The Penultimate Issue

Here she is at the LiBerry Music Festival, Carey Seward, musician and playwright, founder of Seward's Follies, on the cover of the penultimate issue of The Ester Republic. Or possibly the last issue, but what I put on the cover was the word "penultimate," thinking that perhaps I didn't mean it but too tired to look it up. Hah! My subconscious really didn't want to let it go.
At any rate, now I have that ambiguous possibility waiting for me, the hope left in print on the early October 2012 issue of Ester's only paper that it might in fact return, left there due to bleary eyes and a late night trying to get the last damn issue to bed and off to the printer, once again without enough of the right kind of help, despite the good intentions of so many good people.
And now, people still ask me from time to time if the Republic will ever return, or they tell me they miss it. I miss it too.

I think about what the next issue tagline could be:

• the Resurrection Issue (implies it'll go on living, if the Romans don't get it)
• the Zombie Issue (much more probable scenario, at least insofar as the condition of Madame Publisher is likely to be)
• the Revival Issue (I doubt I'll get Religion, but who knows?)
• the Reawakened Issue (it was asleep all along, just hibernating here in the north, folks)

See how much fun this could be?
However, the Republic won't be back until the library is built. I just can't handle two enormous projects at the same time. (No guarantees, folks!)

Farms, schools, soil, and dirt

As the Comparative Farming & Sustainable Food Systems course has progressed, I have, predictably, gotten farther and farther behind in my reading. In part, this is due to the continuing snowstorm of papers, theses, articles, poems, essays, and miscellaneous book recommendations we keep getting from our professor, Craig Gerlach, and his teaching assistant, Bob Mikol (not to mention the occasional suggested piece from various students in the class). There is just no way to keep up. I'm keeping a couple of binders and printing out the various publications I get from them, and I keep finding new and interesting titles to purchase at Gulliver's. These include:

The Taste for Civilization: The Connection Between Food, Politics, and Civil Society, by Janet A. Flammang, and The End of Food, by Paul Roberts

Likewise, I've not been able to keep up with blogging on the class. Johanna Harron came in to talk to us about the Farm-to-School program set up by the state of Alaska (she's the program's only employee so far). The program covers school nutrition, local food systems, and education around food. Nancy Tarnai did an interview with her about her thesis project and about the program.

Last week, Mike Emers of Rosie Creek Farm taught the class, concentrating on soil, dirt, and some farming how-to. So far it has been very interesting. He told us about the phrase "organic farming," apparently coined by one Lord Northborne in 1940 in his book Look to the Land. Mike also told us about Rudolf Steiner, the father of biodynamic agriculture, or the view that a farm as a whole should or can be seen as an organism.

One thing Mike said sticks in my mind: "Farming is a manipulative process." It's all about managing sunlight, water, and soil, he said (and plants and animals, of course). Maintaining economic and ecologic sustainability is a matter of minimizing off-farm inputs to sustain the farm in perpetuity. That requires a lot of work, a lot of manipulation of the systems on the farm. He offered a list of useful books, bringing in well-worn and frankly battered copies of each of them:

• The New Organic Grower, by Eliot Coleman
• Organic Vegetable Production
  
• Building Soils for Better Crops, by Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es
  
• The Soul of Soil, by Grace Gershuny and Joe Smillie
• Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America, by Steven Stoll
  
• Sustainable Vegetable Production from Start-Up to Market (dated but still great, Mike said)

He also recommended an article by William S. Cooter, "Ecological Dimensions of Medieval Agrarian Systems," published in Agricultural History.

Mike mostly concentrated on soil. He described four basic elements of soil that are important to the farmer: structure, soil organic matter (the key to how most organic farmers manage the soil), biology, and nutrients (including water). There was quite a bit of interesting info in this discussion, which explained a few things that I'd never quite understood, although I've been working with soil scientists here at SNRAS for a good decade and had seen some of the terms. Plants, Mike said, decompose into very small, complex particles that have negative charges, which attract cations of the nutrients plants need and hold onto water. The cation exchange capacity of soil is its ability to exchange positive ions of nutrients between organic matter and plant root hairs. Good tilth exists when there is good soil structure and high soil organic matter. Humus is compost broken down further into soil organic matter, very tiny pieces that are useable by plants. Most farms in the country, Mike explained, have very low SOM, about one half of one percent, because of erosion, soil compaction from heavy machinery, chemical contamination due to salt buildup from chemical fertilizers, and poor tilling practices that destroy soil structure.

The problem of poor tillage was broached in the movie The Plow That Broke the Plains. The culprits in poor tillage are (aside from a farmer's failure to understand the value of good soil structure) excessive use of the moldboard plow, the disc harrow, and the rototiller. Good soil has clods (little ones) that hold moisture and nutrients. Too much tilling breaks up these clods, and accelerates microbial action which then releases carbon and breaks down the soil organic matter. Rototilling, in fact, can turn your soil into powdery dust. Overtillage did just that (combined with drought years) during the Dust Bowl.

Mike described machinery that has been invented that doesn't destroy the soil structure, or at least not as much: the chisel plow, the articulating spader, and a couple of other gizmos. Mike liked a company owned by a pair of inventor brothers, I think this company in Pennsylvania.

We then went on to talk about green manure, fallowing, and cover crops, no-till methods which seem to require either herbicides or crushing implements to keep the off-season greeneries from becoming weeds later on. No-tillage farming results in more perennial weeds and it cools the soil---not an advantage in the north.

More later!

Cross-posted at SNRAS Science & News.

Previous posts in this series:

Seven industrial agriculture myths

Farming systems and Food, Inc.

Financial finagling in food and sustainability
Food systems, policy, and foodsheds
Food systems and shizen
Sustainable food systems class

Ukulele madness: Carl Ostergren's banjolele

On January 6, I received a belated inheritance: my grandfather's banjo ukulele. Chip Funk, family friend and luthier, had helped my mother clean out my grandparents' house after my grandmother died. Grandpa had died several years before that, but in a closet in the livingroom was stashed an old canvas case containing a banjo uke. My grandfather, I discovered when I talked with my mom about this delightful instrument, had been in minstrel shows (in blackface) back in the thirties, maybe the twenties, too. He used to ride a motorcycle around New England with his banjolele strapped to his back, playing music with friends.

I didn't know what a banjolele was until this summer, when Gretchen Kerndt brought hers out to the Golden Eagle to jam with Lost Dog on the porch. This one has the original skin drum on it, signed by my grandfather's friends (and his brother Harold, too).



It sounds a lot like a banjo, only not quite so twangy. It's a little smaller than a tenor banjo, and the strings are nylon. Buck thinks it's a Sears Silvertone, but it's hard to tell—no brand name on it anywhere. The tailpiece is a replacement for the original. It has a nice sound. More reasons to practice!

So this makes now four ukuleles: my Lanikai baritone, the Lanikai soprano, my Kala mangowood cutaway baritone with pickup, and my mystery banjo uke. I've been taking lessons with Russell Copelin (had my third lesson last Monday); that's been helping, but I REALLY need to practice every day. I slacked off a bit this week.

I've been showing off my banjolele to the Banana Girls and various local musicians. Last night Robin Dale Ford, Pat Fitzgerald, Richard Fineberg, Andy from on Pebble Road, Hans, and a couple of other people came to the Eagle to jam. I brought ukes and played a bit, but definitely could not keep up. It was lots of fun, though. Hans made a case for the banjolele, a temporary one of foam, duct tape, ribbons, and a bungie cord, but he's making a sturdy wooden one of cedar for it.

The Editors' Revenge: hilarity at the expense of politicians

It's an occupational hazard: editors, if the ones I know are representative of the field, compulsively edit. And that includes the often poorly composed political speech. We do it for money, we do it for amusment, we do it because we love picking nits. Vanity Fair decided they couldn't stand it, and provided this priceless edit of Sarah Palin's sayonara speech.

Say I: HAH HA HA HA HA HOO HOO HAR HAR HEE HEE HA HA HA!

Ahem.

Big tip o' the hat to Ross Coen for forwarding this link to me.

Gibberish

This morning on the news I heard part of Sarah Palin's farewell address. It was gibberish. It was full of clichés, incomplete sentences, full of stereotypes of the military, of the media, of government, whiny excuses for why she did or didn't do X, Y, or Z. This transcript is somewhat cleaned up, but it's still a pretty bad speech.

It's all about patriotism, and the military, and driling, and hunting, and the free market, and evil Hollywood and evil government.

I promised that we would manage our fish and wildlife for abundance, and that we would defend the constitution, and we have, though outside special interest groups they still just don't get it on this one. Let me tell you, Alaskans really need to stick together on this with new leadership in this area especially, encouraging new leadership... got to stiffen your spine to do what's right for Alaska when the pressure mounts, because you're going to see anti-hunting, anti-second amendment circuses from Hollywood and here's how they do it. They use these delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets, they use Alaska as a fundraising tool for their anti-second amendment causes. Stand strong, and remind them patriots will protect our guaranteed, individual right to bear arms, and by the way, Hollywood needs to know, we eat, therefore we hunt.

Good god. What a load of pap.

The thing about this is that what she's talking about is in fact important, but she debases all of it: good government, responsible journalism, military service, energy independence, political responsibility, public service, environmental stewardship, subsistence living.

What a maroon.

Why the post office has such a miserable reputation

With apologies to the many postal workers I know who do a great job, today I encountered a frustrating example of idiocy in the post office. Three returned copies of Agroborealis, addressed to people in Cuba, bore this stamped notice:

"Return to sender for correction. Country name must be in English on last line of address and not abbreviated."

Hmm. So "Cuba" in Spanish, on the last line of the address, must be written in English, like this: "Cuba." Right. The way it was actually written. And apparently it can't be abbreviated as "Cuba." It's got to be "Republic of Cuba."

Like they can't tell "Cuba" from some other country? Sheesh. They certainly seem to be able to tell that "China" means "People's Republic of China" with no trouble, judging from the lack of returns from Asia. Maybe Cuba's a special case, providing particular literary challenges to the foreign-mail sorting machines and/or workers.

Thus confirming my suspicion that the people handling foreign-bound mail can't read, or at least, not very well.

Innocent Americans and Sarah Palin

Jamie is stirring up a spot of trouble with one of his cartoons (so what else is new?) when it appeared on Alaska Report:

The cartoon links to the original post on Jamie's blog, Ink & Snow.

Funeral today

Lee Schauer's obituary is now on line at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

The thing about obits is that, although they tell you the facts, it's hard to get a good sense of what the person was like, just from reading the obituary. An obituary is written so as to be kind to the people left behind, usually, so they don't have to hurt more than they already do. Lee called it like he saw it, blunt sometimes. Not an in-your-face kind of guy, at least when I would encounter him, usually at a party or at the Eagle, but damn direct when he spoke. He struck me as honest, solid, a bit wild too. A good laugh. I imagine that if he'd written his own obituary, it would sound quite different. I can't see him being easy on himself...

Hans and I went to his and Star's wedding, at Hartung Hall. Lee was in a tux, which was shocking. I was used to him in blue jeans and leather jackets. Yet, he didn't wear it as though it was uncomfortable--a man with a wide sartorial range.

In praise of dawdling

I am a dawdler at heart. Always was, when I was a kid. This feeling that plagues me nowadays, as an adult, of having Too Much To Do, gives me a panicky feeling that I hate. Paul Adasiak, over at the Fairbanks Pedestrian, hit it on the head with his post on the metaphor, "Life is a Highway," when he described it as odious.

Indeed.

So we zoom from birth to death as fast as we can with as few stops along the way as possible when we live our lives as though they are highways. And occasionally we get stuck in traffic jams. But basically, we're in a metal box of a life on a concrete, ugly, high-speed and pretty much pointless rush to get nowhere.

Nuh-uh. That is not the life for me. Yesterday I had a perfectly delightful, very productive, very slow and dawdle-filled day. I even took a nap, but I got rid of a huge pile of paper trash, planted seeds of various sorts for my garden, swept up, put away dishes, got the mail, and tidied. I did it slowly and with a great sense of satisfaction. I made quite a bit of vitamin D for myself. (It was sunny, and I made sure to stand in it for a while.)

It's amazing how much one can get done without noticing it when one dawdles and meanders and putters. And it's very relaxing. I always feel as though I'm in a huge stressful rush at my campus job (and frequently with the Republic), and I don't think it's very good for my health.

The definition of community

According to Webster's New Collegiate:

community: 1 : a : a unified body of individuals: as a : STATE, COMMONWEALTH b : the people with common interests living in a particular area; broadly the area itself c : an interacting population of various kinds of individuals (as species) in a common location d : a group of people with a common characteristic or interest living together within a larger society.

Note the repeated emphasis on a group of people living in a specific geographic location. The definition goes on, of course, with more variations on this first definition of the term, and other definitions including "society at large" and "joint ownership or participation." Still, the main definition of community involves these two key elements: a group of people and a location.

Readers of this blog and/or of my newspaper may have caught on by now that I am a big fan of local agriculture. Particularly small-scale, organic, gardening-type smallholder agriculture. This has developed over the last several years (although my mother instilled in me a love of gardening from way back) in large part due to the work of the people at Calypso Farm & Ecology Center. I'd not heard of the community supported agriculture concept before 2000, when the farm was established, although I had discovered things like Findhorn back when I was 21 and the concept of organic and heirloom seeds from Seeds of Change and other like-minded seed companies back when I was living in Seattle.

So it rather fries my editorial oats when I read things like this article on Full Circle Farm's subscription service to Alaska communities, in which the author describes Full Circle as a CSA:

The shipment is part of the Full Circle Farm’s community-supported agriculture program, or CSA, which mails fruits and vegetables from the Washington farm directly to Alaska residents. Unlike traditional farms, which sell their produce by weight to grocery stores, CSAs are supported by consumers who essentially buy into the farm itself. Instead of paying for five apples and a head of lettuce, for example, consumers pay a flat rate for a weekly box, or share, of whatever the farm has produced.

The article goes on to describe Glacier Valley Farm as a CSA and other, long-established CSAs as "new":

By all accounts there is a kind of movement gathering, with new CSA farms popping up in the Anchorage, Fairbanks and Mat-Su areas. These farms are earning popularity among Alaska “locavores,” people who want to eat produce that is grown in their area because they believe it’s healthier or more sustainable than the produce shipped long distances. While Glacier Valley Farm is completely Alaska grown in the summer, in the winter they fortify their local carrots, potatoes, onions and rutabagas with organic fruits and vegetables from outside the state.

Let's get this straight: Full Circle Farm is NOT a CSA, not in Alaska. What Glacier Valley does is based in Alaska, but they are also a subscription service, at least to the Bush, and in winter.

The problem of lack of affordable fresh food in the villages is directly related to the lack of farms there. And, of course, winter. And it's a serious problem, but one that is, for each village, a microcosmic example of the situation that the entire state of Alaska is in. Hell, we ship in 95% or so of our food! That is in no way sustainable or good for the local economy. Sending money Outside for food, even fresh, organic food, is still sending money Outside.

Still, the author is correct: new farms are getting started, and new CSA programs associated with them. Older farms/gardens are beginning to adopt the CSA model. Smaller communities outside traditional Alaska farming regions are developing CSAs. For example, Twitter Creek Gardens in Homer, Jewell Gardens in Skagway, Meyers Farm in Bethel. Even the oldest Alaska CSAs are less than ten years old. But Full Circle is new to Alaska too. As the News-Miner says:

Community Supported Agriculture, commonly called CSA is relatively new to the Tanana Valley. It is a partnership between a local farm and a community of shareholders who buy in for a bounty of fresh vegetables delivered weekly over the summer months.

It's actually really wonderful to see all these news stories and opinion pieces about local agriculture. But I think it is important to keep the distinction clear between local agriculture and import agriculture. Describing the latter as though it is community supported is just plain incorrect.

You said it, Neil!

Every once in a while, Neil Davis lets 'er rip. Consider this choice description:

[T]he private health insurance industry is merely a funds-sucking tapeworm in the gut of the American health care financing system, one that funnels off a huge portion of the funds that should be used to pay for health care.

And he has good reason to think so.

What 9/11 has brought us

Seven years ago, approximately 3,000 people of many nationalities, ethnicities, and languages died in horrific acts of mass murder committed on the United States' eastern seaboard. The world commiserated with us, offered help and sympathy. We mourned.

Great leaders take the adversities of a nation and inspire their people to rise above them. To offer hope, and direction, and resolve, to move an injured people to do great things, requires a person who can orate, who can give us meaningful, potent words that appeal to our higher selves and make us believe that we can do more, that we are meant to be noble, selfless, brave, generous—a great leader not only leads us to breathe in those words and ideas and feelings, a great leader helps us to find the abilities we need within ourselves to actually be what is needed. Literally, in • spirare, to breathe in.

Unfortunately, we didn't have a great leader.

We had a poor orator and simplistic thinker—but one with a good speechwriter, and with a group of men and women behind him devoted to twisted ideals. And so, when he and they spoke to the nation and the world, we heard an appeal not to our higher selves, but to that which was basest: an appeal to our fear, for revenge. We heard lies. And because our leader had a good speechwriter, and because it is easier to ignite a mob than to inspire a people, far too many of us became inspired to those horrible words.

Since September 11, 2001, we have:

Roused ourselves to war based on deliberate lies. We are now involved in two wars, one very badly executed in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and are flirting with a third. Approximately 1,255,000 Iraqis have died as a result since we invaded.

Indebted ourselves to the tune of 53 trillion dollars.

Tolerated and even accepted torture as an appropriate means of questioning suspects.

Tolerated the idea that not all men are created equal, and some have fewer rights than others. Those with fewer rights can be declared outside the law, by the president, without explanation or proof of anything, and held indefinitely, secretly, and without access to lawyers or family.

Accepted domestic spying, wiretapping without a warrant, and other features of the surveillance state as normal and even necessary.

Marginalized and even criminalized dissent.

Accepted the corruption and trivialization of the major news media.

Never underestimate the power of the spoken word.

Snitters

Tonight we're going up to my mother's for our traditional Swedish-style Christmas feast (usually we have this meal on Christmas eve, but it was a bit much for Mom this year, so it's been delayed a few days). My mother's family is largely of Swedish background (also French, Russian, and Lithuanian), and certain traditional family foods are made for certain holidays and seasons, shrimp snitters being among them.

The verb "at snitte" or "snitt" means "to cut" in Scandihoovian (well, in Danish and Swedish, anyway), and snitters are small hors d'oeuvres made with crackers or bread as a base, with butter, mayonnaise, paté, aïoli sauce, soft cheese, or other similar on top, with meat slices, seafood, and vegetable sliced thin on top of that. They're like tiny open-faced sandwiches.

This question came up last year, too, when we went to a solstice celebration thrown by some local Scandinavians. Verice and Jackie Doble recently had a Swede visiting with them (Jackie's niece's beau), and he recognized the term. In fact, when we visited their house on Christmas eve, he was making Swedish meatballs (another Christmas staple at my mom's house) and snitters (using tomato, cucumber, dill, crackers, and thin slices of dry salami--yum!).

More designwork: Haines poetry CD

This little project is something I've been working on for Susan Todd, who is producing a CD of John Haines reading his works, poems and essays. I'm looking forward to hearing this when it's done. John Haines, for those of you who don't know, writes very funny political limericks for amusement (he's entered every one of the Republic's annual limerick contests), is an incredible poet in general (lots of awards, Alaska's third poet laureate), and is a tough old homesteader who lived for decades out (way out) on the Richardson.

Pat & Robin over at 10th Planet Recording worked on the sound edit, and Kathy Turco of Alaska's Spirit Speaks did the engineering. Pat Fitzgerald and Robin Dale Ford are well known for their music, and Kathy is an amazing collector of sounds, which she's supplied to major movie studios (in major movies, even).

"Wow, words mean things."

Quote of the day, courtesy Tom Malone! There's a lot in a word. Whole histories and languages and cultures wrapped up in each little sound-symbol-meme. Amazing things, words.

And there's lots of word fans, too:

World Wide Words

Word Spy

the Word Detective

and the inimitable

Word of the Day

Body parts unmentionable

Apparently, the word "scrotum" is now on the censorship list. See, those wicked authors are trying to get one past the elementary school library censors, according to Julie Bosman of the New York Times:

Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase.

But, you know, any word for "balls" is going to be axed, 'cause it's one of those Unmentionable Body Parts, and the point behind censorship is to erase ideas, not words. In other words, even though every little boy (unless they're very unlucky) has a scrotum, they aren't supposed to know about it until they're, what? 18?

(Thanks to Joe of Joe Irvin's Blog for this amazing bit on vocabulary dimunition.)