Not Amazing

William Peace rants here about misuse use of the word ‘amazing’.  Hearty dittos — go read and be inspired to curmudgeonliness.

As long as we’re on the topic, here’s my list of a few more things that are not amazing:

Parenting more than two children.  I have a mere four, and I get the ‘wow how do you do it??’ thing even from other Catholics.   (My answer: Not that well, frankly.)    Er, hey guys, I’m a married lady.  It’s a normal biological function.

Homeschooling.  Especially when you do it as haphazardly as I do.   Might not be your thing.  But again: It is entirely normal for parents to be able to teach their own children.  You know back all those centuries when married couples were still in the habit of procreating regularly?  Most of them also trained their very own children to follow in whatever trade they practiced.  Now I don’t know how to weave or spin or farm, but I can read and write pretty well.  So it isn’t particularly amazing that I can teach my children to do the same.

Teaching 5th Grade CCD.  Sordid truth: 5th graders are the best.  The rest of you guys are missing out.  Actually I’ve only had one person tell me this was amazing — and that one person was someone who possesses a number of  talents I only dream of.  So her comment wasn’t really about anything being ‘amazing’ so much as recognition that we all have different skills and preferences.

–> I don’t suppose there’s anything really wrong with using the A-word loosely, to merely mean “you are able to do something well that many other people don’t do very well”.   And certainly we shouldn’t lose sight of wonder of the every day world: flowers and children and birds and wideness of the sky are all amazing, when we are pulled out of our busy thinking and stop to consider them.

But back to my ditto, above.  It is woefully patronizing to gush over non-achievements.   If you’ve gotten into that habit, maybe not even realizing it, perhaps 2010 is the year for you to quit?

2010 Catholic Writer’s Conference

Annual Reminder:  The on-line Catholic Writer’s Conference is coming up again, Feb 26-Mar 10.

To review:  It is free, it is helpful, it is open to any catholic writer, aspiring or accomplished.  You can participate as much or as little as you want.

Great event, highly recommended.  Go register.

Venison and Democracy

So the SuperHusband went to a couple 3-D archery shoots this summer, and came to the realization that maybe it was time to set the sights on something more lively than foam. Enter a friend whose vineyard is being over-browsed, another friend unloading a Spigarelli re-curve, and a wife who does a modest impression of the Spouse Who Doesn’t Mind You Are Gone Hunting EVERY NIGHT After Work . . . and after a month or two, voila: Dinner.

Wow. One little doe = a lot of meat.

Living history on so many levels. There’s the whole butchering the animal thing, which was pretty interesting. There’s the waste-not-want instinct that kicks in — hence there is a nice doe skin sitting in my freezer, waiting for some boys to tan it. Or, watch some children amuse themselves with the spare parts, that’s a real eye-opener.

But the real kicker to me is land rights. Because, wow, the deer, they’re just out there. And the lower-tech counterpart of the SuperHusband’s bow is a relatively accessible weapon, for your average medieval european or native american or so on. Which means that if you can obtain the right to hunt on the land where the deer are, goodness! That’s a lot of food to be had.

It is hard to appreciate feudal Europe (or, the commandeering of North America) for an average resident of the industrialized west. Landholding means so little to us — we live in a little neighborhood, or an apartment, and yet magically have all the food we could want and nearly everything else besides. We lose track of how important the land = power equation was throughout most of history.

Depending on who gets to use the land, and under what conditions, your economic structures are going to be totally different. And of course, political structures are both the source and the result of the economic structures.

[And then there’s the bit about how the same weapon used to harvest Bambi is can be turn against fellow man, as needed. Handy in a pinch — though I don’t honestly expect our compound will ever be raided by despots on account of our archery arsenal.]

So that’s been our autumn living history lesson here. Things you sort of know, but don’t really quite get the hang of until you have it in hand.

*****

BTW: Our best recipe so far: Put a random slab of venison in the crockpot with a little liquid, to slow cook all day, pot-roast style. In the evening, shred and use in the _Joy of Cooking’s_ beef stroganoff recipe. Wow. Just wow.

Price Lists

This is why we need price lists.  There can be no real health care cost reform until medical prices become publicly available.

Basic economics.  You cannot have secret prices and expect the market to function.

Asimov / Belloc follow-up

Finished reading The Shaping of France.  Pretty happy with it.  All my reservations stated below continued, and of course it was just dreadful to read such an agnostic account of Joan of Arc — what a spoilsport!  But as a nice clear, readable telling of the kings and battles of medieval France-in-progress, it did the trick.  Great introduction to military history for people who don’t really do military history, but want to understand some of the big picture.  For all its faults, I think reading this one is a good starting point, or re-freshing point, before diving deeper into any particular topic covering medieval France or England.  (For example: 1215.)

I’m not sure whether it makes Hillaire Belloc squirm or chuckle, but I think his  Characters of the Reformation is a natural follow-on to The Shaping of France. Similar type of work, though the author’s historical lense now switches from ardently-atheist-mode to ardently-catholic-mode.   Belloc’s character-by-character approach is a little more disjointed and difficult to follow, but in exchange you get a slightly more intense look at each individual.  Likewise, Asimov is the more goes-down-like-popcorn story-teller, but I think Belloc is selling meatier ideas.  (And it was very refreshing to read an account of the reformation from an unabashedly-catholic perspective.  Just because you never do.  No doubt a bit of bias in there, but bias worth discovering for change.)  As far as historical-documentation goes, they are twins.

My only regret on these two: I really wish I had read The Shaping of France before Characters of the Reformation, because the one really sets you up to understand the other.

***

Next on my to-do list: Getting my notes done on my medieval-france honkin’ big pile of library books before they have to go back at the end of the week.   In between taking girls to the Nutcracker, cooking for Thanksgiving, attending Thanksgiving, hosting Thanksgiving, and maybe doing other fun stuff.  And then cleaning of my desk, haha.

 

Reading French History to Understand the English

I’m about a third of the way through Isaac Asimov’s The Shaping of France (Houghton Mifflin, 1972).  Not exactly a proper history book, since there are absolutely no citations or bibliography or anything else to back up his various claims, but more like a highly readable report written by an astonishingly good undergrad.   For all the man can’t seem to document, he can tell a mighty good story.

I picked up the book from the library wanting shore up my knowledge medieval french history, and certainly it’s been helpful for that.  But the surprise was this:  Suddenly the history of medieval England makes so much more sense.   Asimov’s telling of the Capetian kings’ efforts to build a stable (French) kingdom works like the denoument of a good mystery, where Father Brown or Miss Marple explain the motives of that one character you never really noticed before, but whose actions were driving all the strange comings and goings of the rest.  You need, of course, to already have the outline of English history in the back of your head, or else the final explanation won’t do you any good.

–> I’m don’t know that Asimov’s book is the best out there.  You could never use it for academic purposes without making your advisor chuckle (or cringe, or both).  And I’m only up to Philip VI, so this a PBR.  But if you need an easily-digestible history of the kings from Charlemagne forward, in a way you can actually pretty much remember and make sense of, Asimov is mighty handy in a pinch.   And just the trick for making sense of England.

 

RIP

Please pray for the repose of the soul of Shelly McKinney.

Thanks.

RE: ‘climate change’

I’m a sorry linker, when it comes to WSJ articles .  But anyway, the other day* , after I posted about the beetles, the journal’s “The Numbers Guy” column was on climate models.  Long discussion about how these models are inaccurate, unreliable, not good for making policy, etc. But then there was this graph.  A very eye-catching graph.

–> Which showed, to my slightly-trained eye, that sure enough, over the past century the average global temperature (that’s got to be fun to measure) has been steadily increasing. Plenty of up-n-down blips, but the overall trend was mighty obvious.

Now what to do with that data another question entirely.  I’m not persuaded it’s a man-made phenomenon, though I can certainly see why someone might think so — industrial revolution, all that.  But as I think about Romans-to-Renaissance industrial ebb and flow, and then ponder the climate variations that went alongside, I just don’t see the connection.

It could be that my memory is poor — it’s not like I’ve got 2,000 years of ecomic and weather data neatly filed here at my  hand.  I’m just going off of bits and pieces pasted together from various reading over the years.  So if someone has a nice readable [short, if we could] article fitting that slightly longer-term data into the current climate-change theory, do post.  I really am not at all decided one way or another.

 

*That’s a technical citation, meaning “it is in my mulch box, no longer in the living room”.  Which is how we date newspaper articles here.

Pine Beetles and Climate Change

Listened to Marketplace last night on NPR.  I almost never listen to the radio anymore, as it is difficult to hear an entire story with small children present, and I don’t think the part where I yell at the kids not to interrupt is all that healthy.  So mostly I read.

But last night I happened to catch (most) of an article about how pine trees were dying in Montana due to global warming.  I was stunned — are temperatures really getting so high that pine trees are perishing in the heat??  Maybe I should take this problem more seriously.

No no, it’s that pine beetles are eating them.

Ah.  So, er, what do pine beetles have to do with global warming?  Well, our reporters contend that the 1.something degree rise in global temperature over the past fifty years has suddenly made the pine beetles not get killed off by winter freezes, and hence the attack.

Now if I lived in Montana, I might buy this.  But as it happens, I’m rather familiar with the *southern* pine beetle, which has been on a feeding frenzy for quite awhile now.  (Note to Montana: Start chopping.  Do not leave those dead trees standing there.)  And the thing is, the southeastern US hasn’t had a Montana-style winter in quite a while.  [Thousands of years? Millions? Some geologist please quick speak up.]  So apparently *our* pine beetles are much slower on the uptake than Montana’s . . .  Or else no one is blaming our beetles on global warming, and it’s just a coincidence that Montana gets climate-change beetles, while ours are extra hungry for some other reason.

My reaction?  Linking the pine beetle infestation to global warming is lousy science.  We may or may not be experiencing some kind of human-induced climate-warming.  Or maybe human activity is causing wider swings in weather patterns than in the past (hence, warming and cooling both.)  I’m doubtful, but it could be — I won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.   But claiming anything and everything just must be due to global warming is silly, and ruins the credibility both of the scientists who make these claims, and the journalists who report on them.

That said, as I mentioned, I live with small children, and there’s a chance I missed some pivotal moment in the report when the Marketplace journalists displayed their healthy skepticism.  In which case, good for them.

Depression & Creativity

Essay in the Journal this morning, in the weekend section, about the connection between mental illness and creative genius.  I try not to pay too much attention to the WSJ’s Saturday essays, and my mental health is the better for it.  But I thought today’s page W3 piece by Jeannette Winterson (“In Praise of the Crack-Up”) wanted a little reply.

[For a very thorough, sometimes too thorough, exploration of this topic, see Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression.  But my thoughts, different from his, are what follows.]

No one extols the virtues of depressed Pizza Guys. Read an essay like Winterson’s, you’d get the idea that writers and artists were the only moody people out there.  Perhaps artsy people don’t have a very wide circle of acquaintance.  So let me assure you: mental illness, including but not limited to depression, knows no professional barriers.  Accountants, Wal-Mart Managers, Engineering Professors — keep an ear out and you’ll quickly discover these people, too, can suffer mood disorders.

The difference being, of course, that your average laboratory technician doesn’t get asked to write an op-ed about the experience.  And no one pores through the details of the billing-clerk’s private life, in order to write a riveting biography about the “real story” behind that face we know so well.  Thus we never ask ourselves, “But what would interstate commerce come to, if we didn’t have depressed truck drivers??”  [Who would cover those long-haul routes without the work of those who long for solitude?  Mmn, I suppose the guys who are so fond of CB radios, and, these days, cellphones.]

But in fairness, the nature of literature and art does mislead.  I was struck the other month reading through a collection medieval poetry: it’s 98% about love, death, and combinations of love-n-death.  And pretty  much that seems to hold true through the centuries.   As much as *I* like to write about exciting topics like doing the dishes, or changing diapers, apparently themes with a little more drama tend to be more enduring.

–> So whereas the janitor has little to gain, professionally, by letting his personal agony shine through in his work, a writer or painter can use the depths of despair or psychosis as raw material for a riveting masterpiece.   Of course ordinary grief and heartbreak are plenty dark for those purposes, and most of us will get to enjoy a fair bit of both by the time we’re old enough to write decently;  but sure, if you happen to have episodes of mental illness to draw on, that works too.

And it *is* consoling for other suffering readers to know they are not alone in their experiences. So not such a bad contribution to the art, if you go in for that type of reading.

Which leads to a final point: Writing about difficult experiences is helpful to the writer. Or painting for the painter, and so on, I imagine.  (The other arts are beyond my skill, so I can’t be sure.)   Though honestly, most of us, when we work through our feelings this way, end up with a piece that is dreadfully boring — ‘maddening’ you might say; it takes true genius to be able to write about the experience of  mental illness without causing it to become contagious.   For the average depressed person, best to keep those feelings in the personal journal, far, far, from an editor’s desk.

But none of that makes it necessary to keep around the assorted mental illnesses just for literature’s sake.  Any more than we need to keep around cancer because it has produced so many great works of art (I like this one), or encourage warfare in the Mediterranean that we might get another Iliad in the process.   Given effective, no-obnoxious-side-effects cures for mental illness, there will still be plenty to write about.