Category Archives: Arts & culture

Willie sez…

Biodiesel is a big deal in our household. Carol bought her used VW Beetle because it has one of Volkwagen’s excellent little TDI diesel engine powering it. When she first got the car four years ago, she had to drive to southern Maine or to Chelsea, Mass., to find biodiesel. Slowly, it has become more readily available, and now she can get it at Bursaw’s in Acton, Mass., not far from her co-author’s office.

But now biodiesel has really hit it big. Today’s New York Times reports that long-haul truckers are starting to buy biodiesel because of one very influential man.

[Mike Frybarger] filled up his truck’s 300-gallon tank at Carl’s Corner, a Texas truck stop that is the center of the nation’s growing biodiesel industry.

“I heard about biodiesel on XM Radio,” Mr. Frybarger said. “Bill Mack has Willie come on his show and actually talk to truckers. Before Willie got involved, biodiesel wasn’t well known. But once Willie got behind it, he brought biodiesel to the forefront.”

“Willie,” of course, is Willie Nelson. Seems that Willi’es wife, Annie, bought a VW Jetta with a TDI diesel engine for the same reason Carol bought her Beetle: so she could use biodiesel. The Nelsons live on Maui, where biodiesel has been more readily available than on the mainland, thanks to the efforts of Pacific Biodiesel, one of the earliest successful marketers of the fuel.

Biodiesel pollutes less than petrochemical-based fuels, it does not release carbon that’s been stored for eons, it supports agriculture, and best of all it now has the .

Fireworks

“Why does Providence have its fireworks on July 3?” someone asked. Three of us don’t live in Rhode Island, and two of us were new to the city. We were sitting around behind Sally’s house waiting for it to get dark.

“It’s because of the Bristol parade,” said one of the Providence residents. The other Providence described the parade to the rest of us.

Rob and Sally and I wound up talking together, first about how Sally found her house, and then about how she had been living a few blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “I saw the first plane go in,” she said, and told us the whole story of that morning. She had worked in one of the towers, and many of her co-workers had died. But what she really remembered was how her neighborhood had rallied, and pulled together to support the relief workers.

The conversation drifted along from there, covering Providence’s ex-mayor Buddy (who’s getting our of prison soon), Warren Buffet (I was the only one who thought his philanthropy less than admirable), historic preservation (inevitable, given that there was an urban planner, two New Urbanists, and two owners of historic houses present), sailing (when Chris is around, sailing will come up in conversation) —

— and then the first rocket went up, and the fireworks began in earnest. As fireworks displays do, it started slowly, and gradually built up momentum. A particularly good one went off. “Baby!” shouted a man from the top porch of the triple decker up the hill from us. The fireworks were framed by the trees down the hill from Sally’s house. They lasted for a quarter of an hour, and built to a deafening climax that left little spots of light in my eyes, like looking at a camera’s flash. Boom! boom! boomboomboomboom!

A car alarm went off, and we all laughed: someone had predicted that would happen. The fireworks were over. “That finale was actually a little frightening,” said someone. It had been, and I fleetingly worried about returning veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

On the drive back up to Cambridge, Carol said that Norwegians celebrate their national independence with a children’s parade. We speculated on why fireworks became a tradition for our Independence Day. I mean, why do you set off fireworks to celebrate the signing of a document? Maybe we should celebrate by writing pamphlets on democracy and liberty. But we both agreed the Providence fireworks had been well worth watching. They were so good that Carol is now thinking she doesn’t need to fight the crowds to go see Boston’s fireworks.

Fathers and badgers and magpies and love

Yesterday I was reading up on fathers, in preparation for the sermon I’ll give for Father’s Day, this Sunday. I ran into too many sentimental stereotypes about fathers. I got sick of all the rhetoric around fatherhood and responsibility and family values. I got tired of the usual worn religious cliches about fathers and father-gods that have only a tangential relationship to the real live fathers I know. I made the mistake of rereading the story in Genesis where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Abraham’s son Isaac, which only served to raise my blood pressure.

Then I remembered the second section of Robert Kroetsch’s long poem “Seed Catalog,” a section which seems to me to break away from lots of the stereotypes about fathers; probably because it’s a documentary poem which presents a more-or-less accurate portrait of a real man. Concrete rather than abstract. It’s an odd text for a sermon, but sometimes you have to take your religious sources where you can find them….

My father was mad at the badger: the badger was digging holes in the potato patch, threatening man and beast with broken limbs (I quote). My father took the double-barreled shotgun out into the potato patch and waited.

Every time the badger stood up, it looked like a little man, come out of the ground. Why, my father asked himself — Why would so fine a fellow live below the ground? Just for the cool of the roots? The solace of dark tunnels? The blood of gophers?

My father couldn’t shoot the badger. He uncocked the shotgun, came back into the house in time for breakfast. The badger dug another hole. My father got mad again. They carried on like that all summer.

Love is an amplification
by doing/ over and over.

Love is a standing up
to the loaded gun.

Love is a burrowing.

One morning my father actually shot at the badger. He killed a magpie that was pecking away at a horse turd about fifty feet beyond and to the right of the spot where the badger had been standing.

A week later my father told the story again. In that version he intended to hit the magpie. Magpies, he explained, are a nuisance. They eat robin’s eggs. They’re harder to kill than snakes, jumping around the way they do, nothing but feathers.

Just call me sure-shot,
my father added.

Pym in Cambridge

Perhaps you missed the announcement, but the Barbara Pym Society of North America will host a “Barbara Pym Garden Fête” on Sunday, June 25, 3 to 5 p.m. at 10 Chester Street, Cambridge. Pym fans who are in the area should send e-mail to Tom Sopko at jtsopko@speakeasy.net

I love the way Pym illuminates human character in very few words — as in this passage from An Academic Question, her novel from 1970. The narrator Caro is chatting with Iris, whom Caro suspects of having an affair with her husband Alan:

‘Tell me about Coco Jeffreys,’ said Iris. ‘I believe you and he are great friends.’

‘Yes, we are friends,’ I began.

‘But not lovers, I imagine. No, not that, obviously! What is Coco exactly?– I mean, sexually.’

‘Well, nothing, really,’ I said, embarrassed.

‘But he must be something.’ A note of irritation had now come into Iris’s voice — irritation and impatience of my ignorant stupidity.

‘You mean hetero or homosexual?’

‘Of course that’s what I mean,’ she mocked. ‘Surely you must know.’

‘We’ve never talked about it. In any case, are people to be classified as simply that? Some people just love themselves.’

Iris frowned into her empty glass. I could see my vagueness worried her….

Those who attend the Barbara Pym Garden Fête “are asked to bring finger food á la Pym, or suitable beverages.” I imagine this means there will be sherry. But I have a hard time imagining the kind of people who would attend such an event. Unfortunately, I am committed to attending my denomination’s annual General Assembly; otherwise, I would go myself to the Pym Garden Fête to see what kinds of people turn up.

If you go, please write and tell me who is there.

Rose City reading

My sister Jean just did a reading from her new book, Rose City: A Memoir of Work at First Unitarian in New Bedford. OK, I’m biassed because she’s my sister, but I really enjoyed hearing her read from her book.

Here’s what I said about her book when it came out:

“Just got your book…I like the way you write about work from the inside, not like John McPhee or Tracy Kidder who never really have to do the work they write about, much as I do appreciate their books. Your book is more like Mark Twain’s book, ‘Old Times on the Mississippi,’ about learning to be a river boat pilot; I think Twain gets it right in that book, about what it means to work. So do you. Now that I’m a minister, I’ve decided that work and working is one of the top three spiritual problems I see people facing: meaningless jobs, jobs that deny who you are as a person, not having a job. It’s good to read someone (you!) write about work as it really is.

“What really got to me in your book, I guess, was the bits on worker safety; because of my own memories of worker safety. I remember seeing a guy’s foot pulled off by a forklift. I remember seeing an old-time house painter, his hands all knarled from using lead paint. I remember standing in a 52′ trailer unloading insulation, lungs filled with itchy little fiberglas fibers that can cause silicosis. I remember choking on bronze fumes at the foundry. I remember always always always worrying about getting hurt when I was a carpenter, every single frickin day. On the funny side, I remember the carpenter I worked for climbing up into the cupola of the old Emerson School, in order to put up chicken wire to keep the pigeons out, but when he popped up the hatch all the pigeons flapped their wings covering his head in pigeonshit. In spite of all that I love to work, I have loved every job I ever had, at least at some level. You get at that in the book: the work can kill ya, but ya love it anyway.”

From the Los Angleles Times book reviews:

Rose City is a remarkable contribution to the literature of labor, a working woman’s portrait of an industry that has virtually disappeared from the United States…. Nowadays, should you want to bring your love a bouquet of red roses, be advised that such blooms have been coaxed by pesticides illegal in the United States, tended and picked by even lower-paid, less-protected laborers (most of them women)…. Perhaps a book about roses—grandifloras, hybrid teas with ‘the faintest of fragrances, like clean-washed hands,’ sweetheart Minuettes with vanilla petals ‘dipped in ruby sugar’ — a story of love made manifest in the work of roses, is a better gift.

Children’s books

I like to follow the field of children’s literature, to see what kids read besides Harry Potter. Two blogs on children’s books, both established in the past year:

“Read Roger,” by Roger Sutton, the editor of Horn Book magazine. Horm Book is the pre-eminent review of children’s literature in the United States. By turns delightfully snarky and wonderfully incisive, “Read Roger” offers news about the children’s book world, and well-written, wide-ranging commentary about children’s books, literature, and culture.

“Children and Books,” by Abby Kingsbury, the children’s librarian for the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, public library. This is a brand-new blog, and so far what she writes about is the intersection of children’s books and real life. In the June 6th entry, Abby visits a public school class and reads the book Beatrice’s Goat aloud, and then gets the kids excited about Heifer Project. Even if Abby didn’t happen to be my sister, I’d still follow this well-written blog.

This could be us…

This blog entry by iMomus comes via BoingBoing:

I’m about to write my next Wired column. I’ve decided it’s going to be about the effect of information addiction on the life of couples. And I’d like your help, because I don’t want it just to be me going on about me. But naturally it starts with me, what I’ve observed in my own life. Here’s a photo of me and my then-girlfriend (she’s now happily married to someone else) Shizu, back in 2002…. [Link]

The photo could be one of Carol and me: sitting at the kitchen table, both with open laptops, eating a meal together. The dozens of comments to the post reveal interesting variations on the theme.

Interesting to know that this little bit of the way we live is worth a Wired column.

Cheap Yankee

Not that I’m obsessed with gas prices or anything, but….

My ’93 Toyota Corolla got 37 miles per gallon on the trip up to Cambridge and back. As a cheap New England Yankee, with gas prices hovering around three dollars a gallon, I’m feeling pretty good about that. Sure, a new Toyota Prius would get 44 miles per gallon (as tested in the real world by Consumer Reports), 19% better than my thirteen year old Corolla. But that new Prius would cost me well over twenty grand, whereas my Corolla cost six grand, used, in 1997. So I’m keeping a car out of the landfill, and saving gas, and saving money.

Oh, and I walk to work.

Here’s a case where being a cheapskate is pretty much the same thing as being an environmentalist.

Memorial Day weekend

I’m about to drive up to Cambridge to spend a couple of days with Carol, who has been working up there. I’ll have to fill my gas tank on the way up. Ouch. I can feel the pain in my wallet already. Carol sent me a link to a little online movie about the high price of gas. Be forewarned: the lyrics to the country-and-western soundtrack aren’t exactly polite in places, and you may not want to watch this with your kids. But I’ll bet you’ll be humming the chorus to yourself next time you stop at a gas station. Link