Month: February 2020

Lest we forget: Nature bats last


“The Course of Empires: Destruction.” Thomas Cole, 1836. Click here for high-resolution version.

About two years ago, I reviewed Kyle Harper’s book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Harper drew on new climate research and what we might call archeological microbiology to remind us that political histories are only partial histories. Nature bats last. Are you listening, Donald Trump?

Harper’s book was reviewed in all the right places. Here are some short reads on the book in the L.A. Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Foreign Affairs.

About the painting: The painting above by Thomas Cole is part of a series called “The Course of Empire.” There are five paintings in the set: “The Savage State,” “The Arcadian or Pastoral State,” “The Consummation of Empire,” “Destruction,” and “Desolation.” You can see all the paintings on Wikipedia.

Trump & Company have been saying this week that the coronavirus is being hyped by Democrats to spook the stock market and take down Trump. As for hype, I don’t know. But one thing is certain: We Democrats are delighted to see Trump swept up in a situation that he and his goons can’t lie, cheat, and spin their way out of (though they’re trying). We’re daring to hope for the near-impossible: That Trump’s inability to control a pandemic and the stock market will help members of the Trump cult see how feckless and corrupt Trump really is.

The downturn in global markets is looking pretty serious. My guess, though, is that the coronavirus is the last straw, not the cause, of the market correction. There have been many warning signs and ominous economic indicators. I’m surprised that the market held up for as long as it did.

How scared should we be of the coronavirus? There are some things that I think are particularly disturbing. Rush Limbaugh says it’s just a cold. But colds — or flu, for that matter — don’t have fatality rates approaching 2 percent. The words “difficulty breathing” are very scary words. Bloomberg has reported that two-thirds of the critically ill patients required a month or more on mechanical ventilators. Just how much equipment do hospitals have available for providing “invasive breathing support”? You don’t want to get this virus.

Much has been written about how to prepare for the possibility of pandemic. The most important thing, it seems to me, is to have enough food and supplies stashed away that you can stay home, possibly for weeks at a time. That preparation, if not already done, needs to be done now. If the situation worsens, groceries stores may be overwhelmed even as supply lines break down.

I want to mention a powerful voice for sanity and support in a time of plague and poison politics. That’s Heather Cox Richardson, who posts on Facebook pretty much every day on each day’s significant events. She is a professor of history at Boston College. I have pre-ordered her new book, which will be released April 1: How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America. If you search Facebook for her name, you’ll find her.

Update: I have long identified as a left-wing prepper. Here’s a nice piece in the New York Times about what that means, by someone who, like me, has a San Francisco attitude toward being prepared: How to Be a Smart Coronavirus Prepper: Instead of freaking ourselves out, we need to plan for a difficult future every day.

I would add a bit of advice to the ideas above, based on my experience. Canned food and frozen food are practical only if you are diligent about rotating your stock and watching expiration dates. Otherwise, I’d suggest looking into the storage food that is sold mostly into the right-wing prepper market. These are large buckets of dried foods. The food is packed in Mylar, and vacuum and nitrogen are used to extend shelf life. These foods are supposed to keep up to 25 years if properly stored.

Quorn Stroganoff

I had not thought of Stroganoff in years. If ever I had even made beef Stroganoff, I don’t remember it. But, a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times mentioned beef Stroganoff in its beautiful weekly column, “What to Cook This Week.” Once you get Stroganoff in your head, you might as well give up. You’re going to make some.

I’ve made it twice since the New York Times piece. I used the faux ground beef version of Quorn. Much of the appeal is the egg noodles. I had not had egg noodles in years. If I’ve ever even bought egg noodles, I don’t recall it. I’ve probably acquired a new bad habit. Oh well. Too bad.

You could use any good recipe for beef Stoganoff or hamburger Stroganoff, but you might need to consider some minor changes. Recipes probably will have you brown the beef first, then set it aside while you cook the mushrooms. Since Quorn doesn’t release any fat, I’d suggest changing the order. First, cook and brown your mushrooms in olive oil. Set them aside. Then gently brown your Quorn in olive oil. Then add your flour and brown that along with the Quorn. Then deglaze the pan with white wine or stock, and put the mushrooms back in. If you didn’t use stock, I suggest adding some Better Than Bouillon to give the gravy more oomph and brownness. At this point you should have browned Quorn and browned mushrooms in a thick gravy. For the final touch, you can use sour cream, crème fraîche, or even heavy cream. I used Greek yoghurt.

Most recipes will call for mustard and Worcestershire sauce. Mustard is probably more authentic. But I found that I prefer a touch of tomato sauce (or tomato paste) instead. The red improves the richness of the brown and adds some umami.

I mentioned beef Stroganoff to some neighbors a few days ago, and, like me, they had not thought of it for years. They made some the next day. Resistance is futile.

It’s the mushrooms and gravy and noodles, really, that make this dish, as far as I’m concerned. You could even double the mushrooms and not go wrong.

ATV’s: a new reality of rural life

Yesterday we had the first snow of the winter. It wasn’t a particularly heavy or pretty snow, but the neighbors, who have not one but two ATV’s, invited me to ride with them on today’s equivalent of a sleigh ride: the ATV ride.

These neighbors have property on three sides of the abbey’s woodland, and fortunately we get along well. Most of the people in this area, actually, have some form of off-road conveyance. Given that something like half a million ATV’s are sold each year in the U.S. (and the market is growing), this is happening everywhere.

In the hands of the irresponsible, ATV’s can make a serious mess, causing erosion from the ruts they can create. Fortunately my neighbors are responsible. I gave them permission to build a bridge where one of the old rights-of-way crosses a stream on abbey land. Not only does the bridge look much better, a bridge avoids the mud and erosion that can happen where ATV’s ford streams.

These vehicles are not just an American phenomenon. They’re being sold in large numbers all over the world. On the Scottish islands of Mull and Gometra, which I visited in 2018, there are no real roads, so ATV’s are the new mule carts.

Sometimes neighbors ask me why I don’t have an ATV. The real reason is that they cost too much. But I show them my walking stick (which is always with me when I wander) and say that I already have one — an economy model that I picked up in Scotland.


An ATV bridge of all-local materials. Two streams come together here at the lower end of the abbey’s woodland.

ᚱᚢᚾᛖᛊ : Escaping with Anglo-Saxon


With Lily. We escape together.

Among the teetering stacks of books by my bed, I always keep some books for what I call fill-in reading. This is light reading for short reading sessions — for example, when I know that I’m going to fall asleep after only a page or two.

One such book is a 1950s textbook on astronomy, which I’ve been studying for years. Another, for many months now, is A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. The first edition of this book was published in 1894. It has been through several revisions and new printings. My copy is from 1970. Later editions include a supplement, not because new words are being invented in Anglo-Saxon (that’s supposed to be funny), but because the scholarship continues.

Why read dictionaries, or, at least, historical dictionaries? One reads these dictionaries to get a feel for the kind of words a language had. And because Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English) is an early form of my native language, and because I have a good bit of exposure to Latin through Spanish and French, a better grasp of the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary helps provide a better feel for how Old English and French came together after the Norman Conquest to give birth to modern English.

As an editor, I have argued for many years that writers need to know the difference between the Anglo-Saxon components of English and the Latin components. This is because, when we write in Anglo-Saxon, the writing is clearer and is much more useful for persuasion and evoking an emotional response. For telling stories, only Anglo-Saxon English will do. We resort to Latin only when we’re obliged to get technical or abstract. Still, Anglo-Saxon, like German, is rich with a vocabulary of abstraction and objects of the imagination, for example, gēosceaftgāst — a doomed spirit, a word which is found in Beowulf.

It’s almost impossible now to think of Anglo-Saxon without also thinking of J.R.R. Tolkien, who not only wrote a few of the most famous novels in the English language but who also aroused our curiosity about the roots of the English language.

Do you recall when you first saw the runes in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings? The runes then seemed very magical and obscure. Tolkien’s runes are part of a language he invented. But real runes are not so obscure, because they’re an alphabet used for Germanic languages before the Latin alphabet was used. It’s almost a letdown to learn that runes are so well-supported today that they are included in the Unicode table of international characters, which means that most computers can reproduce runes. (If you see question marks in the headline on this post, rather than runes, then your computer must not be fully Unicode compliant.)

While reading through the Anglo-Saxon dictionary, I found a number of words that I recognize from Tolkien. The page below, Page 105, contains the word ent, for example. It means giant.

The words you’ll find in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary fit roughly into three categories: words that are very familiar and common in English (stēam, for steam or moisture), words that are easily recognizable with a little thought (fordrīfan to drive, sweep away or drive on), and words that are interesting but that make no sense at all (dwæsian, to become stupid).

Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is based on about 400 surviving manuscripts. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries took a heavy toll, though it cleansed England of catholicism. The monks’ revenge, though, is that much of what survives was written down and preserved by monks. Consequently there are a lot of ecclesiastical words in an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. If you subtract the ecclesiastical words, then you have a language that is perfectly suited for describing Tolkien’s Shire, or for telling the kind of stories that Tolkien told. It’s a world of fairy tales and adventure and unspoiled landscapes, a world of people, their surroundings, their thoughts, and their deeds. There’s even the stars. See eoforðring on Page 105. It refers to the constellation Orion. (The ð character is the letter eth and is pronounced like the “th” in “that.”)

It’s a great luxury to be retired and to have time for such pursuits as pursuing the history of the English language. Can you imagine how much fun it might be to do that for a living? Of all the lives that have been lived, I think I most envy the life of Tolkien. I could do without the World War I parts. But I greatly envy his life at Oxford. I can’t find any good photos of Tolkien that don’t require royalties, but here’s a link to some good ones at Getty Images, in which it’s clear that his natural habitat was sitting in a library, reading, wearing his tweeds, and smoking his pipe. The pubs! The Inklings! The books! The walks! The Oxford dinners! It’s all such a wonderful place to escape to in the imagination, and it’s all much easier for me to imagine after a visit to Oxford last summer.

As for escaping, I’m not ignoring the state of the world, or the state of the United States, or the exasperation of reading the news. In fact, I’ve had a lot of little local political responsibilities to deal with of late, such as precinct meetings and fundraising. It’s all a bunch of endwerc †, which you’ll find on Page 105. But that’s all the more reason to have a slosh of ale, or a cup of tea, and to spend a little quiet time trying to think like an Anglo-Saxon.

† Note: The source for the word endwerc is Leechdoms, Wortcunnings, and Starcraft of Early England, which looks like a book I need to read. The book is important enough that Cambridge University Press released a facsimile version, in a three-volume set, in 2012. It’s 1,496 pages.


Click here for high-resolution version


Some of Tolkien’s runes, with translations

Sherlock Holmes ★★★★


Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, 1943

When my search for newer fiction fails to come up with anything that I want to read, I start looking for classics. I vaguely remember reading Arthur Conan Doyle many years ago, but if I’ve ever read The Hound of the Baskervilles, I don’t recall it.

What fun! It’s light reading, which is just what we want for escape fiction. The gothic, old English atmosphere is infectious and comforting and makes you want to go make a cup of tea. Doyle’s command of English is relaxed and confident, strangely formal and informal at the same time, musical enough to be read aloud.

It was interesting to note that Doyle had been dead for only nine years when Hollywood, in 1939, started producing a series of 14 Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. According to the Wikipedia article, 20th Century Fox made the first two films, then Universal took it over in 1942. Amazon Prime Video has 12 of the films.

I started with “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.” I will certainly watch more of them.

Movies of that vintage seem more like plays to me, but that is not a criticism, because I love plays. The exterior sets may be a little flimsy, but the interior sets are rich and beautiful. And the costumes! The men are almost always wearing tweed. The tailoring is classic and superb.

I have to admit that I pay particular attention to the tailoring, having developed a fetish for Harris tweed while on the Isle of Harris last summer. (I now have five Harris tweed jackets in my wardrobe.) The classic tweed jackets of the 1970s and 1980s were cut just the same as the 1942 jackets in “Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.” Some things never change. Some are what we today call “slim fit,” for men who have the figure for it. The jackets of more portly men are cut to flatter their portliness. Rathbone often wears tweed Norfolk jackets. Norfolk jackets, whether vintage or new, are much more difficult to find. (I’m still looking.)

As you can see, I’m in escape mode. The Trump impeachment trial went as well as it could have gone. The Democratic candidates for president are slouching toward Super Tuesday, the first event that really matters. I immerse myself in reading the news every day, as always, but my impulse has been escape rather than writing about what has been happening of late.

It’s pouring rain here. So now back to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and a cup of tea.

Another waste of a big production budget

Above are the opening 38 seconds of Season 2, Episode 1, of The Expanse. How much of the dialogue can you understand?

As if things weren’t already scary enough out in the real world, we now have to add the possibility of a global pandemic to our worry list. Good mental health requires some escape.

It’s funny how we find comfort in dystopia stories even as the world feels more and more dystopian. Mostly what we’re looking for, I think, is courage. Only the right kind of characters can leave us with courage. Those characters are always good, even if (and probably because) they are weak, damaged, and scared.

As streaming services flourish and the cost of publishing is reduced to next to nothing, never have so many stories been available to us. And yet finding stories that are fit to watch or fit to read is a hard task. I wanted so badly for The Expanse to be fit to watch that I watched the entire first season, hoping that subsequent seasons (which got better reviews) would get better. But I gave up after watching a few minutes of Season 2, Episode 1.

I had many complaints about the first season. A big one was that I just couldn’t understand most of the dialogue. Partly because I couldn’t understand the dialogue, and partly because the screenwriters seemed to want us to be confused, I read the Wikipedia plot synopsis after each episode to make sense of what I had just seen.

I Googled for search terms such as “The Expanse” and “confusing dialogue,” and I found that I wasn’t the only person with this complaint. Other people’s explanations were the same as mine: The sound track is too loud and too noisy. We often can’t hear the dialogue because it’s buried under noise and bad music. Many of the actors speak English poorly. Much of the dialogue is ironic and smart-ass, thus much of the dialogue doesn’t really mean what was said. So you have to run all the dialogue through your irony analyzer. But I also found that the sound designers of The Expanse were very proud of their awful work. That’s not very promising for future series.

My Googling also found some serious discussions about the larger problem of incomprehensible dialogue. As the quality of video (and the screens we watch it on) get sharper and sharper, the quality of the audio is going to hell. Among the reasons given for this were that the people who do the production work have read the script and have watched each scene many, many times. They know what the characters are saying, so they fail to realize that the rest of us don’t. So they add noise.

Plus I think there is a kind of narcissism with sound designers, who want to make damned sure that you’ve heard what they’ve done. They’re like the loud (and mediocre) live musicians who intentionally make conversation impossible in pubs and lounges. They want you to hear them and only them whether you like it for not. There actually is a pub a few miles from here in a beautiful riverside setting, but I left and have never gone back after my iPhone measured a band’s volume at well over 100 decibels, and the band arrogantly refused requests to turn it down. I often wonder if many people whose lives involve lots of amplifiers and headphones can’t even hear anymore.

But inaudible dialogue and an intentially confusing script aren’t the only problem with The Expanse. It wants to be hip and edgy, so it disdains classical forms. By comparison, Battlestar Galactica was positively Shakespearean, with a brilliant cast actually trained in accents and diction, and with dialogue that was sharp and smart and efficient. We never struggled to understand what was said or what was happening.

In The Expanse, everything is so gritty and vague that it’s hard to figure out whether there are any good guys. They all seem pretty bad. Though, by the end of Season 1, the Holden character (Steven Strait) is showing some signs of being a good guy.

Once again I’m searching the galaxy for stories that are worth telling, for writers who can write, and for characters who don’t have marbles in their mouths.

Note: In the video clip above, I get the words “cover me,” “light me up,” and “left.” How did you do?