Lesson Two: Wine and Food

Wine education at Chateau Keifus has turned out to be a sporadic but pleasant and social family activity. We've done our best to package up our early lessons on tasting and bring relatives and friends into the mix, especially if the grownups are willing to foot a big part of the bill. This year, lacking funds to fly off to preferred destinations in France or Tuscany or something along those lines, we settled that the once-a-decade trip (as either reader of this blog is no doubt tired of hearing by now) would take us to California wine country to immerse ourselves in the grape, and provided we succeeded in learning anything, proceed to a suitable Lesson Two for the rest of the hometown amateur crowd. It coincided closely enough with my mother's birthday to build it into a celebration. I've promised a couple interested people that I'd share the recipes and other secrets, and this is a convenient place to do that. I go through the lesson below, and recipes follow. (As far as the regular blog thing goes, it serves nicely to fill up space as well. Election season has made the state of the country more ridiculous and loathsome than usual, and the press narrative more puerile, and while that all fuels a rant or two, it doesn't scare up too many entertaining ones.)

The wine and food evening was in two parts. For the first, we examined the basic flavors that you find in wine and food, and did some clever experiments to see how they interact. The results, as they say, will astound you. This was followed by a tasting dinner, where wine was paired for each dish. We had to adjust to east-coast pantries, and the fact that the growing season here is winding down. If you can somehow find fresh peas in October, in other words, you deserve whatever horror they taste like. (And it turns out they don't ship in kumquats year-round from Chile, even if the asparagus got us by.) This was followed, as it generally does in our family, with general consumption, so maybe it's more accurate to say that the evening was a three-parter. As I told my dad: you can learn something and get drunk.

Finally, before the nitty gets gritty, I need to make a couple of acknowledgements. I did cook it all, expanding where I thought to, but my wife did the hard work of organizing the damn thing, including acquisition of place settings and making party books, and the tasting itself we pretty much cribbed from Duckhorn Vineyards in St. Helena, CA. The kid did a good job hosting—and gave us an excellent brewpub recommendation to satisfy our less pretentious pleasures—and I tried to copy his style for my mom's party. Maybe for the sake of free advertising, they'll forgive me for using their ideas and recipes to make myself more popular.

Alright, I know you all know this, but to review the basic wine flavors or sensations—mostly in terms of the stuff you get on the tongue—we have five:

Acidic (Our token crisp wine was a Fume Blanc by Dry Creek Vineyard. I get the acid in this and in most white wines more as a sour green-apply bite on the tongue than a pleasant tingle, and I think I'm getting tired of them. It worked well for our experiment though.)

Tannic (A selection of reds, including a 2005 Merlot from Franciscan and a Bear Boat Pinot Noir which were mildly tannic, and a Cabernet from Oberon (uh, not that Mondavi, the other one) which was aggressively so, especially after sipping the other two; usually I smell fruit on the nose with a cab, but not so much on this one. Both the Bordeaux styles had sort of "unrefined" tannins, that stood not unpleasantly against the red and dark fruit flavors, but it wasn't exactly a seamless transition--none of the wines are very spendy, which is good for education.)

Barrel (I tried to describe the oak flavors as consisting of specific spice and chemical notes, specific signatures like vanilla, toast, clove, diacetyl (which isn't quite correct), and things like that. Not to mention "oak," if you've ever sawed it. The Merlot had the most definable of these sorts of flavors. Here's me blathering more about barrels here.)

Sweet (Since I forgot the "sweet" until the extreme last minute, I pulled a cloyingly floral Moscato from Jacob's Creek at the packy on my way home from work Friday night. It wasn't ideal.)

Alcohol (This is more of a concern for the young or the congenitally sober. Regardless, it's the fiery and vapory sensation you get from a shot of vodka or something.)

These wine sensations were set off against the five food tastes (five?) we all know: sour, salt, bitter, sweet, and, to throw a little curveball at the apple-polishers in the class, spiciness. On little tasting plates, we neatly arranged a couple lemon wedges, a little mound of salt, a walnut segment, a little pile of sugar (raw sugar so it looked different from the salt), and some spicy cheese with one end dusted with a hot curry powder.

I want to include the lesson, just because I found it so damn useful. Resourceful oenophytes can do it themselves without divesting much scratch. It goes like this: "Take a sip of the sauvignon blanc, and describe it." It's reassuring to realize that not everyone's palate is the same, and we register flavors differently depending on our physiology as well as our experience. The composition of everyone's glass was the same, however, and while I tried to suggest acidity, but to hold onto that thought. "Now take a good bite of that lemon, and sip the wine again. Does it taste the same?

I encourage you to try it if you haven't and come to your own conclusions, but since it's less boring to read an anecdote than a lesson plan, I can give you my own set of punchlines. The acid in the lemon pretty well washes out the acid in the wine, and our Fume Blanc doesn't really have a whole lot else going on. The rule of thumb (imparted on us from chef Eric down the street, and you should eat there too, if you ever get the chance) is that the wine should be more acidic than the food, at least if you want to taste the wine. Since tannins are acids too, you should get a similar effect for red wines. We tasted the Merlot with the lemon too, and although it was much less dramatic, I thought it did wash out the back end a lot, or maybe say it was replaced with some brighter stuff, which didn't feel necessary.

Next comes the salt. The Merlot gives us a dramatic lesson in saline. Put some on your tongue, and sip again, go ahead. When I did this, it was like a magic trick. The Merlot vanished in my mouth, leaving not much but a ghost of barrel flavors. It did a similar thing with the cab too (and presumably the Pinot). We tried it with the Sauv. Blanc and the Moscato too. Salt cut the sweet and sour less dramatically, and less unpleasantly. Eric says that it's basically the chips and lemonade thing; salt makes you crave sour, and vice versa. Chips and lemonade, or, if you prefer, chips and Champagne.

Munch on that walnut for a couple seconds, and you get some nice oily and bitter flavors. After careful screening, I felt that this went best in an experiment with the Merlot. Mmm-mm, give it a try and find that somehow the bitterness brings out all of that barrel flavor, and for that particular Merlot, it was very nice to have them brought out. Now, my wife and I have been talking about it and haven't reached a conclusion. Flavor subtraction makes sense if there are competitive receptors for what you are trying to taste—you've flooded your tongue with the other stuff, and the wine doesn't manage to get in. (Either that or your buds get fatigued, receiving such a shock of sour (or whatever) that you spike the detector. Your brain has done its job to register that tartness is there, and refuses to acknowledge further.) Plausible so far as I understand these things, but then tell me why bitter flavors are additive. Why does the walnut enhance the barrel notes? My best guess is that it neutralizes mysterious taste entities that otherwise drown those chemicals out. Or something. I'm working on it.

When you get to sugar, although you obviously have taste receptors for that too, it's thought of more as coating the tongue. (Fat coats the tongue even more effectively, but who'd want a dollop of Crisco on the taste plate.) Putting sugar on your tongue tends to cut the tannins more than other things, and I thought that it toned down our Cabernet in a pleasant way. And for people who hated tannic wines, or who'd only eat them with a steak, I took the chance to act like a know-it-all. Cutting those tannins can make a difficult wine very agreeable, and free up subtler flavors to play nice with the nuances in your dish. Or leave you something to enjoy once the food has taken its share of the tastes.

For the last tasting, we note that spicy food doesn't coat the mouth, but scours it, making it sensitive to alcohol (and vice versa, I guess). None of the wines were very boozy, so no good lesson there, but tongue-coating can compete favorably against tongue-scrubbing. A nice sweet wine should tone down spicy elements in food, which is why Margaritas are so awesome with Mexican. Our pairing of pepperjack and Moscato wasn't particularly pleasant though. My favorite sweet wine pairing with red spicy food is an extremely local one. Last plug, and the end of the class.

The following dinner consisted of small bites. The Fume Blanc went against some cheese-filled spring rolls with a lemon aioli. I didn't have a thermometer for the oil and didn't heat it enough, and although these tasted nice, the texture was disappointing. Neither roll nor sauce was aggressively lemony, and the wine filled in that role nicely. Our next bite was (my favorite), the duck meatballs in porcini broth, paired with the Pinot, lots of earthy savory flavors, and the five spice blended nicely with the minimal barrel notes that the wine gave us. We bought a beautiful whole duck from Long Island for this, and ground it up, which was difficult to get myself to do. The short rib had plenty of salt and fat, as well as some citrus (it was really great), and it was paired with the Merlot. At the winery they did this with lamb and a lighter stock, I think because they had available small riblets, with the bones exposed so you could pick it up. Ours is much darker, fattier, and deeper and I liked it more. We warmed it by braising twelve bite-sized pieces for another hour with all of the liquid, and it probably made it that much better. The tannins in both wines were subdued, which made most of our guests happy. The Merlot was acidic enough, I guess, to deal with the cooked-down orange and lemon. The cab, of course, went with our steak bite. The kids made parfaits for dessert, and it was followed by the usual general-purpose shnookering.

Here are the recipes:

Duck Meatballs in Porcini Broth

• Meatballs:
  
  • 1 lb. ground duck (best if you have a meat grinder: buy a whole duck, grind the meat, and reserve the bones to make the broth)
    
  • 2 eggs, beaten
    
  • 1 c. fresh bread crumbs
    
  • 2 tsp. fresh thyme leaves
    
  • 1 small onion, minced
    
  • ¼ c. Parmesan cheese, grated
    
  • 1 tsp. five spice powder
    
  • 4 tsp. salt
    
  • 2 tsp. fresh pepper
  
  
• Meatballs:
  
  • bones from the duck (or use 2 lb. chicken bones)
    
  • 1 large onion, large diced
    
  • 1 c. carrot, large diced
    
  • 1 c. celery, large diced
    
  • 4 cloves garlic, whole
    
  • 4 quarts chicken stock
    
  • 1 c. dried porcini mushrooms
    
  • 4 parsley sprigs
    
  • small handful of thyme sprigs
    
  • 2 bay leaves

Combine all the ingredients for meatballs (makes a loose mixture). Cover and refrigerate for at least two hours. When ready, roll out to about ½ in. spheres. Refrigerate until ready.

For the broth, place the bones, onion, carrot, celery, and garlic on a sheet tray and bake at 375 °F for about an hour. Drain excess fat (and use a little water to get any of the brown bits stuck to the tray), and add the bones and vegetables, and remaining broth ingredients to a big stockpot. Simmer for about an hour and then strain.

To cook the meatballs, put 1-2 c. of the broth in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil. Add meatballs in batches and cook 7-10 minutes or until they are cooked. Discard the cooking broth.

To serve, heat remaining broth. Place cooked meatballs in a bowl, and pour the hot broth over them.

New York Strip Steaks with Turnip Puree

• Puree
  
  • 1 T. butter
    
  • ¼ c. spring onions (or leeks), thinly sliced
    
  • 1 c. turnip, small dice
    
  • 1 c. milk
    
  • 1 bay leaf
    
  • ½ tsp. fresh grated nutmeg
    
  • 1 tsp salt
    
  • ¼ tsp. white pepper
  
  
• 8 oz. NY strip steak
  
• fresh chives

For the puree, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the spring garlic (or leeks) and sweat until soft (don't brown). Add the turnip, cover with milk, and add bay leaf and nutmeg. Simmer 20 minutes or until turnips are soft and starting to fall apart. Remove the bay leaf and puree the turnip with half of the milk (until texture). Season before serving.

Season the steak and grill or pan-sear it in grapeseed oil to medium rare. Let rest and then slice when ready to serve.

To serve, reheat the puree if necessary. Spoon a little into a Chinese soup spoon and top with the sliced beef, and a little fresh chives for garnish.


Orange and Olive Short Ribs

(I don't think you can call a dish "Moroccan" without the properly available ingredients, and kitchen infrastructure. So I don't.)

• about 4 lb. beef short ribs (4 servings with six short bones apiece.)
  
• Rub (ras el hanout, more or less):
  
  • 1 tsp. cumin
    
  • 1 tsp. ground ginger
    
  • 1 tsp. turmeric
    
  • 1 tsp. salt
    
  • ¾ tsp. cinnamon
    
  • ¾ tsp. pepper
    
  • ½ tsp. white pepper
    
  • ½ tsp. ground coriander
    
  • ½ tsp. cayenne pepper
    
  • ½ tsp. ground allspice
    
  • ½ tsp. fresh grated nutmeg
    
  • ¼ tsp. ground cloves
  
  
• 6 c. beef stock
  
• 1 c. orange marmalade
  
• 2 c. cured black olives or kalamata olives
  
• 2 heads of garlic, split into cloves
  
• 2 bay leaves
  
• candied lemons:
  
  • 12 very thin lemon slices
    
  • 1 c. sugar
    
  • water

Preheat the oven to 375 °F. Rub the ribs with the ras el hanout, and place them on a sheet ban. Bake for 30 minutes.

For lemons, blanch for 1-2 min. in boiling water until softened. Then, in a skillet, make a simple syrup of 1 c. sugar and 1 c. water. Bring this to a simmer and place in lemons. Simmer gently for 1 hr, then remove to cool.

Remove from the oven, and place the ribs in a baking dish (or split into two dishes). Add remaining ingredients. Cover tightly with foil, and return to the oven, and bake for 2 hours or until tender.

Remove ribs and set aside. Strain cooking liquid and set aside olives. Remove garlic cloves and bay leaves.

To serve, garnish with the lemons.

Spring Rolls with Asparagus, Ricotta and Lemon Aioli

(This didn't work very well for regular spring rolls; they don't seal as well, and needed to cook a little longer, which lends to filling exploding.)

• 12 wonton wrappers
  
• ~½ c. spinach leaves
  
• ~½ c. asparagus, julienned (or use fresh peas if in season)
  
• 3 cups canola oil for frying
  
• Filling:
  
  • 6 oz. ricotta cheese
    
  • 2 oz. chevre, room temperature
    
  • 1 tsp. tarragon, finely chopped
    
  • zest of one lemon
    
  • 1 tsp. salt
    
  • ½ tsp. white pepper
  
  
• Aioli:
  
  • 1 egg yolks
    
  • ½ tsp. fresh garlic paste
    
  • 2 tsp. lemon juice
    
  • ¾ c. grapeseed oil
    
  • 1 tsp. tarragon, finely chopped
    
  • 1 tsp salt
    
  • pepper to taste

Mix together filling ingredients.

Place a new wrapper on a clean work surface. Put on a spinach leaf, add a small spoonful of the cheese filling, and some asparagus. Roll into tiny spring rolls. Lay on a lined cookie sheet, and place the rolls in the freezer.

For the aioli, mix the egg yolks, garlic and lemon juice. While whisking, drizzle in the oil. Spoon into a bowl, and mix in tarragon, salt, and pepper. Refrigerate until time to serve.

To cook the rolls, heat the oil to 325 °F. Carefully drop in the frozen rolls, and cook about three minutes, or until golden brown.

Review: Drop City, by T. C. Boyle

My sister-in-law recommended this one to me a couple months ago, after, as it turns out, a nice spin through the landscape. My wife and I had just spent a few days in Sonoma county, including a nice drive, and later a pleasant paddle, down the Russian River, where a lot of the written action takes place. When I was visiting, I was mentally painting rural Sonoma as an especially interesting collision between the filthy rich and the dirt poor, exhibiting some horrifying little off-of-the-path communities we accidently drove through, and ugly little trailer parks and shabby vacation bungalows with beamers in the drive, that have evidently seen tourism ebb and flow over the years. The tiny urban centers like Guerneville (Norm and Marco might have stopped at the same Safeway that we did, forty years later) somehow cater to both elements, and I found myself wondering how the trends of waste and want have gone over the years, looking at the architecture like a geologist puzzling out rock strata. There was open space along the river, and also some ritzy places where wealthy people live right on it (reminding me a little of tubing down the Farmington back in Connecticut, but with infinitely nicer weather and scenery) . It's full of farms and vineyards, currently booming, but they are not so uniformly wealthy as to speak to a history of cash. It's not, to summarize, at all hard to imagine an experimental commune somewhere in the area. (Communism on the Russian? As if!) The book, much like the area, speaks about different ways of defying the rat race, neither of which much resemble the ways that the (yet another) little river community managed in Jayber Crow, but which may be just as doomed. I think it adds up to a good book pairing.

The other frontier that Boyle finds is along the Yukon river in central Alaska, nearly cut off (at least in 1970) from any aspect of civilization that you can't carry on your back in the summer. There's little doubt which is the harder survival environment, and the hippies make do in California with a lot of extra help, both from the climate and from the readily accessible world. The story proceeds for a while merely exploring parallel points of view: from Star, Pan and Marco in the commune, developing a romantic rivalry and navigating the politics of free love and alleged equality, to the trapper Sess Harder and his unlikely blessing of a want-ad wife, unwillingly escalating a feud with one of the other locals. It runs along for a bit as an interesting contrast, enough to get you to care about the main characters' individual stories, but the commune, facing certain eviction, suddenly decides to cut loose to Norm's uncle's place way up north and the direction is finally made clear. When these worlds start pointing at one another, the tension of seeing how they're going to collide is interesting, and really keeps things moving along. The prose keeps clanging along with a forward momentum too, powering through any dropped metaphor or repeated phrase. It doesn't read badly, it just reads fast, a bon mot here or there, but it is not especially philosophical or contemplative on the line level. That sort of thing works out more in terms of plot, character, and theme.

More prose energy is given up to a loving homage to human function and activity. Boyle gets excited about the interlaced assembly of the human body, back muscles describing a character's attractiveness more than the face. There are pleasures in gardens and in layouts of space, how food items are stacked, what survival goods get nailed to the wall, what garden items grow where, and how a tiny cabin (I'd have thought it'd take longer to scrape, notch, and hoist the logs), treehouse (and longer than a day), or party bus is constructed. No meal goes quite under the radar, the composition of every course deserving of a quick mention. The food is about as gourmet as the prose is, satisfying if not subtle, going so far as to contrast bland, vegetarian hippie mush with wholesomely doctored survivor fare. You will cook a muskrat out there, sure, but you also develop it into a simple and real pleasure, filling the pot with stewed tomatoes and onions. Boyle is in love with digestion too (all of which, as my wife can tell you, I can't disapprove) and he does not neglect how we must deal with food once it gets turned into shit, the attention to which separates the more disparaged hippies ("there was a coil of human waste behind every rock, tree, and knee-high scrap of weed on the property") from the worthwhile members of the commune.

Another thing I liked was the qualified description of roughing it. Even up in Alaska, the natural experience remains irrevocably connected to society's umbilical. It's more true for the California commune, for Drop City South, as they call it. Their existence is not just a gift of the weather, but runs on Norm's (the founder's), inherited personal fortune, and through food stamps and welfare. Everywhere in their subsistence is canned goods and storebought necessities, to say nothing of the drugs. (They'd later make an attempt to propagate weed and--somehow!--homebrew.) Even among the crustiest Alaskans, there's some dependence on rounding out the diet and procuring other staples from local suppliers. Sess's cabin is a three-hour canoe trip from civilization's terminus, which is enough to cut it off for six forty-below moonlit months at a time, but it still keeps him in touch, evidently a requirement for even the craziest of the bush coots. It's nice to have something separating this story from the old conflicts of man vs. the elements, even though the winter looms large. The struggle against nature is more a matter-of-fact issue, and the ability to deal with the unforgiving setting is less a question of man-drama than it is of general character. Can you hole up in a single room for six months when it's hitting 60 below and the sun winks out for 24-hour stretches? Do you have what it takes to plan during the warm season and set aside for the winter? It's more about the psychological fortitude of modern people than raw primitive strength or lunatic stoicism.

And if it sounds like there's some preachiness creeping in, there is. The hippies are treated as object lessons from the get-go. They're the bad version of the experiment, the how-not-to, and it ain't so much the drugs and sex as the shirking of responsibility, the unseriousness. (It's worth noting that the residents of Drop City are given from the start as the better breed of hippie, who've tried to do something a little deeper than just pursue free love at the male member's convenience.) I think he approves of the fun to an extent, but even there, the heroes of that community are the ones with heads on their shoulders. They are the subgroup that is more inclined to conventional modes decency: to monogamy, to only moderate indulgence, and you know, who are good enough to stand up to rapists. When they got up north, I kept waiting for the inevitable winter's attrition to weed out the characters that Boyle has loudly telegraphed as unfit.

And when winter does finally arrive, it wasn't like I expected. Sess's nemesis is by all appearances an asshole, almost rising to a sort of under-characterized evil presence. (He hides behind mirror shades, and three of his four speaking lines consist of "fuck you." And yeah, he makes a living heartlessly running booze to the local Indians, who I guess are less entitled to experiment with it than suburban American kids, but if you can take a step back, the sides we're led to pick don't make a hell of a lot of sense. It started when Bosky actually did the right thing and evacuated Sess's former girlfriend when she desperately wanted out—no fault of Sess's—when she couldn't take the winter and wrote an SOS in the snow for passing planes.) As the summer finally starts to close, the characters start to peel off into camps like something out of The Stand, drifting either to the forces of the technological but soulless evil or to the simple but true good folks. The point-of-view character Pan, undisguised as a shiftless jerk, flirts briefly with a redemption (his role as meat-gatherer signified laziness in California, but was useful in Alaska) but loses, and defects. I don't know how well the story and the theme were ultimately served by straying so far from anecdote to tempt allegory, but it did develop into an unexpected angle, and it gave us the means for a suitable close.

All right, this is cool

I hate to "blog," that is, to post clips and useless comments instead of trying to write something, but just one more thing before the boss catches me here...

Andre Geim has won the Nobel prize in Physics for his work with graphene. [Graphene? It's interesting stuff to be sure, and I don't doubt the worthiness of the research, but on the other hand, we've known the structure and properties of graphite (stacked graphene layers) since forever, and didn't Smalley just get the Nobel 15 years ago for fullerenes?]

What's awesome about this (if you follow the link) is that Geim had previously won the Ig Nobel prize in 2000 for performing one of the coolest experiments ever: diamagnetically levitating a frog. I believe he is the only person to move from the Annals of Improbable Research to the Nobel Lectures, at least outside of the Peace Prize.

Immaturity

Maybe by now, you've read about the tragic death of Tyler Clementi, and maybe, if you're unfortunate, or have your ear to the ground for that sort of thing, you've discovered some of our more glib morality police gloating over it. I'm not sure why it's getting to me specifically--this miserable world doesn't lack for unjust death, so much of it already inflicted with my alleged citizen's consent. It is probably a matter of identification: I have always loathed bullies, and this poor Clementi kid, I can sense his pain. On the other hand, I remember college pretty well, and otherwise decent kids can be monsters absent any real life experience and without knowing many people outside their high school clique, and no one's worse than young people (or young straight white guys) this way. I don't think I'd have done this thing to anyone, but I can look back and extrapolate myself to either side of the situation.

It's where my own thoughts keep leading. I'm not that old, but I can tell you that when I tally up my life, I really cherish some of those early sexual explorations, those too-rare times with mutually interested partners, respectful of or equal to my own inexperience. (I don't think I'm alone in that. There are entire music genres that exist to celebrate the first kiss with Suzy under the bleachers, narrow a script as that may be.) And when I look back at the times when I've caused people shame they didn't deserve, didn't deal with them enough as individuals, or those times when I was just a dick, and that's what I most regret, the moments I'd take back if I could. I think this is a fairly typical life experience.

[Often, I want to defend immaturity at that age. It's a rational response to the relentlessly patronizing authority of college institutions. In-jokes and self-inflicted misery can be funny too, as well as certain breeds of mayhem, and I hold that all fondly. But there are lines and responsibilities even then, and it's easy to play really close to them.]

And what's so fucked up about our society is that it has it exactly backwards. The assholes aggrandize themselves and get away with it, and the innocent are humiliated to the point of suicide. The roommate will deeply regret this, if he doesn't already. Maybe Vox and Alex will live long enough to develop a shred of empathy too, who knows. In the meantime, what the fuck? We were all immature at some point, to some degree or other, but why does immaturity rule the goddamn world?

[Added: I see that Ed at Gin and Tacos has a similar take, and covers it better.]

Review: Satyrday, by Steven Bauer

They say you can’t go back: I was twelve years old, and the cover (they have a saying about that too) was exotic-looking enough to scream deep and unexpected meaning from the squeaky library carousel. As I remember it, a sleek typeface against a solid gray background, one letter evolving below into a silhouette, a faun emerging from a crack or from behind a door, evil and alluring, coaxing hidden thoughts with his pipes. Not an accurate impression of the book itself, as it turned out, but when I got to the message, it still seemed a significant statement, some touchstone to reveal that uneasy but beautiful union between primitiveness and humanity. Not so much a question of why are we here, but why should I care? At twelve, I was needing that sort of fable. (A couple months later, I was all over Lord of the Rings, discovered in similarly epic circumstances stuffed on a shelf in my aunt's old bookcase, which made a more indelible impression, for better or worse.)

Those of you with young children are probably aware that there is a fantasy movie about birds currently in the theaters, the latest disposable CGI masterpiece, presented with a gloriously extraneous dimension. I didn't need to worry that they were destroying the cherished childhood pleasure, as it's based on a young adult series, which is probably light enough to adapt to film easily. (There is, parenthetically, also a rule about heavily apostrophed names in this sort of literature. Ga'Hoole is in the title? Bad sign.) But I ordered Satyrday anyway, to see if it still held any magic.

I don't find I have a lot to say about it anymore. There were several things I liked about it, but they were showing promise sorts of things, and it's got to be telling is that I read the book with my editor's hat fitting much more comfortably than my reader's (not that I have ever been an editor, but I've read advice-for-new-writers obsessively at times, and dabbled in a slush pile for a couple months, enough to learn why some of those things are advised). It's a sort of short semi-mythic story of a boy raised by a satyr, both gone off to free the moon from an imperious giant owl, and find out the child's own origins. Along the way they meet with a fox, who is also a nymph, and a raven traitor to the owl's cause of bringin' on the dark. All of the birds made for creative scenery and enjoyable points of view, and as a general rule, he anthopomorphized the various animals cleverly and affectionately. This was less true for the characters with actual anthropic attributes, unfortunately. The dynamic between the faun and the sometimes-nymph had some potential, but it would have been better served if he (Mathew, the satyr) were shown to be more lusty, and she (Vera, the fox) more flirtatious, or if the boy Derin were awake to any sexual tension, if he served as some frustrated counterpoint to their half-animal drama, but then again, it's hard to get a reasonable sense of "animal-ness" when every creature speaks and reasons.

The dialogue between the protagonists tended to be brief and at times cryptic, and even if the kid was suffering the horrors of adolescence, we still needed to have the fundamental relationships and tensions evoked more solidly in the early going. Steven Bauer was a published poet before he knocked off his first novel, and there is some meter to the lines, and some pleasing use of words, but if some scenes were well-served by the sparse style (an idiot falling in love), other times the prose also felt like it needed to be let loose and flow (when describing the scenery, maybe). I found several of the scenes to be evocative, but not like when I was a kid. The ending had just the dollop of irony needed to make it interesting.

There are a handful of authors that like to play with mythology who can write outside of the clear constraints of real settings and occupy some sort of metafictional "storyworld" space, and some of those stories have ended up as favorites. There can be an advantage to leaving explanatory details unstated in something like this, but I found myself more annoyed than usual with the unanswered obvious questions, and maybe I needed the world to be more strongly established as something outside, some winking presence of the author perhaps, to get me to ignore those details. If there are no people, then where the hell is the wine, leather, gauze, etc (not to mention the authorial metaphors) coming from? And where are the rest of the animals? If there's one owl, three hawks, two weasels, three hundred fish, and a hundred thousand ravens, then the food chain and the local genetics are seriously fucked up. How big is the world, why can they walk across it in a week, and what's with the familiar Norse-etymologized weekdays, Christain names, and Latin taxonomy? There's a rule among slush pile readers--one of the top ten things they tell aspiring fantasists-- to just leave the goddamn Adam and Eve story on the table. It's not as original and meaningful outside of your head, and they have to read about a hundred of them a day. Satyrday might get away with it in a squeaker, and if we confine it to the YA bin or the fantasy ghetto, it comes off better than similar books, and even if it didn't live up to my memory, I'm going to leave it on the pile of books my kids might like.

Conferee II

"'Christmas,' said Dr. Drinkwater, 'is a kind of day, like no other in the year, that doesn't seem to succeed the day if follows...every Christmas seems to follow immediately after the last one; all the months that came between don't figure in. Christmases succeed each other, not the falls that follow.'"—from Little, Big

My current job doesn't usually spot me a trip for the big meetings (for reasons including both stinginess and my usual failure to impress), but as I mentioned earlier, having been prepped and then somehow gainfully employed in the sciences for a decade and a half makes it difficult to completely avoid them. Here I am at a mini-symposium at the nearby university, my first permitted outing since the disaster in December, maybe let out because I don't have to actually talk at this one. Whether or not I succeed at identifying like-minded friends at these things (I am not likely to even stay for the open bar tonight), I still recognize a lot of recurring faces and names, some I've seen for the better part of that 15-year span, for the purposes of a handshake or even just to note and observe. The good doctor didn't quite nail it: it's not unique. Technical conferences follow Christmas time too. Even for those folks you see on the outside, the hotel-confined microcosms proceed one after the other in a succession of neckties and nametags, with elves, perhaps, (or grad students) filling new data and research trends into the talks like the gifts that must have somehow been purchased and deposited from outside the Christmas continuum.

This more or less yearly schedule makes observing people an unsettling experience. It's bad enough that time keeps eroding our bodies in analog, but watching our colleagues decay in a discretized, time-lapsed slideshow, it's horrific. Occupying some independent timesteam, the lost intervals are confused with a continuous experience, and the sudden eruption of wrinkles and unburdening of jowls appear to be the action of intervening hours instead of missing months. It's actually similar to what you notice in actors, when you catch a long-running series all at once, graying and drooping in the ivisible spaces between each year's shoots. Even finding forgotten acquaintances on Facebook hasn't been this bad. Ten years later, I expect us to have all noticably aged; my mind registers the intervening years in a way that is obviated during these recurring encounters in supertime.

Since I personally recognize a handful of these characters, I am pretty sure that my impression is correct, but I do have a competing theory. As I said before, there's a whole taxonomy of conference archetypes to be examined (and if they can make good hay with categorizing web personalities, someone really has to go to the trouble to describe them. It's not going to have to be me, is it?). I feel like I'm cheating, but one thing I've noticed about my own aging process is that I increasingly cast people I meet into a big array of character types. If I identify enough people who remind me of each other, then they become family in my limited mind. So running with that thought, there's a possibility that I don't actually recognize anyone here at all, that I've mapped them all to people I noticed back in grad school (or maybe grade school). I guess the test would be to start attending conferences in completely alien fields, to see if I can convince myself I know anyone, or everyone, or if it feels more like I'm crashing someone else's Christmas party.

After All Those Silver Linings: A Cloud

The electronics retailier Best Buy, as you may have read, has begun phasing out its CD and DVD sales. It was inevitable even in the conventional sense of technology progression. The compact disc is a nearly 30-year-old format, which worked fine for music playlists of the usual album length (back when measuring things that way mattered more) and you could back up a few dozen photos once they made 'em writable, but the RW was on the wall from the beginning. They just didn't have enough capacity for what people were already using magnetic media for. Not that magnetic tape wasn't shit. The sleek, discreet (and discrete!), silver-lined disks* only have to worry about getting damaged from the rigors of storage and abuse, not so much in the course of using them. But it took a while for video signal to make the awkward transition off tape. Anyone remember those early video disks? The size of a platter, and you had to flip them over halfway through. Got a friend from college who's probably still geeking out to The Empire Strikes Back on that thing.

If you look back on bubble-vintage tech literature (e.g.), they were very excited about the upcoming 4.7 GB capacity in optical media (which would be your standard DVD), and the promises to extend that to 70 GB this decade (which is approximately what you get out of your standard one-sided blu-ray disk). Big fucking deal. I fell into an interesting conversation yesterday about media formats and obsolescene. (These were old photographic film industry people, with a perspective on their former company's innovations and terminal flaws.) All this investment in optical disks—and the read/write technology is pretty impressive from a materials science geek's perspective—and pretty much no one was thinking about how boring old magnetic media would come along and totally kick their ass.

In terms of data density—how many ones or zeroes you can fit per unit area—a blu-ray gets about 12 GB per square inch. From your hard disk, you're getting 200. Today, a hundred-dollar external hard disk can store all of your music, and a dozen or two high definition movies in a device the size of a deck of cards. A DVR can store the week's worth of television programming that most people care about. It is expected that magnetic data storage will top out at a TB per square inch(!).

The promise of optical computing is speed and maybe bandwidth, not really the inherent size. Optical resolution is usually diffraction limited, meaning, in storage media, that the smallest spot is depends on wavelength of the reading laser (and aperture of the focusing optics). This limits how tiny a bit you can read. I had mistakenly thought that the innovation of DVD was merely doubling up the layers to increase the density, but they also adopted a new laser diode. The old CDs use a red laser with 705 nm wavelength, and the move to a DVD was to a 605 nm laser which shrunk the smallest bits that could be addressed to about 4 um. (Obligatory points of reference: there are a thousand nm in a micrometer; a typical atom is about 1/10 nm; a typical cell is about 10 um, or 10000 nm; record grooves are about 50 um. I am not going to compare to human hairs.) Commercial blu-ray technologies has been enabled in part by the invention of reliable 405 nm laser diodes. The bumps on the blu-ray are down to about 150 nm, and you get more storage off of one layer than you do on the doubled-up DVDs. (The blu-ray disks also managed to get content closer to the surface to increase the aperture.) You can sort of see where it goes, as photolithography had the same issues in making objects of sufficiently small size, but it probably needs better diodes again to happen: it's hard to imagine adopting excimer lasers, mercury lamps, or immersion techniques for my home video. (For optical storage the obvious-ish way to go subwavelength is to go near-field, and who knows, given the tolerances of magnetic disks, it might be made to work. Holographic storage has always been up and coming, but isn't enough of a breakthrough to even propose better than magnetic, even though it's extremely cool. Holography is diffraction, and the data limit, Wikipedia says anyway, is about 1 bit per cubic wavelength.)

The fact that you can write, in controlled circumstances, 150 nm features in your cheap home drive boggles my mind. Just like records, they used to make and distribute music cds from master templates. With a stash of proprietary plates, injection mold the polycarbonate in custom machines, microscopic grooves and all, stamping them out like license plates, and then metallizing them, before packing and shipping out pallets of Better than Ezra's testament to the musical suckiness of the late 90s. (This is essentially what my dad has spent a lifetime doing in a plant that makes decorative plastic containers. Not at quite the same level of precision.) I don't really know if its cheaper to stamp out higher density optical disks than it is to thermally write them, and I don't know how they mass produce the ones you purchase from Best Buy, but you definitely can do it that way. People have imagined this kind of pattern transfer as the cheap way out of photolithography (which is also subject to diffraction limits) for electronics production for many years now (although of course you still need to make a master somehow), and claim resolutions below 10 nm. It is, in fact, on the official roadmap. Even now, a couple hundred nanometers in a production setting is pretty feasible.

A magnetic domain in a ferromagnetic solid can be as small as 20 nm, which, keen observers will note is somewhat smaller than the wavelength of your normal laser-emitted photon. There's a lot of research that has gone into into manipulating magnetic domain size, and I fail you by having kept up with none of it over the years, and I compound that failure by having over the course of the day decided that it was more than I cared to study for a blog post. So how it ends up making sense in polycrystalline materials, thin films, etc., I don't really know, but I suspect is impressive. (I will mention that I have written proposals saying that making magnetic crystals several nanometers across might necessarily be single domain and make for some interesting physical comparisons, but those were justly unrewarded.) That you can move a read head with sufficient precision with something as primitive as a voice coil is fucking insane; the engineering of these devices is really fabulous when you get down to it. On the other hand, it's a little disappointing that the basic tech is as old as my parents, and we're merely spinning ever-smaller plates to get the information out. (Digitization was a big conceptual advance of course, but in some ways, the fact that analog devices work predictably impresses me more. Making record grooves and encoding data without knowing what the code is, that's pretty radical. I mean, I know in my mind that it's not any weirder than a guitar pickup, but still...)

They still make magnetic tape, and the market is data less-than-urgent data storage, such as nightly backups or the kind of stuff you back up or hold in a box for a half-century. The company I spoke to yesterday make optical tape, sort of a reel-to-reel DVD, which offers amazing storage ona bytes-per-dollar basis, and is intended for archival information. It doesn't sit completely well with me. It's probably better than magnetic tape, which is subject to activated bit-flipping with warmth and time, but on the other hand, I think of classic celluloid reels rotting in their cans, or of how Stevie B got deep and garbled at either end of the casette back in 1988 after a couple months of play.** Maybe lets etch it all in stone.

The musical revolutions of the living generations were pioneered by storage technology (and other technology miniaturization). We can trace our experience of music from records to tape to optical media to high denisty magnetic and dynamic memory. Records brought the concert to our living room, and Walkmen to our gym. God knows, enough low-value digital copy has been expended speculating on the low value of digital copying. What's it like when it's pure information, etceterblah. Making information storage and transfer cheap made content even cheaper, and for consumers, it's been pretty great. (Although I have read that the digitization rate of CDs is the bare minimum to fool the ear, just over 44 kHz. That was pretty goddamn lazy, and if I can't hear the difference, diligent audiophiles claim they can. One reason to cling to analog.)

And it's a funny thing. Consumers love storage capacity, so manufacturers like to sell it to them (free markets as actually working). On the other hand, content providers fucking hate the capacity to store and share fungible bits (free markets as they prefer to fail to work). Sometimes the conflict falls within the same entity. Apple has recently made the future clear, let's make the content user-independent. I say, fuck the cloud.

The whole move is to subscription-based media. That's what net neutrality is all about, and while I've never overestimated the democratizing ability of the internet, fair access to greater information has never been a bad thing. It's not so terrible in all the aspects--it would be nice to listen to your music library anywhere, and yeah, I've grown content accessing my email this way, and maybe I'd rather pay a little for the handful of shows I watch a week than let the networks rent my eyeballs to advertisers. But music hits me harder. Maybe it was all the arguments I remember from the Napster days. It's good to pay artists (although bundling album sales must have improve the sales of their deeper tracks), but the RIAA and the broadcasters are the essence of evil. They would like the control over content that used to bring predictable record sales. There's precious few movies I'd rather keep copies of, and normally renting a viewing isn't a biggie. Music though? It's good to borrow before owning, but it's too integral and too much a part of my life to be constantly on lease. I romance a body of music, I fall in love with it, marry it, and then slowly grow apart. Music is a commitment, for which the law only needs to be involved at critical stages. (Books are somewhere in between. I'd prefer to own them as a permanent record, for all sorts of reasons ranging from physical pleasure to the throwback notions of knowledge guarded.) Music needs to stay at home.

I don't know why DVR has to be a subscription service either,and I don't like it. It's a local disk, and I used to be able to program my VCR just fine. It pisses me off that an unnecessary transmission service gets disguised as content. It reminds me of when AT&T under their monopoly used to rent us telephones . When it gets down to it, these fuckers have a fine history of treating both ends of the transaction like shit, making a fortune off of limiting the flow. I have no burning desire to get yet another middleman skimming money from the daily interaction of me and my life. Or, for that matter, to obviate my stored media in a controlled fashion so that I can pay for a lifetime of upgrades and format changes. They've been trying to make music subscription based for years now, and I don't want to restore the greedy bastards to power.


* One year, a friend of mine gave me the gold CD edition of Rush's 2112 for Christmas, the idea being that the oxidative stability of gold will keep the integrity of the bits indefinitely. That's not quite one of the 15 personally influential albums that I would prefer not be admitted, but it's pretty close.

** There's the second-most embarrassing, and probably the first-most dorky, one of those, were I willing to be honest. For my 15th birthday, Mom and Dad got me a home weightlifting set that I set up in the basement, and that's what I worked out to for a few months. "Spring Love" spoke to me, man. Shut up.

[Also, the loudmouth thing again. Edits no doubt to follow.]

Review: Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon

Airport books come with their own sorts of baggage. It's not that my expectations are low going in so much as that they're negative. Unless you're lucky enough to have that big Borders store in your terminal (which will stock a fair supply of canon and cult, for irritatingly precious travelers like myself), then the selection is geared toward more saleable names (I don't know what kind of books Nicholas Sparks writes, and I don't want to know), political and economics schlock (the cover with a white background, high-contrast typeface, and either a catchy graphic or a picture of some sweat-soaked hack trying to look stern), paperback mysteries and romances (the two science fiction books are of the embossed cover variety), and recent literary fads (you can bet that they're stocking up with Jonathon Franzen as I type). Also, David Sedaris, who's entertaining enough those rare times I catch him on the radio, but I'm disinclined to read something called "when you are engulfed in flames" as I fly.

My best bet is usually to pick up the popular-but-indeterminate-genre selection (i.e., the fad) if I can find any connection to it at all. I've come across lots of people with tastes similar to mine who like Pynchon, and there's a stable of authors who can't avoid saying dropping an homage every once in a while. And Inherent Vice, unlike the doorstops he's more famous for, is nice and short, so I figure it was a good time to introduce myself to the author. It was important for the blurbs to communicate that there's an essential Pyncon represented here. It's not a good sign when the pocket reviews invoke an indescribable style to tell me why I should read the book: it's not convincing for a newbie, and it's not a good sign if the faithful need to be reassured like that. You can find a good normal-length review here of Pynchon's early book, The Crying of Lot 49, which, looking at in hindsight, comes out as a good guide for Inherent Vice as well. So let's call the style discursive, willing to take a detour for humor's sake or to showcase an entertaining character sketch (not inconsistent with the guy who broke his lifelong reclusiveness for a silly guest spot on The Simpsons), some intentional blurring of perception and reality, and a simmering critique of the social order. (See? Blurbs aren't so hard.) I am given to understand that Pynchon also likes to indulge in point-of-view experiments and shifts that are nearly Joycean (which, I must admit, could be a good deal more enjoyable to read in a contemporary author with a worldview closer to my own—same playground, lower monkeybars), but that's not so much in evidence with this novel.

Our hero in Inherent Vice is Larry "Doc" Sportello, P.I. and connoisseur of beach culture, and if his grip on reality is slipping by a claw or two, then all the weed isn't helping. I've said it before: intoxicated people are funny when they accomplish stuff, when they're successful in spite of their best efforts. Acting nonchalant in unlikely circumstances is a timeless humor device. Doc admittedly appears to be sharp at drawing connections (even the questionable ones), and the indignation and paranoia endemic to the counterculture serves him well, but he's easily distracted, by women, friends and acquaintances, unlikely food, good tunes, and kind bud. The forced and unforced detours he finds on his investigation are made up for by some certain cosmic juju imparted by (entertaining) bodily excursions and the general grooviness that gives him a needed perspective. Among the various characters of his acquaintance, Doc's admirably countered by the hyperarticulate Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornson (got him as Kevin Smith meets Jesse Ventura), a Nazi square of a cop who, when they fall into moments of honesty, occupies only a small blue shift from Sportello on the spectrum between humanity and authority.

Doc doesn't sound like the private dick type, but part of the brilliance is just how well these styles mesh. I'm not a bit mystery guy, or noir guy: I'm not, as a rule, convinced that the trip through discovery is honest in these kinds of books. In mysteries, it's always easy enough to manipulate the reader by just lying about the stuff, or failing to divulge key information. I generally like the uncovering of a theme better than I like the gradual discovery of an act, but then, I have to be careful with those sorts of statements, as everything's always in the execution anyway. I am just suspicious of mysteries, in a way that's obviously not fair. I am always reminded of seminal stuff like The Murders in the Rue Morgue, trying to outguess the reader by moving beyond reason. It was an ape, Edgar? That's fucking stupid. Or maybe I just don't really impressed by superhuman deduction when the author is always able to whisper in the protagonist's ear. In any case, when I find myself in certain kinds of mystery—and noir is one of those kinds-- I'm not willing to fatten up my own conclusions with the author's early fodder, not without a sign that such attention is worth it. I let the case wash over me as it develops, trusting the writer to guide the thing along or not. If it's a good book, it'll have made sense all along and when I look back, I will be happy. If the plotting is sloppy, at least I can hope for some interesting scenery to accompany the ride. I finally clicked on Pynchon when I realized that he's a good enough writer to be playing with those not-necessarily-rational leaps. He is cognizant enough of his style that the flood of random-looking, significant-sounding, and culturally-referential information, which may or not be connected very well, is a knowing part of the whole mystery-solving schtick. I mean, Sportello is basically following Batman logic to crack the case, but getting along through inherent brains (vice?) and a certain infumated Grace. It's a funny understanding of noir, and it's perfect for druggies, not to mention the uncertain strain of semiotics that Pynchon likes to monkey with.

From my personal perspective, I can spot another common element between the Chandler-esque mystery and the Pynchon-ified plot. In both cases, I'm more familiar with the influences than I am with the original material. Detective fiction often enough serves as an entertaining cross-genre experiment (and since I have, like, four readers, I'll note that it ain't hard to derive a common genealogy for Sportello and the likes of Tom Robbins' Switters). When it comes down to it, the combination of jokes, winking technological revisionism (I remain puzzled how ArpaNet fit into the plot, or how what we saw fit within 1960s computational capabilities), deep cultural and mythological signifiers (Lemuria, frex), and vague shadow conspiracies (a minor word about the Golden Fang in a sec) may fall better among the small handful of science fiction authors that you don't know you're missing out on--I mean, I loves me some Neal Stephenson novels--but Pynchon gets big points as an innovator, for such a strong sense of his own flavor, and he wins hands down when it comes to the zany and the madcap. He gives us surreality that is sneakily real. I don't think Joseph Heller and Hunter Thompson are young enough to be Pynchon's heirs, but that's more of the same school.

I have read that deep conspiracy is a big part of Pynchon's M.O., but it took some time for this novel to get there. If it introduced thematic elements as fast as it introduced characters, I'd have been more down with it at the beginning. The connections to the Golden Fang eventually start to bring heavy drama, and [spoilers follow, but I don't think they're the hurtful sort] I like how it culminated with some token rich old fuck shipped in as a proxy to argue for The Man ("the bums always lose..."). I don't know if Pynchon really puts so much stock in the hippie as a revolutionary; they're steeped in their local American cultures far too heavily to be very useful, and they're still consumers, part of the machine like everyone else. In fact, Sportello's intermediate life as a private investigator might be telling: here he is, half cop and half citizen. The band's corrupted by an unspecified zombie mojo, and, for one dude, by the sinister attention of the Fang. It took the whole novel to finally force a confrontation with the string-pullers, and not unusually, it was like a man screaming attention from the universe. Which is unsatisfying, solves nothing, but seems like a worthy effort just the same.

[Minor edits. I was sipping glasses of loudmouth as I wrote that up last night, and if the prose fell apart by the end of the fist draft, then that's why. I have no excuse for the second draft.]

Five More Thoughts: Whine Tasting Ed.

You folks don't know how lucky you are. A lengthy post months (garnering months in the procrastination) has been averted yet again due to some recent reminders about both being boring and the overestimation of sincerity. So maybe just this once, I'm going to limit my woeful indictment of society and shadowy conspiracy theories to more obviously deserving microcosms (the NFL and the French wine mafia), and then crank up the goth records and complain bitterly to the dog. Meantime, let's keep it light, 'kay K?

1. Back East – What's up with that?
When I was on the left coast last month, I kept telling people I was from back east, in Massachusetts. Now, this made sense considering the relative geography, but I worry that "back" is a universal modifier in this country for "east." Do people who grew up on the west coast also say "back east?" I am pretty sure I have never heard anyone come from back west, instead they are from "out west." At least the latitude is more sensible. When one is from "down south," you might go and visit "up north," perhaps reluctantly if you are sensitive about your redneck cred. People who are already up north only have the option of visiting "upstate," even if they live in a different state.

2. Maybe ...mesquite?
Little did I suspect that I am incapable of a week straight of wine tasting. In the course of a day, your palate gets so swamped with tannins (mostly Bordeaux styles in Napa and Sonoma) that you can taste little else after a while. Even worse, I have somehow inherited the stamina of a 37-year-old, and day after day of drinking just wore me the hell out. By the third day, I was actually using the spit cups. The indignity, I tell ya.

A lot of your wine's flavor (naturally enough) comes from the fermentation conditions, and I heard some interesting discussions about the grades and sources for the oak barrels that are often used. I'll concede that toasted oak does possess many similar flavor notes as the grapes do, but my smoking experiments verified earlier impressions that oak, and especially burnt oak, is about the most chemically intense, acrid tree you'll find among the common hardwoods.

The tradition of aging wine in oak barrels is, I believe a French invention, and at least seems consistent with their culinary heritage of twisting out the most variety and subtle perfection out of a limited set of ingredients. I mean, just look what they did with eggs and dairy. (Is French oak considered superior to American oak? Do American oaks produce garrulous obnoxious wines? Naturellement! Or at least some of them are, where it occurred to them somewhat earlier to be careful about cutting them all down. Older trees (and different species also may) have tighter grains, which gets you less surface area and more subtlety of flavor.) So oak because it's been known for centuries, but man, it's just so inherently nasty, and there other fine woods out there—when will the innovation in wine-making finally hit us?

As just one example, Twif mentioned the awesomeness of smoking meat with bourbon-soaked maple. Something like this has real possibilities. People love the flavors you get out of maple, and think of all the pleasing nuances it could impart to wine, ramp up the vanillas and cooking spices maybe, with less of the peppery or astringent. Or let's defy Europe and take a purely American wood, age a wine in hickory, maybe, see what we get. How about cherry wood to age a nice cab or anything else with a big dark fruit character? Walnut is pretty heavy with tannins, and probably is to be avoided unless you're an oak nut (an acorn?), but maybe age a brandy in it. A port made with walnut brandy? Now we're talking.

When I mentioned this question to a guy on one of the wine tours, he said that one reason was a shortage of coopers these days. He told me that some of the early California vintners worked with barrels made from the local redwoods. You must get some really shitty flavor notes from conifers. Mmmm, turpentine...

I'm also convinced that while it takes a well-trained palate to appreciate wine, any half-drunk oaf can make it. (Not grow the grapes or make a predictable batch, but rather make something that tastes like wine that you can explain after.) Some people were fermenting with wild yeast out there. The high sugar content in the grapes ensures that once the yeast gets chomping, their populations will soar and exclude any other bugs. The high alcohol content keeps them from growing afterwards. Your off flavors come from the grapes (and all that went in growing them) and your barrels, and in wine, let's face it: off flavors are a feature.* Grain, on the other hand, takes major coaxing to ferment, and there's something that can go wrong at pretty much every one of the 3,204 stages, including brushing your hand on some piece of equipment and infecting the whole batch with your disgusting finger-print bacteria. This guy at the winery was manhandling a siphon, that he dipped right into the storage barrel. Right into the barrel! If you did this to beer, you'd be growing macaroni noodles** in it.

*I'm exaggerating, if only a little. It's interesting that these flavor notes all correspond to known chemicals, and, since they have to remain soluble, there's a good concentration of fairly simple chemical species that add flavor. Some of these are common in an industrial chemical lab. Ethyl acetate is easy as hell to spot, and some reds develop simple thiols. I react very negatively to these flavors. Will avoid the Semillon grape in the former case, and catching the latter in the occasional red made for the very rare times I called something undrinkable. (I had to really choke it down.)

**True story.

3. What happened to Engineering?
Back when I was more impressed with myself (the 90s, roughly), I thought engineering was the shit. I liked what Scott Adams said (back then) about other fields appending "engineer" to lend themselves significance. We engineering students mocked the sciences as people who couldn't do honest math. By grad school, of course I'd learn that this was wrong for any discipline that had the "physic" strung anywhere in its title sequence, or any discipline given to modeling complex systems, but (especially when it comes to the Chem/ChemE chasm) here are engineers more invested in questions that anyone cares about or can ever make work. (Chemists were the sorts of hopeless buffoons that'd spend four years synthesizing just barely enough of a chemical they could hope to prove existed.) In the internet age, I've been horrified to see a diminution of the engineer. Somehow, we've gone back to automatons who can't handle the deeper understanding and the thirst for fundamental knowledge that is the provenance of big-S Science. People see that engineering badge I once wore proudly as something like a junior technician of the sciences. Possibly it's because I approximately joined the sciences, and this is just their prejudice surfacing.

In the research areas, they blur anyway, and on a good day, I can't tell you where I fall on the spectrum (applied scientist? that's probably closest), and what the hell, it's not like I'm a sterling example of either anyway. I guess the trouble is more conversational. I've always imagined "engineer" to carry a certain freight, and I've been derailed by short comments or funny looks. Different times, or different circumstances, and most importantly, how come everyone doesn't think exactly like me?

4. A Good Doodle, Spoiled.
Recently quipped (and deleted): Writing is a lot like golf. Early on, you hit a few good ones and think, "yeah, this could be a really satisfying activity for me." Keep going, and you find that not only is it difficult to relive those positive performances of your style, you somehow get worse trying to repeat or improve them. Even longer, and there's the grudging realization that at best you can achieve terminal mediocrity, unable to stop, and unable to prevent yourself from doing the same dumb things over and over again.

And look, I know it's not true of everyone. Some people can swing the club or dash a sentence with a natural talent, or can actually improve to amazing levels. And it's no less true of any other field or activity you'd ever want to take up. Why compare it to golf, and not, say, music, or science? Well, I have been wise enough to not take up golf.

5. At Least They Still Have To Share It.
I'm finally starting to understand why people have hated the Patriots for the past ten years. I always blamed it on the fact that they were awesome and their team wasn't, or on Bill Belichick's lifelong dyspeptic troll impression, or on Tom Brady's clean-cut good looks and junior partner attitude. Or maybe the conservative NFL was supporting the 2001-vintage jingoism by shedding a little love for the Revolutionary-themed team. But I'm finally starting to see that there was something specially annoying about getting the national media soft-pedal for ten years, and it's taken a shift in affection to the hated rivals to really make me understand it.

The Jets have brought in a few named, although not young, players, and Darelle Revis finally signed, and yeah, part of it is the loud blathering of their coach Rex "strong men also cry" Ryan. And there's the HBO special, which seems to have gained some traction, but it's hard for me to tell because (a) I don't watch it, and (b) I never sprang for the service before this year. But there's something even more: the perennially disappointing Jets seem to have a whiff of media magic about them this year. As a full disclosure, I don't hate the Jets as much as a good New Englander should. Got me some close friends who are big fans, and the only NFL games I've ever attended were home games at the Old Meadowlands, and there's something cute about their colorful, loudmouth, drunken, asshole fans you meet there. But I am conditioned to not really respect them either, and I remain enough of a local to wrinkle my nose at the attention they're getting.

You can't watch a televised Pats game without one of the flaks telling you how amazing the stadium is. This is because three years ago, the Krafts teamed with CBS to develop some silly mall complex around the stadium, which combined the business genius of bringing in the crowds to absorb more sports-themed crap at gametime and getting big plugs in every CBS broadcast. I'm a fan of the team, but it's a little hard to listen to them lionize the civic goodness of the pie-faced old nepotist who dandled Hartford and Providence on his knee in a successful effort to leverage $70 million in state infrastructure, subornation of existing zoning codes, etc. from Massachusetts just in time for me to move here and help pay for.

One thing I didn't realize was that Kraft secured a hefty loan for the stadium from the NFL itself. I assume that this is not uncommon, and I picture the owners' meetings as proceeding according to rules of shadow organizations you find in Bond films, with lots of hairless cats. As stadiums go, Gilette was not so expensive as the more recent builds, but he seems to have been pretty shrewd in investing the broadcast media into local fame as well winning some conspiratorial league support, as mentioned above. I remember some enhanced positive chatter about Indy when they built their stadium, although they were actually winning games in '08 and the constant-circumference head of Peyton Manning was already achieving Orwellian ubiquity, and the Cowboys (who deserve an eternity of ignominy for being a Texas product ever labeled "America's team") also got the HBO deal coincidentally with their then-record stadium build. A new bowl rehabilitated Arizona's record, but I'd be committing the fallacy of small numbers to get too impressed about that one, and anyway they did land them some talent. Maybe anyone in Chicago can tell me if Soldier Field, the sequel, did anything for the team.

I don't know what soul-selling it took to get the New Meadowlands stadium built. I know that the fucker was expensive ($1.6B) enough to price workaday lawyers and marketing pukes out of season tickets, and one assumes the blue collars in green jerseys will be watching on teevee a sea of greige suits ogling the Flight Crew from the stands. Go corporatism! Man, I expect nothing less from the NFL. Just so long as they don't start winning.

Review: Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

Jayber Crow opens with a riff on the opening of Huckleberry Finn*, admonishing interpreters and explainers of the novel, taking a more fitting revenge on the offerors of cheap analysis than the summary execution that Twain recommended. (As for me, the subtext is staring me right in the chops, so it's with a heavy heart that I accept my banishment.) It's an interesting contrast. I read Twain with a cutting sense of humor and sarcasm, a conflicted soul and a precise stylist, a sense of innocence that he embraced or lambasted with varying degrees of intent. I confess to a preference for the more playful style, and with Twain I do feel a certain sense of Yankee homerism, as well as a minor resonance with a tone that I often try to achieve. I'd say it's that divided spirit, but then here's Berry again, telling us that someone must be "troubled enough in their own hearts to have something to say." Maybe it's all a matter of delivery. Berry's writing is calm and mature, the narration clipped of any cynicism beyond maybe a gentle head shake as Jayber muses on the past. Words are chosen deliberately, in short sentences, and there are hardly any contractions used in the prose. It is a slow voice, like a beloved grandfather saying: stop, sit, listen. He weights everything with a sad foreknowledge of the future. There's a danger of saccharine here, but Berry is in command of the prose, and his heart is sufficiently troubled. The writing is often beautiful.

The novel, as you can pick up from the cover, is the memoir of an elderly narrator from the river town of Port William, Kentucky. He's a bachelor, a barber, janitor, and gravedigger by trade (which contents him well enough), a man of few words, who is excluded from certain of the upstanding social circles. But using his own sparing language, Berry gradually paints him as a man of deep and sensitive character. Jayber gradually decides to join the "membership" of the community, and tells various stories of its people and himself. Like all of us, Jayber Crow sees his world as hopeful and vibrant at the time of his youth, and as lost and dying when he is old. That the age of this man is meant to accurately reflect the Port William's health is a novelist's conceit. In his understanding of Port William, Jayber sees loss of farm space as an inevitable component of the march of civilization. Introduction of debt financing and a consumption economy (as I've recently babbled) to an agricultural community that was formerly self-sufficient is one part of it, but it's more a matter of overdevelopment, of the quiet and insensate expansion of powerful machinations into quiet rural life. Switters managed to pick the one quote in the whole damn book that rubbed me the wrong way, which used the word "scientific" to describe this progress, and I can't quite agree with that, even though I liked the other 14,000 words on the subject very much. Berry is pushing for simplicity here, and Jayber himself, the literary autodidact and chronicler of natural connections, is a simple man who doesn't by any means embody ignorance. It's a distinction which I appreciate, and if we can find a world where those two concepts don't correlate, it seems like a good one to live in. (Would that it's where this one was going.) But there are crimes of connectedness (just like there are sins of segregation), and the loss of the simpler community is a very real loss. We're offered a eulogy for it here, each departure catalogued as a tug on individual heartstrings.

In order to perform as a narrator, Jayber has to be both an observer and an insider. Berry accomplishes this by giving him a background that's common to novel characters. The familiar stuff is all there: the young orphan, the boarding school, the prodigious and independent reader, the outcast, the nature-lover, the reprobate, the unrequited lover with a hope of something like redemption: these are roles more common to the population of literature (and people who resort to literature) than, I think, to your typical small-town barbers. I suppose you could look at it the other way too, and say that as a habitual reader of novels, that's the format in which Jayber is likely to represent his own life. That story of unresolved affection is for one Mattie Keith (later Chatham), and is telegraphed early, but brought into the story at leisure. The central Port William story is the transformation and fate of the Keith farm over a couple of generations, which I imagine was meant by Berry to be a synecdoche for the casualties of the march of progress. Jayber's life story sometimes seems tacked on around this longish episode, possibly as a vehicle to give more views of the little society. His infatuation with Mattie is, I think, meant to mirror his feeling for the town, and the youthful Odyssey and the establishment of a home by the river** are meant to further fill out his sense of love for the place. It feels a little episodic, but Jayber Crow's understanding of the place feels solid and heartfelt.

Port William at its peak is almost an idealized farm town, and certainly the Keith farm is thrown up as an ideal approach of resource management, independence, and honest labor. I can see the inspiration in there. It's also a southern tobacco-growing town with hardly any black people, suspiciously insulating it from history. (Kentucky didn't really maintain the plantations that other southern states managed, but less-bad is still unconscionable. It's written out because I don't think Berry wants his paean to the farm to include the forced indenture of a whole population.) The town is also carefully isolated by its ruralness, connected to the outside world (in its best times) by only the narrow thread of the river. Although it's filled up with real people, I don't quite believe in Port William, at least not as a typical place. And it's not that I have to: the setting actually feels like well-written science fiction, where consistent application or removal of some real-world constraints can illustrate aspects of the world better the actual muddy past can. Call it America's Shire, and when Jayber goes There and Back Again, it's to witness the filthy industrial machine, the "real world", that'd eventually overrun the place.

(I also can't see the Kentucky River agricultural civilization as timelessly as Jayber can. Anyone living there, say, 200 years before Jayber Crow might have had a similar reaction to Whitey wandering by, cutting down all the trees, and scaring away the game. Sustainable local or regional agricultural models do certainly get some better credit than mechanized ones, having in some cases stood for many centuries pre-industry. Farming technology was slow but hardly static in the east and west, and even then not without environmental effects like deforestation and soil erosion, but it still looks like a much better record for stability of human population, at least if you don't mind the occasional famine.)

Eventually we get to the love story. I can be a softie for tales of true love denied, but taken without text, subtext, or analysis, it's an infatuation that came to Jayber's life far too late. Developing an excruciating crush when you are not a teenager can't possibly be healthy, when opportunities to grow into your senses come up considerably less frequently. If you can take the situation objectively, Jayber's feelings for Mattie were a lot like those of a 14-year-old nerd, and I kept wondering what her view of him might have been all those years. His strict hands-off affection must have been obvious and intense, and her own cautious distance was a perfectly logical response. I don't take Jayber as an unreliable sort of narrator--I trust the sincerity and chastity of his feelings--and of course a not-much-deeper reading says that this emotion is about more than just Mattie. A great theme of his story is learning how to love the world that won't necessarily love you back. It forms the essence of Jayber's religious ruminations. Like his younger self, my own agnosticism comes from an unwillingness to accept the Biblical (or equivalent) story as some kind of useful description, accurate history or comprehensive moral map. On the other hand, I very much understand the idea of loving the world so much that it can break your heart. The very idea breaks my heart. Does Christianity really follow from that? Is it too generous (or too insulting) to humanize God that way? I don't quite see it, but then I'm still far from Jayber's age. Or Berry's.


* One of the small handful of things I actually remember from Twain's novel, having last read it when I was 11 or so. I've read other Twain more recently.

** Quite a lot of these associations are switters' fault.

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Pay It Forward

Last time it was Fred Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, this time it was Wendell Berry. From 1952, The Space Merchants was satirizing indebtedness in the industrial sector, imagining a system of corporate indentureship where wages, by design, could only contribute to paying debt, which of course accrued faster than the pay could cancel it in the company town. It must have been funnier in foresight. In Berry's novel, Jayber Crow (review pending), it's a look back on the 1950s, when mechanized farming really started taking off, and we're given object lesson in debt and sustainability, where the borrowing against the yield for consolidation and growth broke the land use cycle and stabbed the community in the heart. (If I find a handy pull-quote or two, I'll add them later.) It's an interesting piece of historicity: Jayber's reminiscences take place a good century after America's Populist movement. Agriculture was already getting infected with finance in the eighteen-fifties, with fungible grain and futures trading already starting to deliver their mixed blessings. I'm not 100% sure where I stand with respect to agrarian Populism. I'm certainly sympathetic, and I think centralized industrial agriculture has been civilization-scale fuckup, but I also think shrinking the world with technology and transportation has largely been a good thing. Or could've been at least.

And of course (like the Populists), my interest is self-centered and my worldview is heavily projected. I'm more familiar with the debt traps of the modern knowledge-work economy where we aren't actually making anything, and they're alarming in their own way. Wage growth has been poor over the last thirty years, and has been nonexistent for the past ten. Meanwhile, household debt has skyrocketed (and recently declined a little with house prices, but remains enormous; I'll add some charts later if I can find any that summarize it neatly), and loan-based assets (like your house, your car, and your education) are more essential for existence within the model and have likewise puffed up with dubious prices, and escape-free legal clauses. With new legislation designed to prevent it, we can look forward to more creative gouging from our credit card masters (I need to ask what the "minimum interest charge" was all about). Instead of exchanging our labor for income, we're exchanging it for debt. (Poetically just, maybe, considering what our labor produces, but it's no way to live.) Individually, we may or may not be doing okay, but collectively, we're getting screwed.

Like most technologies, the indecency of debt depends a lot on how it's used. Anyone who's made an online purchase can appreciate how great is that liquidity that easy debt (or really, the easy transfer of funds). It is not difficult to justify borrowing when it's temporary, borrowing a little when times are tough, or for the sake of convenience, provided you can expect to repay in the normal course of things. I want to complain about what I guess is called structural debt, the kind that most of us plebes are stuck with, whether it's the mortgage, student loans, or all those pizzas we ate in college. It's those debts that are caught up inexorably with our working lives that really control us.

From a personal vantage, these running obligations are basically liveable, even though they tend to stay you in your course. We're still doing the same things, approximately: working and getting paid, and, unless we're producing our own essentials, paying for approximately the same things. That big tab sure as shit removes freedom though. Try being without a paid job, downgrading your existence to raise a family, or raise food, or even to actually observe life for a moment as it passes you by. It's like forward differencing, you get the same area under the curve, but instead of working with existing data, each time step is one out into the unknown and poorly modeled future. (Or maybe I'm wanting model-predictive control as my analogy. Do they make economists take control theory? They probably should. Understanding dynamic systems is helpful. e.g.)

Even temporary debt presumes your income will grow or at least remain predictable. Taking on a deficit restricts your future. Debt is the engine that drives the treadmill of the rat race.

People who are not you are have gotten rich off of your debt, of course, and they've fought getting poor when you couldn't pay it. It's diffuse, and there's a great deal of overlap because debt issuers are also employees and consumers and there are a million modes of lending, and a lot of small investors, but if we're looking at the extremes, it's the issuers that generally have the upper hand in society. You can argue that there's mutual benefit when it comes to lending, and I think that's probably true. Lending can enrich the borrower too, enabling him to do things that can produce growth (although even when it ends up win-win, the lender and the debtor are not advantaged to change roles), but I don't believe that this is the equilibrium that naturally emerges when the debt-holders are left out of the rule-making loop, and when the debt-originators become few in number. As human history generally exhibits.

It's appropriate to contrast government debt with private debt. Government borrowing also performs the task of supplying liquidity for social programs, but in addition, it offers the service of a stable investment for excess capital. (It's one of those things that works out in an argument of scale, like insurance pools, conservation, or colonialism, when they fall to the state, or to an agency with similar scope.) In that case, the debt-holders are more diffuse than, say, mortgage lenders, but you can worry about the concentration or composition of power there too if you want to, and a different set of worriers pops up quadrennially in this country. The government (or at least its quasi-subsidiary banks) also has additional powers over its debt, controlling things like money supply, exchange rates, and the overall amount of securities it chooses to issue. I'm not excited about the concentration of those powers either, but in bonds, there's a point to their stability, and the monetary entities are at least countered by the fairly democratic population of bondholders, who'd all be pissed if things changed obviously and quickly.

No one likes a welcher, but weaseling people into debt has got to be the bigger evil. The government also makes laws that govern all of these loan contracts, and can you tell me that, say, fractional reserve lending isn't letting independent banks that hold people's debt fuck with the money supply to their favor? Nominally, the U.S. government represents us marks as well as the sharks, but the large banks have little such interest. Legal conditions that enabled easy and high-level private financing have correlated to tuition and real estate bubbles--is there causation at play there too? Someone is making money off those deals.

The basic idea of the liquidity model that works for my home finances seems to make sense for the government, however. My economic expertise is obviously shaky, but there are some differences there too: the bureaucracy doesn't have to eat, but I suppose it can identify baselines for its services or for its existence. Deficit spending to spur economic growth isn't quite the same mechanism as our household plans, but it's still demanding that the future get bigger. I've worried about this a lot. Given limited resources, that can't really be a good thing.

On the other hand, we can take government spending from a money-is-not-real perspective, and keep in mind that money describes the economy, and not vice versa. Sure, the central deal with capitalism is that money is a good representation of our economic activity, and that under rules of its exchange, we can optimize producing or doing some things. (Just like you can take silly unintuitive thermodynamic variables like "fugacity" or do a coordinate transformation to more easily describe or design certain systems, with the caveat that in physics and engineering, those math tricks still describe real things.) The Populist farmer/economists are interesting in that their understanding of the fundamental relations of money to labor and commodities was a lot keener than most people's. Money is a contract, ultimately a matter of mutual agreement or of law. The dynamics of that can drive human behavior, but to a large degree it's as reflective of our human organization as the law is. People making, doing, or exchanging stuff is what the economy is, and we can spur that in various ways and then define the accounting around it. Arguably, that's the way we always have done it when someone has had greater access to Da Rules. The wealth distribution, even where it goes negative, describes power concentrating or decentralzing as much as it is a mechanism of those processes. By that measure, this place isn't particularly progressive or democratic.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get to work here.

Vermont

When I was a kid, I often imagined that I'd end up living in New Hampshire. There is no particularly good reason for this, and it probably had a lot to do with the fact that by the time of my seventh birthday, I'd only ever stayed overnight in two different states. I guess if I take my net migration up till now, then I have made it halfway there.

Although I only get rare occasions to visit, I have always liked northern New England. It has the right mix of civilization and population, the former of which retains scraps of the notions of self-sufficiency and sometimes overeducated cleverness that makes us homers think we're better than everyone, and the latter is suitably low for my comfort. That emptiness isn't the intolerable openness you might find in other rural localities, but is decently surrounded by old hills and endless trees, interspersed with the occasional farm. I'm most familiar with the Litchfield Hills in western Connecticut, as well as the wooded mountains of the Massachusetts Berkshires (which are the lower part of the Green Mountain range). Proceeding north, the major difference in the landscape is the scale length. The trees are just a hair more sparse up there; and the hills are more spread out and significantly larger. The southern mountains are scrappy rolling affairs, but up in the vert monts, they spread out into majestic peaks, between which roads more calmly wind. Vermont also lacks the industrial towns that are nestled into every one of the Connecticut foothills, suddenly visible around every turn of the highway.


Around the time of American independence, the state spunkily carved out an identity from New York and New Hampshire (and earlier, from Quebec--if we want to go back even further, Vermont appears to have been caught between Iroquois and Algonquin power centers as well). I get a kick out of the comparison. New Hampshire's license plates command us to live free or die, features a self-important conservative rag as the state paper, and even today it attracts these "free state" chuckleheads hoping to turn it into a market utopia. (With hardly any people, libertarianism has a chance of working there if anywhere, although with all that money in that little section near the coast, a tax-free environment where the right to property gets equal billing with life and liberty is going to work out better for some than others. As usual.) Although it had a mind to eventually integrate, Vermont is one of the handful of states that was originally a separate republic. The Green Mountain boys were the ones that actually lived under their neighbor's motto, keeping the Brits down and backing its the New Somethings the hell off. The Vermont constitution is the first new world political document to outlaw slavery, and it didn't limit the vote to property-owners. When it comes to living free, New Hampshire is a fucking poseur.


The original Vermont constitution also provided for public education, and has generally been ahead of the curve (by U.S. standards) for public health care. Also: Bernie Sanders. I don't know if Vermonters feel the government is intrusive--nothing feels very obtrusive in Vermont except maybe tourists in ski season. (My wife came across a brochure advertising that "what happens in Vermont stays in Vermont...although nothing really happens.") Here progressivism, and what with the various farm cooperatives, something maybe approaching mutualism stands a chance as well, also thanks to having hardly any people. Competing notions of freedom.


Thanks to college students I knew, occasional skiing trips when I was that age, and Phish, I think of Vermonters as hippie-ish, and generally easygoing. [Actually, the green mountain state has at least two free state/secessionist/teaparty movements, at least one of which is pushing batshit territory.] Certainly Burlington is like that, with more hemp stores and breweries per population than I've seen anywhere else. I haven't quite worked out the connection, but these kids somehow have to turn into the outdoorsy enflanneled geezers that populate the Vermont of my imagination, but even on last weekend's trip, I saw few people over 40. Maybe they hole up and become recluses when their knees give out, eventually snowboard into a tree (to the extreme!), get beaten to death with lacrosse sticks, or eaten by bears. Vermont has a growing foodie culture, excellent cheese, and, importantly, a fine local beer tradition. The college breakfast joint we stopped at had over five excellent beers on tap, which seems mandatory for about anywhere I breezed by in the state. I should also add that of the New England states, Vermont has the least ridiculous accent, approaching the dialectical perfection of Connecticut English speakers.


For the first six months of its independence, Vermont was called New Connecticut. I like that. I'm more seriously entertaining the idea of changing where I'm from. Since the dump I live in now was so cheap, there's some actual cash flow now that we've entered dual income world. Doubling our mortgage still keeps us under McMansion territory, and the market right now favors picking another one up. Here's the theory: buy now (actually a year from now), and use the upstate place as a vacation home, just in driving distance, for the next ten years. When the kids are done with high school, we'll make it a permanent residence, or, if we change our mind, we can sell it, confident that the housing market will rebound in the longer term. (Or if the whole world goes to hell by then, it's a place where there's a chance to fall back on some hard-lived self-sufficiency.) The goal is to make the fastest possible living exit from the rat race. Flaws in the plan include paying for the kids' college educations (yup, one of the awesome things about overpriced education is extorting parents to stay on the goddamn hamster wheel even longer), and the interim possibility of lost jobs and an extra home we can't sell. What are the odds?



Pound for pound, two states worth of Berkshires are prettier than the Vermont range, but except for the aforementioned difference of characteristic dimensions, the main distinction is that a whole lot more of the northern state is like that. Growing up in Connecticut, I didn't get to live in the beautiful hills. There's a north/south industrial line that runs up the state I landed just opposite. A town west, and there were the rich (dominant now) and the farmers (fewer), and the foothills begin rising up with more earnestness. I've only just now realized that the crappy burg in which I currently reside is at the same point relative to the Massachusetts urban divide. I'll complain about the terrible compromise with any provocation at all. I'd like to live west in either state, or in a quality urban center--anything but in-between--but those settings not only fail to let me off the wheel, I'd need to run a lot harder to not get there.



Do I really need to head north? It's not that southern New England lacks codgers, it's just that you have to inherit the land, or somehow get rich working. Mom and Dad blew it in the first department, and I'm in the wrong field for the second. I fantasize about moving to a low-stress job instead of early retirement (community college professor? follow my wife into clinical lab benchwork?). I mean, I think well on outdoor activities and I like the trees, but only a small commute stops me from being more enthusiastic about that stuff here. I'd like a goat and a few chickens if I had room, but I'm incompetent at growing things. I'd consider taking up hunting and fishing with enough outdoor space, but that's really not my religion. By looks, I am sufficiently hirsute to pass for a hippie or (before too long) a codger, so I'm covered there, and if I'm happy whiling away my weekends cooking, tinkering, reading, blogging, hacking talentlessly on my mando, and being an irritating know-it-all, could I really do it for decades on end? Part of me worries that the answer is no, and the rest worries that it's yes. I fear an easy (or difficult) seasonal drift from the wood stove to summer porch, and eventually dying of existence. Maybe there are worse ways to go. Or maybe that's the way we all go, whatever we pretend.

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