April 2016 – Into the Woods

Small solutions for light pollution

The new LED fixture, aimed in such a way as to limit its coverage to 180 degrees.

Acorn Abbey is near the end of an unpaved private road. The abbey feels remote and isolated, but there are other homes on the road. Luckily the other places are closer to the nearest paved road than I am, so there is no daily traffic past the abbey. The closest house is across the road, though that place is out of sight down a steep hill. But I have been bedeviled for as long as I’ve lived here by a so-called security light by the roadside across from me. Its light washed into the abbey’s bedroom windows, lit my house so starkly that the only real shadow was behind the house, ruined the night sky, and all too often tricked a mockingbird into singing in the dead of night.

It’s a vacation home over there; the owner lives in Florida. I’ve tried over the years to persuade her to get the light removed, but she wouldn’t do it. She believes that so-called security lights actually provide security, though some studies have found that increased lighting actually increases crime.

Not until a week ago did I learn that electric companies actually have reflector shields that can contain at least some of this light when neighbors complain. Also, electric companies are in the process of replacing the old mercury vapor lights with LED lights. The LED lights are much more directional. The direct light from them can be limited to 180 degrees.

As soon as I learned that reflectors existed, I called our electric company. The electric company here is Energy United, a small (and very friendly) co-op company. They sent an engineer to see what could be done. The engineer proposed an LED fixture mounted on a S-arm aimed across the road, away from my place.

What a huge difference that has made! Now no direct light falls on my side of the road. I can’t see the neighbor’s place anyway, because it’s down a steep hill. So all I see now is light falling on an oak tree across the road. The oak tree glows a little and shimmers like the ghost of an oak tree. But I don’t mind that, because I don’t get any direct light anymore. The sky is dark again. No light glows through the abbey’s front windows.

If more people complained about light pollution from those infernal “security” lights that can’t be turned off, then electric companies would be forced to come up with even better solutions to keep the light from trespassing.

Tiny lives

Click on image for high-resolution version

While getting laundry off the line this evening, I noticed this tiny egg shell in the grass. Its diameter is not much greater than the diameter of a pencil. An ant was checking it out. I have no idea what hatched out it.

I don’t get to travel as much as I might like. I would like to point my camera at grand Ansel-Adams landscapes — or, even better, at rocky seascapes. But for now I must make do with pointing my camera at smaller and smaller things. A macro lens — not to mention a microscope — is a very good thing to have when you’re stuck in one place. The photo of the egg shell was taken with a Nikon 28-85mm 1:3.5-4.5 lens in macro mode. In macro mode, the lens will focus as close as five or six inches.

Whatever the tiny thing is that hatched out of that egg, I hope that it is safe and thriving in the back yard.

Two takes on Handel’s Largo

Earlier this evening I had an email from a friend asking if I ever played the Largo from Handel’s opera Xerxes on the abbey organ. “Ha!” I replied. “I haven’t played the Largo since I was a first-year organ student.”

My friend caught my offhandedly rude dismissal of the Largo. He’s a trained musician and former music reviewer. The Largo is considered a bit of a cliché. But if you return to the Largo with fresh ears, it’s actually a stunning piece of music that deserves its eternal fame. After my friend mentioned it, I went to YouTube looking for interesting performances on the organ. I ended up — naturally — with Diane Bish.

Diane Bish is so flamboyant and Liberace-like an organist that one is prejudiced against her on sight. But after listening to some of her superb playing, one realizes that she is one of the greatest of living organists. I only wish that I could adequately point out some of the details in her playing of this well-known piece. For one, she uses the organ’s crescendo pedal, which is considered a no-no for most sorts of music, as a matter of musical taste. The crescendo pedal pours on the stops as you press down on it, all the way up to everything the organ’s got. When she looks down to her right at 1:09, she’s looking to make sure that her foot is on the crescendo pedal, because she’s about to let loose with the organ’s power (she starts pulling back on the pedal at about 1:29). At the dynamic peaks of the piece (around 2:35 and 3:40) she has arrived at ff approaching full organ courtesy of the crescendo pedal. Pulling back on the pedal, of course, permits the smooth and rapid fading. The crescendo pedal is one of the pedals that looks like the accelerator on a Mac truck.

The next thing to notice is her use of rubato. Rubato playing is a violation of strict, metronomic tempo. At 2:08, notice how she delays the notes and is a tiny fraction of a beat behind the beat on some of the key notes of the melody. Rubato playing is quite usual for later romantic-era music, such as Chopin. Or even Brahms. To play rubato for a composer who was born in 1685 is dangerously heretical. But Bish flawlessly pulls it off.

Xerxes is an early opera. The Largo, though literally about a tree and its shade, is a love song about displaced and hopeless love. It ought to be sung by a castrato male. Sometimes it is sung today by a female soprano. But probably a more historically accurate sound can be gotten by a countertenor, as in the performance below.

Ironies in the evolution of tyranny

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. By Jack Rakove, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 488 pages.

My reading at present is focused on the American colonial era, the revolution, and the development of the American Constitution. I took a lot of notes while reading this book by Jack Rakove. But one passage in particular flashes at me as though it was written in bright red neon. Rakove is talking about James Madison:

“Yet this reactionary fear of the threat to property also converged with his youthful commitment to freedom of conscience to produce one powerful insight about the protection of rights in republican America. These two concerns enabled Madison to perceive a truth that the political theory of the age did not yet properly recognize. In a republic, unlike a monarchy, the problem of rights would not be to guard the people as a whole against the arbitrary power of government, but rather to secure individuals and minorities against the legal authority of popular majorities.”

This brings us to the so-called Tea Party, the contemporary right-wing movement by angry white losers, financed by billionaires. Though the Tea Party has taken a wrecking bar to the American democracy wherever it can gerrymander itself into a stronghold, I am thinking in particular about the state of North Carolina, where the Tea Party legislature actually called a special emergency session, ostensibly to shoot down a local ordinance in Charlotte that was meant to afford transgendered people some dignity in the use of public bathrooms.

But, in truth, the bathroom issue was just a smokescreen in this legislation, called HB2. The transgender part of HB2 was meant to appeal to the fears and hatreds of mouth-breathing voters in rural North Carolina while also distracting the media. The real and even more slimy intent of HB2, as is always the case with the Republican Party, is the billionaire agenda. HB2 prevents local governments from setting a minimum wage that is higher than the minimum wage set by federal or state law. HB2 also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that grant civil rights protections. But the biggest piece of slime is that HB2 prevents workers from suing for workplace discrimination in state courts. This part of HB2 is pretty technical and has sneaked under the radar, but it was a big item on the wish list of the billionaire Republican donor class, and now the billionaires’ servants in the North Carolina legislature have checked it off their list. Here’s an article on that.

And, by the way, HB2 shows that the Republican Party doesn’t give a fig for any principle, if power is involved. HB2 also tramples on the principle of local rule and local government. North Carolina’s cities tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic. But the Republicans in Raleigh never hesitate to use state law to keep counties and municipalities from doing anything remotely liberal. Even property rights are not sacred to these radical Republicans. If your neighbors want to frack for gas but you don’t, then the state will use its power to frack you whether you want it or not. Or, if you’ve got a nice water system, as Asheville does, or a nice airport, as Charlotte does, then the state will just take it from you if it can.

This brings us back to James Madison. Madison foresaw even in the mid-1780s how kings (or even “big government”) were not the only potential tyrant under the new American Constitution. Rather, it was the tyranny of the majority that Madison was concerned about.

Not until 1868 did we get a remedy — the 14th Amendment. The Southern states were trampling on the rights of former slaves during Reconstruction, and the federal government stepped in to try to stop it. Many of the ugliest parts of American history touch on the 14th Amendment. White Southerners fought back with Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, which stood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why it took so long is a political mystery that I may never understand.

Today’s so-called Tea Party derives its methods and inspiration not from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists protested against a despotic king and a Parliament who gave them no representation in the government. Rather, the so-called Tea Party is shockingly similar in its methods with the Jim Crow racists, who with violence against blacks, the activities of “militias,” gerrymandering, and rigged elections used the government to allow the white majority to hold the black minority down.

The current era is the most shameful period in North Carolina’s history in a hundred years. We will eventually throw the right-wing radicals out of power in Raleigh — hopefully starting with the governor this year. Cleaning up the legislature will take more time. It is highly fitting that the de factor leader of this movement to restore justice in North Carolina is a black man, the Rev. William Barber of the NAACP, who started the Moral Monday movement. I may have some comments on Barber’s new book soon.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.

A killing frost, and a close call

It’s as though March and April got reversed this year. March was obscenely warm. April has been dangerously cold. The warmth of March teased all the plant life into venturing out, so that April’s frosts could bite. The fig trees had put out leaves, and all those leaves were killed. With luck, the fig trees’ stems didn’t freeze, and there will be new leaves.

Otherwise, we seem to have survived what probably will be the last frost of Spring 2016. The peach trees and pear trees already had bloomed and set fruit. They seem to be unharmed. The apple trees are in the late stages of blooming, but they seem to have survived just fine. Once again, I am reminded of the risks involved in exotic species (such as figs). Whereas the tried, true, and experienced local species pretty much know what they’re doing. Some people covered their lilacs. I trusted my lilac to know what it was doing, and luckily it seems fine.

The apple trees are looking great this year. The trees had their adolescent pruning two winters ago. That really reduced the number of bloom buds in the two subsequent springs. But this year the apple trees are looking nicely balanced, with lots of bloom buds. There will be fruit in the orchard this year, though the squirrels and raccoons are likely to get more of it than I do. Not until the trees produce more than the wildlife can eat is an orchard truly productive.

Above, a young pear.

Above, a young peach.

As for the chickens, they don’t mind the cold. They actually seem to do better in winter than in summer. Nothing is happier than a chicken — a chicken, at least, with freedom — in the spring.