October 2013 – Into the Woods

Halloween work day

Ken has done a lot of traveling and has had a number of public appearances to prepare for, so there hasn’t been a lot of time for farm work this fall. But this week he has started catching up. First step: clean the litter out of the garden. Second step: throw on some compost. Next: Till the garden, plant winter rye, and wait for rain. Not only is a crop of winter rye good for the garden, it also provides winter greens for the chickens.

Ken lets the chickens out to roam when he’s outside working and can keep an eye on them. The abbey has six chickens at present.

A late, shabby rosebud

Late bees working a camellia blossom

Free clover, all you can eat

Click on image for high-resolution version

Everybody eats the abbey’s clover — rabbits, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, chickens, deer. And who knows who comes in and eats it in the dark of night.

I’ve seen this chipmunk several times lately outside the abbey’s side door. I’m wondering if a family of chipmunks has taken up residence under the side porch.

Sourdough in winter

During a couple of early cold snaps, I learned that making sourdough bread takes forever in a cold kitchen. Though all the experts seem to like the idea of a long, slow rise, I don’t have forever. The leaven process must complete overnight, and the rest of the job must be done in time to bake by 5 p.m. or so the next day.

The method I’ve hit upon is to let the dough rise in the oven with the oven light on. Then things seem to happen at about the same rate as during the summer. And while I’m at it, I set a jar of clover sprouts in the oven with the dough. All seeds (as far as I know) germinate better when they’re warm.

The standard abbey sourdough loaf is big — about three pounds. It’s half whole wheat. The whole wheat dough rises nicely, but I don’t get much oven spring with half whole wheat. The crumb is far from dense, though, and it’s great hot, cold, or as toast. When there’s company, or for a showy loaf, I use unbleached flour. That makes a much higher loaf with dramatic oven spring.

The thermostat on a typical winter morning

The dough doubles after about four hours in a warm oven

Ready to put the lid on and bake. The parchment is for lifting the dough out of the bowl into the Dutch oven. Lining the dough-rising bowl with parchment, then lifting by the edges of the paper, is the only way I’ve found to transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, which is preheated to 500 degrees. Upending the dough bowl over the Dutch oven deflates the dough.

Another finished loaf of abbey bread

Apple expedition

What an apple should look like

Someday the abbey’s orchard will have a stand of grand old apple trees that will supply a variety of apples from late summer until fall. But unfortunately the abbey’s orchard is only five years old. Though it’s producing apples, the young trees can’t make apples faster than the squirrels can sneak over the fence from the woods and carry them off (along with the figs).

Therefore, whenever we’re out and about, Ken and I are on the lookout for abandoned apple trees. On a recent trip to Asheville, we hit the jackpot. There were two grand apple trees — a green and a red — near a friend’s house, and he had been given picking rights by the owner.

I won’t repeat my rant about the worthlessness of grocery store apples. I’ll just summarize with the fact that, whatever they are, they are not apples. I will make do with commercial apples when I can’t get anything else. But the only real apples come from old, abandoned trees. The age of the tree helps ensure that the apples are of an honest variety meant for eating rather than shipping. And being abandoned ensures that they’ve never been sprayed. A healthy apple tree is remarkably pest free. The ugly skin of the apple is the truest indicator of its quality. An apple with a beautiful skin is hardly ever fit to eat.

These apples were at the perfect time for picking. They were hard and very juicy.

Ken in the apple tree

The red tree wasn’t quite as grand as the green tree

The green apple tree

John Twelve Hawks: I’m not James Frey

Source: johntwelvehawks.com

I had email from John Twelve Hawks this afternoon. He had seen my recent blog post, in which I mentioned speculation in some big-city literary circles that John Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym for James Frey. “… I can confirm … I’m not James Frey,” John Twelve Hawks writes in the email.

He also included a link to a piece in New York magazine (November 2010) that paints a very, um, interesting portrait of James Frey.

I have a tremendous respect for John Twelve Hawks as a writer. For James Frey, none. You’ll see why I have such a low opinion of James Frey if you read the New York magazine piece.

In my Googling on this subject, I have not previously come across a statement from John Twelve Hawks on this. For all I know, this blog post may be John Twelve Hawks’ first public denial of any connection to James Frey. Frey, however, was very willing to milk the publicity and exploit John Twelve Hawks’ reputation. Frey told the New York Post, “I will neither confirm nor deny that I am John Twelve Hawks.” Yeah, whatever, James Frey.

2013 summer garden, R.I.P.

Click on image for high-res version

As you get closer and closer to the last pepper of summer, or the last tomato, or the last basil, it all gets increasingly precious and picturesque.

Thinking rationally about apocalypses

Albrecht Dürer

Apocalyptic thinking is in fashion. The apocalyptic threads in contemporary culture are everywhere to be found in books (both fiction and nonfiction), movies, television series, and the news media. We are riding a long wave of pessimism, with polls showing that something like 80 percent of the population think that life is getting worse.

When writing Fugue in Ursa Major, a novel, I had to think carefully about apocalypses. Science fiction, after all, though a work of imagination, must be internally consistent with itself and externally consistent with what we know from science and other fields. In thinking about how civilization might crash, we don’t want our imagination to just run wild. Rather, we want to discipline our imagination with a historical awareness of previous crashes and an awareness of all the unstable conditions of modern life that could take us down.

So, what could take us down? Lots of things, and in each area of instability you’ll find a rich literature, much of it scholarly and well documented. Pick your apocalypse. Would you like an economic collapse? A political crisis such as war? Environmental? A pandemic? You’ll find dozens of recent books. You’ll find books such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which examines the roots of several cultural collapses. There are many books on the lessons to be learned from Rome. My favorite in that group is Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. I think that anyone doing a survey of this literature will want to read an important paper by Joseph A. Tainter, “Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies.” Tainter approaches the subject from the economics of energy.

I need to make it clear that I am not talking about fringe elements, who are deep into all sorts of delusions. It’s the serious material from serious sources that is of interest. University presses have done good business in this area. Unless our interest is in the psychology of mass delusion, we don’t need to dirty up our imaginations with what some fringy doomers in northern Idaho might think, or religious End Times types. I am baffled by the current fascination with zombies in pop culture (though I thought “World War Z” was a pretty entertaining movie, and I can sort of see how zombies are an interesting metaphor for the empty lives of consumption that so many people live).

Having dug into some of the history, and into the all-too-plausible scenarios for economic, political, or environmental collapse, then it’s interesting to do a survey of the fiction. There is a wave of excellent apocalyptic fiction that started decades ago. Lucifer’s Hammer (1977), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, stands out. There is A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller, from 1960. The thread continues to the present, with good, bestselling fiction such as Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. You’ll find excellent lists of apocalyptic fiction all over the Internet.

The next apocalypse may well have much in common with apocalypses of the past, but obviously much will be brand new. So it’s important to consider how smart writers have imagined it. How and where will it start? How will it get out of control? Who will be wiped out? Who will survive, and why? What conditions will the survivors find themselves in? How long will the dark age last? Will some people in some places be able to keep some lights on? If so, where, and how? What factors will permit an eventual recovery? How will things be different on the other side? Beautiful stories can be told in these settings.

There are dissenters, of course — people who are more optimistic. A good example is David Brin, a writer and futurist, who believes that we are obsessed with Doomsday. People like Brin believe that a bold application of the human spirit, plus advances in technology, would be able to deal with our future problems. Pessimists refer disparagingly to those types as “techno utopians.”

Obviously no one knows what the future holds. So really I am making only two modest claims. The first is that is that the study of unsustainability, in all fields, deserves to be taken seriously. The second is that apocalypses make awesome settings for storytelling.

Empathy for mechanical things

A small area of the interior of my 1954 Collins 75A-4 receiver, which has 22 tubes and lots of rotating shafts attached to its inductors and condensers

It is universally understood that human beings — at least the better sort of human beings — have empathy for other human beings, and for animals. But empathy goes way beyond that. It took me a while to figure out the difference between people with green thumbs and people with black thumbs. I concluded that people with green thumbs have a highly developed empathy for plants. They have learned what plants want. If plants are happy, they feel their happiness. If plants are unhappy, they feel their pain and can’t rest until they figure out what the plant needs to be happy again.

It’s the same with mechanical things, and with electronic things. I have an almost debilitating empathy for mechanical things. Partly, I think, it’s because I’ve been a tinkerer ever since I was a little boy. I grew up in a culture in which boys learned how to use tools and learned how to fix things, things like cars. I did not wreck my toys. Some of my favorite toys, such as a train transformer that I used as a power supply for electrical experiments, lasted for years and years. I would even take it apart periodically and oil its rheostat.

I have a painful awareness of when something mechanical is stressed and is in danger of breaking. Anyone who has been around the abbey for very long knows that I have a seemingly neurotic complex about not slamming doors. Now partly this is because the sound of a door slamming is one of the rudest, most irritating sounds I know. But partly it’s because the abbey’s doors are excessively expensive and complicated, and from the day I moved into the abbey I’ve had premonitions of a door’s latch mechanism breaking, knowing how difficult and expensive it would be to get it fixed. Sure enough, one of the door’s latch mechanisms broke. I described the problem on the phone to a master locksmith, and he empathized with my empathy, warning me how difficult it is to repair one of those fancy German locking mechanisms in a door which has not one bolt but three (tighter weather seal and harder to knock down), not to mention a deadbolt and a special anti-slam finger that tells the mechanism whether the door is open or not, to guard against the bolts shearing if some idiot slams the door while the bolts are extended. Now, I know that not one in a hundred readers understood the mechanics in the previous sentence, but I wrote it anyway as an empathy-raising exercise.

Months before the windshield in my Jeep developed a creeping crack, I had a premonition of it. I swear I felt its stress developing. Two weeks ago, my dishwasher started leaking. I’d had a premonition of that too and had started thinking about what sort of replacement would be best.

When you give a machine a home, it’s like adopting an animal. You take on a commitment to feel that machine’s happiness or pain, and to take care of it. My Jeep needs washing, but it’s impeccably maintained. My god-awful complicated Rodgers 730 organ, now 21 years old, also is impeccably maintained. There’s not so much as a burned-out piston lamp. My IBM Self-Correcting Selectric III typewriter is in excellent working condition.

I don’t have a perfect record. A few weeks ago, I forgot to cover the lawn mower, and rain water got into the fuel tank. Horrible! Some of the garden tools are outdoors instead of in the basement where they belong. My Yaesu FT-897 transceiver could use some work. Boxing it up and sending it back to Yaesu’s excellent repair department is not a priority at the moment, but I feel its pain. And I am absolutely terrible with house plants, which is why I don’t have any and have stopped letting people give them to me.

To be surrounded by things that are broken ought to be a source of misery, similar to the misery of hungry chickens that are late to be fed, or lettuce that is wilting from lack of water.

The local garage that maintains my Jeep has a classic Fifties-vintage Rolls-Royce in storage. Every time I take the Jeep in, I sneak out to the Rolls-Royce, open the driver’s door, then gently close it again, just to hear the sound of its beautifully machined latching mechanism. But every latch, and every machine, especially the lame and the humble and the elderly, deserve our empathy, our respect, and our repairs in their time of need.

Another movie deal for John Twelve Hawks

Source: johntwelvehawks.com

We learned this week that the mysterious John Twelve Hawks has sold the movie rights to his next book. It was first reported in Deadline Hollywood, and the industry is buzzing with the news.

John Twelve Hawks, you will recall, is the author of the bestselling Fourth Realm Trilogy, which (in my opinion) is some of the best science fiction to come along in years. No one knows Twelve Hawks’ real identity, not even his publisher and agent. He lives off the grid. There has been much speculation by people in the publishing industry who consider themselves savvy that John Twelve Hawks is a pseudonym for James Frey, a hustler of a writer who has made a bunch of money and taken a lot of heat after accusations that he made up a bunch of stuff in his memoir. He subsequently went on Oprah and Larry King to account for himself.

However, I think the James Frey theory is bunk, not least because I’ve gotten to know John Twelve Hawks a little, through email.

It’s strange how it happened. No joke, I was stretched out reading the thrilling conclusion of the third book of the trilogy, The Golden City, when I heard the email chime from the iMac. I got up to check mail and could hardly believe it when I found it was an email from my new favorite writer, John Twelve Hawks. How often does it happen that, when you’re reading a book, email comes in from the author, out of the clear blue sky? But Ken can testify that this is true, because actually John Twelve Hawks’ email went to Ken first, because Ken’s email address was easier to find. John Twelve Hawks asked Ken to forward the email to me.

The reason Twelve Hawks emailed me was to ask permission to reprint on another web site a blog post I had written on Internet privacy. Of course I gave him permission to do that. Since then (that was in 2010), we’ve exchanged a few emails.

There are several reasons why I think the James Frey theory of John Twelve Hawks’ identify is bunk. For one, Frey is a hustler and appears to have much more interest in money than truth. I believe that John Twelve Hawks is sincere, particularly in his commitment to freedom from surveillance. I don’t think that a busy businessman of a writer like James Frey would take the time to slum with provincial bloggers like me or to take note of something I had written on Internet privacy. Frey has more profitable fish to fry.

In any case, I can’t wait for Twelve Hawks’ next book. If you haven’t read the trilogy, I recommend it. Warner Brothers has bought the movie rights to Twelve Hawks’ first three books. All of which means that John Twelve Hawks is now a pretty rich man. I seriously doubt that Twelve Hawks is using the money for new hustles, as James Frey would be doing. Rather, I suspect that Twelve Hawks’ is using the money to buy himself more peace and quiet and more writing time at his hideaway in rural Ireland, wherever that place may be. I suspect County Kerry, though, because Skellig Michael is used as a location in the trilogy. When the movie comes out, expect some thrilling helicopter shots from Skellig Michael.

Below, an email from John Twelve Hawks dated May 24, 2013

Ken dines in Dingle (without me)

Photos by Ken Ilgunas

Ken is in Ireland, near the end of a six-week trip to England, France, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. He’ll be home in a few days.

I insisted that, while he is in Dingle in County Kerry, he have dinner at my favorite place — Benners Hotel. This evening he emailed me photos from Dingle, including a photo of his Sunday night supper. Pricey, wasn’t it, Ken?

I’ve stayed at Benners Hotel in Dingle on both my trips to Ireland. The food is excellent. Dingle is a charming fishing village on the coast of County Kerry. And County Kerry is on the west coast of Ireland. One of the great things about the Kerry coast is that the highest mountain in Ireland is right up against the sea, making for some rugged terrain and wild scenery. Off the coast lie the mysterious skelligs — the spires of rock jutting out of the sea. Some of the skelligs are like small islands. There was a tiny monastery on Skellig Michael during the Middle Ages.

No doubt Ken will have more photos from County Kerry later on.

A photo of the Dingle harbor that I took on my last trip there.