Into the Woods – Page 113 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

I don’t get out much, but …

Pumpkin soup

I go into Winston-Salem regularly to get groceries at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but I usually get the heck out of town as quickly as possible, because I miss the peace and quiet of my hermitage in the foothills. But today I was in downtown Winston-Salem, I was hungry, the weather was beautiful, and I figured that it was high time I treated myself to a proper lunch.

None of the restaurants downtown appealed to me very much. They seemed far too trendy and aimed at a younger set. However, just west of downtown is a lovely old restaurant named Bernadin’s. I used to go there frequently years ago, before I moved to California. At the time, it was called Zeveley House. It is more or less French, and it’s as nice a white-tablecloth bistro as I know of.

I tend to be stingy, but I called a moratorium on stingy today. I ordered the grilled salmon without asking the price. I was almost shocked when the check came. The salmon, which included a salad and potatoes and vegetables, was $13. I was expecting anything from $14 to $19. The soup, which came with bread and butter, was $6.

No doubt I still think like a San Francisco person if I’m in a bistro, and I know that good food can’t be cheap. But this seemed shockingly reasonable to me. Country restaurants or the places that I called “fried fish houses” will sell you grilled salmon for the same amount or more, and you’re not likely to be pleased with what they set in front of you. But the cooks at Bernadin’s obviously are well trained, and lunch was delicious.

I will definitely do it again. I sat outside in their patio, by the way, and I was the only person there. I don’t feel the slightest stigma having lunch, or even dinner, alone in nice restaurants.

The salad that came with the salmon

Grilled salmon, one of the day’s specials

Easy apples

When I was a young’un growing up in the country, people had apple trees and actually bothered to pick them up and use them. That meant that, when apples were in season, you might get them at every meal. Everybody’s favorite is apple pie, but that takes time. I don’t know about you, but for me eating apples raw (except maybe in Waldorf salad) takes some discipline.

But the easiest way to make apples that even young’uns will eat is to fry them. The word “fry” makes it sound more unhealthy than it really is. It just means cooking the sliced apples in a skillet, in butter, with some cinnamon and maybe a wee bit of sugar. The fried apples are then served like a vegetable along with supper. I don’t know of anybody who thought of fried apples as a dessert item.

Fried apples can be worked into any meal. Here the fried apples are a topping for sprouted wheat pancakes with toasted walnuts, maple syrup, and blackberry preserves.

Speaking of maple syrup, Trader Joe’s has it at a reasonable price, imported from Quebec. Don’t hesitate to buy Grade B maple syrup. I like it better than Grade A syrup because Grade B has a sassier, more rustic maple syrup flavor.

Winston Graham

I have posted in the past about Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels that were so recently ruined by the BBC and PBS. Last week I had run out of novels to read and was rummaging through all the bookshelves in the house to find something. I settled on rereading Graham’s The Grove of Eagles, which I had previously read in the early 1980s.

It seems very sad to me that Graham never got the credit he deserved as a writer. It was said that he once referred to himself as England’s most popular unknown writer. When his books did get attention, he was overshadowed by bigger names (Alfred Hitchcock made a film out of Marnie, and actors and actresses got all the attention from the Poldark productions). The literati looked down on Graham as hopelessly middlebrow. One reviewer said that Graham had a wooden ear — a charge that I vigorously dispute.

In fact Graham is one of the few novelists whose style (to my taste) is worth reading carefully and analyzing. He writes superb, lucid sentences that have a cinematic effect in the mind of the reader — the kind of fiction writing that I love and strive for. He writes very masculine novels, yet he gets involved in the emotional lives of his characters (one reason why it was easy for screenwriters to ruin the 2014 BBC production of Poldark).

The Grove of Eagles, published in 1963, is a coming-of-age story about the bastard son of a leading Cornish family during the time of the Spanish Armada. It is an intricate novel, more demanding on the reader than the Poldark novels. It is well over 200,000 words long. It took Graham three years to draft it — a big time investment for a writer who wrote more than 40 novels. Graham gets involved in the politics of the royal court in the time of Sir Walter Raleigh. Clearly as a historian he also knew quite a lot about the politics of the Spanish royal court as well. The main character of The Grove of Eagles, Maugan Killigrew, is fourteen years old when the story begins. He is abducted during a raid on the Cornish coast and hauled off to Spain. He returns to England and becomes a secretary to Raleigh. Poor Maugan, forever lovesick, half wild and half poet, is horribly tormented by the author, as is any good protagonist.

There may be a cult developing around Graham, who died in 2003 at the age of 95. Jim Dring has assembled a great deal of information in PDF form. One hopes that he will turn it into a biography.

Most of Graham’s novels are out of print, but, thanks to sellers of used books who do business on Amazon, it’s pretty easy to acquire hardback copies of old editions. The next novel I read will be Graham’s The Tumbled House (1959).

It occurs to me that a huge body of literature may be slipping through the cracks in this new era of publishing — excellent novels published during the last 75 years or so of the 20th Century that came out in only one edition and that are unlikely ever to be reprinted or re-released as digital editions. I hope there are bloggers and booksellers in this niche.

P.S. It is still vastly easier to find good novels than to find something fit to watch on TV, even if you have Netflix, HBO Now, Hulu, and all that.

Oratorio in Ursa Major — April 1, 2016

I have contracted with illustrator Duncan Long for the cover illustration for Oratorio in Ursa Major, the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major. The publication date for Oratorio will be April 1, 2016.

The manuscript for Oratorio is finished, and the book will go out to the beta readers later this month.

About Oratorio in Ursa Major:

Jake Janaway, one of the few survivors of a global apocalypse, undertakes a dangerous journey to recover knowledge from the past that can help lead the planet out of another Dark Age. With the help of a galactic federation of extraterrestrials, Jake and his four companions are transported back to 48 B.C. to recover the lost knowledge of the ancient Celts. Jake learns a whole new way of thinking — and loving — untainted by the corruptions of Rome and its rigid religion. Though this is an adventure novel, the high intelligence of the characters and the harsh trials they face will give the reader a new perspective on how our wounded culture came to be what it is, and how we might progress beyond it.

The Inklings

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. Published June 2, 2015, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 656 pages.

I have long been fascinated with how in the world J.R.R. Tolkien managed to produce The Lord of the Rings. A year or so ago, I read his letters. Last June, a new book was released that adds a tremendous amount of scholarship not only to the writing of The Lord of the Rings, but also to Tolkien’s literary group, the Inklings, and to Tolkien’s biography.

This book focuses on four members of the Inklings — J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. Barfield and Williams are not nearly as well known as Tolkien and Lewis, of course.

How much fun they all must have had! They met regularly at a pub in Oxford, read from their works in progress, drank, smoked, ate, and butted heads up a storm. Part of the fascination for me is Oxford life. Oxford University has been a center of the intellectual life of the English-speaking people for almost a thousand years. The university press publishes an astonishing 6,000 books a year. And of course in my own post-apocalyptic novels it is Oxford from which the intellocracy is drawn that sets out to remake a post-apocalyptic world.

I have never been able to read C.S. Lewis’ books. My criticisms are much like Tolkien’s (though Tolkien and Lewis got along pretty well most of the time). Lewis’ books are oozing with Christian didacticism and allegory. Lewis was a proselytizer. He was glib. He was argumentative. His personal life was a mess. Though Lewis was not a fundamentalist, there are strong fundamentalist elements of his personality. For much of his life, he was virulently anti-Christian. Then he went through a transformation. As my old friend Jonathan Rauch wrote in one of his first books, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, fundamentalist personalities have a hard time with gradual, steady, evolutionary personal growth. Rather, they undergo sudden transformations and reversals, rejecting their former selves and heading in a whole different direction. Lewis was like that. To me he was not an interesting person, or an interesting writer.

J.R.R. Tolkien was very different.

It’s important to remember that it has been almost 100 years since Tolkien and other Inklings underwent their formative experiences as young men in the trenches in World War I. The war was an enormous existential challenge to those who lived through it. Then, in middle age, they went through it again with World War II. Oxford at the time was a kind of center of Christianity, a reaction, I believe, to the existential challenges of living in the first half of the 20th Century. They needed a state-of-the-art, Oxford-smart Christianity to make sense of their times.

Not all writers write for the reason Tolkien wrote — to try to find meaning in his life and in the times in which he lived. Tolkien always denied (not least, perhaps, to distance himself from didactic writers like Lewis) that there was anything allegorical in The Lord of the Rings. And yet it’s easy enough to see how his life shaped the story he told — a great struggle by the common folk against a great evil, his hatred for modernity and for machines, his love of untrampled nature, his belief in the power of myth, and his love for the English language.

Though by all accounts Tolkien truly loved ordinary people and loved to talk with them on his long country walks, he was not above calling them “orcs,” when, for example, they cheered for retribution against the Germans. The Inklings were not saints. They argued. They competed for the same academic posts and sometimes went in for a bit of backstabbing. They held grudges at times — sometimes for decades, in Lewis’ case. Lewis’ love life was a disaster (the splendid films “Shadowlands” give a very limited and one-sided view of Lewis and his brother Warnie).

Tolkien, however, comes across as the most likable of the Inklings, the Inkling with the soundest character. And of course it is Tolkien whose literary theory I find most appealing.

An environmental victory

This is another of my photo essays on grassroots environmental activism.

For three and a half years, ever since a Tea Party takeover of the legislature has tried to fast-track fracking and off-shore oil drilling into North Carolina, a tenacious little organization called No Fracking in Stokes has fought to keep fracking out of Stokes County. To corporations and urban outsiders, Stokes County looks like a poor county with a backward population that would be just perfect for an environmental sacrifice zone — a good place for fracking, toxic waste dumps, and stuff that nobody else will put up with.

Those of us who actually live here beg to differ. To us, Stokes County is a place of unspoiled Vermont-like beauty in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We have a river (the Dan River), our own mountain range (the Saura range), and the most popular state park in North Carolina (Hanging Rock State Park). Our economic roots are agriculture and tourism. The old cash crop of tobacco no longer brings in much money here. Manufacturing is long gone. We desperately need to revive our economy with forms of economic development that take advantage of, rather than ruin, our rural landscape and way of life.

Last night, the all-Republican board of county commissioners unanimously approved a three-year moratorium on fracking in Stokes County. This is the strongest action against fracking that the board can take under North Carolina law, because the pro-fracking legislature has done everything possible to tie the hands of, and to intimidate, local governments. This was a conservative county board telling its own party in the state capital to keep its money-grubbing hands off our county.

Though this issue has certainly caused turmoil in Stokes County these past three years, in the end the fracking issue has united this county as never before. You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed a room full of people of all political stripes, including left-wing liberals like me, not to mention a large turnout from the African-American community, giving a standing ovation to a Republican board.

At the local level, the system still works.

Rainy day breakfast

All during the night, a steady rain blew in from an Atlantic storm. The high temperature forecast for today is 62. This is sprouted wheat pancakes with maple syrup and blackberry preserves. I wish I could say that I made the preserves, but a friend gave them to me.

The last rose of summer

And ripening persimmons…

Oratorio in Ursa Major

I am happy to report that, this morning, I finished the first draft of Oratorio in Ursa Major. This novel, of course, is a sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major, which I published last year.

After a couple of rounds of author revisions, which should take a few weeks, the book will go to the beta readers. I have not yet set the date, but Oratorio in Ursa Major will be published next year by Acorn Abbey Books, my small press.

I am contracting with a well-established illustrator for the book’s cover art — Duncan Long. In the cover art, you’ll get to see what Jake looks like. The cover art will be a portrait of Jake with an appropriate setting in the background. There will be hardback, paperback, and digital editions.

Unlike Fugue, which was more contemplative and involved less action, Oratorio is an adventure. Oratorio picks up where Fugue leaves off. Jake’s mission will take him to Gaul in 48 B.C., and alien technology will get him there. All the characters of Fugue return, all in their old predicaments, and maybe — just maybe — a bit more happiness is in store for them in Oratorio, if they’re able to survive their adventures.

Will there be a third book about Jake? Almost certainly.

Should we tolerate the intolerant? (updated)

Kim Davis, an elected county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, according to news reports, is continuing to deny marriage licenses today, despite an order by the U.S. Supreme Court that she cannot refuse to do so.

She believes that she is defending her religious liberty and that her religious liberty trumps not only the law, but also the rights of the people in Rowan County, Kentucky, to acquire marriage licenses in accord with the law and their own religious beliefs. “This searing act of validation would forever echo in her conscience,” her lawyers told the Supreme Court. According to the New York Times, she is in her office this morning with the door and blinds closed.

First of all, let’s pull away the mask. Anyone who believes that Ms. Davis’ conscience is kind and conscientious is greatly deceived. She is a hateful, hypocritical (married four times) and intolerant person. She is being used by, and financed by, other hateful and intolerant people for political purposes. After this is resolved, keep an eye on what she does. Michael Savage predicts that she will become well-off and popular on the right-wing lecture circuit.

For the rest of us, she presents a problem that goes beyond the law. The law is clear. But the attitude that truly conscientious people should take toward the hatreds and intolerant mischief of people like Kim Davis is not so clear.

In a post a few weeks ago, in the matter of Cecil the lion, I mentioned John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which for decades has been the leading text in the field of moral philosophy. Rawls’ 500-page book includes a section titled “Toleration of the Intolerant.”

“Some political parties in democratic states,” Rawls writes, “hold doctrines that commit them to suppress the constitutional liberties whenever they have the power.” Check. We’ve got that — a Republican party, allied with the Christian right, that is fanatical about the privileges and liberties of the privileged but determined to keep down anyone who would challenge or dilute the privileges of the privileged.

Rawls writes, “Now, to be sure, an intolerant man will say that he acts in good faith and that he does not ask anything for himself that he denies to others. His view, let us suppose, is that he is acting on the principle that God is to be obeyed and the truth accepted by all. This principle is perfectly general and by acting on it he is not making an exception in his own case. As he sees the matter, he is following the correct principle which others reject.”

And yet: “Each person must insist upon an equal right to decide what his religious objections are. He cannot give up this right to another person or institutional authority…. From the fact that God’s intention is to be complied with, it does not follow that any person or institution has the authority to interfere with another’s interpretation of his religious obligations. This religious principle justifies no one in demanding in law or politics a greater liberty for himself….”

In other words, Kim Davis is claiming the right not only to deny people marriage licenses, but also the right to be a religious dictator for the people in her county.

Rawls again:

“Rather, since a just constitution exists, all citizens have a natural duty of justice to uphold it. We are not released from this duty whenever others are disposed to act unjustly…. Knowing the inherent stability of a just constitution, members of a well-ordered society have the confidence to limit the freedom of the intolerant only in the special cases when it is necessary for preserving equal liberty itself.”

I have put the last sentence above in italics because I believe that, setting aside matters of law, that is the moral principle behind the Supreme Court’s ruling — that denying this liberty to Kim Davis is necessary to protect the equal liberty of others.

“The conclusion, then,” writes Rawls, “is that while an intolerant sect does not itself have title to complain of intolerance, its freedom should be restricted only when the tolerant sincerely and within reason believe that their own security and that of the institutions of liberty are in danger…. The liberties of some are not suppressed simply to make possible a greater liberty for others. Justice forbids this sort of reasoning in connection with liberty…. It is the liberty of the intolerant which is to be limited, and this is done for the sake of equal liberty under a just constitution….”

Rawls was writing in 1971, though his book was revised in 1990. Rawls died in 2002. Religionists imagine that no moral framework exists outside religious authority and ancient texts. But most religionists would not know a moral framework even if a modern moral framework saved them from stoning or being burned to death for their own Old Testament crimes.

One of the gross moral flaws and limitations of religions such as Christianity is that they contain no principle for deciding between competing claims other than, ultimately, “I am right and you are wrong, on the authority of the texts.” To make this situation even worse, sects and individuals disagree on the interpretation of the texts, and on what to conveniently ignore in the texts and what to emphasize. They claim liberty for their own arbitrary choices and the end of a stick for everyone else.

As for Kim Davis, I say that she is a common sort — a hateful and vindictive person hiding behind religion. I also say that one of the dangers of religion, and of the authority-loving people who are drawn to it, is that religion tends to produce not good people (though certainly some religious people happen to be good people, not necessarily on account of religion but often in spite of it), but rather that religion tends to produce minds incapable of moral reasoning. Think of Abraham, who was ready to kill his own son because God told him to. As far as I know, the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac is still taught to children to instill the desired concept of unquestioning obedience to authority, and faith.

Take your place, Kim Davis, among the vilest moral imbeciles in American history.

UPDATE

According to news reports today (Sept. 3), a federal judge has ordered Kim Davis to be sent to jail until she complies with the order to issue marriage licenses. While she is in jail, a county judge will issue marriage licenses.

There is an interesting quote in the New York Times story:

“They’re taking rights away from Christians,” Danny Kinder, a 73-year-old retiree from Morehead, said of the courts. “They’ve overstepped their bounds.”

Dear clueless, deranged, and insufferable Christians: You are overstepping your bounds. Your rights to discriminate end where other people’s legal and religious rights begin.