But after my makyng thow wryte more trewe

The literary districts of the internet have buzzed a bit lately over a recent round-up of things novelist Jonathan Franzen dislikes. These range from e-books, smart phones, and the internet, to outdoor cats, to Michiko Kakutani.

I had been hungry all the years

Back at Burns Night, Charlotte commented on the fact that Americans don't celebrate their literary figures the way people in other countries do. We don't have Whitman Night parties, for instance. Nobody celebrates Moby-Dick Day (the novel was published 18 October, 1851) by reciting Ahab's last words and cutting into a whale cake.

Whether to admire the mere sensation

I ignore television ads because they aren't worth my ire. Lately, however, I've been assaulted by ads featuring people being angsty about their psoriasis. 'Does he know it's not contagious?' 'Will they remember me as a mentor or the teacher with red flaky patches?'

Under the ribbons and artificial flowers

I bought some new gardening gloves this weekend. I probably could have taken a picture of them draped artfully over a fence post or something, but I was doing other things (like raking and repotting) and didn't get to it. But they're these: Ethel Traditional, in Jubilee.

Look back at the leopard like the leopard

I've been watching, with some bemusement, the whole 'Franzenfreude' uproar.

"Gardens are not made by singing 'O how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade"

I wait with some amusement for this week's broadside from the WaPo's garden writers, who have, in the last two weeks, railed against azaleas and sung the praises of coneflowers. What's next? An ode to the orange daylilies? A suggestion that we should all grub out our campanulas?

Textura, non catena

So. This Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic thing with the argument that gardening in schools is a stupid waste of resources.

Vexed

I am all kinds of annoyed and frustrated right now.

Stop it. Stop it RIGHT NOW.

Mostly I ignore the abuses against language that appear in the sidebar adverts on web pages. But there is no excuse for this sort of crap, and to be slugged with both in one day is intolerable:

Cuisinternship?

Thindulge?

Links provided to shame the guilty. I'd say I'd boycott the latter product but since I don't buy mass-produced bread much these days, it wouldn't be much of a statement.

Don't make me get the neologism stick. I am not kidding. Do you hear me?

Rant, reconstructed

Last week, Amy Stewart on the Garden Rant blog posted about garden writing clichés she'd like to see die and asked for suggestions for more. I couldn't think of any that really vexed me off the top of my head.

More than 140 words

Dear Twitter:

I am barely interesting enough to maintain this blog.

I am certainly not interesting enough produce several micro-posts each day, updating the world on my doings. I do not need you and your cultists reminding me of this fact.

What would I tweet about? What I had for breakfast? Whether or not I want to defenestrate a colleague? How many times a day dealing with public comment deflates my commitment to public service?

How pathetic is it that despite my unmitigated scorn for you, I know that the preferred verb for your use is 'tweet'?

Breakfast: 1/2 cup yogurt, 1/2 cup muesli, 1 banana, sliced. This is my breakfast pretty much every day. Now you know.

Today's defenestration forecast: Low.

Today's deflation index: High. I just read a comment which included the phrase 'elevated risks of illegality.' I love English. It is a beautiful, varied, maddening language. And then I have to deal with people who write things like that. AUGH.

Miscellaneous data points: It's still raining or threatening to rain. It's the birthday of the young woman who tends to housekeeping duties on the floor where I work. Thursday is farmer's market day. I am hoping there might be something other than lettuce to buy this week.

Sometimes it just takes more than 140 words to say what you need to say. Although for right now, Twitter, I think I can sum it up with two: Go away.

No love,
'nora

Eleventh Century Glamour: In the Name of Fairness

Since I poked fun a couple months back at the copy on the Interweave Press web site associated with the Wrenna cardigan pattern in French Girl Knits, I think it is only fair that I point out that the appalling statements therein are not the fault of the book's author, Kristeen Griffin-Grimes.

Eleventh-Century Glamour

We interrupt our Emmanuel Memo Day celebrations to bring you the following mediaeval glamour don't:

A rare burst of real-world topicality

People, this is why you shouldn't move firewood (I'm lookin' at you, Pennsic-bound peeps):

Ash Trees Threatened

Well, this and critters like the pine shoot beetle, the Sirex woodwasp, and the gypsy moth.

It's also why you shouldn't move nursery stock willynilly. Keep your swaps local.

And this is the big argument against raw milk: Cheese May Cause Tuberculosis.

Headline is a bit sensational, and your risk of local cattle being infected with TB varies depending on where you are -- in the MD-DC-VA area, you're probably at greater risk for listeria than TB -- but that sums it up. I mention it only because I've seen a load of hype about the health benefits of raw milk and very little discussion of the risks. I believe adults should be able to make their own choices, but it's good for those choices to be informed, no?

(By the by, Mycobacterium bovis can infect cervids (deer and elk) as well as cattle and bison; much of the trouble with eradicating bovine TB in the U.S. has to do with cattle herds being infected or reinfected because of contact with wild deer which are also infected. Most cases of human tuberculosis are caused by a different mycobacterium, M. tuberculosis.)

Here's the USDA's page on Emerald Ash Borer

And here's the link to the Bovine Tuberculosis Program

Zeitgeist

I'm pretty sure that I, with my 7-10 subscribers, don't qualify as an influential tastemaker.

But some of my little peeves have been getting a wide audience. In addition to the rapprochement noted in the Observer Food Monthly a few posts back, I present two other gripes addressed by recent news pieces:

Humane Society Criticized in Meat Quality Scandal and A Case of Abuse, Heightened (Cf. Blame Games)

and

Easter Is for Baking, Too which includes a recipe for a Swiss gâteau de Pâques and mentions of Finnish paasiaisleipa, English Simnel cakes and Sedgemoor biscuits (Cf. Not Another Egg(plant)

Blame Games

I love how the Humane Society tapes bad practices at a slaughter plant, then waits weeks, releases to the video to media, and the USDA gets blamed for it.

What's wrong with this picture?

Yes, this is the kind of thing inspectors are supposed to catch. But it's possible for any plant to present a clean face during inspection. If the inspectors don't see the problem the day they're there, and no one presents any evidence that there is a problem, then as far as they know, there is no problem.

And it is possible, as some news stories are claiming, that the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is understaffed for inspectors. I don't work for FSIS so I don't know for sure. I am willing to bet, though, that if they don't have enough inspectors it's because they don't have the budget to pay them.

The HSUS maintains an adversarial relationship with all the branches of the USDA. In many ways, that's a good thing -- it is our critics who keep us on our toes.

Seriously though -- if they really gave a damn about either the welfare of the animals or the safety of the food supply, why the hell didn't they take those tapes to the FSIS at once? Adversaries or not, the FSIS is the agency with the authority to do something about that kind of thing.

But the HSUS didn't contact FSIS. They taped that activity in October and November. They released the tapes only in late January.

Now FSIS is taking flak, and not so much for failing to catch the abuse during an inspection (which might be a legitimate complaint) as for failing to recall the meat 'in time.'

Meanwhile HSUS parades around as the champion of animals and friend of the consumer, and no one's writing op-eds about how they irresponsibly manipulated the media for their own gain.

What the hell?

EDIT: Oh, and before the foodies among you get torqued by certain major food site bloggers, please remember that the National Animal Identification System is VOLUNTARY.

The Rising Price of Slow

Beware, poppets. The slow-foodists are expanding into home decor.

Follow-up

... on yesterday's post. In this morning's installation, the last in the series, Thomas writes:

'Monasteries are notionally very peaceful places—there's nothing to do but what you choose to do. '

'Scuse me a moment while I collect myself.

*coughs*

Maybe there's nothing for you to do while you're at a monastery, buster, but if you think that's the life of a monk (which you seem to suggest it is) then you're not paying close attention. St Benedict prescribed a life of 'ora et labora' -- prayer and work -- and trust me, you don't raise vegetables for a monastic community, or prepare their meals, or wash the dishes, or anything else necessary to the survival of the community without hard, regular work. When was the last time you kept a large vegetable garden? You don't water the tomatos when you feel like it, or 'choose' not to hill the potatoes if you expect to actually have tomatoes or potatoes in their proper season.

It's one thing to go to a monastery for a week's retreat and leave with the awareness that you're not cut out for monastic life. It's entirely another to go in and be willfully obtuse about it.

Not everyone is cut out for monastic life

So, I've been reading Inigo Thomas' account of spending 6 days at Pluscarden Abbey (a Scottish monastery closed in the Reformation and resurrected in the 20th C; it was originally a Valliscaulian house but is now a Benedictine one).

Thomas' piece can be read here: http://www.slate.com/id/2167854/entry/2167856/

I started reading it out of a professional interested -- Scottish monasteries being one of the things I know something about. At least the pre-Reformation ones, anyway. Thomas says at the outset that visiting a monastery in northern Scotland, during January, seemed the most foreign thing he could do, and when it occurs to him that monastic life is rather like corporate life, it seems to disappoint him.

And as the series progresses (I read entry number 4 this morning) that disappointment that monastic life is not, in fact, so foreign, seems to be colouring everything else about his experience. This morning's read went on at some length about the apparently pernicious suppression of the self and suppression of information in both corporate America and Pluscarden. (This grows out of the discovery that one of the monks, who dies while he is there, had been a World War II veteran). He has been expressing the idea, throughout, that there's something weird and unhealthy about the way monks not only await death, but are looking forward to it.

I must confess I'm starting to lose patience with Inigo Thomas. He doesn't seem to get it.

Part of his problem may be that he's simply not cut out for the life of a monk, just as some people aren't cut out to be journalists or celebrities or corporate drones. He talks about finding a phonebox and making a call to New York, and being aggravated when the line goes dead. I wanted to hit him upside the head with a stick. You are in rural Moray. You were probably unutterably lucky to find a working phone box in the first place. And have you ever considered that disconnecting might be good for you?

Part of his problem may also be that he's at the monastery not as an anthropologist but as the worst sort of tourist, the one who demands that the place he has gone conform to his wishes and satisfy his particular wants. He's staying in the guesthouse and eating in the refectory, but he's not keeping the schedule of the monks or otherwise participating in their world. In fact, he doesn't seem particularly interested in the customs and culture of the place he's entered. So far, he has not yet attended even one service of the Divine Office. He talks about his irregular schedule -- of which St Benedict would have disapproved -- and complains about the bells waking him up in the middle of the night. Dude. That's what they're supposed to do. Go sing Matins and get over yourself.

He's not even reading particularly monkish books -- he says his reading material is 'Clive James' latest volume of autobiography, North Face of Soho, about drinking, talking, and journalism in London in the '70s.' Probably fascinating but not perhaps the thing to put you in the right frame of mind for a week in a monastery.

I am not going to get into his association with suppression of self with suppression of information and the slap he makes at monasteries in general for keeping libraries and preserving ancient texts. He seems eager to see monastic libraries as some kind of vast ecclesiastical conspiracy to keep the masses down rather than looking at them as what happened when people who loved knowledge tried to do the best they could.

Part of why I am so annoyed with Thomas is that I actually knew some Benedictine monks. Two of the monks from St Anselm's College in New Hampshire were fellow students when I was at CUA and St Andrews. Dan, the one I knew at CUA, was a fellow mediaevalist and a member of my circle of friends; he was part of the group when we went to Colonel Brooks' for a drink after exams or when we gathered to prepare for classes.

Now, did Dan talk about his life before he became a monk? Not that I can recall. On the other hand, he talked about his life as a monk. He told some funny stories about being a novice. He talked about going home to his childhood church for Midnight Mass and, with the parish priest, locking the doors and making the congregation sing Christmas carols. (He and the parish priest agreed that some of the parishioners were a little too serious and needed to be reminded of the joy in their faith). When my father died, he came to the funeral -- waited for me inside the front door of the Arlington administration building, and gave me a huge hug when he saw me. 'I've been so worried about you,' he said.

Gus arrived at St Andrews my second year there. I got to know him because we both lived in Deans Court; when we started chatting at a cheese-and-wine session in the common room all I knew was that he was studying Reformation/Counterreformation history and was American. So I asked where he was from, and when he said New Hampshire, I allowed as how that made him the second person from New Hampshire I'd ever met. 'Oh really?' he said 'And who was the first?'

'Eh,' I said, 'you probably wouldn't know him. He's a monk at St Anselm's.'

Gus' eyes nearly bugged out of his head. After we confirmed the Dan I knew was the Dan he knew (Gus had a group photo of the monks with him -- Dan was at one end of a row of them, he was at the other), we both laughed. 'What are the odds?' I said. He shrugged.

By yet another coincidence, Gus happened to be on his way out of Deans Court when the taxi pulled up bringing me back after summer my dad died. He saw me in the car and stopped until I paid the driver and got out. He gave me a huge hug. 'I'm so glad to see you,' he said. 'We were all afraid you might not come back.'

The difference, I suppose, is that I was able to see Dan and Gus as real people, not as ciphers. Part of that was because I was willing to see them as real people; I wasn't looking for them to be strange or foreign. And they were willing to be seen as real people -- which may or not be the case with the congregation at Pluscarden; I don't know, and Thomas doesn't seem to have tried to find out.

As for the pernicious nature of the monastic suppression of self and looking forward to death -- that's at once naive and deliberately obtuse. Firstly, as Thomas notes, suppression of self is part of modern life. He mentions this in terms of the corporate life of cube dwellers, but even in something as theoretically cosy as a nuclear family, people don't talk about everything with each other. Teenagers are particularly notorious for this, but adults and young children do it too. Why not tell the people you live with everything about yourself? Well, it might be embarrassing and you want to forget it (think of high school gym class). Or it might not be something you're particularly proud of. Or perhaps it's simply that it's part of your life which is done -- it was fine for what it was while it lasted, but now it's over, and you have moved on. (Incidentally, I know a lot of veterans who feel that way about their military service. Perhaps the monk who passed in the night while Thomas was at Pluscarden felt the same way). Is it more unhealthy to put aside the parts of your life which are, in fact, over, or to continue trying to relive them? (Consider the movie version of the military vet who never quite reintegrates into everyday life, but still lives as though he's in a combat zone -- is that more healthy than moving on?)

Secondly, when your faith tells you that death is not the end, but indeed the beginning of something new and wonderful, that the point is not that your body stops and gets packed away in a wooden box somewhere but that your soul moves on to communion with God, direct communion with God, then what's not to look forward to? The monks I knew were not morbid people. They regarded life as a gift and seemed to be enjoying it. It's just that they believed that death, when it came, was going to be a gift as well. I'm not sure what's unhealthy about that.

When the revolution comes

Through Dichroic, I've learned of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day.

The creation of this event was inspired by a statement by Dr. Howard V. Hendrix of the Science fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (described by him as a rant and linked from papersky's journal), and reading it is good for a boggle. It's one thing to prefer not to blog, visit forums, or otherwise express yourself online. Plenty of people don't want to do that, for a variety of good reasons which I can respect. Pushing back against that which one 'perceives to be destructive to their ways of life and their beliefs,' as he claims to be doing, is the right of the individual.

I am not in the least convinced, however, that characterising people who post their work free on the internet as 'webscabs' is fair or reasonable, or indeed even an accurate use of the word scab. I understand 'scab' to mean a strikebreaker, not someone who gives away what others sell. The American Heritage Dictionary backs up that understanding. A glance at the SWFA website does not suggest to me that the organisation considers itself a union, so even if Hendrix's remarks were aimed solely at SWFA members who post some work online, it's still inaccurate. Nevertheless the remarks about online posting seem to be directed, or at least apply, more broadly.

I can characterise myself as a professional writer, though I don't get a byline in the Federal Register when something I wrote is printed there. (Nor do I want one. I take pride in my work but the hassle of the public contacting me directly about a piece of rulemaking would be abysmal). I've even been paid for an individual piece of writing, my contribution to the Oxford DNB. Wasn't that much money -- about 70 quid for about 1000 words, if I remember right -- but I was paid for it.

Most academic writing -- journal articles and contributions to works like the DNB -- isn't paid. Print runs of scholarly books tend to be approximately 500 copies or less, so they're not money-makers either. Textbooks are the exception. It was a delightful surprise to be paid for my contribution to the DNB. So I'm not unsympathetic to the idea that making a living by wordsmithing is a precarious business, nor will I argue that people who write can and should be paid for their writing, if they choose to sell it (and if people are willing to pay for it, which is another matter). What I am not convinced of is that it undercuts those who do try to sell their work if I choose to give some of my own for free, or that your right to sell your work negates my right to give mine away.

I'm not even convinced that giving some of my own available for free would necessarily hurt my sales, were I trying to sell books. Consider the example of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (the Yarn Harlot; link to her blog over in the blogrolls). Do bazillions of people visit her blog daily? Yes. Does she have the least trouble selling books? No. Her blog is like a never-ending book tour. Even if she didn't enjoy blogging (though I suspect she does), it's a useful marketing tool for the writing she does sell. And, since she blogs about other knitting writers she knows, she probably encourages her readers to buy their books too.

Neil Gaiman blogs. He doesn't seem to have any trouble selling books either.

Giving a little bit away probably actually helps sales in the long run. Grocery stores know this (The local Whole Foods often has someone with an electric skillet offering tidbits of something). Online gaming companies know this (I've tried out several RPGs via '10-day free trial' or open beta). Pharmaceutical companies know this. Even drug dealers of the illicit sort know this (first one's free ...). Give people a sample, let them see if they like it, and the ones who do will pony up the cash.

Continuing to reflect on Dr Hendrix's rant, I think I'm also somewhat ruffled by the undertone (overtone?) of 'I don't like this, so no one should do it.' If you would rather chop wood than blog, that is your prerogative. So too is it your choice to sell your novels or screenplays and try to earn a living thereby. But how dare you tell me what I should do with my time and my writings? This is my intellectual property, and if I want to post it on a blog, or, for that matter, hire a skywriter to write it in the air over Chicago, that is my decision, not yours.

May I also point out the linguistic irony of first calling people who give away their writing 'webscabs' (language drawn from the terminology of labour unions, and a rich shade of pink if not actually communist red) and then labelling them as 'technopeasant wretches'? Technopeasant wretches? How ... bourgeois. How very, very bourgeois.

I will find a way to participate in the festivities next Monday; I'm not sure how yet, but I will come up with something. Let the ruling classes tremble at the revolution. The pixel-stained proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. Technopeasants of all countries, unite!