Month: March 2022

Ken’s new web site


Ken on the Isle of Mull during our hike there in 2018

Readers of this blog over the years will be familiar with Ken Ilgunas, who lived here at the abbey on and off starting back in 2010. Most of his writing on his books was done here. Ken’s blog, which he started in 2009, was way out of date, and he has recently upgraded it:

Link to Ken’s new blog

You can sign up for Ken’s newsletter. All the material from his old blog is there, with new material as well.

Ken lives in Scotland now, but for the record we are still literary confederates and are regularly in touch by email and text.


Ken was often on TV after Walden on Wheels was published in 2013. On several occasions, a limousine picked him up at the abbey to take him to network studios in Raleigh or Charlotte.


Ken in the abbey orchard, 2014

The Sierra Club

I felt a little irritated when I found in my mailbox a thick envelope from the Sierra Club. I had not renewed my membership, so of course it was a solicitation. The thickness of the envelope was clearly meant to give the impression of something valuable inside, as encouragement to open the envelope rather than just toss it. I opened it.

Inside I found five bifold cards, nicely printed, and five nice envelopes, white on the inside but tastefully washed in a pale yellow on the outside. How could I throw that away? A mailing like that must be very expensive. Not only is there the cost of postage, the cost of printing also would be high. It made me wonder if the Sierra Club spends an excessive amount of money to raise money, but I found at Charity Navigator that the Sierra Club has a four-star rating and that their fundraising expenses are 11.6 percent, which is not bad at all. The mailing worked. I’ve sent them a check to renew my membership.

The Sierra Club must be the oldest environmental organization in the United States. It was founded in 1892 by John Muir. In its long history, it has done a lot of good work and has not made many embarrassing mistakes. (One such mistake was accepting money from Chlorox and donations from the gas industry.) According to Wikipedia, the Sierra Club spent just over $1 million on the 2014 elections, all of it to oppose Republicans. Good work, that.

After I thought about it, I was glad to have renewed my membership, and I was impressed by the effectness of their direct mail appeals. With mailings like this they are, after all, providing much-needed revenue to the U.S. Postal Service. It’s also flattering to Sierra Club members (or former members) that the Sierra Club regards them as people who continue to use the U.S. Postal Service and who even send cards in the mail.

Free Guy, and The Adam Project

Few things go better with popcorn than a Ryan Reynolds movie. I have no objection to empty entertainment as long as it’s entertaining, but Ryan Reynolds movies are rarely entirely empty. Free Guy is, in part, a satire on contemporary confusion about what counts as real. And The Adam Project is a family story with some touching moments. Somehow there’s always something smart about the dumbness.

The Adam Project can be streamed on Netflix. Free Guy can be streamed on Disney+ and HBO Max.

The humble onion, good as gold

There should be a National Onion Month or something. Onions are so always-available and so cheap that we take them for granted. Let’s pretend that March is National Onion Month and imagine how drab life would be without onions.

Are there things in your kitchen that you stock a bit ahead as insurance against running out? For me, that’s mayonnaise, salt, olive oil — and onions. I’d almost sooner run out of wine than onions.

Once upon a time, we ate mostly yellow onions, though white onions could be had, and even red onions, sometimes. Now — at least in the United States — sweet, Vidalia-style onions are available year round. I don’t often buy yellow onions or red onions, but both sweet onions (for eating raw) and white onions (for cooking) are must-haves. A friend of mine once said that she started chopping onions before she knew what was for supper.

And I do eat them raw. It is said that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. If that’s true, then it’s also true of onions. Years ago, while driving through the mountains of Mexico, I ordered an onion sandwich ( … de cebolla, con mayonesa, por favor) in a little restaurant. A few minutes later, two women peeked out of the kitchen to see who the crazy person was, and the waiter brought an onion to the table to make sure that there wasn’t a problem with my Spanish. But they brought me a nice onion sandwich, sliced thin and in layers, mayonnaise on both sides, just right.

West Side Story


The duet “One Hand, One Heart” was recorded live on camera at the Cloisters

I have seen four of the nominees for Best Picture at the 2022 Academy Awards — Don’t Look Up, Dune, The Power of the Dog, and West Side Story. I’m rooting for West Side Story.

Only people my age will have grown up hearing multiple versions of the songs — the original cast, the cast of the 1961 film, and the 1984 recording conducted by Leonard Bernstein and sung by opera stars including Kiri Te Kanawa. Given all those performances, it’s apparent how difficult it would be to surpass all those performances and set a new standard. In our time, who could have brought that off other than Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner?

And it isn’t just the singing. It’s also the visuals, including the choreography and the vivid, constantly moving scenery (though there are a few quiet moments in scenes set at the Cloisters, “up above Harlem,” as Tony says). Even the drama — the parts that are not sung or danced — are compelling, though we know the story. Out on the streets, don’t miss out on the constant stream of 1950s cars! From the refrigerators to the ice cream sundae glasses, the retro visuals are beautiful (and accurate). Every member of the supporting cast is ridiculously talented, especially Mike Faist as Riff and Ariana DeBose as Anita. Rita Moreno, now age 90 and who portrayed Anita in the 1961 version, sings “Somewhere.” Some of the songs, including “Somewhere,” were recorded live, on camera. The Spanish accents and the untranslated Spanish make the story much more real. A trans character, Anybodys, played by the nonbinary Iris Menas, got West Side Story banned in such places as Saudi Arabia.

At 1:24 in the video, when “One Hand, One Heart” begins, watch Ansel Elgort’s throat, not only for the perfectly controlled and subtle vibrato but also for proof that the song was sung live on camera.

West Side Story can be streamed on Disney+ and HBO Max. The 2022 Academy Awards will be March 27.

For solidarity with Ukraine: Pierogi !


Pierogi with roasted Brussels sprouts and Impossible vegan chicken nuggets

Yesterday the Washington Post ran an article (with a recipe) on pierogi, written by an American with Ukrainian ancestry. I read the article and could hardly wait to make pierogi. The article is “Making Ukrainian pierogi roots me to my family tree.”

I reduced the recipe by more than half, and I still have pierogi for another day. They’re not hard to make. It’s just a long process. I used yellow potatoes, and for the cheese I used Gruyere — the perfect cheese for comfort food. The Impossible fake chicken nuggets are the best I’ve tried. It has been years since I’ve eaten chicken, but I don’t think I’d know the difference. I didn’t have any sour cream, darn it.

Oil: Why can’t we ever learn?


The 1935 Mercedes-Benz 770 that belonged to Emperor Hirohito. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Here we are once again in that most familiar of geopolitical pickles. The advocates of progress and democracy still have the oil leash tight around their necks, jerking them around and holding them back. The other end of the leash is held by oligarchs, despots, and the greediest and most powerful corporations in the world. We could have freed ourselves by now, but we haven’t. We like our oil too much.

I must hasten to confess how much fun it has been to have lived during the Oil Age. Cars! Labor-saving machines! World travel for the middle class! McMansions, heated and cooled! Lots of food! Lots of stuff! It has been a wonderful lifelong party, with oil in the punchbowl. The industrialization made possible by coal certainly changed the world, but it has been oil, more than any other thing, that has shaped the world we live in now and that made possible a precarious global population of 7.75 billion. The price of punch fluctuates, but the bowl is always full, at least in the rich countries. Back in the 1970s when they told us that we were running out of oil, they were wrong, and they probably were lying.

President Jimmy Carter learned what happens to governments that try to wean people off of oil. It’s the only sensible government policy, but people won’t go along with it. Today, as many people see it, one of the chief responsibilities of government is to keep the cheap oil flowing. Republicans, and all the other servants of oligarchs, despots, and greed, are happy to oblige. It’s clear that we’ll never be weaned off of oil until we can keep the party going on some other punch — renewables, we hope.

Normally I stay home and mind my own business. But the computer went haywire in my four-year-old Fiat 500. That took me first to a garage about seven miles from home for a new battery, which I hoped would fix the problem. It didn’t, so I had to take the Fiat to the dealership in Winston-Salem, 25 miles away. (The problem was diagnosed as a bad wheel speed sensor at the left front wheel.) Everywhere I went, people were complaining about the price of gasoline. At the Fiat-Chrysler dealer, there was not a single Fiat on the lot. Americans (unlike Europeans) hate little Fiats, and most models of Fiat are not even sold in the U.S. anymore. Instead, the dealer’s lot was acres of enormous and heavy vehicles — big trucks and SUVs. That’s what most Americans drive these days. The assumption, clearly, is that the cheap gas will keep flowing. Many people, obviously, can afford gasoline (though they still complain about the price of it). Many poor people, on the other hand, spend nearly 20 percent of their income just on gasoline. Oil is one of the key reasons for the sorry state of our politics. Given a choice between progress and cheap gas, cheap gas will get most people’s vote.

Americans, per capita, use at least five time more oil per capita than the people of China or India. That is a geopolitical weakness for America. And just look at the problems that Germany is having at present because of its need for Russian gas.

This is not going to be a feckless lecture on driving smaller cars and using less gasoline. What we do as individuals is a drop in the bucket, which is part of why we feel so powerless. What matters globally is what the advocates of progress and democracy are politically empowered to do, which will require a loosening of the oil leash. As for our love for cars and our dependency on them, electric vehicles and renewable energy may bring new political possibilities by freeing us from the oil leash. That’s a benefit above and beyond the necessity of just going easier on the earth. Just think how our politics could change if oil no longer mattered.

I wonder, though, whether I will ever be able to buy an electric vehicle as efficient and affordable as my little Fiat. I don’t have the slightest need for a hulking 3-ton electric truck or SUV, but it’s likely that that’s what most Americans are going to want. There’s still something very crazy about that.

Update: Slate has posted a good article about this: “Are Gas Prices Too High? Or Is Your Car Too Big?: When it comes to oil shocks, we have the memory of goldfish.”

Vikings: Valhalla

Were the Vikings really this crude? Must a television series about the Vikings rely on such crude plots? I’ve watched only the first episode of this new season, but so far it’s all about revenge, jealousy, lust, and greed.

It begs the question, is there any continuous thread of human character from the medieval Vikings to the super-civilized Scandinavian peoples of today? I don’t know nearly enough to even try to answer that question, but somehow it seems likely. For example, consider Viking art, or this article on the Viking attitude toward animals. According to the article:

“‘The hierarchy we see today, where people dominate animals, did not exist,’ says Hanne Lovise Aannestad, an archaeologist and researcher at the Museum of Cultural History.”

The Vikings, it seems, saw animals as divine kindred. Whereas the Christians taught them that animals are feelingless and inferior beings to be used in any old way — dominion theology. Which idea is more primitive?

This crudeness of plot and dialogue is one of the mistakes that Game of Thrones did not make. In Vikings, where are the artists, the storytellers, the ship engineers, the ocean navigators, the people who learned and taught other languages? Must everyone swing a blade, including the women? And the hair! Scroungy hair at sea is one thing, but must we imagine that the Vikings couldn’t tame their hair, and make it beautiful, when they were indoors, feasting or debating?

I’ll probably watch an another episode or two before I bail. The best fun I get from Vikings, I confess, is cheering for the pagans against the obnoxious Christians.

Vikings: Valhalla can be streamed on Netflix.