Of Food and Principle

If you click on a link at Arts and Letters Daily, where you’ll end up is an ideological crapshoot.  Today I found an article about why political conservatives should embrace the growing movement to rethink and rebuild America’s culinary culture even though its promoters are people like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver.  The author, a gentleman named John Schwenkler, takes pains to disarm his audience by noting that on the surface Waters et al. are indeed not their sort, before going on to acknowledge that they have some good points–namely, that building a locally-based food culture helps to build a denser fabric of communal life, and that transmitting a culture of growing and cooking and eating to children can help in their socialization as well as their education.

Schwenkler’s argument does not entirely convince me that he is my sort, although I imagine we could have a good time swapping recipes for the odder contents of our respective CSA boxes.  He seems to think that the development of dense local food cultures will diminish general enthusiasm for “centralized government” by emphasizing the role current systems of regulation play in supporting corporate agriculture.  Looking at the same phenomenon, I hope that the creation of a culture that encourages people to feel they have a stake in their communities and a connection to their neighbors would encourage people to develop ties to one another and a sense of responsibility for collective well-being, which would in turn encourage some forms of centralized government to grow.  But then, he sees the relationship between corporate agriculture and governance as something intrinsic to the function of government, where I see it as a devil’s bargain between two groups of selfish rich men out for the main chance in which the political process has been used as a tool.  Nonetheless, we’re walking along fairly well together, writer and reader, ruminating about the benefits that a move away from junk food-land might bring to our social and political culture, until I am rudely awakened from my dream of philosophical reconciliation.

Referring to a comment of Michael Pollan’s that the inability of all Americans to afford high-quality food is shameful, he describes it as a “puzzling line,” adding that while that inability is a sad thing that we should work to fix, “life’s inevitabilities do not warrant our shame.”   Taken out of context he’s absolutely right, but I would hardly call the distribution of wealth in the USA one of “life’s inevitabilities.”  An inevitability, vis-a-vis our eating habits, would better be described as something like our presence in the food chain.  We are dependent on other beings to provide us our sustenance whose interests and lives are taken so that ours might flourish.  That’s the kind of fact that there’s no getting around.  What Schwenkler calls life’s inevitabilities I would call human coincidences– no single decision got us to where we are now, but that doesn’t mean that we have to stay here.

At this point I’m tempted to veer off into a rant about politics, but that’s a lot of baggage to throw onto a short article whose major thrust I completely agree with despite the differences in underpinnings.  We’ll never know what would happen if America embraced mindful eating en masse unless it does, in fact, happen. But there is a large difference between his basic principles, as expressed in this article, and mine, and it was published in a magazine called “The American Conservative.”  The article takes a much more restricted view of human agency, our collective control over (and responsibility for) our circumstances, than I consider valid; “inevitable” is only a step away from “natural.”  That’s a pretty big difference.

I think it’s much harsher to tell someone “I don’t care what you think so much as I think your thought process is wrong” than it is to say, “I don’t agree with you” based on outcomes.  I have a hard time imagining this country sitting down and having that discussion.  I have a hard time imagining myself having that discussion– it looks like I need to add “formulate a credo” to my to-do list.

But still– “life’s inevitabilities?”  Really, now.

The Afterlife of Corporate Swag

This week I’ve started swimming (for which, read splashing around alternating with a lot of back float) up at Chickamauga lake. It’s not quite a beach, more a patch of grassy shoreline where some thoughtful TVA bureaucrat of long ago arranged for a few steps down into the water instead of a rocky shoreline. The water is balmy and unchlorinated, I can float around and watch the clouds (the only thing large enough that I can see it clearly without my glasses on), and when I’m done I can lie out on the grass and let the sun and wind dry me off. It’s just my speed.

Although I’m pretty minimal when it comes to what I feel I need to carry along on a swimming expedition, I do need some towels and a big t-shirt to wear over my suit (this is half so people won’t get a look at my misshapen torso, half to keep from sunburn). Today, those things were all corporate swag, left over from M’s long-ago career as a financial technology guy.

We used to have a lot of swag; the two industries he worked in, finance and bioinformatics, both generated tons of the stuff. I thought I’d gotten rid of it after he died, but once I looked there were still items from four different companies lurking about. The stupid souvenirs of his corporate life outlasted him, which bemuses me and leads me to my mission: to find which lasts longest, the company or the swag.

• “DMR Trecom: An Amdahl Company. The Results People.” The swag is a mug which I drink from all the time; in fact, I’m drinking from it right now. DMR Trecom was a technology consulting company; its parent Amdahl was eventually bought by Fujitsu. Fujitsu doesn’t appear to be using either name, so in this case the swag won.
• “NationsFunds.” The swag is a plushy giant beach towel, really good for swimming expeditions. Probably funded by cheating a pension fund or something. “NationsFunds” is a pretty generic name, but they may or may not be a subsidiary of Bank of America, which was voted one of America’s worst companies by the readers of Consumerist.com. If they are that “NationsFunds,” they were recently embroiled in a lawsuit. I’m not sure whether this swag won or not.
• “Goldman Sachs Service Partners.” The swag is a t-shirt celebrating the inauguration of this entity, back in 1998. Goldman Sachs is still around; the generically named service partners don’t have a web presence. It has been ten years, so I’m sure someone eventually came up with a more exciting title. This one is a draw as well.
• “Stratus FTX: Fault-Tolerant Unix.” Another nice sturdy mug. Swag purveyors take note: the oversized coffee mug is clearly the most insidious weapon you have. Their understated utilitarianism wins them a place in the lifestyle of even an avowed swag-hater like myself (although in this case, since I’m not in need of a defunct corporate entity or a Unix platform, the impact was limited). You’re welcome. Anyway, this company is still out there peddling tech stuff. I don’t know that that means the swag lost– I think its paint would have to peel off and render it generic for it to have lost. But it’s still here, waiting for the company to founder and to bear witness to its downfall.

How will archaeologists of the future (a la the Motel of the Mysteries) interpret all of this junk? Should I have made it into an effigy mound for M instead of tossing it? Maybe pitch it to Pixar as a cartoon horror flick? Or just enjoy the irony of my swim this afternoon’s being supported entirely by the investment banking industry?

The Plasticity of Craft

The first thing I did today was to go to the art museum to see a special exhibit, “William Morris: Myth, Object and the Animal.”  The museum page offers only a very brief description, so just to give you an inkling of what I want to try and describe, here are two links: one to a video from another exhibition, and another to Morris’s homepage.  Just so I’m clear, this William Morris isn’t the Arts and Crafts decorative arts guy; he is a working glass artist whose work is about the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

The pieces in this exhibition, which represent the work of several decades, are blown glass made into animals and birds, made to look like ceramics and human bones, made to represent corn and weapons and elephant tusks.  Some of it looks like prehistoric European art, or Greek art, or Native American or African art; some of it is simply itself.  There were ravens which looked opaque until the light hit them the right way, when their translucence was revealed.  There were pieces of fruit hung with bats, a stem of bamboo festooned with frogs, urns crowned with bird-people, one of which was either holding or mourning a baby bird in its lap.  All glass.  I walked through the exhibit twice with my hands in my pockets or holding my elbows so that I couldn’t touch.  I know the art museum rules, but it was hard.

There was–isn’t there always?–a video in the exhibition which showed how William Morris and his team made the glass.  It emphasized that the hot glass is, while not quite liquid, flexible, malleable and plastic.  Like cooling taffy, it said at one point, as Morris stretched out hot glass and snipped off the extra with a special scissors.

I love glass, as an object and a medium.  Not indiscriminately, there’s plenty of unattractive glasswork in the world, but it appeals to me very deeply, from the bowls of beach glass I’ve collected wherever I find it to beautiful serving pieces to art glass.  When I finish the ridiculously long transition I’ve been going through, I want to do two things.  I want to get a tattoo (although I may wuss out because I hate needles) and I want to buy a piece of art glass (if I can afford it, and it sure as hell won’t be William Morris, since I clicked through a piece offered on his web site and it cost $38,000) as the best possible solid representation of an achievement.

Today the fluidity of the glass captured me; I was driven to hold my hands away from the installations–particularly the giant elephant-tusk one–because I felt certain that if I did touch it, it would give.  It communicated its plasticity.

I took some of that plasticity home with me, I think.  My job for today was to write up a summary, something that was supposed to be yesterday’s job only I overthought and didn’t get anything down on paper.  This afternoon, with this amazing example of human ingenuity in wrestling with something that is literally molten and creating a dazzling range of objects, I was inspired.

I get bogged down when I think about writing history as telling a truth, as the one right thing.  I do better when I remember that it is, basically, craft– taking data that is, in its own way, as obstreperous as the material used in any craft and wrestling it into a story.  What I need to do is to communicate my interpretation and make sure my facts are straight.  I don’t need to find the secret of the universe in my material.  If today doesn’t work out, tomorrow I can do something new.

I need to get to the museum more often.

No Bugs on Me

I went on a hike last weekend and all I got was this lousy case of hypochondria.

Today is Wednesday, and I’m afraid, despite lacking the visible evidence which would have emerged by now, that I was bitten by a tick. There were a few on my pants leg when I came out of the woods, so I brushed them off, came home, stripped off my clothes and threw them out on the porch, checked myself over, took a long, hot shower, and did the laundry. Problem solved, right? Except that since then if I get an itch, it must be a tick bite. One of my knuckles hurt when I woke up this morning, I probably smashed it into something I don’t remember, but the little voice is saying joint pain! It’s a tick bite! You’re going to end up with chronic pain! Oh noooo!

Not to minimize the suffering of people who have tick-borne diseases; it’s just that I’m not one of you. I now have to add hypochondria to my list of the minuses of hiking in the woods, along with being drenched in sweat if it’s a warm day, which I hate, and the fact that around here “moderately strenuous” means “crawling all over the mountain,” because everything around here is a damn mountain. The one time I tried a trail marked “strenuous” I gave up and went home after about thirty feet because it was giving me vertigo.

Despite the ticks and the sweat and the vertigo, I have a compulsion to go walking in the woods. I do it alone most of the time, so no one is pushing me. Go figure. This was a nice hike until I got to the last bit that was flat and full of long grass harboring many ticks. It took me up the escarpment and then back down; at the top were some interesting rock formations which I didn’t observe as closely as I’d have liked due to the ominous buzzing sound in the air. I thought at first that it was flies on a carcass, but there were no vultures or bad smells so I changed my mind and started thinking about the Little People of the Rocks from the Jungle Book. Clearly, the bugs of the world had united to get me that day. I was hoping to get a good view of the Tennessee River Gorge, but I think I’ll have to wait for the leaves to fall.

Maybe.

One of the most depressing things I ever learned was that cold does not, in fact, kill many of my insect enemies (or many ticks, even though I know they’re not actually insects). They have antifreeze in their blood that allows them to survive. It’s just not fair.

Took the Words Right out of my Mouth

Quote of the Day:

I love putting things in context. That fucking fascinates me.

Rob Corddry was talking about Lifehacker, but really, that’s it right there.

Dementia is Demented

At some point during my grade school years, the word “demented” became the all-purpose pejorative of choice in my circle of friends.  It meant “silly,” or “ridiculous,” or “fucked up,” had we known about fucked up.

Time went on and we found a better word with which to express our crushing disdain for the world around us.  I didn’t think of that one again until a few months ago, when I learned that we were right.

This was the culmination of several years during which my grandfather’s abilities to communicate and to make his way in the world had gradually deteriorated to the point where he was diagnosed with some form of dementia.  They’re not sure exactly what it is—it could be Alzheimer’s disease or it could be something else.

I don’t live near Grandpa, so I learned about most of this secondhand through updates from my mom, who assumed the role of caretaker as he grew less able to care for himself.  Grandpa was thinking about driving during a blizzard, which was such a bad, alarming idea that Mom had to take his car keys away from him.  Grandpa wasn’t functioning well in his house, and had to move to an assisted living facility.  Grandpa wasn’t adjusting well to the new facility, although he had picked it out himself in better days.  Grandpa got into a fight in the parking lot of his assisted living facility with a nun who was trying to get him to go back inside, and spent a week and a half in the hospital before his mental state was sufficiently stabilized that he could move to where he is now, a facility which specializes in the care of people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

All of this took place after I saw him over the Christmas holidays, so I didn’t know quite what to expect when my parents and I went to visit him last weekend.  The fight in the parking lot was particularly alarming because Grandpa was both a kind person and someone with great affection and reverence for his church and religious life, so it was weird on two counts.  I started to worry that perhaps his personality had changed in a way that made him not himself.

That isn’t what happened—Grandpa was sitting in a wheelchair (he is apparently kind of tottery on his feet, so the chair provides him with mobility without the risk of falling over); he wasn’t wearing his glasses; his clothes bore evidence of an encounter with blueberry pie.  It took him a little while to wake up enough to notice that we were there.  But he was, fundamentally, still him.  Under the confusion, his mannerisms and his reactions were still there.  He kind of talked to us (he has some problems with speaking).  He engaged with some of the other residents and staff people.  He knew who Mom and Dad were.  I’m not entirely sure he was clear on who I was, but he knew I was someone he was close to, maybe his sister or his daughter.

It didn’t have to be that way. Across the hall from his room a woman was sitting in her room in the dark, having an incredibly depressing conversation with herself using two voices.  The deep, villainous voice kept on insulting the high, childlike voice and threatening to throw it into the lake and destroy it.  I don’t even want to know what was in her memories, her mind.  I am very, very grateful that Grandpa appears, in a vague sort of way, to be content and that he’s so clearly where he needs to be, somewhere where the facility and the expectations of the caregivers are geared towards people with needs like his.

But it’s still ridiculous that this is the end for someone whose life was always active and who worked his way around so many obstacles, someone who took a mixed bag of opportunities and made a good and admirable life from them.  Even while I’m glad to see him doing as well as can be expected, I mourn the Grandpa that I remember, a lot.  Mourning the living is fucked up.  Dementia, as I once would have said, is demented.

A Haiku for M

Here is the end–
My path has vanished
Into the parsley.

–Buson

(Yosa Buson [1716-1783] was a Japanese Haiku master. From Classic Haiku, ed. Tom Lowenstein [London: Duncan Baird Publishers, 2007] ).

Walk on, my friend.