Wow, people, thanks for all the page views (which are huge for me)

Updated July, 2016. And come visit me at Pluot, where I have decided to do my part in re-booting Western civilization from the ground up. 



Well, who knew that I get 1,100 people coming here every month? Perhaps it's all just search engine "dings" -- does that still happen? -- or perhaps it's people who come for ten seconds and leave because they're disappointed. I used to have a terrible "bounce rate" when I kept track of such things.

Anyway I return too, just now, because I noticed another comment on my Pond's cold cream saga and I had to take care of it. Then I took a look around, noticed my page views, and thought I should give everyone a wave hello, and maybe alert you to my movements. 

I've finished my novel/memoir, after three years of work (plus my day job). I'm rather proud of it, even beyond the fact that it's my second. (You have access to Pearls and Roses, which I uploaded here after its I think fortieth rejection. Do all those rejections mean my writing stinks? One thinks not.)

Oddly enough I did have one person, a sales rep at my job where I am a wine buyer, very excited to read this, which is why after I printed it out, I brought it to the local FedEx office along with some pretty arts-and-crafts papers to serve as the cover, and had it bound for $5.72. Considering the price of paper and ink, the book you see pictured above cost about $30 to produce; if I wanted to make a respectable retail profit of 30% I should have charged my one reader/friend exactly $42.99 for it. But, she was so very insistent and I was so flattered that I gave just this one away. Besides, at least now there is another copy in the world, in case God forbid there is a flood (I don't say fire) in my house.

So that, dear ones, is where I have been and what I have been doing for a good part of my time, while I relinquished this blog and decided to concentrate all my writing at the food-wine-and-life blog At First Glass, which then crashed in January 2014 when I could not renew my domain name through Google. I think the problem was it required a smart phone and an app to renew, and I don't have either. So you can still find me at Pluot, rebooted and still eating, drinking, and living. Since I have finished my second book, above -- it's called Now Comes the Petitioner: the Story of an Internet Divorce -- I have confessed to my readers there that they must endure a bit more relaxed, unpolished stuff for a while, while I just sort of write what I feel like without all sorts of proofing and correcting. So I suppose I must warn you the same. Expect and pardon, please, the tag "unpolished."

A good year for roses

... and other pretty, growing things.





Cranesbill, Asiatic lilies, and daisies in the background







Currently reading About Orchids: A Chat, by Frederick Boyle (1893), found at Project Gutenberg. He assures the reader how easy all those Odontoglossums and Cattleyas are to grow ....

Where is "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"?

I only learned about yesterday's being "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" on Facebook, just in time for Facebook to shut down the page. Once again, as with South Park, as with Yale University, as with the Metropolitan Museum of Art canceling an exhibit, as with all the newspapers in America that refused to publish "the Danish cartoons" -- once again, our elites capitulate to sharia on our behalf.

Facebook's "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page was put up in a burst of enthusiasm by an artist named Molly Norris on April 20 of this year, partly in reaction to Comedy Central's censoring of the South Park episode in which, no, it seems Mohammed was not depicted in a bear suit. A character in a bear suit was referred to as Mohammed. Norris suggested May 20 -- yesterday -- should be the day that everybody draw something similarly idiotically random, like a teacup or a spool of thread, and call it "Mohammed." It was all about the fight for free speech. Her own cartoon, below, is excellent.



Image from wikipedia.

Her idea took off, the Facebook page grew, prominent bloggers and news sources approved of it, anti-"Draw Mohammed" Facebook pages started up and of course gained followers, and she got scared and backed off. Understandable, but very regrettable. Her original thought, a mere month ago, was that if millions of free people do this, Muslim terrorists won't be able to kill every one. Noble and rational -- until you get famous and it occurs to you that they may nevertheless be able to kill you. Also, her intention, which on second thoughts all good Westerners repeat endlessly, was "NEVER" to disrespect religion. The extensive Wikipedia article about her quotes her own website in late April:

"This was always a drawing about rights, never MEANT to disrespect religion. Alas -- if we don't have rights, we will not be able to practice the religion of our choice. [...] None of these little characters ARE the likeness of Mohammed, they are just CLAIMING to be!

"I, the cartoonist, NEVER launched a draw Mohammed day. It is, in this FICTIONAL poster sponsored by this FICTIONAL GROUP," [referring to the 'Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor' wording in the cartoon]. "SATIRE about a CURRENT EVENT, people!!!"

Well, maybe. If she never launched "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," if it was only a one-time phrase in a single cartoon's fantasy world, then why go to Facebook with it?

If the breath of Muslim supremacist terror, the breath of thirteen hundred years of sharia -- which lays down among other things that no, we can't choose our religion, and it is forbidden to criticize Islam -- can reach a lone Seattle cartoonist who was trying to do the right thing by free speech given the fate of people like Theo van Gogh, then we can begin to understand what courage it takes for artists, writers, and politicians to do the right thing who are far more in harm's way. Who are living in Muslim-dominated Europe, for example, and need security guards around them in order to give a classroom lecture on free speech. A Muslim killed Theo van Gogh. Nobody to my knowledge so much as threatened Molly Norris. It was just the idea -- and a very vivid one it is.

Not being a cartoonist, I have no drawing to offer as representing Mohammed. Although, given the point of the joke, any one would do. I'm more interested in literary images. Consider this, from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXVIII, on the Sowers of Discord in the eighth circle of hell:

A wine tun when a stave or cant bar starts
does not split open as wide as one I saw
split from his chin to the mouth with which man farts.

Between his legs all of his red guts hung
with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder,
and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung.

I stood and stared at him from the stone shelf;
he noticed me and opening his own breast
with both hands cried, "See how I rip myself!

See how Mahomet's mangled and split open!
Ahead of me walks Ali in his tears,
his head cleft from the top-knot to the chin.

And all the other souls that bleed and mourn
along this ditch were sowers of scandal and schism;
as they tore others apart, so are they torn ...."

Translation by John Ciardi, 1954. The poem itself was written in the early 1300s. Seven hundred years before the Danish cartoons, why on earth would Dante have done this? Just a bigot? Or did he know something?

Longing for death

Let me understand this: as far as Mohammed was concerned, the unbelievers' (specifically, the Jews') love of life is proof that they know their religion is wrong, because if they really believed their faith was correct -- in short, if they were Muslims -- they would want to die and go to paradise. From the Koran, chapter 2:94 and following.

"Say, 'if Allah's Everlasting Mansions are for you alone' " -- and when have Jews ever claimed that? -- " 'then you must long for death, if your claim be true!'

"But they will never long for death, because of what they did; for Allah knows the evil-doers. Indeed, you will find that they love this life more than other men; more than the pagans do. Each one of them would willingly live a thousand years."

Sitting duck

Dear me, I do hate coming across old writing that I once was proud of, and finding that it seems turgid and pedantic and hectoring and trite and really, really, um -- self-absorbed? Inner-directed? Out of touch is the best term -- out of touch with any thing or any idea that might remotely have interested or amused anyone. Maybe the thing was just badly put together, amateurish (the word that strikes more horror into the writer's breast than any other). To remember that I submitted it to people with busy schedules and publishing house reputations to look after makes it even worse. Well, at least it didn't go out into the world to embarrass me (how do editors know?), although if it had gone out, I would have been thrilled, pleased, and unsurprised of course.

This particular essay was about the book of Ezekiel. I used to read the Bible a lot, and I used to teach both children and adults on it, so I got into the habit of summarizing Biblical books in what I hoped were dazzlingly straightforward and refreshing ways. My idea concerning Ezekiel was that the books of the prophets, especially, are kind of like a haphazard collection of newspaper clippings from the ancient world. They repeat themselves endlessly on subject matter that the people on the scene were familiar with. The biggest aggravation and silliness in the Bible -- the repetition, "woe unto them," etc. -- did not annoy or overwhelm them, or gather dust on a shelf, because to them it was not a collection, but simply material that they met in small pieces every day, as we do newspapers, or at least news. We are the ones who read it as a book, as The Book, and say, "Wha --?"

It would be as if, three thousand years from now, our remote posterity came across a sheaf of -- no, a collection of microchips full of the news of our day. Pick an event, a news-generating machine, a decade. The Bay of Pigs. Watergate. The fall of the Berlin Wall. O.J. Simpson, the Bronco chase, the Akita that didn't bark. War. The murder of wives called Peterson. Sarah Palin and moose-hunting. We're accustomed to dealing with this information in small pieces every day, and we're accustomed to references to it piling up and slowly being sifted through, linked, joked about, over-analyzed, and then much of it forgotten. (Remember Abu Ghraib?) Our posterity will not be equipped to do this, no posterity can be. Imagine if a smattering of it only survives, and the poor things find themselves faced with holy scripture about watergates and walls, about bays and capital cities, women, and a surprising amount of animal imagery. They will never fully realize all this had a context and that we all went on living and thinking about other things, too. They are likely to say "Wha --?"

That was my way of coping with the book of Ezekiel. I even came up with a pretty nifty ending. At one point the prophet has a vision of a man "clothed in linen, with a writing case at his waist," going about Jerusalem marking on the forehead all those who are upset at the city's sin. He is followed by six men with clubs, who kill anyone not so marked (Ezekiel 9:3-6). Therefore, I asked, "fancifully" -- can we say, if nothing else, that all those who care about stories are spared God's anger?

That kind of reaction comes from reading too many books and hearing too many sermons too preciously based on a verse or two of the Bible, a pretty one we hope, plucked out of context and smoothed down to illustrate some gentle modern virtue, tolerance or whatnot. But two thousand and more years on, what else can we do? Ezekiel (circa 550 BC) saw impressive visions, saw fused-leg creatures bouncing and flying about in fiery clouds above Babylon, accompanied by gleaming bisected wheels-within-wheels, their rims covered in eyes. He saw the underworld, filled with ghostly pagan armies amid "the trees of Eden" (31:16-18), and he saw the valley of the dry bones. He was also basically a performance artist. Among other activities, he lay on one side for 390 days and on the other for 40 days, to represent years of exile for the Jews, and he made cakes of mixed grains and baked them on dung, to show what it is to eat slops in wartime (chapter 12). God hoped his fellow Jews would wait anxiously upon him, to see what he would do next. They did.

Perhaps such shows were a part of the wider civilization of the time. The philosopher Diogenes (circa 350 BC) made fun of his fellow citizens in Corinth, while they were preparing to defend the city against Philip of Macedon, by "bowling a large jar up and down the Craneum. When someone asked him why he did this, he answered: 'I am rolling my jar so as not to be the only idle one among so many workers' " (quoted in Robert Payne, The Splendor of Greece). In fact in Athens our same Diogenes lived in a jar, and walked about in daytime with a lamp, "looking for an honest man." He sounds a miserable creature, as Ezekiel does not. Although why is it that, at crunchtime, yesteryear's philosophers and prophets seemed to have had a habit of telling people that fighting back against imperial predators was futile and ungodly? May one be annoyed by this, and write more turgid essays?

Better not, or at least not turgid on purpose, anyway. I know that the Bible outranks mere records of performance art, and is more than a collection of newspaper clippings. Exhortations to moral behavior, God's unfailing forgiveness of sins, and above all the vital cosmic need for the Jews to remain faithful and live in Israel forever, are the combined point. Visions, like that of the trees of Eden in the underworld, do seem to hint at a work that human beings could not entirely make up. Yes, I get that, to use the modern vernacular.

And I started out my rotten essay of years ago not necessarily with a mind to master the Book, but merely in noticing that time was marching on and one really ought to read the important things, inimitable things, starting soon. King Lear, Plato's Republic, and the like. The Bible, -- Ezekiel. But do these sublimities really enrich one's life, or give any more pleasure than a jolly good murder mystery? Who will know the difference?

I end on a self-absorbed note, because one of the things that also horrifies me when I look at a disappointing old piece of writing is the personal information I used to put at the top of the first page. Surely I wouldn't have thought of doing that myself. I seem to recall reading in a writer's magazine that editors need to know this about you if they end up accepting your work and then paying you. How droll! -- and we first started hearing the news about identity theft, let's see, when? (More vernacular. It's interesting how Internet writing has affected prose style. My current favorite is mmmkay.) I guess I missed it. With luck, all the manuscripts I ever sent out, blemished in that way, were instantly consigned to the circular file by honest, if pop-eyed and chuckling, people. Otherwise, I would long since have been, well,

like that. Mmmkay?

I hate Dr. Seuss

(Originally appeared in slightly different form in American Heritage, October 2005)

Theodore Seuss Giesel (1904-1991), Dr. Seuss, was already an experienced advertising man, political cartoonist, and children's book author and illustrator when Houghton Mifflin commissioned him, in 1957, to write a "new reader" primer of 225 vocabulary words for the school market. He came up with The Cat in the Hat, hailed as something new, a "karate chop on the weary little world of Dick, Jane, and Spot," as the blurb on the back of every hardcover copy still says.

In fact it was the same old same old. From And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) to Oh The Places You'll Go (1990), Dr. Seuss' 44 books follow the same pattern. He presented, in Mulberry Street, something originally fairly clever (bright silly pictures, easy rhymes) and rendered it, through repetition, both pedestrian and shrill. His furry, long-fingered, snarly-faced creatures are disturbing in the extreme. His poetry ceased to be merely easy and became instead limericks, the dead spaces of which he filled up, endlessly, with what limericks are: jangling "sala-ma-goox" nonsense, and lazy, leaden-witted stories.

What are his books actually about? Nice enough moral themes -- be kind (Horton Hears a Who) be tolerant (The Sneetches) tyranny is bad (Yertle the Turtle) don't pollute (The Lorax) -- are troweled over hastily-thought-out, junk plots. An elephant hears voices coming from a dust-speck. A lowly turtle dethrones the turtle king by burping and thus dislodging the stack of other turtles the king is sitting on. Sometimes there is no moral theme. A boy imagines cooking eggs from different weird creatures. The Cat in the Hat Comes Back is about a pink bathtub stain that gets splashed about the house during various efforts to clean it up. The shopworn conclusion to this one, as so often in Dr. Seuss books, is that the littlest creature brings forth the miraculous "Voom," and saves the day.

Possibly the best thing to be said about his career is that that "karate chop" primer helped launch the Beginner Books series, which gave scope to better writers. Dr. Seuss' own inflated reputation, complete with postage stamps and official public-school birthday parties, remains odd. Odder still is the spectacle of children being made to worship a man who liked to make rhymes about the helpless being allowed to be different. Somewhere in there is a lampoon of the age.