Archive for December, 2008

As the Year Turns, So Our Thoughts Turn…To Goat Sex

Sharon December 31st, 2008

Tonight, most of us are reflecting on the year past and considering what is to come.  What’s coming out here in the glorious, snow covered rural paradise I live in is, well, drive through goat nookie.  Lots of it.

As you may remember, one of the big changes here this year was the acquisition of Selene and Maia, our small but remarkable producers of milk and mayhem.   They came to us after kidding, already in milk - and in order to keep the cycle going, well, the girls have to get knocked up. 

This presents some structural issues for us, since we do not have a buck goat.  With only two females, a buck, who needs seperate housing, and frankly, who doesn’t smell that good when in rut, is overkill.  So when we adopted them, we made arrangements for our girls to return to the farm from whence they came when it was time for the necessary romance.  I was a little vague on what this interaction might actually involve, but I figured we’d figure it out as we went along.

 And thanks to Jamey and Carol at Weathertop Farm, we rather did.  Mostly, what it involves is taking your flashlight (the barn isn’t that bright at milking time these days) and spending some time looking at goat pussy.  That is, the goats come into heat every three weeks, and in order to know when to bring them to the farm, that means we have to know when they are ready and willing.  This is detected by tail wagging, slightly pinked up genital areas, maybe a little discharge.  The changes, at least in our girls, however, are fairly subtle, and involve a certain amount of “Do you think that she looks pinker than yesterday…I’m not really sure….”

But we are pretty sure Selene cycled three weeks ago tomorrow, which means that the next step is the drive through breeding (we weren’t able to get her in for an earlier cycle, so babies will be here on the late side) tomorrow.  That means putting Selene (Maia doesn’t seem to realize that it is inconvient of her to be on a completely different cycle - or she does and doesn’t care ;-) ) in the back of our car (newspaper first, crack windows) and drive to the farm, where Selene will have her date with destiny (a rather smelly but cute guy named Gil-galad).  Ten days later, we’ll be pimping Maia instead.

Then, we bring them home and try and figure out whether the breeding “took.”  That means more flashlight checks to see if she goes into heat again.  If she doesn’t, we should be expecting babies around the end of May to beginning of June.  If not, well, three weeks from now we’ll be doing the MLK weekend goat-lovin’ sex run.

 I know that after yesterday’s posts there are those of you who despair of ever making your life more like my perfect agrarian existence ™.  And for those of you who feel that way, I can only say that all you need is a flashlight, a pair of horny goats, a compact car and the dream.

Happy New Year!

 Sharon 

Like You Mean It

Sharon December 30th, 2008

I have been very fortunate in the response that I’ve gotten to my writings.  After all, you can pretty much sum up my analysis as “you are going to have to live a radically different life than you are now, let’s get at it.”  You’d think that I’d get a lot of shit for it - and I do get some, of course.  But for the most part, people are extremely nice about the fact that I am telling them something that isn’t a lot of fun to hear.

Now many of the people who are kindest and most supportive of my work, are also people, who, to be blunt, have absolutely no intention of making radical changes in their lifestyle.  It is quite common for me to hear someone tell me just how much they love my work, and for it to become absolutely clear in our conversation that while they may well believe in some ways that lives may change, that I may have a point, at a fundamental and deep level they know that they will not be one of those people struggling, and that their ecological impact and choices are perfectly reasonable, and that there is no reason whatsoever to discuss them. 

Now I am a normal person, and perfectly capable of hanging out with people who respect my work but don’t necessarily agree with everything I say, or who aren’t ready to implement my ideas.  Everything takes time, and people come to ideas in their own ways.  But I admit, it worries me.  I recognize that there isn’t much I can do about the people who outright reject my thinking, or think I’m a complete whack-job, but I find myself genuinely concerned by people who cannot fully imagine themselves among those who need to grow food to eat, or really unemployed and without a safety net.

Don’t get me wrong - I think some people will be ok, and that some people are acting from perfectly reasonable assumptions.  At the same time, I think it is worth noting how rapidly we are watching institutions and people who we once were sure were completely secure simply fall apart - Bernie Madoff ‘fesses up, and one day there are a bunch of old ladies who are pretty much destitute.  One day we are certain that nothing could bring down X or Y business or bank - only to find that six months later, it is in the process of vanishing without a trace.  The fact is, our sense of security as it exists now can be undermined rapidly - and the time to prepare for such an evaporation is when it seems barely possible, not after it has happened. 

I get nervous when people email me and say that they know that they are secure because they work as a teacher or for X or Y business.  They may be right, of course, but it seems increasingly like that states and municipalities may not be able to pay the bills, or that businesses that seemed recession proof, aren’t.  I worry when people tell me that they feel like their investments are probably ok, because we’re near a bottom, or when they say they are sure their house will still sell, or that if they just refinance at the new low, they’ll be ok.  I don’t argue - I might well be wrong, after all, but it worries me.

And because of that worry, I’m just going to ask this.  As you go through and make your resolutions to be a better person next year, consider this one.  Resolve to spend five minutes a week asking “what if I actually had to not just say Sharon might be right, but act it, live life like I meant it?”  You can still think that I’m a little over the edge, I don’t mind, heck you can even praise me less and complain about me more for making demands of you.  But I admit, I’d sleep better knowing that you’d covered yourself, just in case.  Because somehow the strange scenarios don’t seem quite as strange any more. 

I don’t mind if you think I’m crazy - in fact, I’m fine with that.  But if there’s a little part of you that thinks that just possibly I might not be, try, for a bit, to live it like you mean it.  I’ll let you yell at me later if I wasted your time, promise ;-) .

 Sharon

Why Buy the Cow When I'm Giving Milk Away for Free? The Problem of Newspapers

Sharon December 30th, 2008

In order to start this essay on the much discussed death of the newspaper, I have to talk about television.  Bear with me for a second.  The tv in question was”The Wire.”

Now we don’t watch a lot of tv (in fact, we don’t have reception, much less HBO), but several people recommended we see “The Wire” and the minute we did, we were hooked - we watched the first four seasons obsessively, and waited impatiently for the fifth to finally be released on DVD.  When it finally was, we drank the episodes down and did something we’ve literally never done before - we actually watched the whole commentary at the end.  Whenever people denigrate tv (and I do too) as a medium, I’m reminded that sometimes you can almost make up for a whole generation’s worth of crap in a matter of a few dozen hours of content. 

But anyway, as we were watching the commentary on the fifth season, exploring the role of the newspaper in urban life and watching David Simon (who I’ve admired since I read the book the original (and very good) series ”Homicide” was based upon in the early 1990s), I was struck by his commentary on bloggers and their impact on struggles that newspapers are having.  He said, with absolute contempt in his voice, “How little respect do you have for yourself to give away your work for free.”  I have to say, I’ve been struck by this for a long time - by what it encapsulates and what it misses entirely as a metaphor for the problem that newspapers face.

It is, of course, the classic “why buy the cow when they are giving the milk away for free” question in all its complexity.  And while the question turns out not to be very relevant on the subject of sex, it rather works for journalism.  And it plays out both ways - the bloggers give it away for free, undermining, of course, those who want to sell the cow (professional journalists who want to be paid), but also creating what I would describe as the classic “blogger’s dilemma” in which a successful blogger, who started out using his or her spare time, now finds that they are imprisoned by their own success, with the blog demanding more time - but thus requiring them to make some money from it.

Of course, I can hardly be said not to have an opinion on this, although I’m hardly the purist that Ran Prieur is said to be - I’ve heard he actually refuses to make any money on his work, whereas I cheerfully accepted a full 4K for _Depletion and Abundance_, and charge a university .06 cents a page to reprint “The Ethics of Biofuels” (total remuneration $11.18 for ’08).  Still, I think it is fair to say that must be having some major crisis of self-respect, since I give most of my work away for free.  Even when I charge for something (my book, classes), I try to ensure that a significant portion of the content is available on the blog for those who can’t spend the money.  In fact, sin of sins,  I’ve been known to give my material away for free to newspapers and magazines, who then make money off of them.  My policy is that if I wrote it for free originally, you can have it for free now, as long as you give attribution and use it appropriately.   

That said, I’m a big fan of print papers.  I grew up in what a friend once called “The Church of the Holy Globe” - by the time I was 14 I purchased my own personal copy of the Boston Globe every morning and brought it with my to high school, and read it before classes started.  Despite the habit of the Globe to overemphasize the importance of regional activities (if the planet were to explode tomorrow the headline would read “Many New Englanders Killed in Planetary Explosion”), the newspaper habit runs deep in me.  I’m told that on my first day of kindergarten I announced I would now read the newspaper to my father.  Even then I knew that the realm of public discourse - and my own entry into it, started with the newspaper.

I can even sympathize with the viewpoint expressed here. 

Now we’re hearing the same thing about the blogosphere. “When enough bloggers take the leap, and start reporting on the statehouse, city council, courts, etc. firsthand, full-time, then the Big Media will take notice and the avalanche will begin,” Mr. Reynolds quotes another blogger as saying. If this avalanche ever occurs, a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

After I got out of Rutgers, I began as a reporter at a newspaper in Ocean County, N.J. If the Toms River Regional Board of Education had not offered free coffee, I fear that I might have been found the next day curled up on the floor in the back of the room like Rip Van Winkle. As it was, I only made it through the endless stream of resolutions and speeches by employing trance-inducing techniques learned in my youth during religion class at St. Joseph’s school up the street.

The common thread here, whether the subject is foreign, national or local, is that the writer in question is performing a valuable task for the reader — one that no sane man would perform for free. He is assembling what in the business world is termed the “executive summary.” Anyone can duplicate a long and tedious report. And anyone can highlight one passage from that report and either praise or denounce it. But it takes both talent and willpower to analyze the report in its entirety and put it in a context comprehensible to the casual reader.

This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren’t doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they’re under pressure is much more mundane. The Internet can carry ads more cheaply, particularly help-wanted and automotive ads.

So if you want a car or a job, go to the Internet. But don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings and explain to you why your taxes will be going up. Soon, newspapers won’t be able to do it either.

 I agree that the work of journalism is one that most people will probably not undertake without payment, and that a wildly democratic society full of bloggers will result in people having to sort through a whole lot of ill-written, inadequate crap (and yes, I know that some will cheerfully put me in that category as well, which seems only fair ;-) ) among the gems.  I rely heavily on newspaper writers for the material I get - I do not underestimate their value in summing things up and sorting things out - in fact, mine would be a poorer blog without them, and I genuinely hope that papers find ways to arrest their decline.

But let us not over-estimate the value of newspapers either.  Let us note that often the guy writing the summary of the city council session isn’t that great an intellect either, and doesn’t do a lot of critical thinking - most of newspaper journalism (not all of it, but a majority) consists of people writing summaries - and not always very useful ones, rather than a serious investigation into whether those who were debating actually have other interests or will do what they say they will.  Often the summary of what the meeting means for your taxes will not be based on the journalist’s deep critical understanding of what has happened, but on his rather superficial and limited understanding - or his deep comprehension will be undermined by crappy editing and what you can get away with saying without offending advertisers.  I say this not to be mean, but because I think that journalists vary quite a bit, and some extremely successful ones, well, suck badly at their jobs. 

If that were not the case, then one would have expected at least a few major figures in the mainstream newspaper media to actually have forseen the present set of crises, rather than overwhelmingly dismissing those who did warn about them.  One would have expected any paper to have broken the coming financial collapse, the real peak oil story or even the fact that the IPCC radically understated climate impacts well before the bloggers, given their legions of paid and dedicated analysts.  Except they didn’t.  It was left to book authors,  bloggers and internet sites to do that, for the most part (there are a couple of notable exceptions, but they are usually op ed writers, and very much exceptional).  The journalists did the work of telling people what the reports *said* - and the bloggers, authors and the internet did the equally, maybe even more essential work of telling you what they *mean,* not just what one city council meant, but what the aggregate body of all the meetings, all the reports was saying.  At times, the best investigative journalism does this too - but not often enough.

And may I speak for those who do things not for payment, but simply because they love them, or they are fascinated with them, or infuriated by them?  Speaking as one of many people who began blogging not to compete with anyone, but because they simply care deeply about a subject, deeply enough that even the boring bits are fascinating, I can honestly say that there are  things that no payday can ever fuel.  If we must conceed Paul Mulshine’s fair point - that some things are boring and that it is worth spending money to make sure even the boring things get adequate coverage, can we also agree on the converse?  That there are people in the world for whom, say,  the impact of internal oil consumption on export figures is a passion, a fascination, enough to justify many hours of research that would never be done by a professional journalist, simply because no doing it would require the consent and interest of too many people up and down the editorial lines to justify the months and years of work.

There are people who will spend 10-15 hours a day reading every news media piece on the financial crisis, sorting out the relevant quotations and drawing emphasis, to reveal, ultimately a picture of a financial crisis that many people imagine was unpredictable but which was, simply, unimaginable to someone who lacked the passion and energy to connect all the disparate, and, sometimes enormously dry dots.  They will do this for less than a burger-flipper might get paid, less than a journalist straight out of college, and they will get up and do it again the next day for the same shitty bits of money, because they want to know and they want other people to know.

There are people who are motivated by things that are not money - by doing good work, and adding to public discourse, by the praise of others with the same interests, by coming to coming to some version of a truth, by saving others from suffering or by the sheer joy of coming up with a new way of thinking about things.  They get their training in a host of ways, and then, one morning, it occurs to them that they have something to say that no one will pay them to say, a contribution to make that they don’t need to be paid for, or perhaps they don’t need the money.  And they make it. 

And something heady and remarkable happens.  Someone else reads the idea, and sends something back - maybe an affirmation, but perhaps an argument, a dismissal, or something they hadn’t thought of.  And all of a sudden you are embroiled in a discussion, a debate, a conversation back and forth about what you know and what you don’t know.  Or, perhaps most heady of all, some thing you say, some dot you connect, some idea you offer up helps someone else.  And you see the possibilities - maybe it could happen again.  Maybe you could teach someone else how to make that cake, or why they should use regression analysis.  Maybe you could help someone understand why present day history has its roots in the enclosure acts or why Tolstoy ought to be read in these days, or how to fix your bike.  Most importantly, you can enter into a conversation - one that may go back to medieval poets or enlightment political figures or to 19th century black nationalism or to the founding efficiency engineers and one that now garners the attention of the strangest and most wonderful and fascinating people. 

Now some of this is not as noble as I make sound, and plenty of bloggers well…suck.  Their contributions to the great narrative, will be, as they say, foul breath and foul wind.  But then again, as Theodore Sturgeon put it, “90% of anything is crap, but the other 10% is worth dying for.” All of us know we’re probably in the 90%, but the chance, just the chance to be among the 10% once in a great while - or even once, when it counts, well, that’s something.  There’s no shame in trying to get there while you get a paycheck, but I admit, I don’t grasp why anyone would think there was the tiniest bit of shame in going there for free. The pursuit of excellence, and that moment when you know you’ve done something really new, well, that’s its own reward and you can live on bread and beans for quite a while for that.

My claim is not that journalists don’t get these moments of delight and passion - and get paid.  Nor do I claim that most bloggers don’t eventually have to come bang up against the question of how they value their time and make their income.  But it is true that we cannot it is manifestly rely simply upon paid professionals to get us the relevant 10% of discourse that matters - the journeyman work of journalism is valuable, but it is not all that is needed. 

The vast gaps that get filled by those with some time and some ideas - some of them bad, some of them good - suggest that the paid corps of journalists were never sufficient.  Their ability to look at the aggregate of the news and see it outside the bounds of the world the paper already portrays is limited, just as the bloggers come to be limited by the lenses they choose to look at the world through.  The bloggers need the newspapers, but it isn’t a one way need - the newspapers need us just as badly.  They don’t just need us to sell papers on their own internet sites - they need us because we are driven by something other than the obligation to produce a half column of text that quotes the city council president on the impact of the new development on the water supply, and then gets a “balancing”quote by someone so that no one can tell for sure whether there will be any real impact.  The newspapers need the person who is angry enough to actually sort through the competing claims - and the public needs them, the crazy person who isn’t yawning, who finds a secret delight in the machinations of their local politics, and in revealing it. 

And there is something to be said for independence - the question needs to be asked - why is it that not one major urban newspaper understood the full implications of the triple economic/energy/ecologic crisis?  Not one could tell their readers what they needed to know in a coherent way.  So why is that?  Is it possible the problem is that newspapers are torn between income streams - readers and advertisers.  Their readers need to know the hardest parts of the truth - and their advertisers desperately need them to conceal those truths.  Is it possible that the only people who can see some things are those who are not dependent on advertising, who can afford to tell their advertisers to go screw themselves if the reality and the advertised reality don’t match up (for the record, I find it hard to imagine Tom over at Sustainable Choice, my only direct advertiser, would ever attempt to influence my writing, but I stand ready and able to return the sun oven we bartered for the ad in the unlikely event he ever demands a retraction ;-) .)  Even if I’m being unfair here, is it possible that the demise of the newspaper has something to do with their deep unreliability in describing the reality of the past year?

It isn’t clear to me what the long term relationship between newspapers and bloggers will be, but my sense is that smart newspapers are going to have to begin to evolve one to stay in business.  And of course, bloggers, who unformly struggle with the problem of success and whether to convert to the sort of people who now need someone to at least pay for the milk, are implicated in this discussion as well.  It strikes me that many of the difficulties have been created by newspapers themselves, who see the relationship with bloggers as fundamentally oppositional, rather than interdependent.  Sure, they give their writers a space to blog, and maybe even pay them for it.  But the blogs are fundamentally secondary in most cases - perhaps that will need to change.  Perhaps the newspapers will have to admit that they are as biased as the blogs are - only in this case, biased in favor of describing the world in terms of status quo, so much so that that they cannot anticipate fundamental shifts in what reality is. 

But what I can say is this - sometimes what you give away for free gets you more in return than what you can sell.  If there’s an answer, it won’t be in selling content, or in fighting the endless and foolish battle of blog vs. newspaper, it will be in finding a way around those battles.  I don’t know what that way will be, only that it will shake out in complex and fascinating ways, and in the end, we’re going to have to find some way of covering the cost of the cow, even as some of us are handing out the free milk.

 Sharon

Updates

Sharon December 30th, 2008

A real blog post will be along shortly, but I wanted to do a bit of an update.

 1. I still have spaces in all three classes, believe it or not.  Information on the details is here: http://sharonastyk.com/2008/11/17/news-and-winter-classes/

If you want in (particularly to the food storage class, which starts a week from today (!) let me know).  If you’ve enrolled in the food storage class and you *have not* received info from me about how to subscribe to the discussion group by Friday, please email me again.  Everyone should get that information during this week.

2. Several people asked about Hen and Harvest - it is undergoing a slight structural modification, and should be updated and shiny and new fairly soon.  We’ve decided among other things that the failure to appoint an editor in chief was a really bad idea ;-) .  We now have one, and “management by committee” is about to be replaced by “management by cruel and violent authority.”  This can only be good.

 3. Despite the fact that the owner of the blog (ie, me) now has fast (for some very liberal definitions of fast - we’re still a long way from the tower) internet, in case you were worried, the blog is not going to be radically and structurally different.  My preference fora primarily language based blog was not an artifact of crappy internet service, but actually a preference of mine. 

I once read an essay by Stephen Jay Gould that made me laugh - he talked about attending a lecture in the humanities, and his blind horror that the speaker offered no visual images, no graphs, no slides.  Speaking as someone trained in a discipline where there weren’t a lot of visuals (that picture of Shakespeare in the ruff gets old fast, and there really isn’t that much else  to show ;-) ), and where it was assumed that your compelling and creative use of language was sufficient to hold an audience (and to be fair, it wasn’t for every teacher I had), I feel very strongly about continuing to do the kind of work I do - that is, I write language-intensive pieces that are not always short, without visuals.  Besides making my blog accessible to those without high speed internet, I also think we live in a culture where the visual is heavily prioritized, and where written material, when it exists, is often overly brief and language is an afterthought.  While I don’t long to live in a world where everyone writes like I do (there is a place for many things), I also don’t aspire to a heavily image-based, radically shortened version of myself, even if I could do that sort of thing well.  I know it costs me some readers sometimes - but I like to hope that there are some out there that like things as they are.  The blog will stay substantially the same - when video or music is included, it will be wholly optional.

Ok, that about covers it.  On to the actual long-winded writing stuff ;-) .

 Cheers,

 Sharon

The Pleasures of the Obsolete

Sharon December 26th, 2008

 Before you ask, no it isn’t quite done, but just about - now all that’s left is some editing and a final look over that I need to step away from it for a day or two to do effectively anyway.  So close, and I’m officially reopening the blog in the meantime. Expect light posting over the next week as I finish up, take a bit of time off, and enjoy the season.

Karl Denninger points out today that part of the reason we’re not shopping is that we’ve all got plenty.  He intersperses his call for a return to hugs and pumpkin pie with a discussion of the fact that most of what we’re being sold isn’t a radical leap forward in technology - that is, blu-ray isn’t that big an improvement on a dvd.

Can you name one product that is a “game changer” - that provides a quantum leap forward, and thus is truly a “must have”?

I can’t. 

That’s a problem, when you get down to it; all retailers are really catering to is “the quantum of more”.

Now look around your house.  Look at all the junk you have in your home.  Quantify “junk” as anything that doesn’t provide you with a place to sit (or lay down), a way to keep you warm, a means to prepare (or consume) food or drink and a way to keep your premises livable (you gotta wash your clothes somehow, right?)

All the trinkets, the 47 computers, the three iPODs and the cell phones.  The “new car” you bought over the last few years, for what - the “new car” smell?  Does a used car - or even a clunker - get you to work? 

Think about it - how much less would an inexpensive used car have cost you?  Liability insurance only as opposed to “full coverage”, because if you wreck it you could replace it for a couple of grand in cash - no need for collision coverage, and if the transmission falls out you could junk and replace it for less than the cost of the repair!  In a couple of years you’re way ahead, and even more so if you make a habit of smashing cars (since insurance gets verrry expensive for collision coverage if you wreck frequently!)

We as a nation have gotten used to deciding we want something and therefore we will have it, because the credit card hasn’t been declined (yet).  When it was, we then went to the bank and pulled out our home equity, paid off the card - and charged it up again.

Now I’m going to have to take Denninger’s word for it, you see, I don’t have a 60″ tv (the size at which he notes you can really see the difference between blu-ray and a dvd).  I’m trying to envision such a thing - that’s a tv as tall as my mother (and there’s a scary way to think about it - how many do you think they’d sell if that was used in the advertising campaign)!  In fact I don’t have a 36″ tv either, on which he says he can’t tell.  I’m not sure how big our tv screen is, actually, but it is pretty small - I can carry the whole thing, built in DVD player and all, under my arm. 

And even that is a pretty big shift in our lives - it was only about 3 years ago that we managed to get something that played DVDs - until then, we had a VCR.  We still have it, because when everyone else converted over to DVDs, videos got really, really cheap and it was a great opportunity to pick up the kind of favorite movies that you really want to watch more than once (as opposed to most movies) - so now we’ve got Butch and Sundance, Singing in the Rain,  The Wizard of Oz and Bladerunner whenever we want them.  Now according to Denninger, there’s a pretty big difference in the quality of picture between a video and a DVD, and I sort of see it, but then again, my tv screen is so small that I don’t notice it much.  I’m just happy that I can show the boys the dancing up the walls bit in “Make ‘Em Laugh.”  For that, we can see fine.

And then I think back to the tv we had when I was a kid - you see, I come from a family of late technology adopters.  We didn’t have a tv a lot of my childhood, but when we did get one, it was a teeny, tiny black and white tv, which was the only option into the middle 1980s.  But the thing I remember most from when we converted to color wasn’t this sudden revelation, a la the shift of Dorothy from Kansas to Oz.  It was the opposite - you see, when you watch black and white long enough you become adept in the ways of shades of grey - it wasn’t that different.  You could figure out roughly what the colors were supposed to be by the light and texture of the film.  What really struck me was that when our new color set broke down a few months later, and we brought out the black and white, that I’d lost the ability to translate black and white into color - sure, the color was nice, but it also cost me something.

Perhaps that’s the origin of my taste for obsolete technologies.  My husband and I chronic late adopters of technology - my guess is that we’re ten years from our first blu-ray acquisition, if ever.  I still don’t have an Ipod, and we just broke down and bought our first cell phone in years - a tracphone with no camera, no internet.  I recently replaced our cracked glass topped electric stove with an old style electric burner one, because you can’t can on the glass top stoves.  Our one car is nearly twice as old as my oldest child, and even my bicycle can claim the same.

That’s not to say that I can’t see the virtue of some technological improvements - the big revelation this year was that the Chanukah fairy brought me wireless internet, something that until now has been impossible in my little rural hollow, away from any tower.  And in many ways that is a huge improvement - I can listen to youtube music while I type and surfing runs a lot faster.  On the other hand, I can already tell there’s a price too - I used to surf the web with a book on my lap, reading poetry or essays while I waited for pages to load.  I have the odd feeling that I’m going to miss the justaposition of Frank O’Hara and the Oil Drum or John Donne with The Automatic Earth.

Of course, I’m famous for my claiming of even more obsolete technologies - I sew with a treadle machine, cook on a wood cookstove, grind my grain with a hand turned grinder, knead bread with my hands, not a bread machine, chop vegetables with a knife rather than a food processor.  This might be just a kind of precious Little House on the Prairie Nostalgia, or so I’ve been accused.

But I have an electric sewing machine.  I’ve used a bread machine.  I have a food processor, and of course, and electric stove.  I don’t use these things because it makes me feel cute and period - in a family with four kids, a farm, the writing, feeling cute falls to the realities.  The truth is that in every case, I’ve decided that the older technology has advantages - or the modern one a price I don’t want to pay.  I don’t like the bread machine because I don’t like the texture of the bread I get out of it - and because when I add in the time to clean all the parts, I don’t feel I’ve saved any time.  The same is true with the food processor - I can cut more uniformly myself, and when you add in the time to clean it, I often can do the chopping faster.  The cookstove warms my house while I cook.  The treadle sewing machine is more fun to use and never goes through my fingers.

All of which for me, raises the question that Denninger doesn’t ask - he talks about how we’re pretty saturated on stuff, and that’s true.  But when wasn’t that true for most of us.  I can remember my Christmases in the 1970s, as a child, in a house with no VCR, no DVD player, no CD player.  I remember sitting with my parents around a record player, singing along, watching the Wizard of Oz on its annual appearance on our staticky black and white tv.  Did the static matter?  Were the records in some way inferior?  I didn’t think so then - is there a way to go back, to forget the monotone clarity of the CD, the perfect picture of the DVD, and accept what we had then?

No technological leap goes just one way - every gain has its price.  Some of them are worth it, no question.  The front-loader washing machine is in every way an improvement over my old top loader, and the price - its hefty price tag - is one I’m willing to pay to use less water, energy, detergent.  But of the technological innovations I’ve had a taste of, few offer that big a step, and when they do, they often come with surprising costs.  The most surprising one, is that they make our past uninhabitable to us.  What I learned for the first time in my early teens going from black and white to color turns out to be true for most things.  Once we accustom ourselves to the new level of technology, it gets harder and harder to go back to the past.  If we do, we must accept the accusation that we are failing in some way, to live in the present.  And there’s a truth in that - because in our society, the present is never “now” it is “what’s new” - and the only way to ever live there is to keep rushing forward, keep unfitting yourself for the now in favor of the future, to always be waiting for the next step.

I’m hopeless, I know.  I’ll never get the full appreciation of the sound and visual quality available to me while the boys and I are watching Donald O’Conner on our tiny little screen.  There are nuances that they may never know about.  On the other hand, the 400 bucks that the blu-ray machine and the dvd would cost are still in our pockets.  And if this is costing us so much, how come we’re all giggling so hard anyway?

 BTW, since I now have decent internet, I can include a link to the scene on youtube - the feat of athleticism I mentioned above is at the very end of the clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tp7LwQYT8U 

Sharon 

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