Cybils widget fun

Look what I have -- over there on the right.

It's a widget with all the Cybils Middle Grade/Young Adult Nonfiction nominees. I found about it from my Cybils GoogleAlert; you can read all about the new widgets at the Cybils website and also at the blog for Adaptive Blue, which did all the widget wizardry. You can click on the book cover or the little blue arrow in a box for the Smart Link information (which you can learn about with the two previous links), or click on the book title for Adaptive Blue's Amazon Associate link to the book. There's a widget available for each of the eight categories, so you can get your own or collect 'em all...

The Water Horse

I'm sorry.

I know going to The Golden Compass is the thing to do this holiday season, but we're not big science fiction fans and don't go to the movies often (there's a tiny theater in town that plays two fairly current flicks at a time) so the kids and I haven't seen The Golden Compass yet, and aren't even pining for the time when it arrives, if it arrives, at the tiny town theater; I'll probably borrow it from the library when it comes out on DVD, though, more for curiosity's sake than anything else. Neither Laura (age 10) nor I have read any of Pullman's series, though I've read and heard a number of interviews with the man, especially lately, and have liked what I've heard.

But last night I discovered a movie I'm pretty sure I would like us to see -- The Water Horse, out on Christmas Day apparently (who knew? none of us), and based on a book by the same name, originally published in 1992, by Dick "Babe" King-Smith. I haven't yet told the kids, because I'd like us to read the book first, especially because the book seems to make the story look properly kid-sized, whereas the movie looks like a rather grandiose version. I discovered the movie because Tom and I saw Millions last night for the first time, and I was enchanted, by the movie and by young Alex Etel, whose second feature will be Water Horse. Sony's website notes that the movie is from Walden Media, the same bunch behind Narnia, which we liked, and Charlotte's Web, which we didn't. But at this point we don't have anything at all invested in the Dick King-Smith original.

I figure that part of the reason I haven't heard about the movie version of The Water Horse is that it's been overshadowed by all this Compass business, and we haven't been to the movies to see trailers in ages. At any rate, I'm glad of another children's movie that sounds more up our alley, though where the line is, for me at least, between fantasy and science fiction I'm not quite sure. But like Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it...

Beyond stocking stuffers for Latin lovers

Harry Mount and his new book, Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life, have made a big splash on this side of the pond, and just in time for Christmas.

From the December 10 issue of The New Yorker:

Last Christmas, the British publisher Short Books issued — along with “Doctor, Have You Got a Minute?” and “Ever Dated a Psycho?” — a two-hundred-and-seventy-two-page half memoir, half manual titled Amo, Amas, Amat . . . and All That, intended, according to its author, Harry Mount, “to give you a pleasurable breeze through the main principles of Latin.” The book was small (bathroom- basket ready), sweet (dedicated to the author’s brother and sister, “Mons Maximus et Mons Maxima”), friendly (cover: cartoon Roman in a toga), and irreverent in a way that might appeal to the sort of rara avis (see page 247) driven to hilarity by a story Mount tells about defacing the cover of Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer to read Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer. But that avis was not so rara after all: the book turned out to be the Tickle Me Elmo of the belletristic-stocking-stuffer trade, selling more than ninety thousand copies. “Mirabile dictu!” the Independent declared. “Lingua Latina superavit!” Chances are, then, that the relative who gave you Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves in 2004 will probably show up this Christmas with Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life, the American edition of Amo, whose original subtitle — “How to Become a Latin Lover” — was nixed after an acquaintance of Mount’s mistook it for a book of antiquarian sex tips. ...

In his book, Mount recasts Kingsley Amis’s idea that bad English speakers fall into two categories—Berks (crass, careless) and Wankers (priggish, overprecise)—saying that Latin readers have a dangerous tendency toward the latter. “People use the Latinate to show off or to be evasive,” Mount explained. “If, using the Anglo-Saxon word, you said, ‘I lied,’ you’d get the sack. Now, if you said, ‘I was economic with the actuality,’ you’d get out of it.”

Mount admits to being something of a Wanker himself, and his book, along with his ridicule of the public education system, has caused a measure of class controversy in the U.K. He began his study of the language as a nine-year-old at a London school called North Bridge House, where Latin was mandatory for boys but not for girls (“a hangover from an old-fashioned gentleman’s education, I suppose”). While he was under the tutelage of the magnificently named Miss Pickersgill, his appreciation of the language blossomed. “Doing Latin was a bit like wearing X-ray specs,” he said. “Everywhere I went, I had the pleasure of knowledge.”

At Oxford, Mount was tapped for the exclusive Bullingdon Club; he enjoys a certain notoriety for having been rolled down a hill in a portable toilet. “It was like coming out of Dracula’s coffin,” he recalled, at a diner near the Met. “I was watching ‘Henry V’ on the plane over—there’s an accepted period of laddish drunkenness in all cultures. The Greeks were keen on wine and sexual misbehavior. There’s a great bit of Plato, often read at weddings, about two halves of the same soul being joined. They always neglect to read the part that says the greatest love of all is between two male halves.”

Mount returned to the subject of his book. “This genre is for people who long to know about difficult things but want them delivered in a jokey, anecdotal way. There’s a tremendous tendency to think the world’s going to the dogs, but there’s an enduring respect for proper things.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a red leather notebook, which he opened to a page filled with schoolboy jottings. He said he loved “Church Going,” the Philip Larkin poem about a young man who will “forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

Digging a little deeper, from Mr. Mount's op-ed piece, "A Vote for Latin", in today's New York Times:

At first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, “Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna.”*

None of the leading presidential candidates majored in Latin. Hillary Clinton studied political science at Wellesley, as did Barack Obama at Columbia. Rudy Giuliani had a minor brush with the language during four years of theology at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn when he toyed with becoming a priest. But then he went on to major in guess what? Political science.

How things have changed since the founding fathers.

Of the 7,000 books originally in Thomas Jefferson’s library, only a couple of dozen are still at Monticello. The rest were sold off by his descendants, and eventually bought back by the Library of Congress. The best-thumbed of those remaining — on a glassed-in shelf in Jefferson’s study — is a copy of Virgil’s “Aeneid.”

Jefferson started learning Latin and Greek at age 9 at a school in Virginia run by a Scottish clergyman. When he was at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a Greek grammar book was always by his side. Tacitus and Homer were his favorites.

High school, Jefferson thought, should center on Latin, Greek and French, with grammar and reading exercises, translations into English and the memorizing of famous passages. In 1819, when Jefferson opened the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (built according to classical rules of architecture), he employed only classically trained professors to teach Greek and Roman history.

This pattern of Latin learning continued for more than 150 years. Of the 40 presidents since Jefferson, 31 have studied Latin, many at a high level. James Polk graduated from the University of North Carolina, in 1818, with top honors in math and classics. James Garfield taught Greek and Latin from 1856 to 1857 at what is now Hiram College in Ohio. Teddy Roosevelt studied classics at Harvard.

John F. Kennedy had Latin instruction at not one, but three prep schools. Richard Nixon showed a great aptitude for the language, coming second in the subject at Whittier High School in California in 1930. And George H. W. Bush, a Latin student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., was a member of the fraternity Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas (Authority, Unity, Truth).

A particular favorite for Bill Clinton during his four years of Latin at Hot Springs High School in Arkansas was Caesar’s Gallic War.

Following in his father’s footsteps, George W. Bush studied Latin at Phillips Academy (the school’s mottoes: “Non Sibi” or not for self, and “Finis Origine Pendet,” the end depends on the beginning).

But then President Bush was lucky enough to catch the tail end of the American classical tradition. Soon after he left Andover in 1964, the study of Latin in America collapsed. In 1905, 56 percent of American high school students studied Latin. By 1977, a mere 6,000 students took the National Latin Exam.

Recently there have been signs of a revival. The number taking the National Latin Exam in 2005, for instance, shot up to 134,873.

Why is this a good thing? Not all Romans were models of virtue — Caligula’s Latin was pretty good. And not all 134,873 of those Latin students are going to turn into Jeffersons.

But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).

Why not just study all this in English? What do you get from reading the “Aeneid” in the original that you wouldn’t get from Robert Fagles’s fine translation, which came out just last year?

Well, no translation, however fine, can ever sound the way Latin was written to sound. To hear Latin poetry spoken smoothly and quickly is to hear a mellifluous, rat-a-tat-tat language, the rich, distilled, romantic, pure, heady blueprint of its close descendant, Italian.

But also, learning to translate Latin into English and vice versa is a tremendous way to train the mind. I think of translating concise, precise Latin into more expansive, discursive English as like opening up a concertina; you are allowed to inject all sorts of original thought and interpretation.

As much as opening the concertina enlarges your imagination, squeezing it shut — translating English into Latin — sharpens your prose. Because Latin is a dead language, not in a constant state of flux as living languages are, there’s no wriggle room in translating. If you haven’t understood exactly what a particular word means or how a grammatical rule works, you are likely to be, not off, but just plain wrong. There’s nothing like this challenge to teach you how to navigate the reefs and whirlpools of English prose.

With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history’s turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America.

You can gain this advantage at any age. Alfred the Great, the ninth-century king of England, who knew how crucial it was to learn Latin to become a civilized leader, took it up in his 30s. Here’s hoping that a new generation of students — and presidents — will likewise recognize that *“if Rome is the eternal city, Latin is the eternal language."

Those crazy Canucks and the dreaded dangling carrot

From an article by Trevor Wilhelm in this past Wednesday's Windsor Star newspaper (emphasis mine):

The local Catholic school board is resisting pressure to remove from its libraries a controversial children's book that critics claim promotes atheism.

The local arm of a national Catholic group wants The Golden Compass -- now a big-budget movie -- banned. It has already been boycotted in the U.S. and banned by another Ontario school board.

"Under the guise of an exciting adventure story, the very clear message being given is that the Catholic church is an evil organization and God and Christianity are a fraud," said Bob Baksi, president of the Windsor Essex County chapter of the Catholic Civil Rights League.

But the local Catholic board, which has had the book in school libraries for a decade, doesn't plan to take it off the shelves.

The Golden Compass is part of a trilogy called His Dark Materials by British writer Philip Pullman. It's set in a parallel world where young heroine Lyra heads to the far north to save her kidnapped friend. She also fights an evil organization called Magisterium, which is the word Catholics use to describe the teaching authority of the church.

The book came out in 1995, but widespread controversy has heated up only recently as the film's Dec. 7 release date draws closer. The Catholic League, which claims to be America's largest Catholic civil rights group, has launched a nationwide boycott campaign.

The Halton Catholic District School Board has pulled the book from its shelves.

Canada's Catholic Civil Rights League issued a warning Monday on its website to members and supporters to not take their children to the movie because of the "strong anti-religious content" in the books.

Randy Sasso, supervisor of faith development with the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board, said the book is on library shelves in only six elementary schools and two high schools. He said it's not popular with students.

The school board never thought about the book's religious implications before, and still isn't worried, he said.

"We never brought a theological perspective to it," Sasso said.

"We treated it as fantasy. It seemed like another Alice in Wonderland, another Chronicles of Narnia. You really have to go through this with a fine tooth comb to catch any of the religious elements. It looks like a real publicity stunt. He's not even a particularly good writer."

Baksi said his group has asked Bishop Ronald Fabbro's office to approach school boards in the London Diocese area about removing the book.

"It shouldn't be in (Catholic) schools in the first place," he said.

Baksi hasn't read the book or seen the yet-to-be released movie, but added that shouldn't undermine his opposition.

"I don't have to see Debbie Does Dallas to know whether it is appropriate or consistent with the faith and values I would like to have in my house for my children," he said.

Baksi said he's heard Hollywood has watered down the more overt religious elements, but worries the movie will encourage people to buy the book for their children.

"The movie is a dangling carrot," he said. ...

Read the rest here.

Except for the gratuitous comment about the quality of Philip Pullman's writing, I'm quite impressed with the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board's approach.

Canadian independent booksellers respond to strong dollar

Just announced, from Audrey's Books, Edmonton's longstanding (50 years) independent bookseller, via The Edmonton Journal [emphases mine]:

The strength of the Canadian dollar and the complaints of customers have convinced Audrey's Books of Edmonton to cut prices, even if that means selling at a loss.

Co-owner Sharon Budnarchuk said Monday the store is now selling books at their listed U.S. prices and will continue to do so through Dec. 31. The move mirrors a similar discount promotion undertaken a week ago by a major independent bookseller in Ottawa.

"We were very concerned about how the Christmas season was going to go," Budnarchuk said. "We've put a great deal of money into inventory, and you don't want to see the whole thing disappear.

"We're hoping we're going to generate a ton of business that will cover what we initially have to eat because we'll replace all this stock by buying American.

"We've been buying from the Canadian distributor at this stupid price."

Once those Canadian-bought books are sold, the store will replace some of them by buying from U.S. distributors in U.S. dollars, she said.

The prices of many books on Audreys bestseller shelves were set when they went to print months ago. At that time, the Canadian dollar was worth substantially less than its U.S. counterpart.

Canadian booksellers have been badgering distributors to reduce their prices on imported books as quickly as possible, Budnarchuk said, but it just isn't happening fast enough.

With the book industry one of the few that lists its prices in both Canadian and U.S. dollars, booksellers like Audreys have been left on the firing line when consumers demand to reap the benefit of a better exchange rate.

Audreys co-owner Steve Budnarchuk, immediate past president of the Canadian Booksellers Association, flew to Ottawa Monday as part of a CBA delegation scheduled to meet today with Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.

"The minister needs to understand it's not the retailers' fault," Sharon Budnarchuk said. "We're buying in Canadian funds.

"He keeps saying go and shop where the price is the best. Well, all you're doing is sending them all down to the U.S. and online in the U.S. And that's outrageous."

The spread between Canadian and U.S. pricing is slowly closing, but the gap remains noticeable to any consumer who can do the math. The U.S. listing price for the new Alice Sebold novel, The Almost Moon, is $24.99, $4 less than in Canada. The new Ken Follett thriller, World Without End, sells for $35 in the U.S. and $42 in Canada.

Full parity with U.S. prices may be too much to ask for, given the extra costs involved in getting American books across the border, including shipping fees and customs brokerage fees.

Penguin Group (Canada) has said it plans to sell U.S. books to Canadian retailers at as close to par as possible in the new year. The Canadian publisher is working toward bringing its pricing to within 1.1 per cent of par by January.

Other publishers, such as Random House Canada and Harper Collins Canada Ltd., have been giving discounts of about five per cent to retailers, but only on new titles. Random House has offered a 10-per-cent adjustment on their backlist titles, but they're still selling $21 paperbacks in Canada that sell for $14 in the U.S.

Budnarchuk says these are very nervous times at her store, a fixture in the city for more than 32 years.

"This is a scary thing. We're hoping that the book buyer in Edmonton is going to turn around and say, 'Wow, here are some people who care about customers'."

It's worth bearing in mind, too, that not all Canadian independent booksellers can afford to cut prices. Ottawa's Perfect Books has a letter from owner Pat Caven on its website that reads in part,

The American price you see pre-printed on your book next to the Canadian price is often times close to or exactly our cost. If some bookstores have made the desperate decision to honour those prices, they are either independently wealthy or have been bullied into it by all this specious media coverage. The fact that these bookstores are making the reader choose to keep that money by paying American or support the bookstore by paying in Canadian is an insult to the customer. Putting the decision in the consumer's hands is an ugly choice that I won't force my customers to make even if I could afford to. By turning this price war into a skirmish between those independents that survived the upheaval of Chapters, Costco and Pharma Plus entering the field makes the situation all that much more discouraging.

This situation will not be remedied overnight. There are no quick fixes. The publishers have been passing on some small incentives to us that allow us to alter the prices on the new release fall books and have sent notices that they will continue to do so until the spring.

All we can ask of you is the understanding and patience you have already shown us over the years. We will try our hardest to keep you as informed as possible and thank you for making individual, neighbourhood bookstores possible.

* * *

Audreys Books, Edmonton

Collected Works, Ottawa

Perfect Books, Ottawa

Good deals -- and not-so-good deals -- for Canadians

Want to celebrate the rise of the up-up-and-away Canadian dollar, currently worth $1.05 US? Here's some information gleaned recently.

To kick things off, here's a good deal for just about everyone, as long as you don't already have a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine: the magazine is offering a special introductory rate --

United States: 12 issues for $12
Canada: 12 issues for $25 USD
Foreign: 12 issues for $38 USD

Compare this to the renewal rate of $29 annually for U.S. subscribers; $42 USD for Canadians; and $55 USD for foreign subscribers. So this is a dandy time to get a subscription if you don't already have one. It's a magazine the whole family can enjoy.

Other Good Deals:

Lee Valley, the wonderful Canadian woodworking and garden tool company, is celebrating its 30th anniversary with 20 percent off all books to the end of this month (this means you have 'til Halloween). Favorite Lee Valley titles from the Farm School book shelf include Boy Craft and Lee's Priceless Recipes; and Daniel has The Boy Mechanic series from Popular Mechanics on his wish list for when he's older. I also keep eyeing Workshop Math and Construction Geometry as possible math texts for Daniel and Davy in high school, when they might find something with practical applications more appealing.

LL Bean: Not only does your Canadian dollar go much further nowadays for cross-border shopping at LL Bean, but now through December 16th, Bean is offering free shipping to Canada with no minimum purchase.

Not-so-good deals, or, Canadians caveat emptor:

Lego: Thinking that with the Canadian dollar above par I could finally head to Lego.com to do some shopping for the kids, since what I can buy online from Chapters.ca and Mastermind (which, by the way, is offering free shipping in Canada on orders over $100, until November 18th) is fairly limited. On a hunch, I checked the price of the Lego digger (item #7248), and lo and behold it's $29 CAD for Canadians but only $19.99 USD for Americans. Hmmm.... No reply yet to the inquiry I sent along via customer service wondering whether they would be willing to consider an adjustment for Canadian customers. I'd like to buy some more Lego soon for the kids, for Christmas and for Davy's birthday next month, but I'm not willing to pay the Canadian mark-up and shipping and duty, so I just might add on to the K'NEX set we just received and which has been a huge success (will write more and post pics later on), and/or buy some more Lincoln Logs (now part of the K'NEX family) to add to the kids' collection. Especially because the fine folks at Canadian Home Education Resources sent along some CHER "customer appreciation dollars" (think Canadian Tire money but better) toward our next purchase. Now that's a lesson in customer service the companies in this nether section could learn.

Math-U-See: We've been using Math-U-See to supplement Singapore Math, and Davy just completed the old Foundations set, which I had bought secondhand. Considering the purchase of one teacher pack and one student kit each for the new Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon levels for my bunch, I saw on the website that while shipping for Canadian customers is free at the moment, each level would cost me $78 CAN, for a total of $234. Buying in the US, the same three levels would cost me $165 US, with an additional $14.50 for shipping, for a total of $179.50. That's a difference of $54.50, which seems rather high to me, given the present exchange rate. And so I wrote to the local MUS rep. To which I received the following reply,

Well as of today the Canadian dollar is going down [it bounced back quite nicely, thank you]. We purchase and print our books in Canada because the Canadian version is different so we pay more then the American version. We have taken off our 8% postage plus 5.00 shipping charge and that is as far as we can go. Sorry. Thanks [Rep's Assistant]

I wrote directly to the company after that -- no reply from anyone there -- and back to the rep, too,

Dear [Rep's Assistant],

Down, I suppose, is a relative term, considering that it's at $1.02 so far today and fell only in response to David Dodge's comments yesterday.

Could you tell me please whether the Canadian version contain substantially more material than the US version?

Many thanks, ME

And the final word on the matter -- and you thought the customer was always right -- from the rep's assistant,

The Canadian version contains both the metric measurements and the imperial measurements. The US version has only the imperial measurements. Yes it is a result of David Dodges comments and the radio said the dollar is at 99 cents today and continuing down either way this is the solution that [Canadian MUS representative's name] and Steve Demme came up with seeing as the Canadian books are printed in Canada and cost signifigantly [sic] more than the US version. [Signed, Rep's Assistant]

Call me cranky, but I can't imagine that each level has $18 worth of additional metric material. And it still seems rather a slap at Canadian customers, who have been paying more for the same items all along, from 62 cents to the dollar to a buck five; and then there's the little matter that after a full week I'm still awaiting a reply to the email I sent directly to the company. At this point, I'm considering secondhand MUS again -- new doesn't seem to be much of a bargain, especially if I can't factor decent customer service into the price -- and going back to Singapore Math for now, supplemented by Developmental Mathematics by L. George Saad.

And with that, happy -- and careful -- shopping!

10 ways to get you to read a book...

from the BBC Magazine website, which has an article on the top 10 "factors that could influence the next sales behemoth". Few of which will gladden the heart of the professional critic -- no doubt as it should be, according to Sir Howard Davies -- especially:

Factor #1, "Word of Mouth": "Who do we really trust? When the chips are down, it's the opinions of our friends and family and colleagues that matter in all things. When you're trying on an item of clothing you don't scratch around for a piece of pertinent fashion journalism, you just ask a mate to have a quick look."

Factor #9, "Praise for": "Once upon a time in the monomedia world, the reviewer was king. Powerful newspaper literary critics bestrode the world of publishing like colossi. Now not so much. As Mr Rickett [Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller] notes: "People themselves are the reviewers now on Amazon and on all kinds of sharing websites. Reader response has almost supplanted the top-down role of the critic."

* * *

By the way, the latest online edition of The Bookseller includes an interview with Peter Usborne of Usborne Books, including his thoughts on children's nonfiction:

Now Usborne wants to turn the spotlight back on traditional non-fiction publishing. "I initially thought that the internet would kill non-fiction, because teachers would tell children to use the internet to help with homework. But if you key in 'castles' [on a search engine], you get 900,000 possible websites. The internet is an inadequate resource for children."

Although space that retailers devote to children's non-fiction has declined, Usborne believes it is time to address this. "People's attitudes are beginning to change. I really believe that we can bring back non-fiction and make it a success again, but that is up to the trade as much as the publishers. I hope that they will start to back non-fiction again."

Taking the chill off, with Gingerbread Upside-Down Cake

In need of some cheering up after that sad business about happy endings ☹, I decided to make Gingerbread Upside-Down Cake with pears, from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (13th edition). Very nice for fall, by the way, or to jazz up a simple autumn supper of venison sausages, creamed garden potatoes, garden tomato salad, and home-pressed cider.

Gingerbread Upside-Down Cake (makes one 8- or 9-inch cake, square or round)

12 tablespoons butter (unsalted)
1/3 cup dark brown sugar
3 ripe pears, peeled, cored, and sliced
1½ cups flour
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. powdered ginger [I use 1 tsp. and also add 1 tsp. cinnamon and a pinch of allspice]
½ tsp. salt [I use just a pinch, and I omit it entirely if I'm using salted butter]
½ cup sugar
½ cup milk
1 egg, beaten

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Melt 4 tablespoons of the butter in a small pan, add the brown sugar, and stir over low heat until blended. Pour into a square cake pan and arrange the pear slices in the pan; set aside.

Mix the flour, baking powder, ginger and any other spices, salt, and sugar in a bowl.

Melt the remaining 8 tbsp. (4 oz.) of butter in a small pan [I use the same small pan from before]. Remove from heat, add the milk and egg, and beat well.

Add to flour mixture and beat until smooth. Pour over the pears and bake for about 25 minutes, or until a toothpick/cake tester comes out clean.

Cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then turn out onto a serving plate, fruit-side up. Serve with whipped cream [or vanilla ice cream, or a drizzle unwhipped heavy cream] if you wish.

There, I feel better already. Don't you? ☺

PS The above recipe is also very nice -- especially if you're a gingerbread purist who requires molasses in your gingerbread -- if you substitute one of Laurie Colwin's recipes, such as this one from Home Cooking, adapted from the Junior League of Charleston's The Charleston Receipts (first published in 1950), though admittedly she likes her gingerbread more gingery than I do:

• Cream one stick of sweet butter with ½ cup of light or dark brown sugar. Beat until fluffy and add ½ cup of molasses.
• Beat in two eggs.
• Add 1½ cups of flour, ½ tsp. of baking soda and one very generous tablespoon of ground ginger (this can be adjusted to taste, but I like it very gingery). Add one teaspoon of cinnamon, ¼ tsp. of ground cloves and ¼ tsp. of ground allspice.
• Add two teaspoons of lemon brandy*. If you don't have any, use plain vanilla extract. Lemon extract will not do. Then add ½ cup of buttermilk (or milk with a little yogurt beaten into it) and turn batter into a buttered tin [buttering not necessary if you make the upside-down cake version].
  
• Bake at 350 degrees F for between 20-30 minutes (check after 20 minutes have passed). Test with a toothpick/cake tester, and cool on a rack.

* Lemon brandy: "a heavenly elixir easily homemade by taking the peel from two lemons, cutting very close to get mostly zest, beating up the peels to release the oils and steeping them in four ounces of decent brandy."

There'll always be an England

Is there not something peculiar about an organization called The Happy Endings Foundation advocating book burnings? The highlight of the group's year is the annual Bad Book Bonfire and Fun Fireworks Party on November 5th (not so coincidentally Guy Fawkes Night): "bring along an unhappy book to burn and we'll be judging the Lemony Snicket Guy competition on the night".

A friend in the UK sent me the link to the website of the group, whose motto is "Sad Books are Bad Books". Under the heading "Report a Book" is the cheery suggestion, "Let us know which bad books you'd like to see burnt." Alrighty, then!

THIEF's aims are

* To eradicate sad thoughts from all literature
* To make people smile a little more often
* To encourage authors to write more uplifting books for children
* To highlight the dangers of reading sad books
* To unite parents of a similar thinking and create a force with which to be reckoned
* To protect the next generation of readers.
* And, above all, to ensure the longevity of HAPPY ENDINGS (that means "to make sure happy endings are around for a long time")

The group is the, erm, brainchild of Mrs. Adrienne Small, who "has now left her career as a tax inspector to focus on THEF full-time. She plans to rewrite all 13 Lemony Snicket books to give them happy endings." Sad and bad, indeed, but not the books.

My penpal was aghast to find that THIEF has chapters beavering away in Glasgow, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Oxford, Plymouth, London, and Norwich.

Other group suggestions for bringing sunshine, lollipops, and happiness to the world at large include holding "your very own Tickle-A-Moody-Person Week", and, for Halloween,

We shall still be having a party but instead of going 'trick or treating' we will be going 'fun & greeting'. Children will be encouraged to knock on someone's door and offer a smile as well as reciting wonderful words to uplift the soul. We will be handing out fairy cakes and other homemade sweeties and showing goodwill to all. We will be spreading happy thoughts and feelings across the country in a rebellion against the witchery and horror of Halloween.

We want to take the darkness of the night and fill it with new light

To which Farm School can say only,

BOO!

Grammar resources

I've been remiss in not posting about the latest Growing with Grammar program by my friend Tamela Davis, for Grade 5. More good stuff for home educating families looking for more choice. And more Growing with Grammar posts and reviews (for Grades 1&2, 3, and 4) here, here, and here.

I'm a big fan of Patricia T. O'Conner's Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, which I consider an essential reference, but wasn't much impressed by the recent Woe Is I Jr.: The Younger Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, which I found tried too hard to appeal to kids, overly laden with references to popular children's culture, from Shrek to Lemony Snicket and, of course, Harry Potter, with Garfield the Cat thrown in for good measure, as if to recognize that yes, grammar is indeed a vile thing (though not vile in a good sense like noxiously flavored jelly beans) and like broccoli must be dressed up with Cheez Whiz. My Spidey sense/hip-trendy-ironic parent alert started quivering as soon as I read Garrison Keillor's "This is, like, cool" on the cover. Oh dear. Borrow it from the library, but to buy for your son's or daughter's desk I'd definitely consider handing anyone age 12 and up a copy of O'Conner's original Woe Is I. While you're at it, add a copy of her Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing, too. Both breezy and informal and not at all overwhelming, And not twee, either.

And much as I enjoyed Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, the illustrated children's versions so far -- last year's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference! and this year's The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage without Apostrophes! -- have left the kids and me a bit cold. Though I have no doubt that Penguin/Putnam is enjoying parceling out the ideas from the original in 32-page picture books; I believe the hyphen is up next. Stay tuned. As an aside, Laura (age 10) has found the Eats, Shoots & Leaves 2008 Day to Day Calendar, meant for adults I think, more intriguing and appealing than the picture books.

The grammar reference book that seems to get the most use around here by the kids is The Usborne Guide to Better English by Robyn Gee and Carolyn Watson; it's what Usborne calls a "bind-up" of its three books on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and like some of the publisher's books it's also "Internet-linked". It doesn't seem to be in print in the U.S. anymore, though it is in Canada; perhaps check with your friendly Usborne rep. A book this good and helpful should certainly be more widely available. It is, indeed, included on the Plain English Campaign suggested reading list.

Americans will find in the Usborne Guide some noticeable differences -- in some of the spelling and terminology (what we call a period the British call a "full stop", which does make good sense, especially when you're teaching youngsters to read) -- but nothing insurmountable. Lighthearted without being silly or goofy, and illustrated with small cartoons and comic strips, the book is full of easy explanations and handy dandy tricks; Davy particularly appreciates the following in the section on nouns: "Nouns can usually have the, or a, or an in front of them. Try putting the in front of the words on the right to find out which of them are nouns." (saucepan, finger, happy, rocket, sometime, heat, daffodil, never, sky, have)

Why Conn Iggulden writes (and reads)

Davy and Daniel realize that their warm summer glory days are numbered -- they've figured out a system where they finish all their school work by lunchtime, so I'll let them head outdoors to the shop where this past week they built themselves a workbench, complete with bookshelf -- and they're frantically coming up with projects to fill the remaining days. Which is why Daniel's copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys (UK edition) looks like this:



















They are making the most of some outdated business card/bookmarks with which a friend gifted us.

Since the Big Red Book has been turning up everywhere around here, indoors and out, I was interested the other day to read this Guardian interview with Dangerous Book co-author Conn Iggulden on "Why I write"; from which:

What was your favourite book as a child?
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. At a very young age, I wanted to have a special bond with animals and birds. I wanted there to be magic in the world, or at least in me. In The Secret Garden, Dickon had that bond and I remember envying him. I also have the idea that he was as grubby as I usually was.

When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
Yes. The house was filled with them. I ate breakfast with Adrian Mole propped under my plate of toast. I read in the bath, in trees and occasionally on the roof. My brother slept under a set of shelves so bowed that I honestly thought they would one day collapse and kill him.

Was there someone who got you interested in reading books or writing?
My Irish mother told me vivid stories of history and grisly executions from a young age. She quotes poems and loves words to this day. I doubt I'd be writing without her tales. Still, I don't really know where the original story-telling bug came from -- loneliness, perhaps.

What made you want to write when you were starting out?
I began with fantasy novels and loved the wild flights of imagination. That was a drug to me and a world I wanted to join. It's difficult to explain, but it's a wonderful feeling when the words come.

Iggulden's current writing projects according to the interview include a second Dangerous Pocket Book, and a book of heroes with his brother David. Read the rest here.

Erm, no thank you

Dangerous Book for Boys to Hit Screen: "Disney has snapped up the rights to the bestseller after a fierce bidding war." It will be more than interesting to see how the folks at Disney plan to make a movie of a politically incorrect how-to-book that includes instructions on skinning a rabbit.

We'll stick to the print version. And the UK edition at that.

Miraculous blog post round-up

Suzanne at Adventures in Daily Living enjoyed the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle so much that she's decided to start an AVM Blog Post Round-up.

Suzanne is also very talented at making nifty buttons to dress things up, as you can see above. Thanks, Suzanne!

Little Heathens and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in The Christian Science Monitor

From today's Christian Science Monitor, from Marilyn Gardner's column, "A harvest of virtues as well as sustenance", with the subtitle, "Two new books remind readers how closely most Americans used to be connected to the land":

If spring is the season when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, summer is the time when a former Midwesterner's heart fills with a different kind of affection – a romance with the land.

For some of us, that romance is three-pronged. First, there is the love of the landscape itself: The way the horizon stretches endlessly, stitching together blue sky and black soil. The way silver silos glint in the sun. The way dairy cows graze in velvet pastures.

Then there is the romance with the bounty of that land, as reflected in the proverbial fruited plain and amber waves of grain. This is the month when the corn is supposed to be knee-high by the Fourth of July, and next month as high as an elephant's eye, at least in the view of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Finally, there are the bedrock values that spring from this fertile land, beginning with the virtues of hard work and cooperation that are required to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops, fruits, and vegetables.

This summer two authors offer reminders of those virtues. In "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," Barbara Kingsolver describes her family's year-long experiment in self-sufficiency. Their locus is Appalachia, not the Midwest, but the values are the same. ...

For Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of "Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression," rural life brought other lessons. ...

As Americans have moved from farms to cities, two profound changes have occurred. Younger generations have little knowledge of where food comes from. Many people have also lost an understanding of – and an appreciation for – hard physical labor. The poetic description of the Midwest as the nation's bread basket masks the intense labor and economic uncertainties farmers face. ...

Kingsolver knows that most families cannot replicate her family's experiment in self-reliance. Likewise, Kalish is not sentimental about the economic strains her family faced.

They understand that there is obviously no going back to a more rural way of life. But both books suggest an intriguing question: In a sophisticated urban and suburban culture, built on the premise of bigger, better, faster, and more expensive, is there value in encouraging a greater appreciation for simpler living, closer to families and the land when possible?

Kingsolver and Kalish both make eloquent, persuasive cases for answering in the affirmative. Sustenance, after all, comes in many forms.

Read the rest here.

More from Millie Kalish

From "'Grandma, tell me a farm story'...and boy, did she ever" by Susan L. Rife for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Florida, where Mildred Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression -- now winging its way to me -- lived with her husband in retirement until 2005:

Kalish began compiling her memories into book form about 20 years ago, when she would walk her 4-year-old granddaughter, Meredith, to school and entertain her along the way with stories from her childhood.

"She would say, 'Grandma, tell me a farm story,' " said Kalish. "That's the title I did the first draft of the book with. I worked on it off and on until about 2002, then decided to really get to work on it."

Her friend, Marilyn Harwell, a neighbor for "years and years and years" at Pelican Cove, said the two would sit "for five years, talking about her book, drinking single-malt scotch." ...

Although Kalish wrote the book for her family, she thinks it has a broader appeal, thanks to nostalgia for simpler times, and, she said, "Part of it I honestly think has to do with the fact that the world is in such dreadful shape. We're having tainted food come in from China -- shrimp, toothpaste, beef, everything -- and we're having this awful war, the whole Mideast thing, and the political thing. I think that people feel they could not control their lives. In our day, we controlled almost everything about our lives. That gave us a sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance that people don't have today."

[Mrs. Kalish's son Greg] described his mother as "the most unbelievable optimist," and said her greatest gift to him had been her love of the outdoors. When he and Doug, who now lives about 10 minutes away from Harry and Millie Kalish in Mountain View, were kids, their mother would awaken them at 2 a.m. to drive far away from city lights to watch meteor showers.

Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books

Or, turnabout is fair play.

Sherry at Semicolon was kind enough to submit a poem to yesterday's Poetry Friday, so since I find I have a reviewish post this week and some computer time this morning, I sent the post to Sherry's weekly roundup, the Saturday Review Books.

If you discount my initial goof, where my finger grazed "enter" before I finished typing, today's review is up 62 entries and counting (where the smilies came from, though, I don't know; I'm just relieved that Mr. Linky behaved himself all day yesterday). What a great deal of great weekend reading! Thank you, Sherry.

Words to remember, words to live by

A Creed for Americans (1942)
by Stephen Vincent Benét

We believe in the dignity of man and the worth and value of every living soul, no matter in what body housed, no matter whether born in comfort or born in poverty, no matter to what stock he belongs, what creed he professes, what job he holds.

We believe that every man should have a free and equal chance to develop his own best abilities under a free system of government, where the people themselves choose those who are to rule them and where no one man can set himself up as a tyrant or oppress the many for the benefit of the few.

We believe that free speech, free assembly, free elections, free practice of religion are the cornerstones of such a government. We believe that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America offer the best and most workable framework yet devised for such a government.

We believe in justice and law. We do not believe in curing an evil by substituting for it another and opposite evil. We are unalterably opposed to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, however manifested, by whomsoever instilled.

We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges economic responsibility. We do not believe that any state is an admirable state that lets its people go hungry when they might be fed, ragged when they might be clothed, sick when they might be well, workless when they might have work. We believe that it is the duty of all of us, the whole people working through our democratic system, to see that such conditions are remedied, whenever and wherever they exist in our country.

We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges personal responsibility. We believe that we have a great and priceless heritage as a nation -- not only a heritage of material resources but of liberties, dreams, ideals, ways of going forward. We believe it is our business, our right and our inescapable duty to maintain and expand that heritage. We believe that such a heritage cannot be maintained by the lacklustre, the selfish, the bitterly partisan or the amiably doubtful. We believe it is something bigger than party, bigger than our own small ambitions. We believe it is worth the sacrifice of ease, the long toil of years, the expense of our heart's blood.

We know that our democratic system is not perfect. We know that it permits injustices and wrongs. With our whole hearts we believe in its continuous power of self-remedy. That power is not a theory -- it has been proven. Through the years, democracy has given more people freedom, less persecution and a higher standard of living than any other system we know. Under it, evils have been abolished, injustices remedied, old wounds healed, not by terror and revolution but by the slow revolution of consent in the minds of all the people. While we maintain democracy, we must maintain the greatest power a people can possess -- the power of gradual, efficient, and lawful change.

Most of all, we believe in democracy itself -- in its past, its present and its future -- in democracy as a political system to live by -- in democracy as the great hope in the minds of the free. We believe it so deeply rooted in the earth of this country that neither assault from without nor dissension from within can ever wipe it entirely from that earth. But, because it was established for us by the free-minded and the daring, it is our duty now, in danger as in security, to uphold and sustain it with all that we have and are. We believe that its future shall and must be even greater than its past. And to the future -- as to the past of our forebears and the present of our hard-won freedom -- we pledge all we have to give.

from The Family Reading Book: Selections from the World's Great Writers and Thinkers Past and Present, edited by David G. Legerman, 1952, Doubleday & Company.

* * * * * *

Stephen Vincent Benét was born on July 22, 1898, in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, to a military family, which meant a great deal of travelling. Benét was raised around the United States, living in California, Illinois, North Carolina, and New York.

He published his first volume of poetry, Five Men and Pompey, in 1915 at the age of 17. His second volume, Young Adventure, followed two years later. A year after that, Benét graduated from Yale University. His writing career, centered around fantasy and American themes, began in earnest in the 1920s after his marriage to writer Rosemary Carr.

At the height of his all-too brief career, Benét was one of this country's most popular and critically acclaimed writers of fiction and poetry. His bestselling epic poem -- try that, nowadays -- of the Civil War, John Brown's Body, won the Pulitzer Prize for American verse in 1929. At the time, the poem was called "the Iliad of the Western world" and its author "the Homer of the Civil War"; Margaret Mitchell said she was inspired by the work when writing Gone with the Wind. I picked up a first edition not too long ago for all of $10.

In the early 1930s, Benét published two works infused by American history and legends. The first, Ballads and Poems, 1915-1930, appeared in 1933, and contained the poem American Names, whose last line,

"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"

was taken by historian Dee Brown as the title for his classic 1970 work, subtitled "An Indian History of the American West".

The second, A Book of Americans (1933), called by Time Magazie "a lyric history in verse", was written with his wife Rosemary. Five of these -- about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nancy Hanks, and Negro spirituals -- were collected by Helen Ferris in her children's poetry anthology, Favorite Poems Old and New. One poem from the book, about Johnny Appleseed, was turned into a picture book about five years ago, with illustrations by S.D. Schindler.

Benét's classic short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, an American version of the Faust legend, was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1937 and won the O. Henry Award. Benét wrote the screenplay adaptation for the 1941 movie (also known as All Money Can Buy), starring Walter Huston (Anjelica's Canadian-born grandfather) as old Scratch. The story was later selected for Benét's short story collection, Thirteen O'Clock, which also included the classic early science fiction piece, By the Waters of Babylon.

Another of his short stories, The Sobbin' Women, was based on the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine women and later turned into the screenplay for the MGM musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Lyricist Johnny Mercer took Benét's story title and turned it into a musical number, Sobbin' Women ("Y'heard about them Sobbin' Women who lived in the Roman days; It seems that they all went swimmin' while their men was off to graze...")

In the 1940s, with the prospect of another world war looming on the horizon -- Benét was turned down for military service in World War I because of either poor eyesight or the effects of a childhood bout of scarlet fever (I couldn't be sure which in my Googling) -- Benét turned toward government service, writing radio broadcasts and other works, such as the creed above, to urge America's entry into the war. Other works included narration for the 1940 Rural Electrification Administration documentary Power and the Land (if you get only one DVD about the Great Depression to watch with your children, make it this one); the 1942 radio play They Burned the Books, about Nazi book burning in German; a short history of the United States, America, commissioned by the Office of War Information for translation and distribution in Europe; and, commissioned by poet Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, “The United Nations Prayer”, to be used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to close his radio address on Flag Day, June 14, 1942. Some of Benét's radio scripts, We Stand United, and Other Radio Scripts, 1940-1942, can be found online.

Stephen Vincent Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943, at the age of 44. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1944 for the unfinished poem Western Star, which was to be a multi-volume verse epic about the American frontier. Rosemary Carr Benet died in 1962, at age 64, of cancer.

Worth noting: Benét's brother, the poet and critic William Rose Benét (1886-1950), was the editor of a book I've mentioned before and find very, very useful: The Reader's Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the Arts, 1948, published by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company. I'll stick with my older edition, thank you, but you can find a new edition here. William Rose also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1942 for The Dust Which Is God; his other works include Rip Tide (1932), a novel in verse, and A Book of Poems in Wartime (1944). He edited the works of his wife, poet Elinor Wylie, as well as The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (with Norman Pearson) and The Poetry of Freedom (with Norman Cousins). He was survived by his fourth wife, the children's writer Marjorie (Story of Ping) Flack.

Gosh all hemlock!

I'm enough of a Luddite that I found it more than a bit disconcerting earlier today, when bringing up the Amazon website to look at a book, to find the main page welcoming me with "Science Picks for Becky". But disconcertedness turned to intrigue when the first cover's illustration, and then its title, caught my eye: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, just out in May and just thirteen dollars and twenty cents. And the cover is adorable. A glowing five star review from someone who didn't seem to be related to Mrs. Kalish. Hmmm...

Then I went Google hunting and found Elizabeth Gilbert's glowing review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. On the front page. From which:

Some of what follows is unsurprising. You’ll never guess it, but these kids were taught to work. They planted potatoes, tended livestock, hayed fields and were beaten for any lapses in judgment. They did without luxuries (electricity, leisure, heat) and were never coddled on account of their tender youth. (“Childhood was generally considered to be a disease,” Kalish recalls, “or, at the very least, a disability, to be ignored for the most part, and remedied as quickly as possible.”)

For anyone from an old-school farming background, this is familiar territory. “We were taught that if you bought something it should last forever — or as close to forever as we could contrive,” Kalish reports predictably. Or: “When one of us kids received a scratch, cut or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.” If all that “Little Heathens” offered, then, were more such hard-times homilies, this would not be much of a book. But this memoir is richer than that, filled with fervency, urgency and one amazing twist, which surprised me to the point of a delighted, audible gasp: Mildred Armstrong Kalish absolutely loved her childhood.

It’s not merely that she appreciated the values instilled by the Great Depression, or that now, in her older years, she wants to preserve memories of a lost time (though all this is true). No — beyond that, she reports quite convincingly that she had a flat-out ball growing up (“It was quite a romp”) and her terrifically soaring love for those childhood memories saturates this book with pure charm, while coaxing the reader into the most unexpected series of sensations: joy, affection, wonder and even envy. ...

Later in life, Kalish became a professor, and while the foundation of her writing is still English-teacher English (orderly, with perfect posture) her old pagan rhythms seep through every disciplined paragraph. “This was our world,” she writes, but one gets the feeling that Garrison, Iowa, was really her world, which she experienced with the awe of a mystic. In the violet dusk of a cornfield, in the cool mornings on her way to chores, on the long, unsupervised walks to school, in the decadence of eating bacon drippings, heavy cream and ground-cherries, Kalish’s simple life routinely aroused her to an almost erotic extreme. (Then again, this was the only kind of eroticism available; the poor girl was never taught even the starkest fundamentals of human sexuality, regretting that “in those days, we were supposed to get such information from the gutter. Alas! I was deprived of the gutter, too!”) ...

Kalish is wise enough to know that the last link to the past is usually language, and rather than lament what’s been lost, she stays connected to her youthful world by using its gleeful, if outdated, lingo. (Tell me the last time you heard someone exclaim, “Not on your tintype!” or “Gosh all hemlock!”) She admits self-deprecatingly that there were certain expressions she heard spoken so often as a child that she grew up mistakenly thinking they were each a single word: “agoodwoman, hardearnedmoney, agoodhardworker, alittleheathen, adrunkenbum, demonrum and agoodwoolskirt.”

Memories too can run together like this, becoming mishmashed over time. Not with Mildred Armstrong Kalish, though. As a natural-born memoirist (by which I mean not only “one who writes an autobiography” but also “one who remembers everything”), Kalish has kept her memories tidily ordered for decades. Now she has unpacked and worked them into a story that is not only trustworthy and useful (have I mentioned the recipe for homemade marshmallows?) but is also polished by real, rare happiness.

It is a very good book, indeed.

In fact, it is averyveryverygoodbook.

Sounds delightful, and perfect for Summer. Sold. And great good luck to Mrs. Kalish.

Pssssst:
The book's website is here. Complete with farm recipes. Oh, and you can wet your whistle with a preview of Chapter One.

Also, this charming article, "Her stories of farm life could fill a bestseller: Hopes are high for debut by local grandmother", from The San Jose Mercury News.

More food for thought: connections and disconnections

I've been cogitating for the past week or so on the things I read in Natalie Angier's science book The Canon, partly in preparation for my regurgitation earlier today and partly in preparation for the kids' science studies next year (informal plans for which I hope to post before too long). So everything was rolling around in my head quite nicely when my I started to read one of the books from my father's recent parcel*, Barbara Kingsolver's latest, the nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, just published in May and which I'm enjoying very much. It sounds very much of a piece with her 2002 book of essays Small Wonder, which JoVE has mentioned at least once to me in her comments here. (My request was down pretty low on the interlibrary loan list, but after opening the package, I canceled the hold and requested Small Wonder instead.)

So on page 11 of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I discovered this passage (emphasis mine),

Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. (My biology-professor brother pointed this out to me.) The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.

What Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, a biology professor, calls "agricultural agnostics" (he and their daughter Camille are co-authors of the book, by the way). Which of course handily echoes what I had read not too long before in The Canon (one of the bits I posted earlier today):

Farmers, too, were natural scientists. They understood the nuances of seasons, climate, plant growth, the do-si-do between parasite and host [and this is much more true of present-day farmers who farm in more traditional, less conventional methods without synthetic chemicals that kill the parasite and injure the host]. The scientific curiosity that entitled our nation's Founding Fathers to membership in Club Renaissance, Anyone? had agrarian roots. ...

"The average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon, or than the average American of two hundred years ago," said Andrew Knoll, a professor of natural history at Harvard's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department.

There's a reason this place is called Farm School and there's a reason we're not budging.

Of course, The Canon goes off in one direction, toward science education, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, toward another. Here's a hint:

When we walked as a nation away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial. Now, it's fair to say, the majority of us don't want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints. Except as straw-chewing figures in children's books, we don't quite believe in them anymore. When we give it a thought, we mostly consider the food industry to be a thing rather than a person. We obligignly give 85 cents of our every food dollar to that thing, too -- the processors, marketers, and transporters. And we compalin about the high price of organic meats and vegetables that might send back more than three nickels per buck back to the farmers: those actual humans putting seeds in the ground, harvesting, attending livestock births, standing in the fields at dawn castin gtieir shadwos upon our sustenance. There seems to be some reason we don't want to compensate or think about these hardworking eople. In the grocery store checkout corral, we're more likely to learn which TV stars are secretly fornicating than to inquire as to the whereabouts of the people who grew the cucumbers and melons in our carts.

Much as Michael Pollan did last year with his Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Kingsolver urges us to rememember that we are what we eat and reconsider what we put in our mouths. Kingsolver does it by eating locally and tending her own patch of earth as lyrically as she writes.

Which reminds me of this article, on farmers who write, from last week's New York Times (I think it's a pesky Times Select story, so if Bug Me Not doesn't work, email me and we'll sort things out). To even things out, here are some free recipes from the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle website.

Now off to the farmers' market with you!


* Also in the package -- thanks, Pop -- and on the go at the moment:

The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left by David Crystal, inspired, as you can no doubt tell, by Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are by Andrew Cohen

For the birds

Late last spring, the kids asked if we could have "bird school" all summer. So, in addition to our various field guides, we pulled all of the bird books off the shelves and grouped them together in the living room on the coffee table. Indoors and out, the kids read the various books themselves, to each other, and asked for readalouds of others. I kept meaning to put all of the titles in a post, but never got around to something so linky and time-consuming.

But Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has, in a recent post on Bird Books for Children that she and her son have been enjoying. The list includes books, websites, and blogs, including a link to Kelly at Big A little a's bird book bibliography earlier this year.

And don't forget Chris Barton's bird book post from last fall, either.