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PHOTO OF THE DAY

Chicago

BY CARL SANDBURG

Photo - unknown source

Hog Butcher for the World,

   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

   Stormy, husky, brawling,

   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

   Bareheaded,

   Shoveling,

   Wrecking,

   Planning,

   Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

PASSAGES

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Text selections by Vermont Views

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, 'We, the people.'

America is known as a country that welcomes people to its shores. All kinds of people. The image of the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus' famous poem. She lifts her lamp and welcomes people to the golden shore, where they will not experience prejudice because of the color of their skin, the religious faith that they follow.

All respect for the office of the presidency aside, I assumed that the obvious and unadulterated decline of freedom and constitutional sovereignty, not to mention the efforts to curb the power of judicial review, spoke for itself.

My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.

A gender line... helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.

It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation.

I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in 2012.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Read more PASSAGES >>>

Recent Passages By: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 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

Half Wild: Stories

Robin MacArthur

Ecco, 2016.

Reviewed by Laura Stevenson

Local Writer Portrays The Other Vermont

In this debut collection of skillfully-crafted short stories, Robin MacArthur, a third-generation member of the Marlboro MacArthur family, joins Howard Frank Mosher and Castle Freeman in portraying characters set in an intimately-known Vermont landscape. All eleven stories are set in the fictionalized environs of Marlboro, and readers with local knowledge will recognize such recurring road names as Stark, Butterfield, Augur Hole. They may, however, be less familiar with the culture that dominates the collection. While the term "half wild" is used to describe wolf-dog hybrids in the opening story, in a larger sense, it describes the ethos of the stories: a world that MacArthur deliberately contrasts with Vermont's image of pastoral loveliness and its tangential relationship with the American Dream. The characters hover on the edge of poverty. While they appreciate (with varying degrees of resentment and frustration) the beauty of the woods that surrounds them, they live in trailers or shacks, disintegrating farm houses whose pastures are going to scrub, or "collections of rooms" that have never quite evolved into houses. Their recreations are TV, drugs, beer, whiskey, and occasional parties in which everybody gets stoned or laid. And yet, their world has a hold on them, even when they leave. "There are two worlds I won't ever belong to," says the narrator of "The Women Where I'm From," who has returned from Seattle to visit her dying mother. "Home or any other."

MacArthur's stories relate "home," a freighted term in anybody's vocabulary, to the illusions and distortions with which her characters consider their histories. In one of the most deftly-written stories, "The Heart of the Woods," Sally, the daughter of a logger, wife of a real estate developer, briefly returns to her past as she drinks with her father at a bar.

Read the full review and other reviewed titles in this column.

The Devil in the Valley — Castle Freeman, Jr.

Vermont Exit Ramps II — Neil Shepard and Anthony Reczek

Half Wild: Stories — Robin MacArthur

NOT QUITE THE THING

Sponsored by Delectable Mountain Cloth

Caption It!

MM Kizi

Series 27 images

SHORTS

Nurses, Immigrants, Religion, & forget the Almond Milk

Vermont Views

STATISTIC: Nurses remain the most revered of 20 occupations rated for their honesty and ethics. Members of Congress and telemarketers are the least revered. — Gallup

STATISTIC: In contrast to most prior refugee situations, Americans are more likely to approve (51%) than disapprove (43%) of letting Central American refugees into the U.S. — Gallup

STATISTIC: Seventy-two percent of Americans say religion is important to them, but few think its influence on U.S. life is increasing, and a record-low 46% say it can solve most problems — Gallup

STATISTIC: What people don’t know is the environmental damage almond plantations are doing in California, and the water cost. It takes a bonkers 1,611 US gallons (6,098 litres) to produce 1 litre of almond milk,” says the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Pete Hemingway. Over 80% of the world’s almonds are grown in California, which has been in severe drought for most of this decade.

Read More shorts

MONKEY’S CLOAK

Ultima thule

Charles Monette

somewhere out beyond Pluto

at the canescent center of stars

clumping marbles compact to ride on wind

man does a fly-by of purest exploration

precious data beaming

astrophysicists’ agog as if it were the clue

who/what are you?

bowling pin gone, snowman of the galaxies

hurtling asteroids stuck together

Ultima & thule, NASA’s named you

static electricity, gas & space dried mire

sucked in a vast vacuum

two spheric lobes combed together

farthest, oldest cosmic body

reflecting light like garden dirt’s dusty miller

New Horizons’ icy beyond distant suns

white glove smooths over empyrean’s window sill

dust jacket removed

just 4.5 billion years ago, a cloud of frozen pebbles conjoining

slow motioning slow, resting on each other

somewhere beyond Pluto

<extract> Read more Monkey’s Cloak

VERMONT DIARY

490 — a record!

Phil Innes

Last Friday the local soup kitchen where I attend Loaves and Fishes served 490 meals, a record high! Included in this reckoning was food for 40 children at an adjacent  daycare center, plus meals for them and their families for the weekend. The rest was a larger than normal demand by walk-in clients  plus their own take-outs, for this early part of the month,

We also had to explain to those attending something not entirely made clear by the Feds or State of Vermont: that the State had anticipated the government shut-down and did a good thing to ensure food-stamps for February — which they drowned in burocratize about if you had signed up late, then to be sure of getting food you should call a certain toll-free number, where it turned out you could wait for 45 minutes or more to be so assured.

The second was even longer epistle about children’s food, some five pages, also intended as a good security notice, but producing the opposite.

The real problem is that there is enough food for all, all the time, and the guy you see pan-handling down at the bridge by the co-op ‘for food’ is collecting for some other reason. I have even seen people pan-handling there during meal-times at the two food kitchens in Brattleboro, ourselves and Bridget’s.

It’s not ‘raising awareness’ of hunger that is the problem, but a lack of contribution to tending to the hungry by making food for them. That is to say, if you have skills to do so, good hygiene and safety, knife safe, and worth training since you will become actually useful beyond 2 or 3 weeks of training.

That is the big yawn at hunger ground-zero contrasted with what the chattering classes say about hunger.

<Extract>

Read More VERMONT DIARY >>>

LOVE IN ACTION

A Ladybug’s New Year

Elizabeth Hill and image by Megan

To what do I owe

the pleasure of your visit

little ladybug.

~David LaSpina

The first thing I see when I wake each morning is “My Gratitude Wall.” This wall, which faces me about four feet from the foot of my bed, brings me out from under the covers each new day with a smile in my heart. Every single item on this wall carries a personal story. Most are handmade, many given to me as gifts over the last couple of decades.

The sweet ladybug image you see here is my wall’s latest addition, given to me this Christmas. It is a trivet made from a drawing by a very dear child named Megan, who was just five years old when she drew it. 

The past few days, I’ve been mostly confined to bed due to a nasty virus. As I sit here writing, Megan’s lovely Ladybug—having arrived here in the nick of time to usher in 2019—fills my heart with a dose of hope for the days ahead. 

Unlike many other insects, ladybugs are friendly workers and protectors in gardens, as their favorite food are aphids and other bugs that destroy crops and flowers. Ladybugs’ life cycles are similar to butterflies. They begin as an egg, advance to a larva stage, and then to a pupae stage from which emerges a lovely adult ladybug. Once full grown, they can live up to a year, depending on their environment. 

Ladybugs’ symbolism is commonly considered to be good luck and prosperity in life and love. In spirit animal traditions, ladybugs are seen as messengers of promise that reconnect us to the joy of life.

Extract Read More Elizabeth Hill >>>

WRITE WALK

Auld Lang Syne

Susan Cruickshank

We have made it through the holy nights of the holiday season. We’ve closed with the celebrations of the Epiphany and before that we rang in the New Year singing Robbie Burns’ classic, “Auld Lang Syne.” A song that asks us to remember by reminding us what we have forgotten. 

And with this paradox in hand we move into the deepest part of winter.

A time of extreme darkness, the harshest months of the year, before the light returns. This time of darkness invites us to dig deep into its mysteries, offering us its wisdoms if we would opened our hands and receive. To receive from the depths, from the places of not knowing, to trust in the consuming, to have faith we will not be consumed. For it is only by experiencing the darkness that we can recognize the light and only by relinquishing our power, or our idea of it, that we are given true power. It is in the empty space where all is found, where our hope is found.

Unfortunately, our world teaches us that Shadow is bad, it instructs us to push away the time of Shadow. But to do so is at our own peril. To do so is to ignore the relationship between Shadow and Light, to fail to recognize that Shadow can only exist because the Light is near.

By pushing away what we most desperately need, we miss the gifts that Shadow brings to us.

Shadow provides shade and protection when our fragile skin is not equipped to receive the full heat of direct sunlight. The shadowy darkness is a place of respite which nourishes in a way that can only come from the dark and the silence. This truth is not simply the case in the physical world but provides insight into our emotional landscape as well. Shadow’s arrival informs us that our emotional skin needs some protection and rest. It’s not pathological, on the contrary, it illustrates our body’s innate intellect urging us toward health. It beckons us to slow down and walk our path with more intention by making our world a little smaller. In a manic and busy world, where ‘busy’ is held in the highest regard for its own sake rather than any sort of meaningful output, is it any wonder that the gifts of the Shadow are scoffed at and bathed in shame? 

<Extract> Read More Susan Cruickshank >>>

AN A-MUSING LIFE

One Moment, Please

Nanci Bern

I am in a car on a New England highway. It is a sunny winter day. This ride could not be more different than the one I took last month. I recall that day because it is 4 days before New Year's Eve and we still have had no snow to speak of. This does not make my inner snow bunny smile.

It was 1:00 pm. The drive from Vermont took the requisite 3.5 hours. The sky grew grey and menacing the closer I got to New York City and the anticipation of having a much missed hometown exploit. Snow was in the forecast. I hadn't been in a winter snow in my beloved concrete jungle in years. Not that I do not appreciate where I live now; but I am split like a log being halved for a winter wood stove.

My friend came to the lobby and introduced me to the doorman. He entered me in the computer so other building folks would know that I passed muster to be allowed to traipse in and out for the week. When I saw myself being popped into the thing a.k.a., the real doorman, I wondered if it was related to H.A.L.

So up we went to settle me in, then just as quickly we spun around to walk the streets of Broadway and West End. Oh, the grit and wait, the harsh swirl of wind (?) that was wrapping itself around my ankles made me stop. I took a whiff of the air with my now New England snout and knew we were going to be in for it. 'This can't be good', I thought. I tried to ferry my friend along all of our stops to avoid the ensuing deluge, but she wouldn't heed my warning.

Yup, we got caught in it. We got so caught in it that I stopped seeing a way out. The snow came down fast, wet and heavy. Frenzy ensued. <extract>

Read more Nanci Bern

OPEN MIND

Transcultural Awareness Dining

Offie Wortham

Schools and workplaces should have eating places that are set aside for students and workers who would like to know more about each other. In our Multicultural society there is an emphasis on differences which divide us, instead of similarities which bring us together. We should seek common ground.

Many choose certain schools and workplace environments for their diversity. Not to self-segregate and have little or no communication between each other, but to get to know more about a person from outside of their own sub-culture. With a change in circumstances, enemies sometimes become friends.

A Transcultural Awareness Dining Area could be a set-aside area for eating or communicating in a cafeteria or dining room where people would meet specifically to learn how to communicate with an individual from a different ethnic group, race, religion, country, gender, or socio-economic background. This type of stress-free interaction would be a good way for individuals to break away from groups or individuals who are ethnocentric or bonded by a fraternity, group of jocks, nerds, intellectuals, secret society, or some other confining clique. It can even help a couple to be free to sit apart and learn something about the interests and world of their associates.

The area should also be Cell-Phone Free. Not mandatory, but with a sign or poster of cell-phone with the wide red line crossing it diagonally. It is obvious what the advantages would be to uninterrupted discussion if cell-phones were voluntarily turned off in the area.

Simple to initiate, and possibly of great benefit to students and the workplace. Transcultural Awareness Dining will help produce a zone of true communication and community.

<extract>    Read More Offie Wortham >>>

Scandinavian Christmas Dishes

Real food from scratch, submitted by Anneli Karniala

One thing is for sure. When there are only about 6 hours or less of daylight during December, depending on location, Scandinavians know how to light up the darkness. It is with beautifully set tables, candlelight along with lamplights, and delicious, satisfying food.  

There are many food traditions in Scandinavia around Christmastime, depending upon country, and whether referring to a company luncheon, a December dinner for guests, Little Christmas Eve dinner (Dec.23), Christmas Eve dinner (the 24th), Christmas Day luncheon (the 25th, actually another dinner!), or 2nd Christmas Day dinner (the 26th). 

As you can see, there's a lot of eating.  And drinking. Of wine, beer, vodka, glögg, eggnog, Akvavit, snaps, aperitifs, etc.  Not much is low-cal!

On Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, for example, there would be several courses.  Typically, the first course would include fish (smoked, or pickled, or salt-and-sugar cured), sausage, head cheese (not a cheese).  Then the main course would perhaps have one or two of the following: roast duck, roast pork, beef roast, turkey, ham along with various condiments and sauces. The accompanying dishes could be any of the following: braised red cabbage, creamed kale, caremelized potatoes, potato casserole, rutabaga casserole, beet salad, green beans, peas. Various breads or rolls are also served.

Here are 2 recipes that are often prepared at Christmas in Denmark.

LEVERPOSTEJ (Danish Liver Paté)

GRAVLAX   (salt-and-sugar-cured salmon)

serves 10-12

Read on for ingredients and procedures

Read more FOODISH

MEANDERINGS

Sunday quiet

Charles Monette

Sunday quiet, December 9th, 2018.  The promise of sun and warmer temps, perhaps a high of 33, brought me to the mountain.  That and a wish for fresh air, solitude… a little exercise.  As I begin each hike, I think that today the mountain will offer something that I haven’t encountered before.  Hoping each time that when I get to the top, I will have experienced more than just the lonely mountain wind.

Does a mountain have a soul?  Does it hold the words, the dreams, the steps of those who walk upon it?  Are legendary spirits, tricksters or venerable elders of Abenaki lore still about, dancing in the rustle of leaves, slip gliding on snow, whispering to each other on the breeze?   Sometimes a voice riding the wind comes out of the emptiness. As if startled by a dream, I scanned the sky and listened.  Bird calls seemed fewer and more muted.  The sky more clouded over than forecast.  As Vonnegut would say, “so it goes.”  So, I go…

Thoughts meander in the present future past.  Black Mountain’s eastern trailhead is covered with 3 or 4 inches of snow as I embark upon today’s climb.  Snow on the trail had been walked on, creating little wavelets of frozen footprints to negotiate.  Slippery ones… It was cold, but not unreasonably so in the lower woodland.   Since I was the only one on the mountain, and not up for a fall, I decided to take it slow.

Stone walls appeared below caps of snow.  A few south side stones were beginning to peak through.  Sun had melted through from above creating small patches of wet & dry russety brown leaves that afforded moments to engage a steady gait on trail.  They welcomed me, and I them.  Coppery leaves hung down, and exhibited a strong connectedness to their branches, holding on, seemingly shivering in the breeze.  Some smaller trees had been snapped in half by wind, but were held together by splinters to form right triangles to the ground.

Lichen, in all their glory, had come to life with a dampened glow.  Stamped high and low on trees willy-nilly as far as I could see, their viridescence, tinged with the slightest touch of yellow and palest turquoise blue, gave approval to the stark trees they were imprinted on.  The trees didn’t seem to mind this intimate symbiotic relationship that colored their bark with abandon.  In fact, these are called tree dwelling lichen.  For example, on Black Mountain you might find lichen and moss on oak bark.  You can find a multitude of photo images online.  However, I recommend seeing them in person on the mountain.

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

Finnish Fandango

WHAT'S THE RUSH?

Anneli Karniala

    Imagine not having to constantly check the time...your time...the correct time...important time... meeting time...time is flying...it's late...you're late...I don't have time...it's time to go.

Imagine not having to "keep an eye on the time". But, you say, there are important appointments, important meetings, important activities...important this...important that.  

    How many timepieces do you have anyway? Your regular watch, your Fitbit, the clock on your laptop, PC, TV, cell phone, landline answering machine, clock radio, car radio, stereo, living room wall, oven, kitchen wall, alarm clock, and the list goes on and on. Isn't that ridiculous? Go ahead, count your timepieces! Then there are the clocks on streets, on highway signs, at the gas station, at the post office, inside stores. Every which way you turn, you become at least reminded of, or irritated with, if not actually obsessed with, time!

   Imagine instead, listening to your body's signals as to when you're hungry and should eat, when you're tired and should sleep or nap, when you really should turn off the blue light from all your devices that are messing with your ability to fall asleep. Doing all those things without looking at a timepiece.

   Imagine relying on your memory regarding that list of VERY important things you just have to do tomorrow, and falling asleep instead of going over and over it all with your closed eyes and your wide-awake mind. Don't you think you can remember anymore? 

   Imagine actually noticing that it's becoming dusk. Or dawn. The light is different. The sounds are their own. What were the colors of the sky this morning? How did the clouds look at sunset? What kind of bird was warbling outside your window at sunrise -- did you listen to it?  Did you hear the screech owl in the neighbor's backyard tree this evening? 

   We are all so Busy. Busy With Important Things...therefore, We Are Very Important People!

   That is the fallacy in our thinking. We, you and I, are no more important than anyone else. Where did this narcissistic focus come from?

    We surely didn't learn it from our parents. Their life-times are referred to by many as "the good ole days", "back in the day", "when life was simpler".   Well, I don't really think that life was simpler then. On the contrary. They tended to their jobs, their homes, their yards, their families, their friends, their neighborhoods. As do folks today. 

    But there were major differences too.

Extract Read more Anneli Karniala

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 >>>

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

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 >>>

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 >>>

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.

Take #7

Vermont Views

January 19th 2019

The good news is that it isn’t 3 feet, only 2. The bad news is that the second foot is going to be sleet and freezing rain. 

Whatever the snowfall amounts Monday 21st January looks brutal with a high with windchill of -7F.

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