Month: March 2017

An abbey literary update

Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.

When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.

A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.

If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.

This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.

On slamming doors

There are two things in the world that are guaranteed to make my blood pressure go from normal to nuclear in a fraction of a second.

The first thing is a crude right-winger throwing a talking point at me that he learned from Rush Limbaugh. We liberals are supposed to go down mewling and begging for mercy at the mighty power of right-wing talking points. I respond with involuntary rage, and maybe a fact or two that Rush Limbaugh didn’t think to tell them.

The second thing is the sound of a slamming door.

It has been many years, I’m happy to say, since I’ve heard a door slammed in anger. But a heavy door slammed carelessly — with a loud noise and the shaking of walls — spikes my blood pressure all the same.

I well remember the signs that used to be posted inside the doors of New York taxicabs: DO NOT SLAM THE DOOR. How I wanted one of those signs! I have the utmost empathy for those New York cab drivers. For one, the sound of the taxi door slamming is jolting to the driver even in the noisy context of New York City. And for two, it damages the door and the latch. The doors on old cars are almost always damaged (and thus close poorly) because people slammed them.

It’s very awkward, but if a houseguest slams an abbey door, I usually can find a minimally obnoxious way to restore peace and quiet. I try to find a way of bringing up the subject of two of the abbey’s exterior doors, which are pretty nice doors and which I never would have been able to afford had my contractor not bought them for me at a bankruptcy sale. The latch hardware is German (Hoppe multipoint latches). The lock cylinder also is German (CES Gruppe). When closed properly, the doors make a quiet little “snick” sound as the latches engage, like the door of a Mercedes.

When I was at the San Francisco Chronicle, we had a new Rolls-Royce for a few days that the auto editor was reviewing. I was impressed to see that the doors closed themselves. When you pushed the door almost together to close it, a closing mechanism would take over. I don’t know if the mechanism was electrical or hydraulic. But, untouched by human hands, the door would finish closing itself with a faint little snick of the latch.

I love the sound of a door that snicks. In the best of all possible worlds, all doors would close themselves and say “snick.”

Here in the South, back when people had screen doors, children (including me) were told a million times, “Don’t slam the screen door!” But screen doors, unlike other doors, had springs on them to close the door and keep the flies out. No wonder they slammed.

Whether car doors or house doors, it ought to be a universal rule (screen doors are an exception): Children should be taught to never “fling” the door so that the door closes from the inertia of being flung. The right way to close a door is to keep a hand on the door and slowly push it closed until the latch clicks. Or snicks. That works with car doors, too. Unless car doors have been damaged from slamming, they’ll close quietly and easily.

Schweinehunde?


A statue in Germany

In political conversations with friends during the weekend, I was reminded yet again of what a perplexing political situation we progressives are in — particularly if we are Democrats. Kinder souls than I (or maybe they’re just more naive than I am) insist that we must “reach out” to Trump voters, “connect” with them, try to understand their issues, etc. Others say that reaching out would be futile, that anyone who is incapable of seeing through Donald Trump is unreachable from the real world.

We progressives also have a big problem to our left. I call them “Bernie diehards” — blind and self-righteous idealists who wasted their votes on the Green Party (or who didn’t vote at all) and who could not see that they might as well have voted for Trump.

Probably the definitive piece scolding liberals for not reaching out to Trump voters is this piece in the New York Times by Sabrina Tavernise. There was a great deal of pushback to Tavernise’s mushy piece — for example, by Heather Digby Parton in Salon. I agree with Heather Digby Parton. The political challenge is not to reach out to Trump voters. Rather, the political challenge is to expose their crudeness and stupidity, politically destroy their con man hero, shame them, and push them back out to the margins of decent society. That’s where they came from, and that’s where they belong.

I came across a new word and a new concept this morning in a Slate piece, “How Hitler Conquered Germany: The Nazi propaganda machine exploited ordinary Germans by encouraging them to be co-producers of a false reality.”

The word is Schweinehund.

I don’t know any German, so I’ve had to use Google’s translator in trying to figure out what this word means to Germans and how the word has been used in talking about Nazis and Nazi propaganda. Schweinehund translates literally to pig dog or swine dog. It is sometimes translated as cur or bastard. I get the impression that Germans use the word fairly often. The derived term innerer Schweinehund also seems pretty common — inner pig dog. The inner pig dog, I think, refers to low human instincts that propaganda is designed to reach and that the Trump campaign was designed to reach. Trump’s closest advisers in the White House are people like Steve Bannon, whose very career has been producing propaganda to politically motivate and manipulate the pig dogs among us.

I should say at this point that talking about Hitler and the Nazis — long regarded as rhetorical overreach — is now absolutely necessary if we’re to understand the situation we’re now in. The people who were eventually effective against the Nazis were not people who “reached out” to the Nazis. They understood that not only was it not possible to reach out to the Nazis, but also that it was dangerous.

One such person who called out the Nazis right from the start — and with the right word — was Kurt Schumacher. He spent more than ten years in prison and concentration camps for it, and he was a witness at the Nuremberg trials. It was in 1932 that he said:

Die ganze nationalsozialistische Agitation ist ein dauernder Appell an den inneren Schweinehund im Menschen; und wenn wir irgendetwas beim Nationalsozialismus anerkennen, dann ist es die Anerkennung, dass ihm zum ersten Mal in der deutschen Politik die restlose Mobilisierung der menschlichen Dummheit gelungen ist.

Google’s translation:

The whole National Socialist agitation is a daunting appeal to the inner pig dog in man. And if we acknowledge anything in National Socialism, it is the recognition that for the first time in German politics the complete mobilization of human stupidity has succeeded.

As the Slate piece points out, Hitler and his propaganda people well understood that their propaganda had to be primitive to reach the “inner pig dog.”

Sefton Delmer led the British counter-propaganda effort during World War II. Delmer clearly understood that “reaching out” to Nazi supporters could not work, just as reaching out to Trump supporters cannot work today:

We do not appeal exclusively to their higher instincts, or their idealistic opposition to the regime. We try to exploit against the German war effort the ordinary German’s Schweinehund, his desire for self-preservation, personal profit and pleasure, his herd instinct to do as others do, and his ordinary human passions of fear, lust and jealousy.

Delmer’s insight explains quite well how the Republican Party and Donald Trump were able to reach Americans’ inner pig dogs, simply because Donald Trump and the Republican Party are willing to go as low as necessary to get power from the little people with which to serve the rich. Whereas we Democrats would never stoop that low. That is why I am convinced, as I said a few paragraphs above, that our political challenge is not to waste our time on trying to win them over, but rather to expose their crudeness and stupidity, politically destroy their con man hero, shame them, and push them back again to the margins of decent society.


Kurt Schumacher

Carolina burger

I had lunch today with my brother at Jim’s Grill in Boonville, North Carolina. He ordered a Carolina Burger. The waitress didn’t know what that is, so he defined it for her. A Carolina Burger is a hamburger dressed like a hot dog — slaw, onions, hot dog chili, and mustard. The more usual hamburger treatment in these parts would be lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise and onion.

Jim’s Grill is an old roadside cafe that has been in business at least since the 1950s. Back then, it was a hot spot for teenagers. These days you’ll see no young people. The parking lot was full today with old people who had come for lunch.

Low-privacy bathrooms: Let’s get rid of them

Here in North Carolina, home of the infamous “bathroom law,” civilized people are fighting back against the medieval minds of the Republican Party. Many businesses — especially those that cater to liberals — are rethinking and changing how they manage and label their public restrooms so that no one is conflicted about which restroom to use.

For example, the Whole Foods in Winston-Salem has relabeled its two public restrooms. They’re now both unisex restrooms instead of one for men and one for women. Some businesses are experimenting with making a political statement on their restroom signs.

Public bathrooms have a long history, as the essay I’ve linked to here shows. I’m hoping that the fuss that right-wing fearmongers have made about bathrooms will lead to a great step forward in the evolution of public restrooms.

A few years ago, on business trips to Denmark, I noticed a fantastic new trend. I saw this trend not only in airports in Denmark and the Netherlands, but also in hotels and newly built corporate headquarters for Danish companies. The new public restrooms are simply a row of single private restrooms, unisex, each with a toilet and a sink. Now that’s civilized.

The Danes are some of the friendliest and most convivial people you’ll ever meet. But clearly the Danes don’t see public restrooms as places for exercising their conviviality. Privacy is more appropriate there. Personally I have always hated big public restrooms with rows of toilets, rows of urinals, and rows of sinks. Such places treat human beings like cattle. In junior high school, they were a haven for bullies and a place of terror for kids who weren’t cut out to be cattle. May our medieval bathrooms — and the lords of cattle that legislate “safety” in them — go the way of Rome and never come back.


A row of private unisex restrooms in Denmark. Let’s hope this is our future.

Grinding your own flour

As I have gotten more and more experienced with sourdough bread, two factors have converged to pull me into breadmaking even deeper. Watch out. It could happen to you, too.

For one, the sourdough baker becomes so obsessed with the quality of the bread and takes such pride in each loaf that the amount of time and work involved is no longer an issue.

For two, it’s difficult to find stone-ground whole wheat flour these days. Partly, I suspect, this is because of the demonization of gluten (and therefore wheat) by so many “gluten free” people. Whole Foods now carries all sorts of exotic (and, in my opinion, useless) flours, and that’s crowding out good wheat flour. Organic wheat berries, however, are easy to buy in bulk, and they’re cheap.

My Champion juicer, fitted with Champion’s grinder attachment, makes a somewhat slow but entirely workable wheat grinder. The flour is excellent. Later this week I hope to have a portrait of my first home-ground loaf.

Update: The bread rose poorly and did not make a portrait-worthy loaf, probably because the weather was so cold. However, it was delicious.

Spring so far


Lettuce, started from a plant bought at the local mill

Though the early spring is exciting, there is a big risk that a cold snap will cause a lot of damage. The apple trees have held back, almost as though there is something wise about them. The peach trees, on the other hand, as well as the plum and pears, have rushed into bloom.

We know a lot of gardeners, including some of the best gardeners in the county, the people who teach master gardener classes, and we’re pretty sure that Ken has one of the earliest, if not the earliest, garden in the county. The garden probably will be fine, though. The early crops can handle light frost. Only a seriously hard freeze would be a problem. Ken does all the garden work, by the way, not me. In only a few weeks, if all goes well, there will be some serious feasting here and much less spent on produce at Whole Foods.


Spring greens, started from seed


Lettuce, started from seed


Onion, started from pearl sets. The abbey’s garden soil makes incredible onions.


Peach blossoms, fully committed and much too early


Forsythia. Note that Ken’s bedroom window, the bay window downstairs, is open. It’s 71 degrees out.

Princess Sophia

At the abbey, the cat and the chickens are royalty, and we are their servants. We had some worries about the elegant new chicken ladder in the new chicken house, because it’s a new object in the environment that none of our chickens had ever encountered before. They’ve always jumped or flown when changes of altitude were needed for ingress or egress. The new chicken palace is just too high and too grand for that.

But moments after I opened the door after the first night of occupancy, Sophia descended the ladder like a princess descending a staircase. Ken sleeps somewhat later than the chickens, so I took him a picture.