K: "Sweet dreams --"
C: "I'll dream of magical kitty unicorns"
K: "Those are kittycorns"
C: "Are they like candycorns?"
K: "Russell Stover makes them. Only in the summer though."
C: "Oh."
K: "Goodnight"
C: "-night"
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
5. Black Hawk Down
The media images I experienced in Africa were all from the United States. Christmas songs would blare from radios as I walked Ndejje road, their value as a form of westernization outweighing the fact that Easter was one week before. American Hollywood is a far-reaching monolith, it’s impact a huge part of the creation of terms like “globalization.” The idea that Villagers would pay to sit in a wooden shack and watch a movie about mobs of black African Somalis coming for the white American pilot with a broken leg—trapped in the cockpit of his downed helicopter—leaves me breathless with questions. If I’d described the movie without the colors of the people, instead called them Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s supporters and then deferred to the idea that a good movie functions by creating empathy with the heroes, regardless of color, is that enough to release this subject? It’s a movie. It’s fake. People go see movies to forget themselves. They specifically go to see war movies where people’s legs get blow off for the plain old thrill of it. But these are the stories we tell about Africa. We film the chaotic street scenes in super-saturated light to ensure the feeling of brokenness. Except for a silent wave from a small child missing a finger, there isn’t a single human interaction between a Somali and the American unit.
What I fear is that this movie was filmed and marketed with the blackest of latent American racism. Hundred of machete-wielding black people are coming for you as you clutch the photo of your lovely wife, as you struggle to rise to the full honor of being an American soldier. Leave no man behind! Brothers! The men stoop to retrieve the shot-off body parts of their comrades, knowing that it must be someone’s hand because, well, its white.
There is the argument that this story is true. This story is as true as two hours of history-less emotions and violence can be, which is about as true as the idea that dogs eat their own shit because they have a mineral deficiency.
I didn’t see this movie before I went to Africa, though it was released in 2001. I saw it two full years after returning to the States, remembering that Black Hawk Down was the only movie playing in the Ndejje movie theatre the entire time I was there. And I watched it the day after I saw the movie “Hotel Rwanda” for the sixth time with friends who hadn’t seen it. I saw it the first time as a British Airlines in-flight movie when I was returning from East Africa. Stunning work, really, but not something that doesn’t lend its tale to the concept of Africa as a black hell. And to look at what was going on with—and in—the UN’s decision-making process at the time of both these actual events, 1993 and 1994, respectively, makes the picture we grapple to understand even larger. It is, again, the enormous hand on the billboard, the “rice doesn’t have to feel like this” paradox of the need to understand more the closer one gets to a question’s answer. The closer one gets to a situation. The closer one gets to a person.
In Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, a novel told by Idi Amin’s personal physician (and another movie) the narrator says “. . . it has often struck me that it [Africa] looks, cartographically, like a gun in a holster.” How starkly different from the way the coastline of Africa had always been a face in profile to me—a face without skin, reduced to basic bone and human story. Human story, I was realizing, that underrepresented the small and consistent joys, the maneuvers of the heart within the home, the laughter and bother and rhythm of a day. The gossip.
On the ground in Africa I took to reading books by local authors, especially enjoying the emergent power of the prolific, Mary Karooro Okurut, one of the original founders of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association, “Femwrite.”
The media images I experienced in Africa were all from the United States. Christmas songs would blare from radios as I walked Ndejje road, their value as a form of westernization outweighing the fact that Easter was one week before. American Hollywood is a far-reaching monolith, it’s impact a huge part of the creation of terms like “globalization.” The idea that Villagers would pay to sit in a wooden shack and watch a movie about mobs of black African Somalis coming for the white American pilot with a broken leg—trapped in the cockpit of his downed helicopter—leaves me breathless with questions. If I’d described the movie without the colors of the people, instead called them Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s supporters and then deferred to the idea that a good movie functions by creating empathy with the heroes, regardless of color, is that enough to release this subject? It’s a movie. It’s fake. People go see movies to forget themselves. They specifically go to see war movies where people’s legs get blow off for the plain old thrill of it. But these are the stories we tell about Africa. We film the chaotic street scenes in super-saturated light to ensure the feeling of brokenness. Except for a silent wave from a small child missing a finger, there isn’t a single human interaction between a Somali and the American unit.
What I fear is that this movie was filmed and marketed with the blackest of latent American racism. Hundred of machete-wielding black people are coming for you as you clutch the photo of your lovely wife, as you struggle to rise to the full honor of being an American soldier. Leave no man behind! Brothers! The men stoop to retrieve the shot-off body parts of their comrades, knowing that it must be someone’s hand because, well, its white.
There is the argument that this story is true. This story is as true as two hours of history-less emotions and violence can be, which is about as true as the idea that dogs eat their own shit because they have a mineral deficiency.
I didn’t see this movie before I went to Africa, though it was released in 2001. I saw it two full years after returning to the States, remembering that Black Hawk Down was the only movie playing in the Ndejje movie theatre the entire time I was there. And I watched it the day after I saw the movie “Hotel Rwanda” for the sixth time with friends who hadn’t seen it. I saw it the first time as a British Airlines in-flight movie when I was returning from East Africa. Stunning work, really, but not something that doesn’t lend its tale to the concept of Africa as a black hell. And to look at what was going on with—and in—the UN’s decision-making process at the time of both these actual events, 1993 and 1994, respectively, makes the picture we grapple to understand even larger. It is, again, the enormous hand on the billboard, the “rice doesn’t have to feel like this” paradox of the need to understand more the closer one gets to a question’s answer. The closer one gets to a situation. The closer one gets to a person.
In Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, a novel told by Idi Amin’s personal physician (and another movie) the narrator says “. . . it has often struck me that it [Africa] looks, cartographically, like a gun in a holster.” How starkly different from the way the coastline of Africa had always been a face in profile to me—a face without skin, reduced to basic bone and human story. Human story, I was realizing, that underrepresented the small and consistent joys, the maneuvers of the heart within the home, the laughter and bother and rhythm of a day. The gossip.
On the ground in Africa I took to reading books by local authors, especially enjoying the emergent power of the prolific, Mary Karooro Okurut, one of the original founders of the Ugandan Women Writers’ Association, “Femwrite.”
Thursday, June 21, 2007
News-Miner article: Farmers have long, painful history with state
Farmers have long, painful history with state
Long about 60 years ago, a 13-year-old boy helped feed and care for a mixed herd of 2,000 cows, give or take a few hundred; 700 were dairy stock being milked twice daily. I grew up with the ranch and like many farm kids couldn't run fast enough leaving.
I spent the rest of my life in different positions in agriculture: farming, writing about farming, farm historian, ag mechanic and farm adviser. All with some success I brag, meaning neither I nor my family starved.
After I was informed Mat Maid was shutting down, the Mat-Su Cheese repo sale, B-Y Farms financial ills, and knowing the chain of farm closures and infrastructure that will now collapse, I recalled that expertise to write this obituary.
Alaska farmers have had a long and painful relationship with the state, mostly bad. It got a lot worse after the mid- to early '50s when Alaska agriculture was at its peak and balance between market and producer was on even keel and along came statehood.
Statehood becomes a farm factor.
The promoters of statehood bowed to Pacific Northwest state's producer concerns and left all the U.S. Farm support programs out of the statehood agreement. To make matters worse, improvements in raw food transportation and food preservation flooded Alaska grocer shelves, sinking local farmers and ranchers.
By the late '60s, almost all the state's dairies had closed, root cellars collapsed from lack of use, and fields went fallow from lack of need, Nome to Juneau.
Milk in Fairbanks was sold dry or reconstituted (wet reinstalled), meat was aged sometimes to green, and root crops were limp.
By the mid-'70s, commercial farming in Alaska had the drizzles and was in its final throes of death, and along came Gov. Jay Hammond. I knew Jay from meeting him at a few writers' conferences and enjoyed and trusted his intuitive intellect.
The state's leadership earned this failure by disobeying the four basic elements of agrarian economics, which is "farmer, farmland, crop, and market." In ag economic college courses they are often referred to as the four horsemen who don't know if they are afoot or horseback.
The farmer is the keystone to the farm and a breed of man apart from all others. He is the point horsemen that must drag along and trust his existence to the other three. When the ignorant and sometimes unmitigated stupid political entity becomes evolved, a painful death ensues.
Last rites begin June 28 (the 27th is the last day for milk pickup) when milkers start drying down their cows; the animals start screaming in pain in the 10th hour and must receive pain relief shots within 24 hours. Many of these gentle bovines will contract a disease caused by the forced dry-down and be destroyed. The families will see their net worth shrink as the value of their herd falls by 85 percent and their land value by 50 percent.
Offer your prayers.
Jim Ellison lives in North Pole, where he moved in 1970 from central California.
Solstice & Flickering Thoughts
Short on time this am
Please support the following small publisher in Ester Alaska. They are kind, timely,brave, helpful, humorous and helping Alaskan fiction to bloom.
McRoy & Blackburn, Publishers
"Learning to be White" is an excellent read by a Unitarian minister. Very psychologically comprehensive, intensely thoughtful. She opens the book by suggesting her Euro-American friends and students play "the race game". Every time a person's name is mentioned you give them a racial tag, as in "my white husband Mark' 'my white friend Beth'. It isn't about teaching a lesson to her interested friends . . . she spends another 100 pages untangling the feelings that these Euro-Americans elicited in themselves and others if they were brave enough to play this game. They were, literally ostricized from their own race. Then we ask the question . . .
Please support the following small publisher in Ester Alaska. They are kind, timely,brave, helpful, humorous and helping Alaskan fiction to bloom.
McRoy & Blackburn, Publishers
"Learning to be White" is an excellent read by a Unitarian minister. Very psychologically comprehensive, intensely thoughtful. She opens the book by suggesting her Euro-American friends and students play "the race game". Every time a person's name is mentioned you give them a racial tag, as in "my white husband Mark' 'my white friend Beth'. It isn't about teaching a lesson to her interested friends . . . she spends another 100 pages untangling the feelings that these Euro-Americans elicited in themselves and others if they were brave enough to play this game. They were, literally ostricized from their own race. Then we ask the question . . .
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Rabbits instead of Lions
Currently reading "The Ice Storm" Rick Moody, "Learning to be White: Money, Race, and God in America" Thandeka
"'I want to make a lion' I said, 'but I can't do it.'
'You don't understand,'my mother gently but firmly replied. 'When you create, you let the
material show you what it wants to become.'
. . .'Mom,' I explained, 'there's a rabbit in the clay.'
'Help it get out,' she said, and I did." --Thandeka
In other news: brunch on Sunday with an abbreviated gathering of The Loyal Order of the Coelacanth (school of fish co-workers), solstice canoeing tomorrow eve, Friday meeting with the lady who runs 'Organic Alaska, one week of work out at North Pole Vet Hopital then two weeks of writing classes at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Fest. Hangin in and hangin on
"'I want to make a lion' I said, 'but I can't do it.'
'You don't understand,'my mother gently but firmly replied. 'When you create, you let the
material show you what it wants to become.'
. . .'Mom,' I explained, 'there's a rabbit in the clay.'
'Help it get out,' she said, and I did." --Thandeka
In other news: brunch on Sunday with an abbreviated gathering of The Loyal Order of the Coelacanth (school of fish co-workers), solstice canoeing tomorrow eve, Friday meeting with the lady who runs 'Organic Alaska, one week of work out at North Pole Vet Hopital then two weeks of writing classes at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Fest. Hangin in and hangin on
Insanity?
My first seventy-two hours in Africa remain refractive in my memory. The phrase most often used is “culture shock.” All my senses were hyper vigilant. Though the journal entry above wasn’t written until my first three days had actually passed, my pencil scrawl records things in the present tense: we take a ride. . . . everyone wants me to rest. . .I buy a mosquitonet. And while I’m breathlessly recording the exigencies of my every move, presumably, again, for Willa, I left out the largest stories of import. I wasn’t hauling water up the hill in the dark so we could have drinking water or bathing water or cooking water for the morning. I’d followed a young volunteer named Mark down the hill, across Ndejje Road, into a different compound with an actual tiled shower stall to fill five-gallon jerry cans with water that we would carry back up to the library. In the darkness, beneath a solid roof and half finished walls, we poured the water on the ground. The red dirt splashed upwards into my face with the first, uncontrolled gush from the mouth of the can. After that it was about fanning the stream along the earth. We did this again, and again. And again. I tried to carry the full jerry can, luminously yellow in the night, on my head, as Mary suggested. I was a funny sight, indeed.
Ndejje needed a library.
The library needed a concrete floor.
A concrete floor needed solid soil beneath it.
Go ahead and argue about what it means to “need” something, but pouring potable water into the dirt is something that only mzungu should be in charge of.
Ndejje needed a library.
The library needed a concrete floor.
A concrete floor needed solid soil beneath it.
Go ahead and argue about what it means to “need” something, but pouring potable water into the dirt is something that only mzungu should be in charge of.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Visiting with husky pups
OK, so the last one of the guys was taken on the airplane on their way to visit Overlook Farm
Saturday, June 16, 2007
"sitting to a trot" and other practiced rhythms
reading "Mother Africa and the Rift"[Cat Whitney] and "Omnivores Delimma" M. Pollan, on CD.
I'm rewriting the manuscript often referred to as "the Africa book". The other manuscripts have equal life left in them but the temporality of their subject matter--and the degree to which my changeability influences their plot--simply isn't as dire. While writing and rewriting is fraught with all the discomfort one can imagine feeling when accidentally meeting your psychiatrist at your ex-husband's new wife's sister's baby shower . . .I can clearly see what the problem with the mss. is at this point. It's good. It's beautiful in parts. But the majority of it reads like near-fitting puzzle peices wrongly locked in place. Or sitting to a trot on a horse you don't know well enough. I'm seeking that body-slouching sigh when you finally stabilize to the length of the horse's stride. Flow. Naturallness. Which comes, in writing and other things, with patience.
And patience. Many of us happily recognize that we are/have become a culture of immediate gratification. I'm as guilty as anyone of railing against the easiness of modern US life . . .while breezing into the coffee shop and "grabbing a bite" before "running" to the post office and stopping at the dump to leave the banana peels that came from the store down the road. But what cultivates patience? And how did I come to use the word 'cultivate' in this inquiry?? "Cultivate: to prepare and work on[land] in order to raise crops;till"
Before we can begin to think about raising crops, before we can dream about fruit, about harvests and sales and filling minds and bodies, we must do the work of preparation. The work of preparation--essentially, the work before the work. When a farmer decides to graze his cows and "go organic" he is half a decade away from being certifiably organic. He must plan for the plan, seed the field, wait, visualize. The rolling open of seasons, then years, then decades (when we are talking about soil quality, etc.), the ability to work with long-term uncertainties while continuing to plan . . .can I even extrapolite this to explain why Americans have more money than ever but have the lower rate of personal savings than they did even during the Depression? Can I even suggest that changes in our culture like this--are related to being "off the farm" for generations now?
Patience=progress. Progress= working with uncertainty to move forward.
I'm rewriting the manuscript often referred to as "the Africa book". The other manuscripts have equal life left in them but the temporality of their subject matter--and the degree to which my changeability influences their plot--simply isn't as dire. While writing and rewriting is fraught with all the discomfort one can imagine feeling when accidentally meeting your psychiatrist at your ex-husband's new wife's sister's baby shower . . .I can clearly see what the problem with the mss. is at this point. It's good. It's beautiful in parts. But the majority of it reads like near-fitting puzzle peices wrongly locked in place. Or sitting to a trot on a horse you don't know well enough. I'm seeking that body-slouching sigh when you finally stabilize to the length of the horse's stride. Flow. Naturallness. Which comes, in writing and other things, with patience.
And patience. Many of us happily recognize that we are/have become a culture of immediate gratification. I'm as guilty as anyone of railing against the easiness of modern US life . . .while breezing into the coffee shop and "grabbing a bite" before "running" to the post office and stopping at the dump to leave the banana peels that came from the store down the road. But what cultivates patience? And how did I come to use the word 'cultivate' in this inquiry?? "Cultivate: to prepare and work on[land] in order to raise crops;till"
Before we can begin to think about raising crops, before we can dream about fruit, about harvests and sales and filling minds and bodies, we must do the work of preparation. The work of preparation--essentially, the work before the work. When a farmer decides to graze his cows and "go organic" he is half a decade away from being certifiably organic. He must plan for the plan, seed the field, wait, visualize. The rolling open of seasons, then years, then decades (when we are talking about soil quality, etc.), the ability to work with long-term uncertainties while continuing to plan . . .can I even extrapolite this to explain why Americans have more money than ever but have the lower rate of personal savings than they did even during the Depression? Can I even suggest that changes in our culture like this--are related to being "off the farm" for generations now?
Patience=progress. Progress= working with uncertainty to move forward.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Scuffle hoes, ruminations, the kitty man dies
Just finished reading "Here on Earth" Alice Hoffman, "Finding Fish" Antwone Quenton Fisher. **Will list current reads and bookish news at the top of each blog**
Scuffle Hoes
I was at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center yesterday helping with the weekly CSA harvest and learning to use a scuffle hoe. Was the word 'scuffle' borrowed from the tool and inserted into the language at large, or was it borrowed back from idiomatic speech of the day . . . or did it co-evolve? Yes, I can Ask Jeeves. A scuffle hoe has a square head, sharp on both sides, that disturbs the soil and uproots dandelions if you put enough muscle into it. For the harvesting of the early greens it's just like being a cow on a rotational grazing system. Only with a knife. And dirty knees. And a sore back instead of a four chambered stomach and quadruped body orientation so you can do it all day. The most productive/nourishing photosynthesis happens in the leaves of the greens. You harvest the mature foliage, but don't cut so close to the ground that the tender new shoots can't replenish the plant before the end of the season.
I'll be going to Calypso every Thursday morning until . . . well, UNTIL.
The Kitty Man
The director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, a sweet, brilliant man who called them "kittycats", who apologized to me for not having a full ward of cats for me to play with when I was there in 2004 and made me an honorary member of the Center instead, was riding his motorcycle with his buddies in late April and swerved so not to hit a (YES!) kittycat. He died from his injuries two days later. This has been making me angry with it's ironic unfairness for two days. At least he was partaking in his favorite hobby.
Ruminations
I am now, officially, a full-time writer and a part-time technician for After Hours Vet. I aim to be a part-time substitute teacher in the fall, with special interests in "resource" education(I LIKE special ed!). There's another teaching project that I hope works out, but you'll get an e-mail with excalamation points if that good news comes in. I've put faux wood flooring in my apartment and what an INCREDIBLE difference!! Who the heck thought wall-to-wall shag, in this climate, was a good thing to leave in a small house for several decades?? (I'm a little extra ascerbic these days, bear with me.) So . . . projects,readings, plans, a two-week writing intensive with the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival July 16-27 that is being taught by a number of super-cool people, including Peggy Shumaker (she awarded my poem a few weeks ago) . . .the first annual Fairbanks Book Festival the weekend preceeding the 9-5pm write-a-thon . . .re-applying to Hedgebrook . . . re-submitting the THREE book manuscripts I have under my bed . . .and weaving my vet tech memoirs into my Overlook Farm memories to make something entertaining for others to read. I've been a licensed vet tech for ten full years, worked at sixteen different practices, including Cornell, (four of those were clinics that re-hired me after other adventures) and have, generally, rotationally grazed myself right off the farm with these experiences. Full-time, day-time practice is no longer for me. We shall talk of other things.
And love animals and life all the more.
Scuffle Hoes
I was at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center yesterday helping with the weekly CSA harvest and learning to use a scuffle hoe. Was the word 'scuffle' borrowed from the tool and inserted into the language at large, or was it borrowed back from idiomatic speech of the day . . . or did it co-evolve? Yes, I can Ask Jeeves. A scuffle hoe has a square head, sharp on both sides, that disturbs the soil and uproots dandelions if you put enough muscle into it. For the harvesting of the early greens it's just like being a cow on a rotational grazing system. Only with a knife. And dirty knees. And a sore back instead of a four chambered stomach and quadruped body orientation so you can do it all day. The most productive/nourishing photosynthesis happens in the leaves of the greens. You harvest the mature foliage, but don't cut so close to the ground that the tender new shoots can't replenish the plant before the end of the season.
I'll be going to Calypso every Thursday morning until . . . well, UNTIL.
The Kitty Man
The director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, a sweet, brilliant man who called them "kittycats", who apologized to me for not having a full ward of cats for me to play with when I was there in 2004 and made me an honorary member of the Center instead, was riding his motorcycle with his buddies in late April and swerved so not to hit a (YES!) kittycat. He died from his injuries two days later. This has been making me angry with it's ironic unfairness for two days. At least he was partaking in his favorite hobby.
Ruminations
I am now, officially, a full-time writer and a part-time technician for After Hours Vet. I aim to be a part-time substitute teacher in the fall, with special interests in "resource" education(I LIKE special ed!). There's another teaching project that I hope works out, but you'll get an e-mail with excalamation points if that good news comes in. I've put faux wood flooring in my apartment and what an INCREDIBLE difference!! Who the heck thought wall-to-wall shag, in this climate, was a good thing to leave in a small house for several decades?? (I'm a little extra ascerbic these days, bear with me.) So . . . projects,readings, plans, a two-week writing intensive with the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival July 16-27 that is being taught by a number of super-cool people, including Peggy Shumaker (she awarded my poem a few weeks ago) . . .the first annual Fairbanks Book Festival the weekend preceeding the 9-5pm write-a-thon . . .re-applying to Hedgebrook . . . re-submitting the THREE book manuscripts I have under my bed . . .and weaving my vet tech memoirs into my Overlook Farm memories to make something entertaining for others to read. I've been a licensed vet tech for ten full years, worked at sixteen different practices, including Cornell, (four of those were clinics that re-hired me after other adventures) and have, generally, rotationally grazed myself right off the farm with these experiences. Full-time, day-time practice is no longer for me. We shall talk of other things.
And love animals and life all the more.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
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