Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
Ken has been playing in a hockey league in a nearby city. I went to my first hockey game last night. Ken’s team won 7-1.
Also, Ken is mentioned in a piece in the April 24 New Yorker. The New Yorker piece is about van dwelling and how it has been commercialized in social media. Ken provides the authentic element for the story, since he lived in his van not as an edgy Bohemian lifestyle but for a more practical and frugal reason — to afford grad school.
⬆︎ Gragg, North Carolina, with Grandfather Mountain (altitude 5,945 feet) in the background
If you’re shooting a movie, shooting on location costs a lot of money. But if you’re writing a novel, good locations cost nothing. The author is limited only by what he can imagine and describe.
As a rule, I like for the locations in my novels to be places that I actually have been to and seen. Book 1 of the Ursa Major series, Fugue in Ursa Major, mostly because the story is just getting started, doesn’t stray very far from Phaedrus’ cottage in the Appalachian backwoods — places such as Charlottesville, Washington, and the national forests of West Virginia.
Book 2, Oratorio in Ursa Major, travels much farther — the coast and highlands of Scotland, an oil rig in the north sea, and an enormous space ship in deep space billions of miles from earth.
Book 3, Symphony in Ursa Major, which is in progress and which I plan to release next year, will get deeper into the Appalachians and will return to Charlottesville and Washington. But we’ll also go to London for some scenes at Westminster, and we’ll also go to New Delhi. And we’ll get even deeper into space and learn much more about galactic history and politics when we visit the galactic capital.
Back in the 1980s, on my first trip to London, my Welsh friend in London, who was a lawyer and policy wonk, wanted to impress me, so he requested tickets from his member of Parliament to visit Parliament on the prime minister’s question day. The prime minister was Margaret Thatcher. The tickets were for the sergeant-at-arms’ private box. So I have seen a good bit of Westminster, including of course the greatest abbey in the world, Westminster Abbey. And I’ve heard Margaret Thatcher getting rough with the opposition in the House of Commons. In my archives, I have a copy of the Times of London from the next day, which includes a story on what Thatcher was asked and what she said.
I was in Delhi in 1994, and though I have not seen the government buildings in Delhi, I’ve seen plenty of Delhi’s streets and markets including, of course, Connaught Place.
In Oratorio in Ursa Major, there is a brief visit to the place I call the Pisgah abbey. In Book 3, we’ll return to the Pisgah abbey. This place is deep in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina. The abbey is imagined, but the location is real. I searched out the location using Google Earth. I was looking for a small clearing in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains. I wanted a location reachable only by winding, treacherous roads. I settled on Gragg, North Carolina.
On a trip to Asheville last weekend, I went to Gragg. The place is so remote that GPS cannot be trusted. At one point, GPS wanted me to turn left on a nonexistent road that would have sent me crashing down a forested mountainside. But I finally found a way into Gragg by going to the little town of Linville. From Linville, GPS gave me a route down into Gragg on roads that actually existed. The road — narrow and unpaved with lots of one-lane bridges — looped and wound down a mountainside and gave up about a thousand feet of altitude in five miles. There is a small settlement of people at Gragg and even a small lake. Gragg seems to possess the only fairly flat parcel of land for many miles. The road to Gragg is so steep that, when I climbed back up toward Linville, my little Smart car stayed in 2nd gear (of five) for almost the entire drive.
Writers and readers know how important a story’s settings are. Writers and readers also know that, for some reason, stories just work better when the plot moves characters from place to place. When characters are in the middle of nowhere, the author is probably exploring the characters’ inner lives, their motivations, and their inner obstacles. But if the story deals with larger, planetary issues, then you can expect the characters to show up in places where planetary power is concentrated. In Symphony in Ursa Major, that will be Washington, London, and Delhi.
Many writers (and films) have imagined what a galactic capital might look like. In Symphony, I’ll have my go at that.
⬆︎ A resident of Gragg, with his hoe.
⬆︎ The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of my favorite roadways in the world.
⬆︎ Gragg viewed in Google Earth
⬆︎ Westminster
⬆︎ Dogwood in the woods
⬆︎ Though we do see honeybees, these days bumblebees do much of the work of pollination.
⬆︎ Baby peaches
⬆︎ I always forget the name of this.
⬆︎ Baby chickens
⬆︎ It’s thrilling to see the woods coming alive. Looking down through the orchard toward the back of the house.
⬆︎ The wires that run along the top of the eight-foot fence needed replacing. For the top wire, we used copper wire and good insulators. The wire should serve as a reasonably good horizontal loop antenna for the low bands of amateur radio, including the 80-meter band. The loop is almost 400 feet long. That’s a long antenna.
Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, by Mark Williams, Princeton University Press, 2016. 578 pages.
Like many people who have worked hard to understand how our Celtic ancestors lived, I regularly grapple with a smoldering fury. No matter what thread to the past we try to follow, we find it broken. “Broken” is too weak a word. The thread wasn’t merely snipped cleanly in two. Entire centuries have been deliberately hacked from the record and have been lost to us. We owe a huge debt to scholars such as Mark Williams who spend their lifetimes trying to reconnect the threads.
From genetic testing, because I carry the genetic marker for the Uí Néill family (carefully studied because it’s a royal genetic marker and is common in Ireland), it can be said with high confidence that my ancestors were in Ireland (probably the north of Ireland) before Patrick. For that reason, I take very personally the cultural catastrophe that the church brought to Ireland.
In this book, Williams brings us up to date on what scholars of the written record can tell us about pre-Christian Irish history, insofar as Irish history can be deduced by studying the rich body of Irish literature that was produced from around 500 to 1400 A.D. The catch, though, is that this literature was produced in the church’s monasteries, in the centuries after Patrick. Though surely the literature contains some older, pre-Christian elements, no clear or consistent picture of the past can be reconstructed from it. The stories are muddled, often contradictory, and they have been polluted with Christian allegory and snippets that appear to have come from Bible stories. And obviously, for someone who was writing in, say, 1200 A.D., the trail had gone cold, because the Christian subjugation of Ireland was well under way by 500 A.D.
Like it or not, that’s where things stand. The Celtic people of Western Europe know next to nothing about their pre-Roman past because the Celtic past was systemically expunged and can be glimpsed now only through a Christian fog. Williams acknowledges that those of us who make an effort to reconstruct the Celtic past have no choice but to speculate. Williams seems to respect that speculation, but he wants the speculation to be grounded in a scholarship that is up to date.
He mentions a movement that began in the 1980s that he calls Celtic Reconstructionism. “Celtic Reconstructionists,” writes Williams, “have tended to ally subjective feelings with thoughtful investigations of the writings of classical authors, archaeology, and comparative Indo-European mythology.” That’s pretty much my method, so I suppose I am a Celtic Reconstructionist. Most reconstructionists, I think, are searching for a religious practice with which to replace the poverty of Christian theology. My purpose, on the other hand, is to make use of the Celtic past in my novels and to encourage people to think about how the world would be very different without the imperial Roman religion, which was imported from a little cult in the Middle East and which is based on very thin and very silly texts. In his notes, Williams even includes a link to the web site of a Celtic Reconstructionist in Scotland whose work he clearly respects. Here’s the link, for those who might like to follow up: Tairis: A Gaelic Polytheistic web site.
Lately I’ve been making sourdough rolls. They’re almost as quick as yeast rolls, and almost as easy. It occurs to me that those of you who might like to get started with sourdough artisan breads, but who are concerned about the work and risk of “total bread failure” involved, might want to make sourdough rolls as a low-risk way of getting started.
I hope to make a video soon on quick-‘n’-easy sourdough rolls.
This blog gets a lot of visits from people who are interested in the history of Buffalo China. I would collect Buffalo china if I had anywhere to put it, but as things are I’ve collected only enough Buffalo china for the table, and no more than will fit in the kitchen cabinets.
But recently, while searching on eBay for more green-stripe cereal bowls (of which I have only four and need more), I came across an item that I had never seen before — cups and saucers with a dogwood pattern.
The seller, who is in Lenoir, North Carolina, said that the cups and saucers were from an old hotel in Lenoir, the Carlheim Hotel, which was torn down in, I believe, 1971. I don’t know for a fact that this china came from the Carlheim Hotel, but it seems very likely. Partly this is because the china did indeed come from Lenoir, and partly because dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina (as well as Virginia). It seems unlikely that Buffalo China would sell much of the dogwood pattern outside of North Carolina and Virginia. So I’m guessing that the dogwood pattern may have been custom china made for the Carlheim Hotel.
The china appears to be brand new. This stuff and its quality always amazes me.
Some catnip seeds were casually strewn along the garden fence once upon a time. Now it has gone rogue, with at least three little catnip groves in the yard. Ken brings in little flower pots of catnip for Lily and sets them on the floor for her. I asked Ken if I should mow around the catnip, and he said yes.
A goal for this year: More herbs for humans, especially cilantro. There’s always plenty of basil during the summer.
(The big brown crocks are Harsch sauerkraut crocks.)
We saw the white deer a couple of times through the winter, but never when a camera was handy. I got a glimpse of her this morning through the kitchen window while making coffee. I dashed upstairs and took this photo through an upstairs window. I didn’t have time to switch to a longer lens.
She was drinking from the little creek, then she slowly ambled downstream through the may-apple bottom. She was being followed by a smaller deer that I can’t see in any of the photos. A fawn, possibly? I don’t know.
I know I’ve blogged about vegetarian (vegan actually) hot dogs before. Every now and then you’ve got to have one. Last night’s supper on the deck, near the grill, we called “heritage night.” The heritage here, of course, is Southern white trash heritage.
The vegan hot dogs come in a can. They’re made by Loma Linda, a Seventh-day Adventist company. The chili is homemade, using vegan burger that comes in a can, also made by Loma Linda. The hot dog buns are made by a local commercial bakery. The steak fries are from Ore-Ida.
That should take care of the hot dog craving for a couple of months.
Ken’s third book, This Land Is Our Land, has been in the final editing stages here at the abbey and is due at the publisher, Penguin Random House, next week. The book is scheduled for release in March 2018.
When the idea for this book was hatched last April, Ken was here at the abbey, traveling through on book tour for his second book. He had just published a piece in the New York Times, This Is Our Country. Let’s Walk It. After that piece was published, it was apparent that Ken had become the honorary owner of a “right to roam” movement in the United States and that a book on the subject was needed. Ken had no trouble at all selling his agent and his publisher on the idea, and in no time he had a contract to write the book.
A year ago, I would have assumed that this book would be a fairly bland and somewhat academic — but necessary — reference book for a new movement in need of a manifesto. But having read the manuscript twice during the past two weeks, I was reminded how Ken’s books always exceed my high expectations. It’s not just his superb research and the charm of his writing that make This Land Is Our Land such a good book. It’s also the way he surprises me, when I finally see the manuscript, with how deeply he delves and how high he flies, even though I was in on discussions about the book from the beginning. Though this book’s topic is seemingly narrow, Ken also has produced an incisive snapshot of contemporary American culture through the lens of our attitudes toward the land. And he has laid out a lion-hearted vision of a future America that is less insular and more benevolent.
If you’re not certain what a “right to roam” is, I’d suggest the New York Times link above. It’s not as radical a right as you might think. The people of England, Wales, Scotland, and Sweden have generous roaming rights, and even countries such as Lithuania and Latvia are far ahead of the United States with the right to roam.
This Land Is Our Land will be the fifth book to be born here at the abbey during the last four years. Ken’s other two books are Walden on Wheels (2013), and Trespassing Across America (2016). There also are my novels Fugue in Ursa Major (2014) and Oratorio in Ursa Major (2016). Symphony in Ursa Major is in progress and should be out next year.