Month: January 2013

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.

First snow of the winter

More than 6 inches of rain has fallen here this week. The rain was forecast to turn to snow tonight at midnight, but it turned to snow five hours early. Plus, it’s thundering. Last week the temperature was 70 degrees.

I’d much rather have the rain and snow than the spookily warm weather. The cherry trees were blooming in Winston-Salem. And this is the kind of prolonged winter rain that feeds the aquifer and protects our well water.

So much destruction, so little oil

We’re being bombarded with all kinds of propaganda these days about a so-called renaissance in American oil production, as though they’ve found a way to get around the absolutes of peak oil and keep the stuff flowing for decades more, cheap.

See that little blip on the end of the chart? That’s what we’ve gained from fracking places like North Dakota into mudholes filled with toxic wastes. Can you imagine what we’d have to do to this country to get any meaningful amount of oil from a highly polluting extraction method like fracking?

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.

Low cost text input devices

One of my bad habits is scouring eBay for older technology that has become cheap but remains useful (or interesting). This Alphasmart 3000 word processor cost me $7.85 on eBay, plus $8.05 shipping.

It’s a simple device. You type, and it stores the text. To retrieve the text, you plug the Alphasmart 3000 into your computer’s USB port. The computer thinks it’s just a keyboard. Press the “SEND” key on the Alphasmart, and the computer thinks that a fast typist is keying text into your word processing program or whatever program is open and receiving keyboard input at the time.

The Alphasmart can hold eight separate files and up to 120 pages of text (though I’m not sure what their definition of a page is). It has rudimentary editing capability, and a spell-checker. There are later versions of the Alphasmart, also available on eBay for somewhat more money. They have bigger text buffers and a somewhat larger LCD screen. And of course you can still buy them new.

Need to type something in bed, or sitting at the picnic table? It works, and the keyboard is much nicer than any confounded laptop I’ve ever seen. Not to mention that it’s much cheaper and less fragile. I think the biggest market for these devices is in schools, so they’re made to take the sort of beating that fifth-graders can give. Its design clearly was inspired by Apple’s clamshell Newton from the 1990s.

Ridiculous political drama

Here is a fresh, important lesson in how political players and the corporate media collude to generate false, self-serving drama. It’s not difficult to pull back the curtain and see what they get out of it. Political players — especially those with the weakest hand — get to strut in front of cameras and recite their talking points, to build their brands, to reinforce the fiction that Washington is the center of the universe. The media need conflict, urgency, and drama to get people to watch their crap and listen to their dumb-as-rocks talking heads.

Immediately after the election, the political entertainment industry panned their cameras to the so-called “fiscal cliff,” as though it was all pre-planned, which it was. Political players cooperated in all sorts of ways, including running it down to the wire to maximize the drama. But in the end, it wasn’t even close. The legislation passed 89-8 in the Senate and 257-167 in the House. What a silly drama.

It was the same with the election. The right-wing media said Romney would win (apparently believing their own fantasies), and the mainstream media said it was a close horse race. But a small minority of real-world people, thanks to Nate Silver, knew that it was not close, and that Romney would not win. Silver was demonized and marginalized, and the political entertainment industry went right on playing out the election according to their horse-race script. Here’s a test: Did you find, and evaluate the evidence of, Nate Silver before the election? If yes, you get a gold star. If not, you need to rethink your information sources.

The ringmasters of the pig circus will do it again, and then again. We will see within the next day or two what their next dramatic theme will be. They’re shifting the cameras and rehearsing the script even now. The show will go on.

To the ruling elite (and by this I mean all the players in the government industrial complex, not just Democrats), there are many benefits in this arrangement. One important benefit is distraction. By focusing the people on empty dramas, they distract us from the things that really matter. They keep us angry and divided, so that we can’t see who is really eating our lunch.

The cure: to turn off our televisions and read. Everything must be read with great skepticism and an alertness to hidden agendas and conflicts of interest. Those who have a record of being wrong (that category includes almost all our pundit class and all the players who go back and forth through the revolving doors between government and corporations) must be ignored. Anyone who has any kind of power must be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. Similarly, anyone who is rich must be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise.

Also, keep a long memory. Remember when the whole political entertainment complex ridiculed the idea that there was a housing bubble? Remember when Alan Greenspan, kissing the ass of George Bush, who was running for president, said that the Clinton-era surplus created the danger that we might pay off the debt too fast, and that we must therefore give rich “job creators” a tax cut? The script-writers for the pig circus keep the horse shit flying so fast that we’re not supposed to have time to fact-check or to think back to their lines in last year’s script. Don’t let them get away with it.

Apply a few simple tests of track record and truth, and it’s clear that 99 percent of what we’re fed by our media and by political players is horse shit.

As they roll back the curtain on the pig circus’s next act, pay no attention. What’s important, as always, is somewhere they don’t want us to look.

At the water cooler, instead of talking about the “fiscal cliff” and the drama du jour, review the show. Critique the performances. Ridicule the script. Laugh at the contrived, car-chase ending. Speculate on the setup for the sequel. Then turn off the damned television and don’t fall for it again.

In fact, the “fiscal cliff” legislation passed the House with a significantly greater margin than John Boehner’s re-election as speaker (220 to 192).