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PHOTO OF THE DAY

What is it

Mystery Photo

I suppose I could give clues, but maybe someone recognizes it straightaway?

Otherwise it is either animal, vegetable or mineral.

PASSAGES

Amy Lowell

Text selections by Vermont Views

*See the note below for a recent Guardian article by Alison Flood ont he debt that Hughes and Lawrence owe Amy Lowell

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.

You are ice and fire the touch of you burns my hands like snow.

All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.

For the man who should loose me is dead, Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?

Happiness, to some, elation; Is, to others, mere stagnation.

A man must be sacrificed now and again to provide for the next generation of men.

Let us be of cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Hate is ravening vulture beaks descending on a place of skulls.

Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils.

*Ted Hughes’s poem Pike is one of the late poet laureate’s best-known works, taught in schools across the UK and endlessly anthologised. But Hughes’s image of a fish with “green tigering the gold” has an unacknowledged debt to a forgotten poem by the American poet Amy Lowell, according to an English academic who claims that Hughes “confidently fished out the most appealing imagery from the earlier work” in a new paper.

According to Dr Hannah Roche, a lecturer in English at the University of York, it is “nothing short of incredible” that Hughes’s 1959 poem Pike “has not been considered in its close relation” to Lowell’s 1914 work The Pike. In her paper Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians, which has just been published in the academic journal Modernist Cultures, Roche pinpoints similarities between the poems.

“In Lowell’s poem, ‘shadows’, ‘green-and-copper’, ‘under the reeds’, and ‘orange’ appear in sequence; in almost the same pattern, Hughes’s poem gives us ‘green tigering the gold’, ‘silhouette’ , ‘under the heat-struck lily pads’, and an ‘amber cavern’,” she writes, also highlighting the “echo” of Lowell’s line, “darkness and a gleam”, in the final line of Hughes’s poem: “Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed”.

Alison Flood — The Guardian

Read more PASSAGES >>>

Recent Passages By: Amy Lowell, Bernardo Bertolucci, Buffy Sainte-Marie, John Keats, David Niven - Actor, David Niven - PhD, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joan Didion, Pablo Casals, Geoffrey Chaucer, Muddy Waters, Aretha Franklin, Dorothy Maclean Read their work here

NOT QUITE THE THING

Sponsored by Delectable Mountain Cloth

Caption It!

MM Kizi

Series 26 images

SHORTS

97% gone

Vermont Views

STATISTIC: “Like the canary in the coal mine Monarch butterflies are now 97% gone”. In the 1980s between 10 million and 4.5 million monarchs spent the winter in California. The last count, conducted annually by volunteers each November, showed that in 2018 there may be as few as 30,000 across the state – a number that’s 87% lower than just the year before.

Anurag Agrawal, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Cornell University, suggests that the butterflies are like the canary in the coal mine. In a blog about his work, he said that because they travel across North America every year, monarch migration can be helpful in determining the “health of our entire continent”. But saving them could require big changes. “We have to take a step back and ask ourselves the harder questions that none of us want to deal with.”He said monarchs are “are exhibiting multi-decadal declines that point to very big systemic problems. We shouldn’t fool ourselves”.

Read More shorts

IN BETWEEN

An Encroaching Lawlessness

Julia Ferrari

When I drive lately, I have been noticing an increasingly impatient and lawless road culture. People drive thru red lights, pull out in front of other cars with no warning, and in general drive without much concern or caution for the other drivers on the road. I think this is a small warning sign of changing attitudes and could be a result of our preoccupation with the internet and the overwhelming impatience and distraction that it seems to be producing. As with any new technology, of course, we don’t really know what cultural side effects will arise from it. This creeping lawlessness seems to have as its basis the fact that life within the internet has no conscience, no repercussions, or at least very few. It seems to be dividing us more deeply into separate camps, and impudence, aggression and hate seem to reign more easily. In contrast, when we interact in the physical world with our actual neighbors, we are able to see, in person and up close, those human beings. They are real, and are simply people that we either agree or disagree with… but we are more likely to exhibit some sense of respect and decency when we interact.

    In the remote and somewhat abstract territory we call the internet, we don’t usually see the actual person and so we are inclined to demonize people for their lack of what we believe to be good sense. This goes both ways, from the most conservative to the most liberal people. Perhaps we need to be more open to an empathetic sense of others, to see that, rather than political or cultural enemies, we are all just humans trying to survive. I recently saw an article  in the Opinion section of the NYTimes called “Can You Like the Person You Love to Hate” by Bari Weiss and Eve Peyser, who were politically distanced, and who, on-line at least, disagreed with each other about almost everything, essentially really strongly disliking each other. The article talked about the feud culture platforms like Twitter that encouraged lashing out at each other’s beliefs. Then they met in person at a conference and ended up liking each other. “Even though our views differ in so many ways, we managed to connect over feeling utterly exhausted by the hyper politicized world we live in.  …  In these divisive times, the increasingly moralistic left has adopted this idea that those who don’t agree with you politically are the enemy. (And vice versa.) I think it’s a self-defeating way of looking at things. If we dismiss the almost 63 million people who voted for Trump as irredeemably evil, where does that leave us as a society? You (Bari) voted for Clinton, and yet, when we became friends, I worried I’d get “canceled” if Twitter found out. ” (Eve Peyser)

Extract Read more Julia Ferrari

WATER’S EDGE

Morning on the Mountain

Nicola Metcalf

I live near the Connecticut River, alongside fields of strawberries, corn, and a cemetery. Mt. Sugarloaf, a small mountain, stands across the river in the background of my backyard.  Cliffs facing the river expose gray rock that is 210 million years old.  For the last several years, I have risen early with my two dogs to meet a group of 1-5 women at its base, 2 miles away. We hike a steep paved road that leads to the 652 ft. summit with a grand view of the Ct. Valley.

Many other individuals and groups climb the mountain, though most adjourn for the season when temperatures drop and snow accumulates. We are familiar with the pattern of people and dogs who hike the mountain every day. Serious athletes running or biking sometimes join the morning parade. Once we passed a young woman in a manual wheel chair inching herself upward. We mere pedestrians are all drawn to the quick and relatively easy work out the mountain provides, free of charge, and the camaraderie of hiking in good company.

Conversation is the fuel that carries us up the steep road. We talk as we walk about everything from world news, local politics, our families and food, to husbands and pets. We discuss some of the tight corners of marriage, help each other navigate medical crises and advise each other on raising teenagers. We witness job changes, divorce, death of friends and family, renovation projects, graduations. We share the joy of a good shopping experience or debrief after an important town meeting.  Our skill sets include law, design, medicine, publishing, and accounting so chances are one of us has a knowledgeable opinion. Or at least we pretend to in the shadow of pre-dawn light. All in all, it is a chant of life that ushers our steps to the top.

<extract> Read more Nicola Metcalf >>>

OLD LADY BLOG

For the gardener who is gone

Toni Ortner

The dried stalks of the sunflowers are snapped in half, and the wooden slats of the porch are split and broken.  Fake spider webs are draped across the columns of the porch, and a plastic skeleton hangs from the branch of a tree. The front door is half open but blocked by a piece of rusted gate and the driveway filled with empty cardboard cartons and weeds.

This was the most beautiful garden in town right in front of a house that has a caved in roof, windows covered with plastic sheets, and red paint peeling off. The barn behind is a mass of dirt and stones. The man who owned the home who lived alone was always in the garden hanging up hummingbird feeders or tending to huge red and orange zinnias. A motorboat without an engine was stuck in the untrimmed hedge and an antique white Chevrolet missing a tire sat in the driveway.

From the first day of spring until winter the owner of the house worked in the garden mowing and planting and mulching and deadheading and weeding. Every other day he replaced the sugared water in the feeders and put out slices of fresh orange or apples for the birds. I stopped once to tell him what a magnificent garden he created, and he said, I love this garden like it’s my baby.”

The last time I saw him was a year ago in July. He always wore the same torn stained pair of faded denim overalls and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up. He lurched about as if he were out of breath; although I waved, he did not wave back but maybe he did not see me.

Yesterday morning there were two cars and a van in the driveway and people yelling at each other carrying tables and chairs and pots and pans. Today the white Chevy is gone.  I walk with head bent down against the wind and wear a fleece jacket and two layers of shirts as well as a wool hat and gloves. The moss between the cracks of the sidewalk that was green in the sun is brown. The last flock of geese veered south last night with hoarse honking sounds. The hard ground is blanketed with yellow leaves curled at the edges. Everything is shut down.

Read More Toni Ortner >>>

MEANDERINGS

Moments of Silence

Charles Monette

A cool breeze mingled with brilliant sun.  Walking along, I glanced left through leaf barren trees to see sunlight kissing ledge and rock.  Stone surfaces were adorned with bejeweled blankets of light green moss that glistened when touched by rays.  Stone walls I’d never seen before appeared!   Stoic, standing as neatly piled as they had in yesteryear.  Evergreens were dark, verdantly vibrant, save for some spotty patches of burnished brown needles at their base.

It was Veterans’ day, November 11th and I was a veteran hiking Black Mountain in solitude, reflecting on wartime long ago.  I had had a late invitation to a free meal at the VFW that morning.  While appreciative of the thoughtfulness of my daughter and others at the hall, I’m usually a solitary man that day.  “Thanks, I’m headed to the mountain”.

I wanted to be with my brothers long gone in the jungles of Vietnam.  Some bush, or break in the trail, or light filtering just so, would elicit a memory.  Agent orange splashing us from above… blackening us with soot for days after the defoliation was complete.  Let’s let go of that flashback.  How could the bastards be so feckless as to drop that ghastly chemical on us? On anyone? On any land? On anything?

The morning light trickled through the canopy, dancing on the trail ahead, brightly showing the way.  As I climbed higher, crystals of ice webbing laced the frozen mud of the trail, eliciting a slight crunch when stepped on.  These were interspersed with recently gelid ellipses of puddly water.   Clear atop, the puddles were imbedded with dead leaves still moving, sprinkled with pine needles rusted brown.

In my mind, the solid green leaves of the mountain laurels mimicked the leaves of hardy Magnolia trees in Vietnam.  Both plants using ‘the golden mean’ to ensure that each green leaf receives as much sunlight as possible. 

For some reason, or maybe none, a saying from Taoist scripture came to mind:

                  “A cup is only useful because of its emptiness.”

I thought of my last day of combat, crawling through mud puddles past Delta’s dead. I thought of their sacrifice on that heated June day of 1971.  Heated by sun and humidity; heated by battle.  How was it that enemy soldiers and our only recourse upon meeting in the jungle was to kill each other? I said what you don’t say in a moment of silence…. then continued on.

<extract> Read more of this and other articles by Charles Monette >>>

WRITE WALK

Shower Etiquette

Susan Cruickshank

For a number of years, I lived in Camphill Village, an intentional community, working with developmentally delayed adults. We lived in house communities, often made up of twelve adults, who commonly shared just two bathrooms.

Whether in a home of two or twenty, the harmony of communal spaces is dependent on how willing each of one us is to step outside of ourselves and consider the needs of others. When living with someone else, what we SAY we believe about change and equality is put to the test in a daily, not-so-sexy way.

Global change begins in the bathroom.

There is nothing brag-worthy about bathroom etiquette. But if we can master a few simple steps, our home can become a kinder, more thoughtful place to be. And CLEANER too!

Brush Your Hair BEFORE You Shower. Women of the world, this one is more specifically for you, although it wouldn’t hurt for men to put a comb through their hair as well before stepping into the tub. We shed, especially in the winter, and when we wash our hair, those loose hairs land in the tub and all over the floor and clog up the drain.  It’s unsightly. Like other bodily functions of our own, which we don’t mind because they’re ours, they become gag-worthy when they are inflicted on us or we inflict them on someone else. Our runaway hair can, and often does, produce the same horrified reaction in others when we don’t take the time to clean up after ourselves. Do.

<Extract> Read More Susan Cruickshank >>>

LOVE IN ACTION

Choosing Hope

Elizabeth Hill

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perch in the soul

And sings the tune without the words

And never stops at all…

~Emily Dickinson

While in art school, I was assigned to make a sculpture inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Pandora, who was given a locked box and warned not to open it. Needless to say she did open it—releasing pestilence, sickness, death, and all manner of strife into the world—leaving only one thing inside it—Hope.

Not wanting to make something that would focus on the harshness of the Pandora myth, I carved an image of my hands in white alabaster—both palms together with fingers entwined. One finger lifts itself upward—free from the entwinement—as a personal symbol of Hope.

This sculpture showed me that my natural inclination as a nurse wanting to soothe and heal pain would also be the foundation of my work as an artist.

Small Seeds of Gratitude will produce a Harvest of Hope.

~Author Unknown

Last weekend, a dear friend invited me to a play in Philadelphia called “Every Brilliant Thing.” We entered the intimate theater-in-the round, no bigger than an average grammar school classroom. As we took our seats, a man—who turned out to be the play’s singular actor/narrator—gave us each a post-it note with a number and a word or words on them. He instructed us to speak out the words when our number was called.

The actor’s character was not introduced by name, which made the story seem as if it were his own autobiography. He was hilarious, and very much at ease, spontaneous, and welcoming with audience participation.

Extract Read More Elizabeth Hill >>>

MONKEY’S CLOAK

Walls Have Ears

Alan Rayner

Walls have ears

I’ve heard it said -

An inner sensitivity

That reaches down to subatomic core

Far beneath their superficial hardness

Where silence calls

In endless refrain

To heed its deep-felt yearning

Behind the din of every thing

We too have ears

With which to hear this inner, noiseless calling

Beneath the clamour of everyday demand

For our attention

Whether we hear the silence or the racket

Or both within each other’s reach

Depends on whether we use our ears

Partially or fully -

Or block them off

Behind a wall of self-sealed privacy

That chooses not to care for them

<extract> Read more Monkey’s Cloak

SCREENplay

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Lawrence Klepp

It’s never been easy to be an independent writer. One could cite Dr. Johnson’s indignant letter to his negligent patron, Lord Chesterfield, or George Gissing’s account of 19th-century scribes hanging by a thread, New Grub Street.

But even harder is the plight of the woman writer trying to make her lonely way into often hostile, male-dominated literary territory, as demonstrated by several recent movies. The French-Belgian film Violette (2013) told the true story of Violette Leduc, poor, provincial, lesbian, and despondent, who, with the help of Simone de Beauvoir, eventually overcame the resistance of postwar French publishers to her erotically frank fiction. This year there has been The Wife and Colette, both about women feeling it necessary to write under their husbands’ names. And now, Can You Ever Forgive Me?—a superb movie about a real, if obscure, woman writer who, thwarted in her own work, finds she has a gift for concocting fake literary letters.

I had never heard of Lee Israel before this movie came out. She wrote several successful biographies of 20th-century women celebrities like Tallulah Bankhead. But by the early 1990s, when the movie is set, she’s at a dead end. She’s broke. She drinks too much. She’s overweight. She alienates people and loses part-time jobs with her abrasive manner and caustic put-downs. Her last lover, a woman named Elaine, has given up on her, leaving her alone with her aging cat as her only company in a cluttered, rank-smelling Upper West Side apartment where she’s way behind in her rent. Her agent curtly dismisses her latest book ideas. So a life of crime, finely-wrought literary crime, beckons.

The material may sound a bit depressing, but it’s actually a poignant comedy of engagingly innocent scoundrels carried by the pitch-perfect performances of Melissa McCarthy as Lee and Richard E. Grant as her charming, witty, disreputable British vagabond accomplice, Jack Hock. The director, Marielle Heller, has made the movie convincing in every detail, scene, and word, capturing the somber texture of New York streets in rain, snow, and darkest night, its refuge-offering bars, its dusty or elegant second-hand bookstores, its comfortable snobbery and ruthless angling for money and down-and-out deceits and desperations.

<extract> Read More SCREENplay

URBAN NATURALIST

An Austere Hogle Sanctuary Sleeps in Beneath a Chill Sunday Morning Sun

Lloyd Graf

Fall had recently passed its halfway point this November Sunday, and the pending onset of winter appeared to permeate the Hogle Sanctuary as I headed down the Eaton Ave approach. A dense carpet of fallen leaves scrunched underfoot: richly yellow maple increasingly peppered with fading brown oak. As I reached the riser zone's new-ish cement “stairs” leading down to the water-level boardwalk, the vivid green of grass seeded in the trail area during late summer renovations stood in marked contrast to the flat browns and grays of withered brush flanking the trail. A thin coating of frost on the boardwalk slats reflected an 8:45 AM temp of 34F, and puddled water lay beneath and well “inside” the boardwalk attesting to the past week's rains and wind. The oak brown-intensive remaining leaf cover on slopes to the west and north of the Sanctuary's observation zone was dulled and chilled down to a drab matte finish reflecting metabolic shutdown. The Sanctuary's perennial scenic beauty was well-launched into somber seasonal lock-down phase.

A two week lapse since my last visit had seemingly taken its toll on animal presence, as silence and lack of visible creature activity characterized the half-hour of this visit. No mammals of any sort were visible, not even the squirrels and chipmunks that had been foraging all over the Sanctuary a scant 2 weeks ago (when not making mad death wish-driven and frequently doomed dashes across local roadways). Pollinator insects, epitomized by heroic bumblebees that had still been visiting mini-asters and goldenrod remnants two weeks ago, were now as absent as flowers to be pollinated. No mosquitos or gnats were in evidence, leaving the arthropodal domain to hypothetically lurking ticks.

Extract Read More Lloyd Graf

OPEN MIND

Why do we really have a drug problem in Vermont?

Offie Wortham

         Too many of our Vermont children have no formal, or informal pre-education before elementary school. Vast differences quickly show up in the progress of the child before the 3rd grade. Ultimately, over 40% of the youth in Vermont fail to finish high school. Over 70% cannot qualify to be accepted into the Army, Navy, or Marines. 23% fail the written test. And the rest are rejected because of obesity, being physically unfit, a criminal record, or no GED or high school diploma.

Our Vermont Community college, which is open admissions to anyone with a high school diploma, a GED, or the ability to pass a test, has a graduation rate of 21%!

        Local and statewide employers have more jobs than qualified applicants. They actually expect their employees to be able to pass an employment test which measures reading ability, writing, and simple math skills such as addition, subtraction, and multiplication. In our automated society, one must be able to learn complex skills. Even after ignoring arrest records and no diploma, it is still difficult for many employers to find qualified job applicants.

        So what happens to the young person, who has just failed out of high school and community college, is rejected by the military and is denied the employment opportunities that offered training and decent wages, and finds themselves in a group of their peers on the street with over a 50% unemployment rate?

<extract>    Read More Offie Wortham >>>

Finnish Fandango

Apple-bobbing and

Remembering the Dead

Anneli Karniala

   I drove past the house the other day.  It looks unchanged -- maybe just with a newer coat of paint since then -- has the same doorway and front facade at least. It's old, but sits solidly down a small embankment and is surrounded by some lovely old trees.  In fact, it didn't look spooky at all. Just rests quietly off the old winding road with the other houses.  Norma used to live in that house.

   My mother was a head nurse at the then Barnstable County Hospital, and Norma also worked there as a nurse. I had met her a few times as a kid. My mother always said, "Oh she's such a character, so much fun. And what a great nurse." I only remembered that this Norma would say things very quietly and without much expression, and it would make other adults laugh and laugh. But I never really got the gist of it then as a kid, because she barely smiled...though she did have a certain twinkle or blink of her eyes, as I recalled later in life. I suppose you could say she had a dry wit, or a droll sense of humor, like so many real New Englanders. But basically as a kid, I was a bit intimidated by her. 

   In the gloaming of one Halloween evening, my mother drove my sister and me to Norma's house, because she was having a Halloween party for some of us kids in the village. I was 9 or 10 at the time, and very impressionable. So when I saw the outside decorations in black and orange, swaying in the orange-tinged lights, and then saw Norma at the door dressed up in costume -- maybe a witch, but now I'm not sure -- well, let's just say then I was royally spooked!

   We went inside. I still remember the location of the creaky stairway to the dark upstairs, and the arrangement of the living room and kitchen furniture. Everything was decorated Halloween-style. I saw the other kids and we started having fun playing some games, eating corn candy, popcorn, and drinking soda pop. We all had rudimentary costumes on: a paper bag over the head with holes for eyes and mouth, or a sheet with ditto. Nothing like the $50+ costumes these days.

   Then it was time for bobbing for apples! That was the best part of the entire evening! The big galvanized tub was on the floor, and the red and green shiny apples were floating in the water. So we knelt down on the floor, hands behind our backs, heads down to the water, and bob, bob, bob, invariably getting water in our noses and mouths, coughing and sputtering, laughing hysterically, but finally each of us sitting up with an apple in our mouth.

Extract Read more Anneli Karniala

AN A-MUSING LIFE

Witch Hat To Wear

Nanci Bern

The spirit of Samhain has become a cultural reality in spite of its commercialism and its plethora of  horrendous sex-up-anything costumes. People come together to host Halloween fun for the kiddies and themselves. Okay, so perhaps this is because it is no longer considered wise to let children roam around town after dark looking for candy; but this reality has opened like a skeletal hand rising from the dirt of a grave pointing us toward community turf to celebration together. 

And oh, yes, back to the costumes. I do not don too much of a holiday costume, as I am in costume all year, so to speak; but I am not a costume curmudgeon. I will help anyone fancy up, and once my vampire costuming skills won first place in a competition.  [Illus. The prehistoric Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire, Britain. About 3,000 years old.]

I love the way that Halloween garb can be an expression of ideas, concerns, hopes and dreams. Some are witty, some are beautiful, and some are touchingly poignant. I usually wait with light-hearted breath to see what will be parading around, but with what is going on in the world right now, this year my breath will be holding more stalwart apprehension than gleeful anticipation.

I suspect that this year I will look out from under my seasonally pointy and wide rimmed hat with one eye. The other eye, you may presume is looking for the nearest bar, er I mean, tea room. Nope, I do mean bar. I can have one bourbon and not fall off my broom, right?

NOTE: I wrote this before the massacre in Pittsburgh. Is any humor appropriate today? Should I have saved this for next year and offered a tone like my Charlottesville article? If I have offended anyone by not only writing about yesterday, I apologize; but i am a Jew and I am a Wiccan, and i will be open and proud about both, although I am surely a double-whammy target some some hateful f*** out there. So I will not hide. I will not hide. <extract>

Read more Nanci Bern

WRITE ON !

TYRANT!

Phil Innes

Limitless self-regard.

Law breaker.

The pleasure of inflicting pain.

The compulsive desire to dominate.

Pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant.

A grotesque sense of entitlement never doubting he can do whatever he chooses.

He loves to bark orders and watch underlings scurry to carry them out.

He expects absolute loyalty but is incapable of gratitude.

The feelings of others mean nothing to him, he has no natural grace nor humanity, nor decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law, he hates it. He takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and he holds the public good in contempt.

He divides the world into winners and losers; the winners arouse his regard in so far as he can use them to his own ends. The losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth, was born into it and makes ample use of it. Although he enjoys what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination, he is a bully easily enraged who strikes out at anyone who stands in his way.

He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble or wince with pain. He is gifted with detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult.

These skills attract followers who are attracted to the same cruel delights.

Although they know that he is dangerous his followers help him to advance to his goal which is the attainment of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the subjugation of women, he despises them more than desires them.

Sexual conquest excites him but only for the endlessly reiterative truth that he can have anything he likes.

He knows that virtually everyone hates him.

This makes him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies but it soon begins to eat away and exhaust him and sooner or later he is brought down.

He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage.

<Extract>

Read More Phil Innes >>>

THE FIRST GLASS

TEXAS TOAST

VOLUNTEERING FOR BETO

PART 2

Vincent Panella

[Vermont Views Magazine does not take part in partisan stances in local or national politics, but it does, from time to time, observe the state of people who vote, their knowledge and acuity, if any]

A Beto volunteer calls.

"Have you been trained?"

"In what?"

"Phone banking and block walking. Have they sent you the webinars?"

"What's a webinar?"

"It's like an online seminar."

I watched the webinars on phone banking and block walking. For the former you log onto an automatic dialer and speak from a prewritten script. Block walking is based on the same principle: instead of phone numbers the system identifies voters' streets and houses from a smartphone GPS. The script is the same: get voters to commit.

"Will I see you in Dallas?" I ask the volunteer.

"No, I'm calling from another part of the state."

At Logan Airport I watch the Jet Blues line up and taxi, top lights blinking in the sunless afternoon. It's all New England, cloudy, chilly, ready to rain. A mental goodbye to home. Dallas will be in the nineties. I don't know what's in store. All I know is the address of the Dallas headquarters and my plan to walk in and introduce myself.

My  phone rings. Its another Beto volunteer. How am I?  Where am I? Is everything okay? I'm relieved that people are taking the time to reassure me that all is well. I tell him I've watched the webinars, that I have a smart phone and computer but would still need a little help. No problem. I begin to rest easy. He says to show up tomorrow at the headquarters.

Dallas is all sprawl. Fast food joints abound, Chick-fil-A, Whataburger, Taco Bueno, a Spanish chain supermarket called La Michoacana. My Lyft driver is an Iranian named Mashid. We have a softball conversation about immigrants coming here for a better life, my grandparents, his grandparents, all the same, all good. We speed through a maze of highways and beltways and swirling  roads above our heads, all concrete and red steel. There's no feeling of a center. We're not in Kansas any more, but I don't say this to Mashid. We talk football, Vermont, snow and seasons. Does it snow in Dallas? Hardly and when it does, watch out.

At the end of the ride I channel Polonius. When trying to find out about his son, Laertes, then in Paris, he instructs his spy to "take as it were some distant knowledge of him." I tell Mashid that I've read about a race for Senate between someone called Beto O'Rourke and Ted Cruz.

"Who do  you think will win?"

"Cruz."

<extract>  Read More >>>

VERMONT DIARY

Has Bean Has Travelled

Editorial

I am copying all Vermont Views Columnists, plus friends of the magazine, and issuing a challenge and invitation on behalf of the FOODISH column to write up your own favorite winter season dish — plus an anecdote of why you chose it.

Likely we will have a big Scandinavian contribution this year from friends of friends of family, and I wonder if we could all follow a format and tail your recipe with some anecdote, however long, of why you like this dish? Here is a sample entry for format reasons plus my own anecdote:—

Notes (Prep time plus cook time.)

Prep

Cook

Plating notes

Anecdote

As a young man I found myself in a delightful old farmhouse in Sussex, England, one summer, one which had bagged figs in the tree in the garden, and over which there were contrails such as there were in WWII — and  which had a Rayburn stove, and for transport I had a pre WWI sit up and beg type one gear black bicycle, with which I could sport around, visit Blake's house nearby, also the Roman town of Chichester, and the castle town of Arundel.

This was my first experience of cooking for myself and for another, a titled older lady who I was 'keeping an eye on.'

Now and again visitors would appear — Lady Goodwood in her Bentley, with attendants, driver, et ca, a lady who owned substantial chunks of Africa at the time, to whom I served tea and to her question of 'who I was' I said 'Innes' which I think she took as being Viscount Innes, such as are responses this way in England, and which was received equitably without demurrer. 

Then came the wife of the Bishop of Puerto Rico — himself was at a conference in Canterbury, and she, bored, came to visit. To visit and incidentally to assess my cooking skills, including baked beans which I had made some from a can, which is the buried subject of this thread. 

She went off to town and bought all sorts of things, including beans which she cooked on the stove top for best part of the day, before immersing them into a large oven pan, and adding things I hardly know the names of, but including sweet peppers, chilies, considerable amounts of mustard, fresh tomatoes, bacon, 'exotic' herbs' and as I say, other things unknown to me by shape, name or previous contact thereof. This all went into the oven of the AGGA the next day to then emerge 6 hours later to the reprise, "those are baked beans."

And they were extraordinary, and probably sparked my interest in cooking things which didn't come in cans or from factories.

<extract> Read More Vermont Diary >>>

September 2018

George Harvey

Science and Technology:

¶ “Flood frequency of world’s largest river has increased fivefold, study finds” • Flooding on the Amazon River has increased fivefold over the last two or three decades, a new study has found. Analysis of more than 100 years of river level records from the Amazon showed that both floods and droughts had become more frequent. [The Independent]

World:

¶ “SIMEC Atlantis Unveils World’s Largest Tidal Turbine” • Tidal turbine maker SIMEC Atlantis Energy unveiled designs for what may be the world’s largest single-rotor tidal turbine, the 2-MW AR2000. SIMEC Atlantis’s 1.5-MW turbines are used at the world’s largest tidal stream away, the 6-MW MeyGen array off the north of Scotland. [CleanTechnica]

¶ Nearly 400 investors, with assets worth $32 trillion, announced The Investor Agenda, a first-of-its-kind global agenda aimed to accelerate and scale-up actions critical to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. [CleanTechnica]

¶ “Electric For All Campaign From Volkswagen – 10 Million EVs Based On MEB Platform” • Volkswagen officially launched its “Electric For All” campaign this week with the official introduction of its MEB platform. The platform is where the powertrain, suspension, brakes, and other vital components all come together. [CleanTechnica]

Illustrated:— VW MEB platform

¶ “Renewables reach 37-year high” • Strong hydro and wind generation saw 85% of the New Zealand’s electricity produced from renewables in the June quarter, government data shows. The country has a target to achieve 90% renewable power by 2025. The Labour-led coalition has suggested going to 100% 2035. [Newsroom]

US:

¶ “Boise City Aims At 100% Renewable By 2030 For Municipal Operations” • The City of Boise has joined a growing list of cities across the country that have committed to transitioning to 100% renewable energy sources. The Boise city facilities are already fueled by a combination of renewable and non-renewable sources. [Boise State Public Radio]

¶ “Renewable energy proposition draws millions of dollars in campaign spending” • Arizona Prop 127 is an initiative to amend the state constitution to require power utilities to get more of their electricity from renewable resources. Both supporters and opponents are currently engaged in a fierce and expensive media battle. [Tucson Local Media]

¶ “Jacksonville utility company wants federal regulators to intervene on Plant Vogtle dispute” • Jacksonville Electric Authority asked federal energy regulators to intervene in its dispute with a Georgia electric agency over an agreement requiring Jacksonville’s ratepayers to help build two nuclear reactors in Georgia. [Savannah Morning News]

<extract> Read More World & US Energy News

Why I chose to look ugly, and the reasoning behind it.

Susan Polgar

Editorial note: The writer of this letter is Susan Polgar who became the Women’s World Chess Champion, pictured with Mikhail Tal, another chess world champion

Here are the reasonings behind it, something I never talked about.

When I was a young chess player, I consciously tried to look as plain and unattractive as possible. Most people never knew why. I never really talked about it. There were 2 main reasons:

1) It is because I was tired of being sexually harassed and hit on constantly by male chess players.

I was often the only girl in all-men chess tournaments (In fact, FIDE severely punished me by taking away my world #1 ranking for choosing to play only against men at that time. I was the only woman in chess history to be punished for wanting to play and beat male chess players). And the behavior of some of these male chess players was absolutely appalling. It sometimes became dangerous.

I wanted to prove myself on the board. I could not care less what people think about how I looked. I was NOT there to "pick up" men. I was always very thankful that my parents (especially my Mother) were always with me at tournaments to try to protect me. It is better today but still bad at times.

2) We were so poor that we had no money for fancy clothes.

Now, I can just be me. So no, most men cannot understand what many girls/women have to endure in chess, especially back then. Sexism and discrimination in chess still exist today, just not as much. This is why I wrote this

“WHY IS THERE A NEED FOR SOME ALL-GIRLS' OR WOMEN’S CHESS TOURNAMENTS?” This is probably one of the top 5 questions I have most often been asked:—

Many girls/women need to be able to set their feet in chess before they can fly. I took this problem head on for decades, and suffered so many severe consequences, so that girls and women of this and future generations can have an open path to bigger heights if they choose to. I am still being blacklisted by many today for exposing the real and serious problems in the sport I love and devoted my entire life to.

Knowing what I had to go through, and the price I had to pay, I would still do it again. It is a fight worth taking on for countless girls and women out there around the world.

Read more letters to Vermont Views >>>

Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Dates and Balsamic Vinegar

Real food from scratch

Notes

10 minutes prep time plus about 30 mins cook time. Try this basic recipe then innovate with added honey, for example.

Ingredients

Brussels Sprouts

Dates

Garlic cloves

Balsamic vinegar

Olive Oil

Prep

Reduce a cup of balsamic vinegar over medium low heat to about half a cup. Vinegar should begin to be syrupy. Refrigerate if you are cooking ahead.

By all means start by turning on the oven to 350 and start the balsamic reduction.

At the same time trim and cut in half the sprouts, toss in a bowl with half a cup of olive oil.

Smash a few cloves of garlic into splinters, sauté, add to sprouts

Cut a handful of dates into slivers. Or figs. Or dried plums...

Cook

You won’t need to coat the baking tray, roast brussels and garlic for about 30 mins at 350, or for crispy, start at 400 for 10 minutes, and then cook 30 mins at 350.

Combine cooked sprouts, garlic, dates and as much of the balsamic as you like, serve hot or cold.

Read more FOODISH

GALLERY ONE

A photographic essay on Devon and Cornwall

Anne Lenten, Ed.

A series of photographs about ‘another place’ collected by the remarkable photographer Anne Lenten — Notes by Phil Innes

#6 Mining conditions haven’t changed much in 100 years

See more photos in this article Gallery One >>>

Gardner Motor Cars

Featured Article

Gardner was an automobile maker based in St. Louis, Missouri between 1920 and 1931.

Without a dollar in his pocket, Russell E. Gardner left his home state of Tennessee for St. Louis in 1879. Three-and-a-half decades later he was a multi-millionaire. Gardner had made it big in St. Louis by manufacturing Banner buggies before the turn of the century, and unlike many wagon builders, was well aware of what the automobile age meant to his business. He got started by building new Chevrolet bodies and alongside, his company was building wagons. By 1915 this had led to the complete assembly of Chevrolets in St. Louis and Russell Gardner controlled all Chevrolet trade west of the Mississippi River.

Gardner sold his Chevrolet business to General Motors after his three sons entered the Navy during World War I. After the war, his sons decided to build their own automobiles. The Gardner Motor Company was established with Russell E. Gardner, Sr. as chairman of the board, Russell E. Gardner, Jr. as president, and Fred Gardner as vice-president. Their previous experience had been in the assembling of cars, so it was not surprising that the Gardner was assembled from bought-in parts. Lycoming engines were used throughout the years of production. A four-cylinder model with a 112-inch (2,800 mm) wheelbase and medium price was introduced in late 1919 as a 1920 model.

Sales in 1921 were 3800 cars, which increased in 1922 to 9000. In early 1924 Cannon Ball Baker established a new mid-winter transcontinental record from New York to Los Angeles in 4 days, 17 hours, and 8 minutes in a Gardner. They started to prepare to expand the product line and distributorship network. The plant's capacity was 40,000 cars annually, and by 1925 these included both sixes and eights. The fours were dropped in 1925, with both sixes and eights being produced in 1926 and 1927.

For 1927 and 1929 the eights were the only engines used. The interior of the Series 90 cars had many high-quality materials, such as silver-finished hardware, silk window curtains, walnut wood pieces and mohair upholstery (Series 75 and 80 did not have walnut in the interior.) All cars had a gas gauge and temp. gauge standard. During the summer of 1929, Gardner announced two "very important" automobile contracts. The first was with Sears, Roebuck and Company, who wanted Gardner to develop a new car to be sold by mail order. The other was with New Era Motors, to manufacture the front-wheel-drive Ruxton. With the stock market crash in late 1929, both deals were off.

<extract>  Read more yore

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

Lessons We Must Learn

Jeri Rose

When I was in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, I experienced personally that the weather was near perfect. The trees were tall and spread their branches forming a roof above which was a continuous layer of clouds. If I got a bit cool, all I had to do was go where one of the giant trees had fallen breaking the continuity of the canopy, and as a result of that one tree being gone, the hole in the canopy produced a hole in the clouds above...the sun came through. I would sit on the trunk of the fallen tree and warm up and once warmed by that extremely hot sun, I would return to be under the canopy where the clouds also existed above and be comfortable again. That experience taught me so much about the inter-dependency of trees, sky and weather.

Read more Jeri Rose >>>

WRITE ON !

TYRANT!

Phil Innes

Limitless self-regard.

Law breaker.

The pleasure of inflicting pain.

The compulsive desire to dominate.

Pathologically narcissistic and supremely arrogant.

A grotesque sense of entitlement never doubting he can do whatever he chooses.

He loves to bark orders and watch underlings scurry to carry them out.

He expects absolute loyalty but is incapable of gratitude.

The feelings of others mean nothing to him, he has no natural grace nor humanity, nor decency.

He is not merely indifferent to the law, he hates it. He takes pleasure in breaking it. He hates it because it gets in his way and he holds the public good in contempt.

He divides the world into winners and losers; the winners arouse his regard in so far as he can use them to his own ends. The losers arouse only his scorn. The public good is something only losers like to talk about. What he likes to talk about is winning.

He has always had wealth, was born into it and makes ample use of it. Although he enjoys what money can get him, it is not what most excites him. What excites him is the joy of domination, he is a bully easily enraged who strikes out at anyone who stands in his way.

He enjoys seeing others cringe, tremble or wince with pain. He is gifted with detecting weakness and deft at mockery and insult.

These skills attract followers who are attracted to the same cruel delights.

Although they know that he is dangerous his followers help him to advance to his goal which is the attainment of supreme power.

His possession of power includes the subjugation of women, he despises them more than desires them.

Sexual conquest excites him but only for the endlessly reiterative truth that he can have anything he likes.

He knows that virtually everyone hates him.

This makes him feverishly alert to rivals and conspiracies but it soon begins to eat away and exhaust him and sooner or later he is brought down.

He dies unloved and unlamented. He leaves behind only wreckage.

<Extract>

Read More Phil Innes >>>

GUEST ARTCLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #15

Some sentences from Cuba

Mac Gander

It is dawn in La Habana and I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music” as my wife Shanta sleeps in the next room and I mark the end of our third week here. One week to go. Travel is exhausting. There is no moment in which one does not wish to be awake.

I am thinking of the opening trope in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro,” where he invokes Marley as one of the three great gods still left in the Florida Keys after a nuclear holocaust, a book that ends with a war-ship returning to those shores after a 90-year quarantine, from Cuba, a grey ship that is taller than the sky.

GUEST ARTICLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #12

What lies beneath: Our stories our ghosts

Shanta Lee Gander

Who came first?  Europa or Europe?  With some research, I could get an answer, but the story of a girl who keeps dreaming about two continents fighting over her and who meets her fate and immortality with a God turned beautiful bull is an old one

SPECIAL FEATURE

A Dance with Hermes

Ken Masters

‘Into this hallowed room (I remember a gratifying visiting Professor of Logic, who, whilst debunking “Eastern Philosophy”, and cutting short his fourteen pages of definitions of “consciousness”, waved his arms in the air, inviting in the energy to energise the very expression of his de-bunking – which intangibility I can not possibly recognise, classify, or exonerate) came one Lindsay Clarke, propagating one irritatingly intangible “(A Dance With) Hermes”, full of vital “presence”, whom I hoped I had seen off aeons ago.

Halley’s Debris

Vermont Views

Debris from Halley’s Comet to spark Orionid meteor shower this weekend, Oct 19 to 21ß

Cloud-free conditions will allow much of the United States to see this weekend’s Orionid meteor shower, the first major shower of the fall.

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