The way we were – Page 3

Murder, Mayhem and the Mother Tongue

The cover of the rare 1969 pamphlet

Wallace Carroll’s “Murder, Mayhem and the Mother Tongue,” until now, existed only in the form of a pamphlet printed around 1969. A few are still in existence. At a reunion of former Winston-Salem Journal employees not too long ago, an old colleague gave me a copy if I promised to scan the text and get it on line. Here it is. Any errors in the text are mine. At last this piece is on the Internet so that it won’t be lost when the last pamphlet is lost.

Mr. Carroll was a journalist’s journalist. He was, without a doubt, the most important influence in my career, though I was just a young whipper-snapper when he was publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. He died in 2002 at age 95.

His staff idolized him, partly for his amazing background (see bio material below), and partly for his dignity, charisma, and kindness. He knew Churchill, and Eisenhower, and for that matter most of the American and European leadership during the World War II era. I will never forget how, when I was a copy boy, he would walk into the wire room, nod politely to acknowledge my presence, then stand in front of the Teletype machines reading, deep in thought. Later, as a young copy editor on his copy desk, my youthful sins against the language that got into print earned one or two of the brief, polite notes from the publisher’s office that made me crave to do better. Those of us who worked for him will never forget him. His book Persuade or Perish, which is still often cited by scholars, stimulated my longstanding interest in propaganda.

A future project, I hope, will be do to the same thing for “Vietnam — Quo Vadis.” That two-page editorial was very influential in getting the United States out of Vietnam. It is mentioned in the New York Times obituary. As far as I know, the only form in which that piece exists at present is in the clippings or microfilm files of the Winston-Salem Journal.

Murder, Mayhem and the Mother Tongue

An address given by Wallace Carroll, then editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal and Sentinel, on receiving the By-Line Award of Marquette University at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Sunday, May 4, 1969.

I rise to speak of murder. “Murder most foul, strange and unnatural,” as Hamlet called it. Or, to use the more precise words of Professor Henry Higgins, “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.”

This cold-blooded murder is committed with impunity day in and day out, and each one of us is at least an accomplice. The language of our fathers is mauled in the public schools, butchered in the universities, mangled on Madison Avenue, flayed in the musty halls of the bureaucracy and tortured without mercy on a thousand copy desks.

Because of our brutality and neglect, the English that is our heritage from Shakespeare, from Addison and Steele, from Shelley and Keats, from Dickens and Thackeray, from Conrad and Kipling — this English is now on its way to the limbo of dead languages. Certainly, the language has changed more in the past ten years than in the previous one hundred — and the change has been entirely for the worse. And, if nothing is done to check this deadly process, our children and their children will speak in place of English a deadly jargon, a pseudo-language, that might best be called Pseudish.

This is a prospect that should alarm everyone who earns his living by the spoken or written word. Leaving pictures aside, the only thing we have to offer our readers and listeners is words — words arranged in more or less pleasing patterns. But as things now go, those patterns are becoming less and less pleasing — to the eye and to the ear. Even if we look upon spoken and written news as a mere article of commerce, the trend is an ominous one.

But the debasement of English as we have known it should also concern everyone outside our journalistic circle. For the English language — as I hope to prove to you — is one of our great natural resources. It is as much a natural resource as the air we breathe, the water we drink and the timber and minerals that have made possible our material growth. Yet we are now polluting this priceless resource as senselessly as we have polluted the air and lakes and streams, and we are despoiling it as ruthlessly as we have despoiled our forests and mineral wealth.

The consequences for the American people could be as grave as the consequences we now have to face because of our heedless exploitation of our other natural resources.

The assault on the language begins in the public schools. We all know how Abraham Lincoln learned to read, lying on the floor of a log cabin, a candle or oil lamp at his elbow, puzzling out the words in an old Bible or whatever book he could lay hands on. Now, if Abraham Lincoln had enjoyed the advantages of our present-day schooling, he would never have discovered the strength and beauty of the language in this way. For Abe would have learned, not to read, but to “acquire a reading skill.” There is something about this curious term that suggests what a plumber’s apprentice goes through in acquiring a plumbing skill. In any event, the teacher, who had already been convinced by her courses in education that reading is a hard, tedious, mechanical process, would have conveyed the same feeling to the boy. And so Abraham Lincoln might have become an adequate plumber, but he certainly would not have written the Gettysburg Address.

Still, having acquired a reading skill, the boy might have advanced to something even more grand — a course in “language arts.” If you will compare the plain, clear word “English” with this pretentious and really meaningless term, “language arts,” you will see what I am getting at. Or perhaps you will grasp it more easily if I quote a few words from Winston Churchill, a man who never took a course in language arts, though he did learn something about English:

“By being so long in the lowest form (at Harrow), I gained an immense advantage over the cleverer boys. I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence — which is a noble thing. Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honor, and Greek as a treat.”

It is a good thing for you and me that Churchill learned English and not language arts. For if he hadn’t learned English (and I will explain this further), his England would have perished three decades ago. And then our America would have been left alone in a world of pernicious ideologies and relentless dictators.

I put this stress on “reading skills” and “language arts” because they are the most obvious symptom of linguistic blight that someone has called “Educanto.” A teacher who has mastered Educanto can rattle off such expressions as “life-oriented curriculum,” “learner-centered merged curriculum,” “empirically validated learning package” and”multi-media and multi-mode curricula.”

And such a teacher can easily assure you that “underachievers and students who have suffered environmental deprivation can be helped learning-wise by differentiated staffing and elaborated modes of visualization.”

Of course, this passion for pompous and opaque expression is only the merest beginning. The higher we go in the educational maze, the more overblown does the lingo become. Our universities have in fact become jargon factories: the more illustrious the university the more spectacular its output of jargon. And let someone find an awkward, inflated way to say a simple thing and the whole academic pack will take it up. I once remarked to a group of distinguished scholars that they would be offended if someone offered them the second-hand clothes of a Harvard professor, but they seemed only too proud to dress their thoughts in the man’s second-hand gibberish.

Speaking of Harvard, we were told a few days ago by the faculty that the old place is about to be “re-structured.” That word, if it really is a word, conveys to me a picture of what Attila did to Europe, and perhaps Harvard deserves as much. Certainly something is due an institution that turns out scholars who speak like this:

“You must have the means to develop coherent concepts that are sufficient to build up a conceptual structure which will be adequate to the experiential facts you want to describe, and which will not only allow you to characterize but also to manipulate possible relationships you had not previously seen.”

In a spirit of mercy I shall skip what is done to the language Madison Avenue-wise and business-wise, and proceed directly to the apex of government in Washington.

Here we discover that the President doesn’t make a choice or decision: he exercises his options. He doesn’t send a message to the Russians: he initiates a dialogue — hopefully (and what did we ever do before the haphazard “hopefully” came along?) a meaningful dialogue. He doesn’t try to provide a defense against a knockout blow: he seeks to deny the enemy a first-strike capability. He doesn’t simply try something new: he introduces innovative techniques.

All this and more he does after in-depth analysis has quantified the available data as input so it can be conceptualized and finalized for implementation, hopefully in a relevant and meaningful way.

Of all people, those of us who write and edit the news should be the guardians at the gate, the protectors of the public against this kind of barbarism. But what do we do? We not only pass along to the reader the Educanto, the gobbledegook and the federalese, we even add some nifty little touches of our own.

Thus the resourceful reporter is likely to uncover meaningful decisions and meaningful dialogues all over the landscape. Or rather at all levels — the national level, the state level, the community level, the frog-pond level. And in every community — the scientific community, the academic community, the black community, the business community, the dog-catching community.

Then the editorial writers do their bit. These meaningful dialogues, they assure us, are adding new dimensions to our pluralistic society. And where this same society is going to stack all those new dimensions is something that will really call for some innovative techniques.

Then we get the syndicated columnist who writes like this: “The key element in this mix of Nixon amelioratives and public concerns is that ephemeral element of confidence in the President and his conduct of the office. If Richard Nixon were in trouble on the personal confidence dimension, he could well be on the brink of imminent slippage.”

Now add to all this human ingenuity what the machine has done to the language. The Morkrum printer that brings the wire reports into the newspaper office chugs along at a 66 words a minute. The linecasting machine in the composing rooms sets type at a rate of eight to twelve lines a minute. The machine is mightier than the mind, and news writing must sacrifice all grace and clarity to accommodate these physical limitations. Thus most definite and indefinite articles must be eliminated in news writing. So must prepositions and constructions that require commas. Identification must be crammed together in front of a man’s name so that everyone gets an awkward bogus title. All the flexibility and lilt must be squeezed out of the writing so it reads as if the machine itself had composed whatever is written.

And we get leads like this:

“Teamsters union president James R. Hoffa’s jury-tampering conviction apparently won’t topple him from office under a federal law barring union posts to anyone convicted of bribery.”

Clickety-clickety-click. It’s not English — it’s Morkrumbo, the language of the Morkrum printer.

“ ‘Daddy,’ shrieked champion space walker Eugene A. Cernan’s daughter, Teresa, 3, as she raced to her father.”

And…

“Former North Carolina State University’s head basketball coach Everett Case today declared …” Clickety-clickety-click.

Of course, our lucky colleagues in radio and television are free from the tyranny of the Morkrum printer and the linecasting machine. And they have had fifty years to develop an easy conversational style. So they, at least, have managed to preserve a little of the grace of pre-Morkrumbo English…. Or have they? Listen to one of the great men of television:

“Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy today declared … Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney today told newsmen … “

You can almost hear the clickety-clickety-click of the Morkrum printer in counterpoint to the broadcaster’s voice. The language of news broadcasting is frequently the purest Morkrumbo — a language devised for the convenience of the machine, not for the pleasure of the human ear.

But why should anyone care? Well, as I said earlier, the English language as it came to us from our fathers has been one of our great natural resources. And that is what I must now prove.

At least twice during my lifetime I have seen the English-speaking nations raised from despair and defeat almost by the power of the language alone.

The first time was during the Great Depression. It is hard to realize today how low our people had fallen. America had been eternally blessed. Americans had gone ever forward and the future held nothing for them but more and more wealth and happiness. Then came the great crash. The farmer was driven from his farm. The worker was sent home from the factory. Fathers scrounged in garbage cans, mothers prostituted themselves to feed their children. Was this the end of the system? Was this the end of the American dream?

Then the American people heard on the radio the voice — the unforgettable voice — of Franklin Roosevelt:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

He had no program when he said it. His concept of economics was as silly as Herbert Hoover’s. But he told the people: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And the panic began to subside and the people began to hope again.

Go back to the history of those days and read the words of Roosevelt. Easy English words. Simple declarative English sentences.

Then go back to the year 1940 and the story of the Battle of Britain. Hitler’s invincible armies, his equally invincible air force, were poised at the Channel. Britain, its little army driven from the Continent and unprepared for total war, stood alone. Then the British people heard the voice of Winston Churchill:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”

Blood, toil, tears and sweat — four bleak one-syllable, Old English words. Only a great leader would have dared to make such a promise — and the British people suddenly knew they had such a leader.

“We shall fight on the beaches (he said), we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”

How simple the words — nothing but crisp, clear declarative statements. But they stirred in every man and woman in the land the urge to be a hero.

Legend has it that Churchill then put his hand over the microphone and said as an aside: “We shall hit them with beer bottles; because — God knows — that’s all we’ve got.”

It was certainly in character and almost literally true. I remember a trip I made at the time to the Channel coast to see whether the British were really capable of repelling an invasion. I remember meeting an unknown general named Montgomery, who had been driven out of Belgium and northern France, and whose shame and resentment burned in every word and gesture. The best he could show me was a platoon of infantry — 16 men — armed with tommy-guns from America. When I returned to London I did a little checking and learned that those were the only 16 tommy-guns in the British Isles. Yet Churchill said:

“We will fight on the beaches … we will never surrender.”

And the people believed him.

Then he turned to America and said:

“Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

Note that he did not say: “Supply us with the necessary inputs of relevant equipment and we will implement the program and accomplish its objectives.”

No, he said: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

And across the Atlantic, Roosevelt heard him and spoke this simple analogy to the American people:

“Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out his fire. Now, what do. I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15, you have to pay me $15 for it. I don’t want $15 — I want my garden hose back after the fire is over …”

With plain backyard talk like this, Lend-Lease was born, Britain was saved and America gained time to arm for war.

My friends, the English language has stood us in good stead. And never doubt for a moment that we shall need it again in all its power and nobility. That language, as it was entrusted to us by our fathers, enables us to stand with Henry V at Agincourt, with Thomas Jefferson at the birth of this Republic, with Lincoln on the hallowed ground of Gettysburg, with Roosevelt at the turning point of the Great Depression, with Churchill in Britain’s finest hour.

That language gives every man jack of us a right to claim kinship with Will Shakespeare of Stratford, with Wordsworth of the Lake country, with Thoreau of Walden Pond, with Bobby Burns of Scotland, with Yeats and Synge and O’Casey of Ireland and with all the others from whom a great people can draw its character and inspiration.

Let us not allow the latter day barbarians to rob us of this birthright. Rather, taking our watchword from Winston Churchill, let us resolve today:

We shall fight them in the school rooms, we shall fight them on the campuses, we shall fight them in the clammy corridors of the bureaucracy, we shall fight them at their mikes and at their typewriters. And when we win — as win we shall — we shall bury them in the rubble of their own jargon. Because, Lord knows, they deserve nothing better.

About the Author

When this was written in 1969, Wallace Carroll was the editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal and Sentinel. Before that he was news editor of The New York Times Washington Bureau. He was well known as both a writer and editor.

A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was graduated from Marquette University in 1928 and immediately went to work for the United Press in Chicago. A year later he was sent to London, in 1931 to Paris, and in 1934 to Geneva, where he was manager of the UP bureau at the League of Nations. In 1938 he covered the Spanish Civil War, then moved to London as bureau manager. He directed UP operations in Europe during the London Blitz and the first two years of World War II.

When the Nazis struck Russia in 1941 he was on the first British convoy that carried aid to the Russians. He covered the defense of Moscow — and won a National Headliners Club award for it. Returning to the United States, he was the first newspaper reporter to tour Pearl Harbor after the attack.

In 1942 he became director of the U. S. Office of War Information in London and advisor on psychological warfare to General Eisenhower. Two years later he moved to Washington as deputy director of OWI’s overseas branch.

After the war he became executive news editor of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel. He joined The New York Times in 1955 and managed its Washington bureau for eight years. In 1963 he returned to Winston-Salem as editor and publisher.

He was the author of Persuade or Perish, an account of U. S. psychological warfare operations in Europe, and of many magazine articles. He has lectured at the National War College, the Air War University, and the Foreign Service Institute and served as a consultant to the State and Defense departments, the Ford Foundation, and several universities. He held an honorary LL.D. degree from Duke University.

Mr. Carroll died in 2002. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times.

Road trip

This building is in Alleghany County near Sparta. I’m not sure if it was a church or a school.

My sister and I made a little road trip to Ashe County yesterday to go to a funeral. It was the perfect day for a road trip — sky busy with heavy, fast-moving clouds, pleasant temperatures, everything lush and green from the generous rain western North Carolina has had recently. The old buildings always catch my eye.

Ken has been drawing sketches for a shade shelter and straw shelter for the chickens. I thought this little building, on Booger Swamp Road in Yadkin County, had a lot of charm. Yes, there really is a Booger Swamp Road. The road sign was missing yesterday, so the signs must get stolen all the time.

Got a revolution?

Jefferson Airplane, Woodstock 1969: Got to Revolution

I am dumbfounded at the passivity of today’s young people, particularly recent college graduates. If they got any education at all for the money they spent on a college education, then they ought to be able to see that they are among the designated losers in an already almost-lost class war being waged by the corporate and political elite against the people of America.

My generation would never have put up with it. Even if we lost the struggle, we’d be in the streets raising raising hell and having a good time at it. To quote Jefferson Airplane from the song they sang at Woodstock in 1969:

Look what’s happening out in the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Hey I’m dancing down the streets
Got a revolution got to revolution
Ain’t it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey now it’s time for you and me
Got a revolution got to revolution
Come on now we’re marching to the sea
got a revolution got to revolution
Who will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of america

The statistics are appalling. Surveys show that 85 percent of this year’s college graduates will be forced to move back home with their parents. Their average student debt is $27,200. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that at least half of college-educated people under age 25 are unemployed or working for low wages in dead-end jobs such as bartending. A survey showed that 71 percent of recent college graduates wish they’d done something differently while they were in school to better prepare for the job market. In other words, they’re blaming themselves.

I already detect that some young readers are about to click the comment button and say that this is a generational problem: That my generation, which grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, got all selfish and self-indulgent as we aged, in spite of our youthful idealism, and that we screwed up the world. Don’t bother, because that’s just right-wing propaganda. The vast majority of we Boomers who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s worked our butts off all our lives to raise the generation that’s now moving back home. The tax money we Boomers paid out was the greatest source of revenue this country ever had. This was not a generational failure, this was a right-wing project: To capture the government and regulatory agencies to serve corporate interests, to shift the tax burden down, to redistribute income up, to starve the schools and the social safety net, to shift government expenditures toward profitable business projects such as war, to privatize profits and socialize costs, and to saturate Americans with propaganda so that we blame the poor, the hard-working, and the weak for the country’s problems while building right-wing hero myths around weak-minded, sociopathic pipsqueaks like Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Right-wingers say that the country is broke. Ha! The United States is richer than ever, so awash in cash that new speculative bubbles may again be forming. Corporate profits are at record highs. The rich are richer than ever, and paying far less in taxes than they used to. There is plenty of money, but all the gains are going to the top. In Reaganomics, you’ll remember, that was the excuse for reducing taxes on the rich and ending regulations on corporations and Wall Street — it would create jobs. How’s that working out for you, recent college graduates? And how do you like the new line that’s coming out of the corporate propaganda machine, that college degrees are a hoax? That’s the new propaganda line: It’s not that economic elites are capturing all the new wealth and productivity gains, it’s that college degrees are a hoax.

Each year, about 3.2 million young people graduate from American colleges and universities. There must now be millions of college-educated young people unemployed and/or living at home. What the devil are they doing with all that free time? If they organized themselves and took to the streets, they all by themselves would have the power to take back the American democracy from corporate control and to get this country’s wealth back into the hands of the people who produce it rather than the greedy, unproductive hands of those who skim, scam, exploit, and tax-avoid their way to the top.

How I wish that today’s young people would start raising a little hell and pushing back against the elites who’ve eaten their lunch and offshored their future. Taking to the streets and civil disobedience are very effective strategies. Right-wingers know this. That’s why rich oilmen like Charles and David Koch pay good money to organize those fake little made-for-TV Tea Party rallies.

If you’re looking for an organization to get started with, consider U.S. Uncut. They’re a sassy new disobedient but non-violent organization going after greedy corporations and the corporate capture of government. They need help starting local chapters.

You don’t even have to have a revolution. You only need to claw back the American democracy from the corporate forces that have bought it with their obscene profits, and shout down the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine.

Right-wing propaganda update: This is from a transcript of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday:

LIMBAUGH: Young people are moving back in with them. Their moms and dads! And some of these people moving back in are 35 and 40. How old are their moms and dads? 60 and 70, try. But they’re 60 and 70 and if they can afford their worthless offspring moving back in with them, just how poverty-stricken are they?

Another update: Ken Ilgunas has written a response to this post on his blog, “Why aren’t we revolutionaries?”

The Internet as it used to be

Warning: This is a nerd post!

People sometimes ask me how long I’ve been on the Internet. I’ve been on the Internet since the mid-1980s. Then when people ask me what the Internet was like back then, I find the question almost impossible to answer. It’s simply too geeky for most people to want to bother to understand. Telehack.com has reconstructed the Internet (using large archives of text files) as it appeared around 1991. In a second I’ll explain how you can try out the early Internet on Telehack.com’s simulation.

First of all, the early Internet (or Arpanet, as it was called in the 1980s) was text-based. Everything happened on a command line. Also, you had to thoroughly know Unix and have access to a Unix system that was connected to the Internet. It really helped if you were an engineer. If you weren’t an engineer, you sure as heck needed to know some engineers (luckily, I did).

At the campuses and big research labs, there were early forms of local-area networks. Most long-distance traffic, though, was carried over the long-distance telephone network. Unix computers knew how to call, and connect to, other Unix computers as needed. Long distance costs were very expensive then. Luckily, my computer never had to make those long-distance calls. The phone companies operated Internet computers, and if you asked nicely and knew the right people, the system administrators of those big phone company computers would call you so that you didn’t have to call them. My computer, which was named gladys, had close connections to a computer named pacbell (run by Pacific Bell in California), and ihnp4, run by AT&T/Bell Labs in Indian Hill, Illinois, near Chicago.

My first email address was “ihnp4!gladys!dalton.” As new standards for addressing were developed, this could later be shortened to “dalton@gladys.” The standard that brought the .com, .org, .edu, etc., extensions had not yet been developed.

Anyway, if you go to Telehack.com, you can try out some of the early Internet commands. Type your command at the blinking cursor. If you type the command “hosts”, you’ll get a scrolling list of the major computers on the Internet, in alphabetical order. You’ll see my computer, gladys, in the list, and yep, gladys passed muster as a major computer (she was an AT&T 3B2 running System 5 Unix). Try the command “finger dalton@gladys”. You can also try the command “ping gladys”.

If you type the command “traceroute gladys”, you’ll get some idea of how data was passed from computer to computer on the early Internet until it reached its destination. The route from telehack to gladys could be expressed as “telehack!mimsy!ames!pacbell!gladys”. This means that telehack and gladys did not talk to each other directly. Rather, telehack knows mimsy, and mimsy knows ames, ames knows pacbell, and pacbell knows gladys. “Ames” is Ames Laboratory.

You’re probably wondering what “ihnp4!gladys!dalton” means. Bell Labs’ computer ihnp4 was probably the No. 1 best-known, best-connected computer on the civilian Internet. Everybody knew who ihnp4 was. So what that old email address means is, if you want to send something to dalton, send it first to ihnp4. Then ihnp4 knows how to communicate with gladys, and dalton is a user on gladys. Early email addresses could get quite long with lots of “!” separators if you were way out on the fringes of the Internet. Gladys was a lucky computer. She spoke directly with the big guys, and so my one-hop (ihnp4!gladys) email address was a very high-status email address in those days.

Typewriters rule!

Before computers came along, no possession was more important to me than my typewriter. I have been fascinated with typewriters — or anything with keyboards, really — for my entire life. I got my first typewriter when I was about 10 years old. My father even had an old touch-typing textbook, so I taught myself to type correctly right from the start.

In the 1980s, after I had computers and printers, I got rid of my typewriter. But I always longed for an IBM Selectric, particulary a Selectric III. The Selectric III was the very pinnacle of typewriter technology. I finally acquired one in 1997. The San Francisco Examiner had a whole pile of them abandoned in the basement, so I rescued a Selectric III. It worked pretty well for a while, but eventually, unless they’re kept oiled and maintained, Selectrics get sticky and stop working. Mine needed to be soaked in a bath of cleaning solvent, then put back together, lubricated, and adjusted. It was a splurge, but I finally got this work done. My Selectric III is now working like new.

The work was done by Bert at Executive Business Machines in Winston-Salem. Bert has been repairing typewriters for 65 years. He got started with IBM Selectrics in the 1960s, when he took an IBM class on Selectric repair. I also found out from Bert that he used to repair typewriters for the Winston-Salem Journal. That’s the newspaper where I got my first job and where I worked until I moved to San Francisco in 1991. So, without knowing it, I’ve been using typewriters maintained by Bert since 1966, when I first went to the Winston-Salem Journal as a weekend copy boy.

I’ve been thinking that there ought to be typewriter clubs these days — for people who still have and use typewriters and who send each other typewritten notes in the mail just for the heck of it.

Bert with my newly reconditioned Selectric III

Jane Austen

Why have we had a Jane Austen revival? Why do we remain fascinated with 200-year-old novels in which nothing much happens but drawing-room conversations and emotional detective work by women to figure out the intentions of men? Partly, I’m sure, the answer to that is the BBC. We can’t get enough of those BBC costume dramas, those lavish sets, those charismatic young English actors and actresses. I’ll argue, though, that reading Jane Austen, for some mysterious reason, is more entertaining than the BBC productions.

It had been more than 30 years since I’d read Jane Austen, so I’ve had a bit of a Austen marathon during the last month. First I read Sense and Sensibility, then Pride and Prejudice. Then I watched the 2009 BBC production of Emma with Romola Garai. How many versions of Emma have we seen? Still, we’re always ready for a remake.

Many readers today probably find Austen difficult to read. Her sentences are long and tangled. Though her world is a world of strict and repressive rules, if she has a rule for using commas, I don’t know what it is, unless it’s that long sentences must have lots of them, with some semicolons mixed in for variety. Some new editions include notes to help modern readers understand some of the references to elements of culture that are now lost. For example, my 2003 Barnes and Noble edition of Pride and Prejudice includes notes from a scholar. But on the very first page this scholar proves that she doesn’t know as much as she thinks she knows. Jane Austen writes (Mrs. Bennet is speaking):

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

This sentence, the scholar deems, requires two notes: One is to tell us that a chaise and four is “a four-wheeled closed carriage.” I laughed out loud, because this is very wrong. A chaise and four is a carriage pulled by four horses. Anyone of Jane Austen’s time would have known that a carriage carrying a single person pulled by four horses means either or both of two things: That the person is rich, or he is in a hurry. The second scholarly note tells us that Michaelmas is the feast of St. Michael, celebrated on Sept. 29. Michaelmas also marked the end of summery weather.

That Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first novel (1811) is, I think, evident in a certain lack of confidence in her writing style and an unevenness in her sense of drama. For example, she pulls off a stunning piece of drama in one place, but misses the opportunity in another. Near the end, Marianne falls ill while she and Elinor are traveling and staying at the home of a friend. Marianne takes a turn for the worse, and Elinor fears that the situation is so grave that she sends for their mother to come in all haste. In the dark of night, a carriage (drawn by four horses!) comes roaring up to the house, and Elinor assumes it is their mother. But actually it is Willoughby, who has heard of Marianne’s illness and who comes to say that he has loved Marianne all along. Contrast this high drama with the book’s climax, when Edward reveals to Elinor that it is she he loves after all, but without a bit of drama.

No film version of these novels can reconnect us with our lost culture (and lost powers of the English language) the way the books can. We seem to realize that something important is missing in our post-industrial lives, but we’re not sure what. And how could we know, without some research? These classic novels help to remind us of what was lost when we went to work in factories and paved the world.

As an example of the loss of a picturesque element of culture: In chapter 7 of Sense and Sensibility, Sir John Middleton decides to have a party on short notice:

He hoped they would all excuse the smallness of the party, and could assure them it should never happen so again. He had been to several families that morning in hopes of procuring some addition to their number, but it was moonlight and every body was full of engagements.

These days we hardly ever notice the moon. Once upon a time, our social lives revolved around it, because those carriages (and poorer people on foot) could move around much more safely and conveniently in the moonlight.

We traded our moonlight for headlights and street lights. What a sorry deal.

Blum's Almanac

Recently, while talking with a neighbor who has been gardening in this area for a long time, I asked him how he decides when to plant particular things. His response: “I use the almanac.” I didn’t even ask him which almanac, because I just assumed that he meant Blum’s Almanac.

Blum’s Almanac is published in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (about 25 miles from here), and the 2011 edition is its 183rd year. My grandparents always had this almanac, and I believe they planted by it. Though the almanac was an icon of my childhood, as an adult I’ve never used an almanac. My first question (and I don’t know the answer) is how an almanac can give planting dates without reference to the planter’s latitude and altitude. So I have a lot to learn about how an almanac works and how to use it.

But I intent to start. I ordered a three-year subscription.

Rolling back the clock … if only for a summer

Ken Ilgunas with the chickens, June 2010

Summer is over. Ken went back to school yesterday.

One of the disappointments of getting older is that most young people care so little about how the world used to be, or whether in some ways it might have been better. I have often said that I will measure my success at Acorn Abbey according to how well I can roll the clock back to 1935. How many young people would understand what I mean by that? Young people are transported by J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, both the book and the movie. But how many of them grasp that the Lord of the Rings is a critique of industrial society or that the Shire is a representation of the Late Victorian England in which Tolkien grew up? Tolkien was born in 1892.

Ken is the only young person who has ever asked me, why 1935? What was it about 1935 that is worth going back to?

I see 1935 as the peak of a sustainable American economy, with a healthy mix of industry and agriculture. In 1935, Americans’ level of consumption was reasonable and sustainable. In The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Wendell Berry talks about how our homes have become centers of consumption, where nothing is produced. We leave home to work. In our homes we consume astonishing quantities of energy, food, gadgets, and throwaway stuff and produce a similarly astonishing quantity of waste. In 1935, it wasn’t like that. Homes were centers of production as well as consumption. Non-city households were able to produce most of their food. Most people worked at home.

Modern homes can’t even produce their own entertainment. It comes in on a wire. People used to have pianos. Piano ownership peaked around 1930. Everybody had to have one. In 1930, the most expensive item people bought other than their house was their piano. By the end of the 1930s, that had changed, and cars displaced pianos as the most expensive item other than the house.

During the boom of the 1920s, there was a huge migration of young people off the farms into the cities. In the 1930s, this reversed, and young people went back to the farms. [Rural Poor in the Great Depression, Bruce Lee Melvin, et al.]

I was not alive in 1935, of course. I was born in 1948. But most of my earliest memories from the 1950s have to do with the places in which my relatives lived. These were family farms in the Yadkin Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains, all of which had been running at full tilt in 1935. In the 1950s, many of my relatives still kept cows and churned their own butter. They had chickens, pigs, mules, tractors, pastures and fields. I saw how it all worked, and it must have fascinated me as child, because those images of productive households are burned into my memory.

I was born 56 years after Tolkien, so my witnessing of the industrialization of the United States picks up five or six decades after Tolkien’s witnessing of the industrialization of England. As The Lord of the Rings Wiki says, “The industrialization of the Shire was based on Tolkien’s witnessing of the extension of the Industrial Revolution to rural Warwickshire during his youth, and especially the deleterious consequences thereof. The rebellion of the hobbits and the restoration of the pre-industrial Shire may be interpreted as a prescription of voluntary simplicity as a remedy to the problems of modern society.”

During the course of our lives, we our all blown around, sometimes even battered, by economic forces and economic trends, but we rarely pause to think about it. We are no less battered today than the young people who moved off the farms in the 1920s, only to move back again in the 1930s. In the 1950s, I witnessed how my father moved his family away from a small-farm lifestyle to a more suburban lifestyle. When I got my first job in the early 1970s working for a newspaper in Winston-Salem, N.C., even though I didn’t fully realize it then, the economy that supported that newspaper (not to mention the economy that supported old Southern cities like Winston-Salem) was based on manufacturing. By 1991, when I moved to San Francisco, manufacturing was dead. Winston-Salem was in decline. Whether I knew it or not, it was an economic wind that blew me to San Francisco, during the trough of a recession. Lucky for me, the California economy started to roar again by 1995. When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner from 1995 until the Examiner closed in 2000, we were riding the dot-com boom. After the dot-com boom, San Francisco rode the housing boom. When the housing bubble broke, I didn’t particularly want to stick around San Francisco for the lean times. Instead, I read the tea leaves: Just as in the 1930s, economic winds were blowing me back to the farm.

But I didn’t have a farm. Most of those we once had have been lost.

In my family, there is a precedent for starting a small farm from scratch. It was around 1935 when my father’s family’s home in the mountains of Virginia was destroyed by a fire. My father would have been about 18 then. Rather than rebuilding there, they moved to the Yadkin Valley and acquired about 10 acres of land from a relative. They built a small farm. I spent a great deal of time there when I was a child. I can still see clearly every inch of ground. I can still see the house and each outbuilding in detail. I can remember my grandmother’s cow, which she once let me try to milk. I can remember gathering eggs for her, and carrying in wood for the stove. I can remember what everything smelled like.

Ken Ilgunas is the only person who ever asked me about that little farm and what kind of infrastructure it had. Ken is the only young person I’ve ever known who has shown any curiosity about the economics and routines of family farming. I can walk around my grandparents’ farm in my memory and find answers to the question: What was considered essential on a family farm in 1935? There was a small house with three bedrooms, built from local logs and wood from local sawmills. There was a wood cookstove and a coal-fired heating stove. The house had a large, floor-model Philco radio for entertainment, though no piano. The enclosed back porch was a sort of laundry room. The front porch was where you went to cool off when the weather was hot. Attached to the back of the house was a concrete platform with a well and an insulated well house. Water was drawn from the well by cranking a windlass and raising a bucket with a rope, a chore I loved to do for my grandmother. The well house was where milk was kept (jars were immersed in a trough of cool well water) and where canned foods were stored. These were the outbuildings: a small barn with two stables and hay storage in the loft; a tobacco barn for curing tobacco; a woodworking shop (my grandfather was a carpenter); a woodshed; a large chicken house; a granary where animal feed was stored; a garage. Most of the 10 acres, except the fields and garden area, was fenced for a pasture. There was a small orchard. There was a wood-fired outdoor stove made of brick that was used for heating water for laundry. This was a small, newly built farm. The nearby farm on which my mother grew up was much older and larger, around a hundred acres. My mother’s family farm had the same kind of buildings, though larger and with the addition of a smokehouse for curing hams.

On Ken’s blog, some commenters sometimes accuse Ken of being somehow fraudulent for his determination to revisit and rethink, in how he lives his own life, all the givens of industrialization. This revisiting and rethinking is not an easy project. By default, most young people don’t much question the world they were born into. What’s not to like about a life of consumption? Quite a lot is not to like, of course, such as enslaving ourselves to buy things or indenturing ourselves with debt.

I’ve known a lot of brilliant young people. But I have never known a young person other than Ken who was willing, even driven, to rethink everything before putting on the heavy harness and stepping onto the treadmill of industrial (or post-industrial) life. How did he do this?

He did it by reading and thinking, and by seeking experiences that wouldn’t interest most young people, like working in Alaska for several summers. Instead of becoming a creature of popular culture, Ken has, through his reading, kept company with some of the greatest minds of the past and present. He is a sterling example of why a liberal education is of such great value, though it won’t help you make money on Wall Street. From talking with Ken, it’s clear that this project of reading and rethinking has been going on since he was a boy. His graduate studies at Duke are a continuation of that process.

His summer at Acorn Abbey also was part of that process. I don’t think it necessarily means that he’ll become a monk or a farmer. His intense need for exploration and adventure will produce a lot of creative tension with his cloister instinct. But Ken realized that, by the accident of when he was born, he lacked certain experiences that industrialization has robbed us of: how to start a farm, how to grow at least some of your own food, how to build things, how to fix things, how to use hand tools. Ken also got a taste of the cloistered life, because we lived like monks, with much silence and much reading along with the labor. I told him that it’s a shame he can’t get course credit at Duke for what he learned this summer.

Ken’s hard work at Acorn Abbey this summer brought this place much closer to becoming the productive tiny farm that I want it to be. The work he’s done here will be visible for many years to come. It’s amazing what two adults working at home can accomplish. All my grandparents made their livings at home and still had time to sit on the front porch and smell the gardenias.

And I’ve added a second way to measure my success, in addition to how well I’m able to roll the clock back to 1935. That measure of success is whether people like Ken Ilgunas want to be here.

Crippled collie?

Gladys and me, circa 1989, Winston-Salem, NC. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard

I don’t think I’ve ever explained on this blog the meaning of my domain name, crippledcollie.com.

There once was a crippled collie. Her name was Gladys. She was born, as I recall, in 1981. She was active, athletic, extremely sweet, and not the smartest collie in the world (though she became quite wise in her old age). When she was 8 years old, she had a stroke. I came home from work one day to find her moving with great difficulty. Her eyes wandered in different directions. Her pupils were different sizes. We rushed to the vet. The vet quickly diagnosed a stroke and administered heavy doses of intravenous cortisone. Still, within hours, Gladys turned into a vegetable. She was paralyzed. All four legs were useless. She could only lie on her side and watch me with her now-strange eyes.

On follow-up visits to the vet, my vet and I discussed the options. The vet pointed out that Gladys was not in pain, that she was strong-willed and surprisingly happy, and that Gladys was very attached to me and trusted me very, very much. The vet said that, if I was willing to take care of a paralyzed dog, that there was a chance that Gladys’ condition might gradually improve.

That’s what we did. Very slowly, over a period of weeks and months, Gladys regained control of her legs. Eventually she was able to stand. Then she started hobbling. And eventually she started walking again. Still, for the rest of her life, she walked with a limp. She dragged her right hind leg. When she walked, her feet on the floor made a strange sound — click click scratch, click click scratch, click click scratch. When I moved to San Francisco, Gladys went with me. She spent her last few years in my apartment across from Buena Vista Park in Haight-Ashbury. She loved Buena Vista Park. She could click-click-scratch her way to the top of the park without any trouble. I used to call her the Crippled Collie of Haight Street (which also is the working title of my memoir-in-progress). She knew Haight Street quite well. Especially she knew the location of the bagel store, and she would take us straight there if I asked her if she wanted a bagel.

Gladys died a natural death at the age of 13. Gavin and I were with her. She is buried on the Point Reyes Peninsula, near Inverness, California.

Recovered photos

The motherboard of a 12-year-old computer: somewhere you don’t want to go

What if your computer crashed today and couldn’t be restarted? What would you lose? There is no costless way to back up your computer. Probably the easiest and least expensive plan is to periodically burn CDs or data DVDs of files you don’t want to lose.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was working for the San Francisco Examiner (may it rest in peace), I sent my older sister a quite fine computer that was being retired by the Examiner — a Hewlett Packard Kayak XA. The PC had been in the office of a former publisher of the Examiner, Lee Guittar, so the computer was executive-suite squeaky clean. My sister used this computer until about three years ago, when the computer was damaged by an ugly power failure in which the power went on and off several times in quick succession. The computer went to the garage, and my sister got an iMac.

A week or so ago, my sister brought the computer to me. I had promised to see if I could revive it. When powered on, the computer would emit a series of beeps and then go silent. I have the technical documentation for the computer, and I knew that the beep codes probably indicated a problem with the BIOS on the system board. But my attempts to reflash the BIOS using the procedure in the technical manual failed. If there was any hope for reviving the computer, a new mother board would be needed.

What would we do without eBay. There was a mother board for sale with exactly the right part number, for $20 plus $15 shipping. I bought it. After I installed the new mother board, the old PC booted with almost no further drama.

My sister had kept things well organized. Everything of interest was pretty much in three folders — “Pictures,” “Pictures 2”, and “Recipes.”

I’m trying to decide what to do with my refurbished HP Kayak XA mini-tower computer. It’s pretty slow by today’s standards. But I’ll at least keep it as relic of the San Francisco Examiner days. The computer still has an Examiner property tag on it.

Here is a sampling of the photos which were almost lost.

San Francisco, looking across the bay from Point Bonita. My mother and sister used to make annual trips to San Francisco. Several of these photos were taken on those trips.

Mendocino County, California, along Highway 1. In Ireland those rocks would be called skelligs.

My sister’s deviled eggs, looking very Southern

Loaves of bread made by my sister

I believe this is some sort of apple pastry, made by my sister

A pie, made by my sister

The Hillsville Diner, Hillsville, Virginia. It’s about 40 miles northwest of here.

Inside the Hillsville diner

That’s me serving pinto beans from the wood cookstove. The stove is in a house that my sister and mother and I stayed in on a visit to Mendocino County. During the 1970s and 1980s, two of the old houses I lived in had wood cookstoves in them. I’m very skilled at cooking on a wood stove. Notice the gas stove behind me. We had ’em both going.

That’s me, doing a very unprofessional job of cracking oysters in Inverness, California. The oysters came (of course) from the Hog Island Oyster Company on Tomales Bay. As for the oysters, we fried ’em in batter.

A couple of times when my mother and sister came to San Francisco, we stayed at the Chicken Ranch cottage at Inverness, California, right beside Tomales Bay. In spite of its humble name, the Chicken Ranch cottage was at the time an outpost of Manka’s Lodge. This photo is taken from the backyard of the Chicken Ranch cottage.

This is my sister and I, before the premiere of a Sharon Stone film in San Francisco. My boss at the San Francisco Examiner, Phil Bronstein, was married to Sharon Stone during that epoch, and so I got invitations like that. What an era: the thrill of the dot-com boom, grief for the end of the Examiner, and some Hollywood glamour thrown in.