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. [Keith Oatley]
Psychological expertise. There you have it. But I think you have to read widely — many, many good authors — to develop psychological expertise.
Those whose view of reality is proudly empirical do not recognize such a thing as psychological expertise, because its insights are not falsifiable. That is almost certainly true. But the fact that something is not falsifiable does not prove that it is wrong. To empiricists, English majors are just babbling when they sit around and analyze stories and characters. But there is a method to it. Harold Bloom at Yale, for example, has a very well developed literary method. Camille Paglia was one of Bloom’s students, and it was this kind of method that she used in her brilliant book Sexual Personae. Empiricists despise that book. English majors and other lovers of fiction find it rich with cultural insight.
I don’t buy the proposition, by the way, that reading fiction increases empathy. Some fiction diminishes empathy and gives people permission to exercise their predatory instincts. There are good stories, and there are bad stories, which affect us for good or for ill.
Click on photos for larger version
I saw quite a lot of Mrs. Fox today. She crossed the yard several times as she went about her business, and she was hunting voles in the weeds. I couldn’t change lenses on the camera fast enough to catch her hunting voles, but it was fun to watch. She’d sit on her haunches, very still, and watch. Then she’d leap in a very high, graceful arc and come down with her jaws and front paws ready to make a catch. Unfortunately she didn’t get a vole while I was watching.
Mrs. Fox may be getting more and more comfortable being in the yard during daylight. I hope so. She makes a nice dog substitute. And I’m not absolutely sure that this is Mrs. Fox. It could be one of the pups she raised this year. These are the clearest photos I’ve been able to get so far, so I’m hoping the markings will help me distinguish one fox from another.
As I watched this snake, it appeared to me that it was lapping water droplets, like a cat, from the wet grass. It wasn’t just flicking its little red tongue. It was flicking it at the grass. I asked a friend who has kept snakes as pets if they lap water. He said no, that snakes get most of their water from their food.
I remain unsatisfied by that answer. It sure did look like it was lapping water like a cat.
The recent rain, much of which came from the remnants of tropical storm Lee, have given the fall greens a good start. I need to thin the turnips, though.