You Think Too Much

Nature Book Review: Changes in the Land

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 23 May 2012 14:06:00 +0000

When I was in graduate school in sociology many years ago there was a woman who wanted to specialize in environmental sociology. In the heart of the Midwest at Indiana University, most of us–graduate students and professors, alike–would just give her a puzzled look when she stated this intention. It took me teaching my own environmental sociology course to understand the importance of sociology to the study of the environment. Here it is in a nutshell: environmental problems are caused by the ways in which society is structured, and understanding how we structure our societies is what sociology is all about.

Of course, if there’s such a thing as environmental sociology, there’s bound to be a field out there called environmental history. Why is environmental history important? That’s one of the questions explored in this seminal book in the field of environmental history, William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. Cronon didn’t set out to write environmental history. There really wasn’t even such an animal when he began the research that would become Changes in the Land. But his book was one of the first to seriously consider that one could write a history of ecological change and that that history would be both fascinating and important.

This book began as a paper for a seminar at Yale in colonial history. As a college professor who grades a lot of papers, it’s hard to imagine anything my students produce ever becoming quite as readable as Cronon’s book. Perhaps he was blessed with good writing skills, or an amazing series of editors. This is an academic work, but that rare gem of a book which can transcend the mere academy.

In Changes in the Land, Cronon systematically details what New England looked like before the arrival of the first Europeans and how the ecology of the land was changed by the interaction with Europeans. You learn many fascinating things in this book. For example, honey bees, ragweed and dandelion are all species that are not native to North America; they were brought over by Europeans. Can you imagine? The dandelion and the honey bee are both, technically, invasive species. You can read about which kinds of trees early settlers most valued, how the Indian method of agriculture compared to the Europeans, the origins of the wampum as a form of currency. Cronon’s book is a treasure trove of exactly the kind of obscure but carefully documented historical details which I love. Had I read history like this in high school or college, there’s a good chance I would be teaching history right now. History like Cronon’s book answers the question that is always foremost in my mind–Why are things the way they are? Why do our landscapes look the way they do?

You could read Cronon’s book just for that treasure trove of juicy historical tidbits. But there’s a larger argument being made here as well, and here are the two main points as I see them. First, Cronon systematically dismantles this idea of a pure, untouched wilderness encountered by the Europeans. We all know now that the Indians were there, but Cronon directs our attention to the ways in which the Indians had, of course, altered the ecology of New England before the Europeans ever arrived. A little reading of early colonial history will tell you that the Native Americans had cleared some land for their villages; by the time the first colonists arrived, these spaces were abandoned because of the illnesses that had already decimated the Indian population, and these were the sites of the first European settlements (this isn’t the focus of Cronon’s book, but he does also go into some detail about the biological holocaust caused by European diseases among the Native American population).

Some Native American groups in New England also engaged in controlled burning practices. The first Europeans were amazed by the open and park-like nature of the American forests. This characteristic of New England forests was due to the burning practices of the Indians, which cleared out the underbrush and shrubs that would otherwise grow up. In addition to making it easier to get around in the forests, burning sped up the process of returning nutrients to the forest soil. It encouraged the growth of forageable plants like raspberries, strawberries and blackberries. Burning also helped to control plant diseases or pests like fleas. Perhaps most importantly, controlled burning created what ecologists call an “edge effect.” The burned forests were grassier than un-burned forests, and resembled the boundary areas typical between a forest and grasslands. By creating more area of grassland, Indians had manipulated the environment in ways that increased game populations like elk, deer, beaver, hare, and grouse. Native American groups were intentionally altering the environment in ways to benefit them.

Europeans settlers chose not to recognize the ways in which Native Americans did, in fact, manipulate the land for two reasons. First, the ways in which the Indians changed the natural landscape were unfamiliar to Europeans. Indians farmed, but they did not enclose their land, and they did not stay in one place. After the soil around one village had become depleted, Indians would move on. Second, recognizing the ways in which Indians were, in fact, manipulating their environment would have made the argument that Indians did not really “own” the land harder to make. Colonists argued that your right to own land was based on your alteration of it. You had to plant something or cut down trees. That the Indians didn’t appear to be altering the land meant they had no legal rights to it. This is a simplified version of a much more complicated argument Cronon makes about the differences between European and Native American concepts of property and property rights, and even that discussion is kind of fascinating. If you can make an explanation of property rights interesting, you’re a pretty damn good writer. The bottom line is, New England, and by extension the rest of the country, was not a pristine wilderness when the Europeans arrived. It was an ecology that was already affected by direct and intentional human intervention.

From this first conclusion follows the second. What exactly do we mean by ecological change? In setting out to write about ecological change, there’s a sense that you establish a baseline and then work from there. Here’s the baseline and here’s how we changed from that baseline. The baseline is static and unchanging. Here’s what New England was like before the Europeans arrived and here’s how it changed afterwards. Only, it had already been changed. It had been changing for thousands of years. Who knows how old the burning practices of the New England Indians were? What did New England look like before that? There is always already another foot print on the beach; the island is not ours alone.

This is an interesting philosophical problem until you combine it with the kind of moral and normative perspective we bring to the problem. It is not just that there is a baseline which we have departed from; there is often a sense that the baseline was pure, untouched, and better than where we ended up. In ecology this is called a state of equilibrium. When a natural environment has reached equilibrium, all is well in the world. When it is disturbed, it is, well, disturbed. It is a system out of balance, and seeking to return to equilibrium. But in reality, ecological systems are always in flux, always changing, and not just as a result of human intervention.

The shift in ecology to the model of ecosystems as opposed to equilibrium moves away from a more functionalist perspective on nature. Ecosystems are dynamic and interactive, and there is no need to establish a baseline before human intervention. But the question still remains, how do we understand the relationship of humans to ecosystems? Is any ecosystem that includes humans somehow tainted? Are some human relationships to ecosystems better than others? Did the Indians of New England have a better relationship with their ecosystem than the Europeans? What is the optimal way to interact with an ecosystem?

The book I’ve just started reading in many ways picks up where Cronon leaves off. Rambunctious Garden is about our relationship to nature in a world without any wilderness left, assuming there was ever any wilderness in the first place. What do you do as a conservationist? If we were to restore Clifty Falls Park to its pre-European state, maybe it would mean doing some controlled burning to clear out the undergrowth. If we don’t like invasive species, should we get rid of all our honey bees? How do we decide what nature is and whether or not we’re a part of it?

Stay tuned for some possible answers from Rambunctious Garden.

Madison Monday: River Roots, The Finale

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:25:00 +0000

It’s officially over and now the long wait for next year’s River Roots festival can begin. Let me just say from the beginning that this year was the best River Roots festival EVER! The O.C. Bear guitar I won probably has something to do with that. But also the amazing weather...this is the first year I can remember a folk festival with absolutely no rain. And, of course, the music was outstanding.

As I said yesterday, Sunday at River Roots is kind of your low-key day. Originally, the festival only went for Friday and Saturday, so some folks might still be getting used to the whole Sunday concept. But more recently, Sunday has become local day at the festival, and let me tell you that there is some really amazing local musical talent in our area.

Appalatin
photo courtesy of Kriss Luckett-Ziessmer

Those who were in the know yesterday showed up early–at 12:30–for the first act. Appalatin is a band that bridges mountains...the mountains of South America and the mountains of Appalachia. All you need to be convinced that this is a brilliant concept is to hear their version of the consummate old-time song, “Shady Grove.” And then you’ll want to hear much more. This group is out of Louisville, so hopefully they’ll be coming back again next year to play on Friday night. They clearly liked the festival, as after their gig, they went and played some more in the Folk Jammers tent with the local musicians.

Whiskey Bent Valley Boys were supposed to be next, but instead we got Michael Kelsey. Now, let me confess that Michael Kelsey was not one of the acts that really leapt out at me from the sampler cd that the festival folks put out in advance of the event. In fact, I just now had to go back and look at which song was his. The beautiful thing you discover at River Roots is that some acts are a whole different animal when they’re live. Sometimes they’re better and sometimes they’re worse. Michael Kelsey is solidly in the former category. Kelsey was one man on the stage, and it took some of us back in the tent a while to realize that what he was playing was Prince’s, “When Doves Cry.” And then some of us started saying to ourselves, “How is he doing that bass line?” when it was just him on acoustic guitar. And then, “How’d he get that sound out of a guitar?” Eventually, we had to go check it out, even though there’s no shade in front of the stage, so there was a bit of sweating involved in standing up there. Kelsey uses a loop pedal to set up his bass line or rhythm. And then sometimes he hooks his fretting hand over the top of the neck of the guitar, almost like he’s playing a slide guitar. Then he stomps and jumps and clicks and snaps and thumps and scratches on his guitar like it’s a beat box. The end result is quite amazing, or as my husband said, “Micheal Kelsey is pure music with a covering of skin.” I’ve only been playing acoustic guitar for 5 months or so, but I continue to be awed by the possible sounds that can come out of just one instrument.

The Black Lillies
photo courtesy of inMadisonIN.com

The Whiskey Bent Valley Boys then did show up, and they were your solid, old-time group. Three guys with beards in chairs around the mikes...a guitar, a fiddle and a banjo, and hailing from the mountains of PeeWee Valley, Kentucky. A nice interlude leading up to the Sunday headliner, The Black Lillies. I’m happy to say that this is a group I thought would be a show-stopper, and they truly were. Every year at the folk festival, there’s one moment when a musician literally stops all the conversation and creates her or his own space of silence with the music. This year, that was The Black Lillies, and specifically an acapella song by Trisha Gene Brady. By the time her song was almost over, all you could hear was her voice and the birds, and even the birds may have stopped to listen. My musical expertise is weak, so I still can’t explain to you things like why what looks like a fairly simple and basic mix of instruments on the stage for The Black Lillies turns into some really exceptional music. I just know it does. And though the Sunday crowd was small, the festival ended with a lot of dancing, and a lot of joy.

And that, my friends, is why this was the best River Roots festival ever. That and all the amazing people in our little community who make it happen every year. River Roots will hopefully continue to draw folks from all around to come and visit, drink some good beer and hear some good music. But for me, the festival is also a celebration of community and the wonderful things that are possible even in small places like Madison. I can’t say enough about what a great job everyone does, so I’ll just say that I have complete confidence that next year will surely also be the best River Roots festival ever.

River Roots: Day Two

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 20 May 2012 15:13:00 +0000

Day two of River Roots is the long haul day. The day where you truly earn your festival-going chops and you have to be in top festival shape to survive. If you’ve been offered moonshine in the women’s restroom on day one, you’re probably not going to be in top festival shape for day two. This is where the tent and a comfy blanket in the shade come in handy–for babies and people recovering from moonshine.

It was another beautiful day on Saturday, though a little bit warmer. It’s always fun to see the tent-less multitudes clustering their chairs around the shade. For the past two years we have been blessed with what we like to refer to as the Bicentennial Bathroom, as it was built during (and perhaps in honor of?) the year of our bicentennial (2009). This means you can pee somewhere besides a port-a-pottty, genuinely wash your hands, and there’s a water fountain, which means free water available to the hot and the thirsty. The most creative heat-alleviating strategy I saw yesterday: one enterprising tent brought in an inflatable kiddie pool which they filled with buckets of water they hauled up the hill. Those kids were having fun.

There are lots of great activities at River Roots for kids (making a tie dye shirt, making your own necklace, drawing, dressing up in period clothes and getting your picture taken), but my stepdaughter and her crew are most interested in running around like maniacs and rolling down a grassy hill repeatedly. Of course this led to great itching, and then great complaining about the itching, and then promising she would complain no more if she could just roll down the hill one more time.

Hill rolling

One of the very nice additions to this year’s River Roots festival is the plein air painting. This group, who also meet every Tuesday night at the West St. art center, set up their easels and draw or paint people, the festival...whatever. Folks can just sit down in a chair and for the cost of being still (and maybe having to sit in the sun too long), someone draws a picture of them. It’s lovely to be able to walk by and see what folks are drawing or painting.

There was, of course, also music. I liked Roosevelt Dime, and particularly watching one of the band members play a stick attached to a bucket as an upright bass–a bucket bass. Sitting back at our tent with my not-so-great vision, I couldn’t figure out what the guy was doing at first. He appeared to be holding a stick and strumming the air, rather vigorously. The bucket was hidden behind a speaker. Finally, I figured out he was playing a bucket bass. There’s a cheaper alternative to a bass fiddle, which usually start at $1200.

Speaking of instruments, let me tell you a little story about my new guitar. This year my husband and I became River Roots members. As you can tell, we’re big fans of the festival and for only $100, you can become an individual level member. For an extra $25, you can sign up for the raffle that happens at the festival. I’ve watched this raffle every year, and wondered vaguely how you get signed up. They always give away an O.C. Bear guitar. The first year I heard this, I just thought, “What’s an O.C. Bear guitar?” And then I started hearing more about these guitars and this local Madison luthier. And then I saw the one and only banjo he’s ever made for a friend, which was an absolute thing of beauty. And then, of course, I started playing guitar myself, and there’s something about holding a guitar against your body and hearing the sound it makes that changes your whole perspective on the instrument. So this year for the first time, I wanted to win that guitar.

Plein Air painting

I suppose my intention was pure, because we did. And perhaps the guitar wanted me. Instruments, in the end, want to be played, and I’d always wondered, what happens if someone who doesn’t play wins the guitar? I imagine this happens, but how sad. Mr. Bear was so happy to have someone who plays win his guitar. And I was so happy to have won! Also, while we were waiting behind the stage to get the guitar case and talking to Mr. Bear, Hayes Carll walked by! Being in festival mode, my first thought was, “Hey, I think I know that guy, but I don’t remember how,” and so I did what all good Madisonians did–I waved. And then I realized, “Oh, I don’t know that guy. That’s Hayes Carll.” Later, Mr. Bear told us that the guitar I won is modeled after the one Hayes Carll plays, a Gibson J-45. I can tell you that it sounds something like hot chocolate and bourbon.

As you can tell, it was probably the best River Roots day EVER! Because after winning a beautiful, hand-made guitar, and waving at Hayes Carll, I got to see Hayes Carll perform. Here’s the best thing Hayes Carll said, which I know he probably says in every podunk town he plays in, but is unique in that it’s actually true about Madison–“We could see you guys all waving from a mile outside of town.”

O.C. Bear guitar

Today is Day Three, and there’s still a lot of good music left. Appalatin, a band that fuses Latin and old-time music, is at 12:30. I’m looking forward to both the Whiskey Bent Valley Boys at 3:00 and The Black Lillies at 4:30. Sunday’s are sometimes the very best days of the festival...chilled out and laid back, kind of like laying on the couch and watching football after the chaos of opening the presents on Christmas morning. It’s too late to win a guitar, but not too late to enjoy the last day at River Roots.

River Roots: Day One

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 19 May 2012 13:17:00 +0000

Obviously whoever’s in control of the weather really loves good music (and, I think, also beer). The first night of River Roots was a gorgeous one. We saw one very small cloud go by in an otherwise blue sky, and really I think it was just passing by to hear the music.

There were three acts last night...Carolyn Martin, Searson and The Band of Heathens. One of the things that occurred to me as I was watching my stepdaughter do a little heroine worship of the three sisters in Searson was that there are always lots of women at River Roots festival. And not just women singing. There are women playing all manner of instruments, women dancing, bands like Uncle Earl and Searson that are pretty much all women. Maybe that’s intentional on the part of the folks who are doing the choosing. Maybe there are more women in this particular genre of music, whatever genre you want to call it. Regardless, I like it. It’s nice to see women up on stage tearing it up.

Last night it was Colleen Searson tearing it up on the fiddle. I’ll go ahead and confess that I always fall a little in love with fiddle players. Colleen Searson was amazing, and she’s been playing the instrument since the age of 9, so that makes sense. Celtic fiddling is fast, fast, and then a little faster. What I learned from watching Searson about my own fiddle playing is that I really should move my hips more, which is a lesson I’m happy to learn. I have to say, The Band of Heathens were at a distinct disadvantage having to end a night that started with Carolyn Martin and went on to the rocking Celtic music of Searson. Also, they were boys.

The other highlight of the night for me was being offered moonshine in the women’s restroom. I won’t reveal whether I accepted their offer or not, but I really can’t think of anything more appropriate than moonshine at a folk festival. And it’s representative of the kind of festival River Roots is. Folks are just happy to be there, moonshine or not. It’s very much a festival that brings out all my favorite people in the community, but even the people you don’t know are friendly. I suppose it’s entirely possible to find yourself sitting in a camp chair on the grass, watching a barge go down the river and listening to some amazing music and not be in a good mood. I guess that could happen. But you can always come down for Day Two and put it to the test.

Madison Monday: Gearing up for River Roots

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:33:00 +0000

Yes, it's not exactly Monday in Madison, but better late than never. For those of you who might be new the blog, you can check out a list of previous Madison Monday posts here.

This day after Monday, I'm in the middle of a very complicated recipe for ciabatta and drinking a mojito. Those two activities are more compatible than you might think. In fact, the mojito helps you to care a little less about the fact that you might have dough in your hair. When I say "complicated" ciabatta recipe, I mean it. There are poolish and couche and all kinds of very intense stuff.

So instead of writing a new post today, I'm re-posting from right after last year's folk festival (when it was still called folk festival) in preparation for this weekend. Yes, it's River Roots this weekend, so you know where I'll be. It's not too late to buy a wristband...it's never too late to buy a wristband. So see you there, and thanks to the shout-out from inMadisonIN.com.

Re-post from May 23, 2011

The Tillers

The folk festival is over and I’m crawling out of my music, sun and beer-induced haze to report on the proceedings this Monday. As I wrote before, the Ohio River Valley Folk Festival takes place every May here in Madison, on the banks of the Ohio River in Bicentennial Park. In my humble opinion, this is quite simply the best festival on the planet. If there had been any chance of me being raptured on Saturday evening (and there probably wasn’t much according to the rules set out by those who believe in the rapture), I would have said, “No, thanks. I’ve found heaven right here.”

There was, as always, good beer, good music, and good friends. This year about 20 or so friends went in together on a VIP tent, which meant we had cover during the 30 minutes or so of rain on Saturday night, and a fire pit to grill some sausages and veggies on. Getting a tent was probably up there as one of the best ideas I’ve ever had.

Here are some highlights of the festival for me:

- The Greencards on Friday night. The festival gets under way at about 6:00 on Friday, and because it’s a Friday, the crowds are usually a little thinner. For years, my husband and I have never made it to the headliners on Friday and Saturday night because, big surprise, drinking beer all day makes you a bit sleepy. And in May in southern Indiana, it’s liable to still be cold at night. The solution? Get up in front of the stage and move. And The Greencards were the perfect band for that. This group is a mix of Australians and Americans playing their own funked up version of American folk music. They have a fiddle player, a mandolin and an acoustic guitar, but also an electric bass thrown in. Why not? They were fabulous. The fiddle player and guitarist did an awesome little instrumental solo. Then for their encore they did a great crowd participation version of “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick.

After the rain

- The Folk Jammers at the jamming tent. The folk festival is a laid back kind of affair, so I believe the Folk Jammers’ role in the festivities evolved somewhat spontaneously. But if you come, you’ll see in the Storytelling tent a group of mostly guys on banjos, guitars, mandolins, and other assorted instruments, just sitting around playing. And having a good time. Everyone’s welcome to join them, to sing along, to pick up a washboard and play. So I brought my fiddle down and played a few tunes with the very kind and patient Folk Jammers. What I love about this group is that they’re clearly just having fun playing music. Their tent is very popular, and not just when it rains, because that sense of enjoyment is deeply contagious.

- Music workshop by The Tillers. Every year one of the bands does a music workshop on Saturday in the Storytelling tent. Last year, it was the Carolina Chocolate Drops, and unfortunately, I missed it. This year, it was The Tillers, who talked about songcatching. They started with John C. Campbell and Olive Dame Campbell (of Songcatcher, the movie, fame). Then the Carter family and the Seeger’s. They talked about John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and his discovery of Roscoe Holcomb. And of course, they played some tunes. On November 19th at Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky, they’ll be doing a benefit show to raise money for multiple myleoma research with lots of special guests, including John Cohen.

- The Wiyos. I don’t even know how to describe The Wiyos. They had the 3:00 spot on Saturday afternoon, which I officially declare the “Wow, they’re kind of cool.” spot at folk festival. Last year, I believe the Carolina Chocolate Drops were in that spot. Around 3:00 on Saturday, you’re usually on your second beer. Folks are beginning to filter in. You might be doing more chatting and eating than you are listening to the music. If you can draw folks in during the 3:00 spot, and make them stop talking long enough to listen to you, you’re doing good. The Wiyos did that. Every now and then I had to stop to say, “What did he just say?” The Wiyos are folksy in their instrumentation, but then they go in some weird directions. It reminds me a bit of kleismer music combined with gypsy music, and I don’t know, maybe like They Might Be Giants thrown in for the whimsy?

Uncle Earl (on stage, not in the beer tent)

- Uncle Earl’s impromptu concert in the beer tent. It’s really not a folk festival unless it rains some. In past years, we’ve stuck it out in the beer tent. Where else would you rather be in the rain? Or sometimes just packed it up and left when the rain lasted too long. This year, thank god, we had our VIP tent, and so during the rain, we all sheltered fairly comfortably (at one point we counted 30 heads under the tent) until the sun came back out and the rain stopped.

At some point, someone who had ventured out for a beer in the rain said, “Hey, there’re these women in the beer tent playing banjo and fiddle and an upright bass.” And I said to my husband, “That’s Uncle Earl!” So, sure enough, down in the beer tent Uncle Earl was playing surrounded by heaving masses of people packed in to stay dry. The folk fest coordinator, Madison’s own Greg Ziessmer, told us that they’d asked him if it was okay, while it was raining and no one was on the stage (there was some lightning, too, which had shut down the music) for them to go play in the beer tent. I’m hoping no one in the band was claustrophobic, because they were right in the middle of everyone, just wailing away. Only at folk festival.

By the time Uncle Earl actually took the stage, after the rain and after David Bromberg finished his set, the hours under a tent drinking heavily had taken its toll on the crowd. In front of the stage, it felt kind of like you were in a rowdy bar...a lot of talking, laughing, drinking, and not much listening to the band. And there were some sound difficulties. But just seeing Uncle Earl on the stage, a group of all women playing music together, was very cool and empowering. And their fiddler looked almost exactly like a friend of mine from graduate school.

Carrie Newcomer, from the tent

- Carrie Newcomer. Sunday is a mellow day for the folk fest, and usually has a kind of local theme. Greg Ziessmer and Kris Luckett played, and sang one of my favorite song’s, “Jack’s Home Town.” Jack is their two year old son, and the song is all about Madison. My parents came down for a few hours, their very first folk festival visit. The last act on Sunday was Carrie Newcomer, and it was the perfect way to close out the festival. The talking in the tent just stopped when she took the stage, and you just had to listen. She’s from just up the road in Bloomington and Monroe County, so she sang us some songs about Indiana. I’ve been listening on the folk festival sampler to “One Woman and a Shovel,” but I didn’t realize until yesterday that it’s based on a collection of stories by Indiana author, Scott Russell Sanders, called The Wilderness Plots. I have a collection of his essays I’ve been reading, but now I’ll have to check this out as well.

She also played, “If Not Now,” a beautiful song which felt perfect. It’s a Sunday afternoon and I’ve just spent the whole weekend doing pretty much nothing. The yard needed to be mowed, the house cleaned, the laundry done, and on and on. But sometimes you also need to sit back and savor the moment, sitting under a tent full of friends next to the beautiful Ohio River in a town you love. If you’re not going to savor that moment now, then when?

Gardening Book Review: Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sat, 12 May 2012 20:51:00 +0000

During the month of May I’m team-teaching a class on the philosophy and sociology of food with 13 students who do things like move chickens, plant seeds, cook greens, make garlic aioli and bake bread. We’ve been talking a lot about the process of producing your own food by having a garden or raising your own animals. Some of our students will probably end up living in the country or in the suburbs where they’ll have some room for a nice garden or maybe even a goat or chicken. But some of them will end up in cities, and that’s got me thinking about small space gardening.

Now, my little town of Madison is not a city, but many of the historic houses downtown have fairly small backyards. Up until our destruction of the mimosa tree two years ago, our backyard also had very little in the way of sun for raising vegetables. Our solution has been to rent a plot in the community garden, which allows us to raise many, many tomatoes for canning.

The problem with the community garden is that it’s a car ride away. Not a long car ride by any means, but it is, nonetheless, not observable out of our back window. It might be a garden in which we raise things to cook in our kitchen, but it is not really a kitchen garden. It is not a potager.

Literally translated from French, potage means a soup of broth with vegetables. A potager has come to be synonymous with a vegetable garden–the place where you grow the things that will go in the vegetable soup. Unlike traditional American gardens, which are usually planted away from the house in neat little dirt rows which mimic the rest of our agriculture in the U.S., the potager is located as close to the kitchen as possible. The potager is also different from American gardens in that aesthetics is equally as important as edibility. You should certainly be able to cook out of your potager, but it should also give you great pleasure to look at year round.

In the United States, we tend to have a somewhat compulsive need to separate out all our uses. You see this in our insane zoning, which in the suburbs, puts houses miles away from the nearest place to buy anything. God forbid commercial and residential be in the same block. This idea becomes so ingrained in our heads that it really was weird for me when I moved to Madison to have a florist right down the street from our house. “What’s a shop doing close to my house,” I kept thinking.

Maybe this need to compartmentalize is specifically a food thing. I just read in Margaret Visser’s book, Much Depends on Dinner, about the American need to eat all the parts of our dinner separately. Meat here, potatoes there, salad in a separate bowl. This is very different from some food traditions which lump everything together in one big, delicious pot.

A diagram of the potager at Versailles

In our yards, we separate our pretty plants from the plants we eat. Edible plants in the vegetable garden with no eye to aesthetics and usually hidden somewhere out of view. Certainly you don’t put your vegetable garden in the front yard, even though for a lot of urban and semi-urban dwellers like myself, the front is the sunniest spot available. Pretty plants exist to be pretty and are prominently displayed. The potager spits on this artificial division. Or it’d probably be more accurate to say that the potager makes that dismissive “pfft” noise that seems uniquely French at the idea that plants can’t be both edible and beautiful.

I checked out a score of books from the library that are all about raising food in unexpected places....on your roof, your patio, and yes, in your front yard. What was especially interesting about Designing the New Kitchen Garden is that Jennifer R. Bartley grounds her very useful suggestions in a fascinating history of kitchen gardens and a brief survey of some historic and contemporary potager gardens. So from this book I learned that the root of the word for paradise comes from the Persian word for a walled garden or orchard. Isn’t that lovely to think about?

Medieval monks and nuns took their gardening very seriously, and the principles of the potager harken back to these early traditions. They are often laid out with paths that cross in the middle, symbolizing Christ on the cross and the four rivers flowing from the Garden of Eden. In Europe, the garden followed the archetype of the clearing in the woods, while Eastern gardens were designed to resemble an oasis in the dessert. But their design was also grounded in practicality; the kitchen garden went next to the kitchen and the medicinal garden by the doctor. The poultry house would be located next to the garden for fertilizer. In many monasteries, the monks would be buried in the orchard, their bodies fertilizing the trees. Can you think of a more perfect way to participate in the natural cycle of life, death and re-birth? Bartley gives us lists of what would have been grown in these medieval gardens, and it’s fascinating to think about Medieval monks fighting the same battle with their spreading mint that we all fight today.

In a contemporary sense, the beauty of the potager garden is so simple that I had to read this book to be reminded of it. A garden, regardless of what kind of garden it is, should be enjoyed every day. It should be something that is like a part of your house, in that it is just another room that happens not to be heated or air conditioned in quite the same way as the rest of the house. Some people stumble upon this reality by accident and some by an intuitive sense for the kinds of places that are enjoyable to spend time in outside. My parents have a beautiful deck and gazebo which are shaded almost all day long by a large oak tree and other trees they have planted over almost 40 years in their house. Because these areas are shaded all day long, they are cool enough to spend time in even during the very hottest part of the summer. This outdoor room is connected to the rest of the house through a kitchen extension with windows on three sides. These two rooms–one indoor and one outdoor–are clearly the most pleasant rooms in my parents’ house. When people visit, they exclaim over how beautiful it all is.

An espaliered tree

And yet, when we build a house in a new development, the first thing that happens is we cut down all the trees. I understand completely why no one in the suburbs ever leaves their house. What would they do? They build quite pleasant and sometimes elaborate decks on the back of their houses, and they put up umbrellas sometimes. But they’re still sitting in the blazing sun because what they don’t have are trees. Who wants to spend time out there in the summer?

Anyway, the potager should be designed to be an additional room, so it should be pleasant and livable and comfortable. And, yes, edible. This comes as no surprise to any of you who have tried raising any kind of growing thing yourself, but the growing of things takes some maintenance and care. Gardens work best if you can regularly check out what’s happening. Are the tomato plants wilting? Is that a potato bug? And what’s happening to the eggplant leaves, for Christ’s sake? These kind of crises are best handled on a daily basis, rather than in weekly intervals. And it’s easiest to take care of your garden daily when it is both close to you and a place where you want to be. In fact, daily maintenance of a garden can actually be enjoyable because small daily tasks seem infinitely more manageable than that moment when you walk into the garden and realize that the battle with the weeds may have been irretrievably lost in between your last two visits. This I can swear to from personal experience.

Can an edible garden also be beautiful, though? Yes, I think so. It may take a small step outside of our normal gardening sensibility, but have you ever looked at the beautiful stems of rainbow chard? Or the lovely purple flowers on an eggplant, let alone the sensuous opulence of the eggplant fruit itself? All the principles that apply to flower gardening also apply to the potager. Balance colors and height. Think of your garden as a year-round endeavor rather than just a spring explosion. And there’s always the edible flower, which includes nasturtium, calendula, pansy, Johnny-jump-up, tulips, violets, daylily, hollyhock, bee balm, and rose.

This book came to me at just the perfect moment. My backyard already has the beginnings of an herb garden in the flower beds with mint, sage and oregano. When I found some brussel sprout plants early this spring, the fence wasn’t yet up at our community garden plot. This meant to plant the brussel sprouts up there was to risk their being nibbled to nothing by deer. So I stuck two in the empty pots on our patio. And then I planted some cilantro seeds in a pot. And then the little basil plants I got at the farmer’s market (for a mere 50 cents a pot!). And then when I bought eggplant and peppers, I thought about how I could probably control what happened to them better down here than I could up there, so a couple of them went in pots, too. Currently I have two eggplant, a banana pepper plant, cilantro, dill, parsley, beets, rainbow chard and nasturtium all growing in various pots. My own little potager is under way and it’s quite satisfying already.

An urban potager

And my ambitions are growing. Potager very often used raised beds, because these often take good advantage of small spaces. There are also amazing pictures of espaliered fruit trees growing in very small spaces, and so we're contemplating an apple tree espaliered against our wooden fence. Hopefully when I check back in next year, we will have busted up the concrete sidewalk that bisects our back yard and begun building some raised beds scattered through the sunniest parts of the yard. I’m even contemplating a smaller raised bed out front, though there’s always the risk of having your vegetables stolen by the passer-bys.

Needless to say, I found this book quite inspiring. Life-changing, you might even say. There are, of course, lots of pictures. Barley also breaks the potager down into some basic principles. She walks through her re-design of several spaces into potager, including a garden for a functioning restaurant. She’s clearly a convert to the idea of the potager, and I have to say that now I am, too.

P.S. Okay, one more interesting tidbit from the book. She speculates that English cooking is not as–hmmm, how to say this delicately, flavorful?–because the English moved their gardens farther away from their kitchens and hid them. See how important it is to have your garden close?

P.P.S. I just discovered Bartley has a blog called, American Potager. Brilliant!

Book Review: Wife 22

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Wed, 09 May 2012 19:15:00 +0000

What would chick lit look like if it went online? What seems like ages ago now in 1998, the chick flick went online with You’ve Got Mail. Isn’t it quaint and funny now to think about AOL and that horrible noise your computer used to make when it dialed up the modem? And how incredibly slow it was to search the Internet? Even slower than when you have a bad connection on your iPhone. The horror!

A few weeks ago I wrote about the connection between Facebook and loneliness. This is not exactly what Wife 22, the first novel by Melanie Gideon, is about. But Facebook, e-mail and the constant accessibility of our lives do have a part to play in the story being told in this book. Gideon seems to be playing a bit with the idea of the epistolary novel in the digital age. What would a story look like if it were told through Facebook? Probably pretty boring, but thankfully Gideon supplements with old-fahioned novel-style prose.

Wife 22 is the story of Alice Bumble, forty-something mother of 2 and wife to William, who has recently been laid off from his job in advertising. Alice’s marriage is in that bad place that some marriages go to, when you can’t remember the last time you had a meaningful conversation with your spouse. Alice is an obsessive Facebook-checker, and receives an e-mail invitation to participate in an online study of marriage where she becomes Wife 22. Because this is chick lit, becoming Wife 22 ends up as a life- transforming experience for Alice.

I quite enjoyed Gideon’s attempt to tell a story that is firmly based in the reality of modern life, where folks sometimes quite obsessively carry on a whole life online...on Facebook and Twitter and through e-mail. Alice seems to be mildly obsessive about her phone, and though there are some suggestions in the novel that this isn’t the healthiest thing, the novel is in no way a cautionary tale about the dangers of living online. In fact, in the end (not to give too much away) we discover that her online relationship with one of the researchers involved in the marriage study ends up being a good thing in some ways.

I found Alice’s character to be quite likable, and most of all, I quite enjoy reading about people whose marriages have gone awry. I’m not going to analyze exactly what this is about, except to say that it’s probably very similar to whatever motivates people to watch bad reality tv. The kind of reality tv where you can comfortingly say to yourself, “Oh, thank god that’s not me.” I'm quite lucky in that I don’t understand on a personal level exactly how marriages get to that place, but it seems to me that the more you know, the less likely you are to make the same mistakes yourself.

Wife 22 is another ARC I received from the good folks at Village Lights and it’s due out at the end of May.

Madison Monday: Odds and ends

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:41:00 +0000

The American Queen docked in Madison
photo courtesy of InMadisonIN.com

InMadisonIN.com
Madison, as you may have gathered by now, is a place with a lot of things going on. It is also not always the most technologically savvy community, so many events may be searchable online somewhere, but many of them are not. I probably find out about half the things going on in Madison because of fliers hung in the places I go, but a virtual wall of fliers would be nice. Enter InMadisonIN.com, a website and Facebook page that attempts to bring all the information about what’s happening in Madison together in one place. Quite a feat, but it’s especially nice to like this page on Facebook and see on a day to day basis what’s new in Madison.

The American Queen
One of the things that’s new in Madison is the recent visits by the American Queen steamboat. There’s nothing quite like a steamboat ride, as I can tell you from personal experience on the Belle of Louisville. Owned by the Great American Steamboat Company, the American Queen came for a visit last Friday and then again today. Folks were treated to horse and carriage rides through town, and there’s really nothing like hearing the sound of the calliope as the boat pulls away from shore. The American Queen will be coming back to Madison four more times this year.

Painting of our house (and the church)
by Eric Phagan

Gallery 115
A few weekends ago, my husband and I strolled into this new gallery/cafe/home decor shop on Main St. and we walked out with a beautiful painting of our house. Not everyone is so lucky as to have their house the subject of works of art (it helps to live next door to a scenic church spire), but if you live in Madison, you might find your house on the walls of Gallery 115. This beautiful space has been lovingly renovated by Eric Phagan, the artist whose work is showcased in the building. But there are also sandwiches, soup, coffee, tea and some delicious desserts in the back of the building. Eventually, they’ll be a patio space and wine. Check out this great addition to Main St.

Galena Garlic Company
Another new addition to Main St. is the Galena Garlic Company at 317 W. Main St. This Madison store is their third location, the flagship store being in Galena, Illinois. The store stocks a wide variety of olive oils, balsamic vinegars, spices, rubs and sea salts. My husband and I bought some basil infused olive oil as well as some nice sesame oil. It’s a great place to buy gifts for the foodie in your life.

Over the Rhine

River Roots Festival
It’s t-minus two weeks now until River Roots festival. A tent has been procured. Armbands are in hand. I am quite excited about Hayes Carll, but also to hear Over the Rhine, a band which I should know better than I do, having grown up in the Cincinnati area. The best thing about River Roots is the acts that unexpectedly blow you away. Often it’s on Friday night (e.g. The Greencards) or in the middle of the day on Saturday (e.g. The Carolina Chocolate Drops). But there you are, in your camp chair, pacing yourself through your next beer and chatting to friends, when suddenly, you hear this music. You stop listening to your friends. You may even forget about your beer (though that takes some damn good music). And you find yourself saying, “Who is this?” I predict this year that conversation stopping act might be Roosevelt Dime....or The Black Lillies...or The Band of Heathens. Also, there’s the beautiful part where you walk four blocks at the end of the night to sleep in your own bed.

Those are some odds and ends from Madison this week. If you're interested in reading about college students and goats, check out the blog for our Food and Society spring term course over here.

What do all my favorite tv shows have in common?

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 06 May 2012 21:38:00 +0000

The answer, my friends, is patriarchy. This according to a piece in The New Yorker by Emily Nussbaum, and I can’t say she’s wrong. In her review of Game of Thrones, Nussbaum points out that what this HBO drama based on the series of books by George R.R. Martin has in common with The Sopranos, Mad Men and Downtown Abbey is that the viewer gets to watch patriarchy gone amok. I agree wholeheartedly and would only add that every television show is, in fact, about patriarchy. All of them are produced in patriarchal cultures, because all the cultures I know of that produce television shows are patriarchal, including Hollywood. The important difference with these four shows is that there appears to be the slightest bit of awareness that patriarchy exists and that it is always, in fact, going amok.

Nussbaum notes that many critics have thumbed their noses at Game of Thrones, but unlike the other three shows, Game of Thrones is a story which often puts at the center those who are most disadvantaged by patriarchy–women, children, bastards, eunuchs, and (my favorite) dwarves. I just have to toot my own horn here, and point out that I said this in a blog post back in July of last year. Here’s what I said, just in case you’re too lazy to read the whole post:

Having both read the book and watched the series now, there are some things that strike me as kind of interesting. In the book, most of the main characters are much younger than is suggested in the HBO series. Daenarys is 13, Robb Stark and Jon Snow are 15, and I believe Sansa is just 12. This makes the things that are happening to them much scarier, darker and creepier, so I’m glad the actor who plays Daenarys in the series does not actually look 13. But in essence, both the book and the series are about mostly children, teenagers, women and a dwarf (and one of the teenagers is also a bastard, just to make it interesting). The only main character who does not fit into any of these categories is Eddard Stark, who is perhaps just emotionally handicapped (and no spoilers, but if you watch the show or have read the books, you can see why he might be less of an outlier in this group). In essence, the story is told by an assemblage of people who are generally seen as less powerful, less capable, less at the center of stories. I don’t know if this was intentional on Martin’s part as an author, and it’s subtle. I didn’t really notice this about the characters or the story until several days after I’d finished the book. But I think it’s part of what gives this story such an original twist. The plot itself is not particularly novel, but the perspective is.

So, yay me.

Of these four shows, the one that is least comfortable for me to watch by far is Mad Men. Why? I think because it is very closest to my own life in terms of the culture (set in the United States and focused on middle class, WASPs) and time period. It is the patriarchy with which I am most familiar. And so watching Betty Draper makes my skin crawl. This is, in fact, my parents’ generation. It’s a very thin line of history and a legion of brave and defiant feminists who separate my life from Betty’s. Or Joanie’s. Or Peggy’s. And there is always, always, always a crowd of folks chomping at the bit to move that line right back to where it was in 1965. Witness the birth control debate. Witness the fact that no one ever even talks about the gender wage gap any more. Witness the fact that even in academia, where everyone is supposed to be a bleeding heart liberal, women still make less than men; this does not even account for the legions of missing women I have watched disappear from the ranks of academia over the course of my very short career.

In a patriarchal system, it’s all about power and who has it. As Nussbaum points out, this is at the core of all four of these shows. In Downton Abbey, who has the power to marry who they please, or to decide how dinner’s served? In Game of Thrones, who gets to be king (or queen)? In The Soprano’s, who gets to be the head of the family? In Mad Men, who gets to have the office without the big pillar stuck in the middle of it?

Compared to all of the other shows, Mad Men is...boring. Nothing much happens. But after reading Nussbaum’s article, I think that’s part of the point. How pathetic is the power struggle for the good office? Or to be the one who brings in the Heinz account? No wonder Don has that same constipated look on his face all the time.

Mad Men, oddly enough given that it’s set in the 60s, is about the evolution of the new patriarchy. Aside from that fist fight between Peter and Lane, there’s no physical violence. From our perspective as outsiders, there’s not much at stake. It’s not like you get to rule the world. Just Madison Avenue. The good wars are over and working in an advertising firm is, quite frankly, emasculating. It’s not like you’re John Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie. No robber baron of industry here. You’re not even making anything. You’re not even selling anything. You’re helping other people sell their stuff. You are William H. Whyte’s Organization Man, and no amount of heavy drinking or screwing or commuting will make much difference. It is, of course, amusing to watch the characters try.

The moments in Mad Men that are creepiest for me are the moments when I know that I’m supposed to be thinking how very different things are today, and they’re not. Peggy feels like she has to act like a man in order to be successful. Are there people out there who believe that’s really changed much in the last forty years or so? Daenarys in Game of Thrones might have her own problems as a woman, but they don’t look particularly like my problems. And whose to say if her problems are better or worse than Peggy’s?

There’s a story that tells us that it’s become increasingly easy to be a woman in the grand march of history up until the present. Sometimes this feels more like a fairy tale than a truly accurate depiction of historical truth. If I had to choose between 1965 and 2012, I would certainly pick 2012. But the particular brand of insanity that seized the United States in the post-war years was a pretty big historical aberration, comparable probably only to the similar craziness of the Victorian era in terms of gender ideology. And even in those periods, the idea that Betty should stay home and take care of the kids (and love it) was only ever possible for a small fragment of all the women in the United States, let alone the world. Poor women and many women of color could not afford to be housewives.

This story of increasing liberalization of gender roles is an interesting one, but I’m not sure if I buy it. Does sexism really fade away, or does it just morph and change? Some scholars have argued that the standards we hold up for moms today are actually more demanding than those that Betty Draper faced in 1965. In her 2010 lecture to the Sociologists for Women in Society, Paula England points to the number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled out in the 21st century. The gender wage gap has been stuck at about 75% since about the mid-1990s. A clever critic like Emily Nussbaum may notice that these four, very popular shows are about patriarchy, but does anyone else? And does anyone much care?

The duck and the whale

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:40:00 +0000

Driving back from a visit to see my family in Kentucky this Sunday, I witnessed a recurring tragedy or just another day on the road, depending on your point of view. There’s a lake or inlet on the north side of U.S. 50 right outside of Aurora, Indiana. As I was driving along this stretch of road, some movement in the median of the four-lane highway caught my eye. My window was cracked just a little bit. At the same moment I registered that movement as a mother duck with her ducklings headed in a determined beeline towards my car, the sound of their quacking reached my ears. Quacking in miniature, as it was mostly the ducklings making the noise.

You know how squirrels and deer and other animals will freeze, or dart, or at least register somehow in their motion their awareness of the large, loud, heavy metal object headed towards them at high speed. The ducks did none of that. There was no hesitation, no slowing down, no freezing in fear. They just persisted in their straight line across the road towards the water on the other side.

I avoided them, and I saw in the rear view mirror that the next car behind me managed to safely swerve into another lane to miss the duck line. I couldn’t see what happened with the next car after that, and part of me didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to know, but what are the odds that all those ducklings and their mother made it all the way across? I didn’t want to think about the consequences of this collision between car and birds.

I am that person who will slam on her brakes in the middle of the road to avoid hitting a squirrel...that person who stops her car to go back and pick the turtle up out of the middle of the road. I can count on one hand the number of animals I’ve knowingly killed with my car, and each time, I feel as if their deaths are a burden from which I might never recover. Call me soft, but that’s just how I feel.

There was something different about the ducks. Something about their seeming oblivion to the bizarre and life-threatening situation in which they suddenly found themselves. Something about the sounds they made as they crossed the road, about the determined line of their motion. For a few brief moments in my car because of those ducks, a small crack in the fabric of everyday life opened up.

Image from "Healing the Circle" installation, 1995
courtesy shawnskabelund.com

Maybe it’s the lingering and dormant effects of an artist installation I saw earlier this year by the sculptor Shawn Skabelund. Skabelund’s pieces often incorporate the skulls of dead animals, often animals he or friends have found dead along the side of the road, killed by cars. One piece includes placemats which are pictures of dead deer killed along the side of the road. In one exhibit, he used the actual fetus of a deer his brother had found that was thrown from a deer’s body when it was hit by a car. My students watched Skabelund’s slide show of these works in a silence which was hard to read. Were they deeply moved? Were they disgusted? And were they disgusted by the death, or by his choice to use that death in his art?
Roads and cars are dangerous things. They’re dangerous to all kinds of lifeforms, human and non. In 2009, 33,808 people in the United States died in an automobile accident, far more than those who died from Mad Cow disease or AIDS. An additional 2,217,000 were injured by cars in 2009. In addition to ducks and ducklings, one million animals will be killed on our roads each day in the United States. It’s holocaust by automobile out there, folks.

Well, that’s just the price we pay, you might say. In exchange we get....the ability to move fast. Global climate change. Several wars to protect our access to cheap gasoline. An obesity epidemic. The social dysfunction that is suburbia. We get our cars.

As a sociologist, I’m always going on to my students about the sociological imagination, a phrase that comes from an essay by C. Wright Mills. The sociological imagination is the ability to see the taken for granted aspects of our lives in a new light. I like to tell my students it’s like pretending you’re an alien who’s just landed in the U.S. and has no idea what’s going on. You would ask some stupid questions. Stupid questions are good. Sometimes I think I do okay at teaching my students the sociological part of the equation, but not as well at the imagination part.

For example, imagine the stupid question someone might ask if they landed anywhere in the United States today–“Why is your transportation system so very lethal, in such a wide variety of ways? Why do you persist in getting around in a way that destroys so very many lives?” What answer would you give?

Sometimes I think my students find it difficult to imagine a world in which the first time we realized that our big, fast-moving cars would be killing a lot of animals, we shook our collective heads and said, “Yeah, that’s not really worth it.” Even before we got to the whole destroying the planet or fighting wars or getting fat, we knew that our cars were destructive machines. Can you imagine a world in which that loss of life would have been unacceptable?

Instead, this is the world we live in. We drive along a busy highway. We watch a duck and her ducklings get smashed into the pavement. For a brief moment, this opens up an abyss of sadness and remorse and anger at the way things are. But in order to go on living, we cover it over, brick by brick, and go on with our lives. We stop thinking about it. We get good at not thinking about a lot of things. We head on down the road. Motion is distracting. If you go a little faster, you might not even notice the ducks at all.

The whale

And then there’s the whale, beneficiary of perhaps the most successful public relations campaign since Ronald Reagan convinced all Americans for all time that every woman on welfare has 10 children (in fact, the average family size of people on welfare in the United States is slightly lower than the national average). What is it about whales? They’re not cuddly, or furry. They don’t look anything like us. You can barely tell where their eyes are at all. How many Americans have actually seen a whale anywhere besides on a nature program? And yet, ask even a small child about the whales and I feel certain they will tell you that they should be saved.

Recently I watched the outstanding PBS documentary, The Meaning of Food, which tells us about the Makah people of the Pacific Northwest. This Native American group has been hunting whales for thousands of years. Before Cleopatra, before Jesus was born, the Makah were hunting whales. When the numbers of gray whales became greatly depleted by European hunting in the beginning of the 20th century, the Makah voluntarily elected to stop hunting them, despite the centrality of whale hunting to their culture. So from 1920 until 1999, the Makah killed no whales.

In 1994, the gray whale was moved off of the Endangered Species list. The Makah had never been covered by international treaties prohibiting whale hunting because in 1855 they traded all their land to the U.S. government for the right to continue hunting whales; it was that important to them, but not so important that they would keep hunting when it seemed likely that the gray whale might disappear off the planet altogether. But when the gray whales ceased being an endangered species, the Makah began to prepare to hunt whale again.

In footage from this documentary, you can see the angry protesters who flood the Makah community when they begin to go out for their hunts. You can see the angry letters the Makah received, including one which says, “Save the whales...hunt a Makah.” Despite these protests, the Makah had their first successful hunt in May of 1999, and you can watch the footage of them killing their first whale in over 70 years. It’s not pretty if you’re someone who cringes at the fate of ducks. There’s blood, and there’s no doubt the whale suffers.

After killing the whale, the Makah hunters haul the whale back to the beach in their canoe. The whole community waits on the beach for them, cheering. Someone blesses the whale. All the men drag the whale up onto the beach using nothing but human effort. And for the first time in generations, young Makah children taste fresh whale meat, something that the Makah have been eating for thousands of years. I have to confess that it was this scene that almost brought tears to my eyes, and not the scene of the whale being killed.

Duck or whale?

So who suffers more, the whale or the duck? Is this even the right question to ask? Why do people line up shouting on a beach to save one whale and just drive right on by the ducks? Do we believe that the whale is a superior being of higher intelligence and therefore more worthy of being saved than that duck? Or is it just that most of us aren’t implicated in the killing of whales, while all of us are implicated in the killing of animals along the side of the road?

One of the Makah women in the documentary points out the hypocrisy (she’s kind enough not to call it this, but hypocrisy it is) of the people protesting the Makah’s hunt of one whale while they regularly eat animals who are the end product of what is hard to describe as anything but a tortured and perverse life in our factory farm system. I read an article recently which compared the quite pleasant life of a cockfighting rooster as opposed to his counterpart chicken in the factory farm system. Yet, cockfighting is illegal. This author suggested that the answer to this conundrum has nothing to do with the animals and everything to do with the human beings. Namely, it’s social class. Though this was not at all true in the past, today cock fighting is associated with the poor, the rural, and the ethnic other. It is not what solid, white, civilized, middle class people do. Solid, middle class people eat chickens who have been bred to be unable to stand up, had their beaks chopped off so they don’t peck each other to death, and lived their whole lives standing in their own shit in a poorly ventilated building.

So is the whale more important than the duck because of the type of people involved? American Indians have a long history of being the very easiest targets in our country. As of this moment, the Makah are in the midst of a legal battle to reclaim their right to hunt whales and they’ve now gone another 10 years missing out on part of their culture.

Back here where it’s just ducks, raccoons and deer, it might be hard to imagine a world in which we give up our cars, but those worlds are not impossible. In India, cows cause traffic jams as people try to avoid hitting them with their cars. They don’t always succeed, and the cows certainly cause loss of both bovine and human life. But because of the values place on cows in India, the overall goal is still to prevent cows from being killed. One solution suggests providing grazing areas and burying roads underground. The problem in the United States is not that there aren’t any solutions; it’s that we don’t see these deaths as much of a problem in the first place. A whale hunt is dramatic; there’s blood in the water and a huge carcass. A dead deer along the side of the road is just another dead deer along the side of the road.

And so what? Our children are horrified the first few times they see dead animals along the side of the road. We try to shelter them from these sights. We don’t want them to see the dead bunny rabbit, let alone the dead cat or dog. But in time, they get used to it. In time, we all get kind of used to it. We become quietly accustomed to our lives being strewn with corpses that result from largely senseless deaths. We become accustomed to these deaths because what would happen if we were not? Would we feel compelled to do something else? Would we feel compelled to do something more? Would we feel compelled to do something?

Check out our students' reflections on food, making bread, and goats at their blog, Food and Society.

Book Review: Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:54:00 +0000

U.S. cover

I feel very cool and ahead of the curve to have a review of Chris Cleave’s new novel, Gold, before it’s official release in July of this year. The very generous proprietors at Village Lights Bookstore allowed me to dig through their pile of ARCs for this, and unlike every other time they have done this, this time I actually read the book before it was released.

Gold is the story of five people whose lives are connected by the intensely competitive world of Olympic cycling. Zoe and Kate are at the very top of their athletic form leading up to the 2012 Olympics in London when their coach, Tom, finds out that due to changes in the regulations, only one of these two friends and rivals will be able to compete for the gold. Kate’s husband, Jack, is also an Olympic cyclist while Kate and Jack’s daughter, Sophie, is battling leukemia. Add in the tortured and complicated history of Kate, Zoe and Jack together and you have a perfect potential formula for high melodrama, but Gold speeds as quickly away from that literary disaster as a novel can travel.

When I read Little Bee a few years ago, I thought it was a terrific novel up until about two-thirds of the way through. At that point, I felt like Cleave just kind of gave up. When you spend a lot of your life doing any kind of writing, you can understand how this happens. The first chapter of my textbook probably got read and re-written at least ten times. The last chapter of the textbook may have been read through once. Writing something long–like a novel or a textbook–is like running a race. You have to make some decisions. Will you go all out in the beginning and fade away at the end? Will you save your best stuff for last? Or will you try to keep a consistent pace throughout? I read a lot of novels in which it’s clear that the authors were exhausted by the end. You can almost hear them murmuring between the lines, “My god, just let it be over, already.” This is not true of Gold, which finishes strong and without veering off course in the way I felt Little Bee did.

The novel is interesting for the insight it gives the reader into the lives of Olympic athletes at a level that is not just autobiographical. I read Lance Armstrong’s biography, and it was inspiring. But there’s a difference between a story being told from the inside and from the outside. Cleave is not an elite athlete, though he did try his hand at cycling for the novel. There’s something to be said for a novelist who is trying to get inside a certain kind of lifestyle and culture but is not there himself. There’s something important to be learned sometimes from the distance an outsider can provide. Cleave pulls this off very well in Gold.

Cleave’s novel juggles the narrative voice of all five of these characters, including Sophie, an eight year old girl. They all end up quite believable and compelling, especially, I think, Sophie, a child battling with illness and even more so perhaps, with managing her parents’ struggle with her illness.

U.K. cover

I didn’t actually read a summary of the plot or subject of this novel before reading it. I just dove in. If I had read what this novel was about–Olympic athletes, competition, a child with leukemia–there’s a good chance I would have turned my nose up and walked away. “That’s far too much going on there,” I might have said to myself. But it’s not. What I’m struck with about this novel is how Cleave mixes the exceptional with the mundane. Being an Olympic athlete is exceptional. Battling leukemia is exceptional. The story of the human beings in this novel is not particularly exceptional. This felt like a story about a family and people who also happened to be elite athletes or diagnosed with leukemia. But fist and foremost, it was a story about people, and so you could find yourself identifying with the characters–even with Zoe, the most uber-competitive and isolated of them all.

I don’t know if Cleave would describe his novel this way, but if I had to sum it up in one sentence I’d say this is a novel about family. This particular family is kind of weird...not everyone is related by blood and some people are related in unexpected ways that are revealed over the course of the novel. But they are family all the same, struggling with a set of circumstances that from the outside seem exceptional, but from the inside is really just like the things with which we all struggle.

A couple of nice passages:

“Perhaps everyone struggled with the possessive flaw in human memory that hoarded the episodes you most wanted to let go. Maybe by the time you reached thirty-two, it was a miracle if you could completely forgive your friends.”

“After all the years of speed, the greatest challenge of all was to make yourselves sit still, up here in the dark of the stands. This was what you learned, after all the racing was over: that the hardest laps were the ones you did after the crowd had gone home.”

Madison Monday: Blowing stuff up

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000

Last week in Madison there was a festival-like atmosphere down by the river, before the festival season has even kicked off. All that was lacking was food and good beer. But if you’d stumbled onto this gathering, you might have wondered why everyone was staring at the bridge.

View from a boat on the river

The Madison-Milton bridge (whether you call it Milton-Madison or Madison-Milton kind of depends on which side of the river you’re on) was built in 1929. You can see footage from the original bridge dedication ceremony here, including the wonderful footage of the parade that happened down Main St. The Milton-Madison bridge is the only way to cross the Ohio River for a 26 mile stretch. Upstream, the nearest crossing is the Markland Dam and downstream, you have to go all the way to Louisville. The bridge provides the shortest distance route between Indianapolis, Indiana and Lexington, Kentucky.

What makes a bridge beautiful? I remember the first time I saw the Milton-Madison bridge, I was mostly unimpressed. It’s certainly not the Golden Gate Bridge. Nor is it the Roebling bridge which I grew up admiring in Cincinnati. Many folks think the Roebilng bridge looks like the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s actually the other way around. The Roebling bridge was built first, and then Roebling’s son built the Brooklyn Bridge later.

The Milton-Madison bridge is not a suspension bridge like the Roebling or the Brooklyn bridge (it’s a truss bridge), but it grows on you. It has going for it a beautiful location. It’s certainly not pretentious. Thankfully, no one’s suggested painting it blue or purple or yellow. It looks beautiful seen from a boat on the river, and gorgeous when you’re coming around the bend down into the river valley from Milton on the Kentucky side. And in the end if you live in Madison long enough, it becomes your bridge, a lovely part of the landscape of the river valley.

New structure being built on Kentucky side

It is a bridge that after almost 200 years needs some work. Essentially, though the bridge pilings are okay, the infrastructure on top of the pilings is in bad shape. It’s a narrow bridge by our modern standards (especially with SUV’s and Hummers) and has no room for pedestrian traffic. In 2010, two years after a 2008 study began to figure out what to do about the bridge, the Indiana Department of Transportation and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet gave the contracting bid to Walsh Construction. Originally, everyone thought the bridge would have to be closed for almost 2 years while it was being fixed. Two years with no easy way for folks to go back and forth from Indiana to Kentucky would have been a very bad thing for people on both sides of the river. And then like magic, Walsh came in and told us they could fix the bridge with only 10 days of closure. Ten days, folks! What magic is that?

Well, it is kind of magical what they’ll be doing. Check out this video of a similar bridge project in Vancouver that involves a “truss slide.” This “design-build” method will result in the fastest built modern-day bridge across the Ohio River. Here’s a video which shows exactly how this will work, including the coolest part, the “truss slide.”

Basically, the contractors will build the new superstructure on temporary pilings right next to the existing bridge. They’ll repair and widen the existing pilings and then use computer-controlled hydraulic jacks to pull the superstructure across onto the existing, renovated piers. It’s all very complicated, but here’s what I know for sure: it’s going to be very cool.

I know this because the first part was already cool. Over the last few months, they’ve been building temporary ramps up to the bridge. Last Wednesday, they blew up the existing ramp onto the bridge so that they can connect these temporary ramps to the bridge. So, there was an explosion. Several explosions, in fact, but the most impressive was at around 1:15 Wednesday afternoon. Hence, the gathering of people hanging out down by the river staring at the bridge.

Originally, the explosion was supposed to happen between 8 and 10, and then at noon. I went down around noon, and the rumor in the crowd was that there’d be a siren, then ten minutes later another siren, and then, KABOOM! Well we waited for a siren and eventually, a woman with a walkie-talkie who looked vaguely official held up her hand and said 2 minutes. This was after the mass exodus of all the construction workers we could see. I guess I don’t have a particularly good sense of how long 2 minutes is, and I thought there’d be a siren or something, so I was actually talking to my husband when there was a colossal, well, KABOOM! So, I’ll confess that I didn’t actually see the bridge fall, but luckily this was captured by many cameras, including one view from a local tv news helicopter. You can see some of this footage here, here and here.

As far as Madison events go, this was up there with watching the courthouse cupola burn a few years ago, but much less depressing and scary. This was controlled destruction, and a prelude to an exciting new bridge whose walking path will allow me to walk across the bridge to the Dairy Queen in Milton. Now, that’s exciting. Originally folks in town thought there’d be money to be made on the ferry service that would have to take the place of the bridge for the year when it was closed. Right now, I see a huge money making opportunity in the crowds of folks who will gather to watch various things get blown up and eventually, the truss slide. So calling all hot dog vendors, ice cream trucks, lemonade stands. And perhaps also, some beer? You can find out all about the bridge plans at this web site, which includes a live bridge cam or by following the project on Facebook, here.

Also happening in the Madison area, today was the first day of a Food and Society class I'm teaching with my good friend in philosophy at Hanover College. The class will be posting on our blog, here, about their experiences planting stuff, milking goats, baking bread, making pasta, making goat cheese, taking a tour of a local farm and visiting the farmer's market.

My friend Jane's footage of the demolition:

Three Quickie Reviews

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:57:00 +0000

April’s been a slow reading month so far...one of those months where nothing’s really grabbed me and pulled me in. I just rode my bike home from Village Lights Bookstore with a basketful of ARCs, and already, my reading luck has turned. Here are some quick reviews of a few winners and losers from this month.

The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell, by Rachel Herz. I’ve been thinking about smell a lot lately, and looking for a good book to tell me interesting things about this rather neglected sense. This book is not that book. I did learn some interesting things about smell. But I also learned the difference between a stellar nonfiction book written by an expert in her or his field and a less than stellar nonfiction book written by an expert in the field. If you want to read the stellar version, check out Some We Love, Some We Hate and Some We Eat, by Hal Herzog. If you want to appreciate how well that book is written, read The Scent of Desire.

I could expound on the things I didn’t like about this book, some of them ideological. Herz absorbs the faulty logic and bad research of evolutionary psychology hook, line and sinker without a moments critical pause. She also treats race as a real, biological category, casually mentioning all the physiological differences between “Asians” and the rest of the world. Who are these “Asians,” exactly? Chinese? Japanese? Indians? Mongolians? Bangladeshi? And she extols the virtue of modern technology which allows hog farmers (she avoids calling them CAFO’s, which if they stink that badly, is what they really are) to disguise or reduce the smell of manure, glossing over the fact that manure is really only a problem when you factory farm. Ok, I did expound, but let me just add that Herz is also not a very good writer, and leave it at that.

Reservation Blues, by Sherman Alexie. I read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for a book group and really liked it. So I picked this book up used from Village Lights Bookstore and thought I’d give it a try. There were definite echoes of The Absolutely True Diary...a nerdy Indian, only now he’s grown up. And there was Robert Johnson and his cursed guitar. Alexie’s style in this novel is pretty bare bones, and this was sometimes alienating. But he plunks you right down in the middle of contemporary American Indian reservation life without much fanfare, and lets you make of it what you will. In the end, I was glad I read the book. I can’t say I loved it.

The Five Lives of Our Cat Zook, by Joanne Rocklin. This book I did love. Of course, it’s about a cat, so there’s that. This middle-grade novel tells the story Oona, her brother, Freddy, and the adventures that ensue when their cat, Zook, gets sick. Of course, this is a quick read, but I will warn you, still capable of producing tears. I loved Oona’s voice and the multicultural, real world in Oakland, California where she and her family live. Her Jewish family hangs out with their Indian neighbors next door and attend an annaprasan. Her mother dates the black man across the street, who is also an urban farmer. Well, you had me at urban farming, didn’t you?

Since I started trying to actually write my own novel, I developed a whole new level of appreciation for the well-crafted story, in any genre. You might read this nicely put-together little novel and think, “I could write that.” And maybe you could, but maybe also you could not. The characters are likeable and well-constructed. The writing is lovely and the story becomes a bit of a reflection on the nature of stories themselves, as well as having something to say about heavy topics like death and family and growing up.

This book was one of the ARCs I hauled home from the very kind folks at Village Lights Bookstore this afternoon, who are busy preparing for this weekend’s Poetpalooza: A Tri-State Poetry Summit. Poetpalooza will feature readings by 16 acclaimed local poets, including 5 poet laureates of Kentucky and Indiana. If you’re in Madison or the area, you should check it out.

My new iPhone: falling headfirst into the 21st century

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:35:00 +0000

My husband might have been one of the last people on the planet with a flip phone. I was right behind him with a phone that didn’t flip, but didn’t have any keyboard either. We talked a great deal about upgrading to a smartphone. But both of us felt like being more connected to our e-mail, Facebook and internet in general were not something we wanted. We didn't want to become one of those people who spend more time looking at their phone then they do talking to you when you get together for a beer. And then we went to Baltimore.

I love Madison, but one of the things you cannot really get in Madison is a good bagel. I would say that even in Louisville, the quality of the bagels is sometimes suspect. One of the pleasures of traveling to cities for us is a good bagel. So several mornings in Baltimore, we went in search of a good bagel. One morning we tried just walking around downtown, figuring that surely there’s enough morning business traffic to have spawned a decent bagel place. The next morning we asked the concierge and he directed us to....Panera. This raises the question, with the advent of smartphones, is the profession of concierge on the decline? I mean, Panera? In retrospect, we know there are good bagel places in Baltimore. Perhaps we should have asked a local before we went, but now, thank god, we can just ask Siri. Yes, we made the collective plunge and got ourselves iPhones.

Like a child with a new toy, I spent the first 12 hours or so playing. Oh, all the wonderful things I could do! I could check in on Facebook. I could look at my blog. I could instant message my brother and sister. Last night, my husband asked Siri who the coach of the Oakland Raiders is. Dennis Allan, my friends. Look at how our lives have changed.

I know the decision to get a smartphone is, well, really almost not a decision for anyone under the age of 20. It’s not, “Should I get a smartphone?” It’s really, “Which one?” But I’m a sociologist, and so with almost all the decisions in my life, there’s a lot to think about. A bagel-less Baltimore pushed us over the edge, and it certainly is cool to suddenly be one of the people who doesn’t just have to stand around, but can stand around and gaze deeply into the shiny face of your iPhone.

Will the iPhone make my life easier? No, I suspect not really. Part of the reason we couldn’t find a bagel place in Baltimore was that neither of us did any research before we went. In my old-fashioned past, I would do something like buy a travel guide before we went somewhere. I would read this book and scope out some interesting places for us to go. I would probably turn down the corner of the page with the bagel shop. And then I would carry the travel guide around in my purse. Now, of course, I can download the Lonely Planet app. Is that easier?

Don looking lost in front of the Howard Johnson

Being a person who can remember life without cell phones, one of the things I remember being surprised by was how much more time people spent on their cell phones talking to each other than they had before cell phones. At first, cell phones were really about those rare situations when in the past, you could have used a portable phone. I think about the scene in this week’s Mad Men when Don is hanging out at the Howard Johnson looking for his wife. You just wanted to practically scream at the screen, “Just use your cell phone, Don!” Those were the moments in the past when you needed a cell phone. What we never really needed them for was to be in constant communication with everyone about...nothing. And yet, that’s how we gradually began to use them. Adding to your daily life a stream of constant conversation that wouldn’t have been there before never seemed to me to be making anyone’s life easier to me.

So I’m not going to lie to you and say that I bought our iPhones because they make our life easier. Already my iPhone has been acting wonky, functioning fully in every capacity except as a phone. And so I’ve had to go back to the store, look up information online, and call Apple to try to fix the problem. Already my iPhone has asserted its needs. Over and over again in our history, we create technology to free us from something, only to find our freedom reduced by the needs of that technology. Does your car really give you freedom? Or does it just give you a long list of things you have to do in order to have a car–pay car insurance, take a driver’s test, pay vehicle taxes, get it serviced, fill it up with gas, find a place to park it, wash it, clean it, etc.? Does your car take care of you or do you take care of your car?

I bought our iPhones because they are cool. They are a source of status and identity. Even though I spent a whole 14 weeks in my environmental sociology course talking about the ways in which status and identity drive our need to consume, I still wanted an iPhone. They are fun and probably in some circumstances, useful. But mostly I just wanted to be someone who had an iPhone. Like Saumel Jackson and Zoey Deschanel. The night after I bought our iPhones, I had iPhone dreams. A restless night of sleep in which I imagined that the iPhone could cure my sore shoulder. I woke up worrying about how staring at that tiny little print would affect my eyesight. I had dreams in which the power of the iPhone grew and grew.

The newness and excitement will, of course, wear off. My husband and I are smart people. Surely we can figure out how to be judicious in our use of this new technology. I comfort myself with the fact that at the same time we both bought iPhones, we have also begun to play music together. Two guitars are considerably less complicated technologically speaking, and if the apocalypse comes and the grid goes down, our guitars will go right on working. I find comfort in that balance between old and new technologies. I think it tells me that an iPhone, for all its sophistication, can never really take the place of a guitar. And Siri can never really take the place of an actual person. And that if we are smart and careful, we will continue to use our technology wisely, rather than allowing our technology to use us.

The pathology of modern life: loneliness

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:48:00 +0000

This week, I read an article on The Atlantic.com about the relationship between Facebook and loneliness, called, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” In a nutshell, the answer is no. Not really. If you are lonely, Facebook will make you lonely. If you are not lonely, Facebook will probably not make you lonely. As with almost any technology, there is nothing predestined about our particular use of it; we shape our use of technology just as much as the technology shapes us. What was more interesting to me about the article was the insight into the long-term historical march toward loneliness which many of us in modern society have quite willingly undertaken.

As a sociologist of community, the increasing isolation of social life is nothing new. The founding fathers of sociology, writing in the 19th century, were already concerned with the myriad effects of the rise of individualism and the decline of collective life. There were good things about this transition from small, tight-knit communities with many overlapping groups to the anonymity of social life in cities. We all know how claustrophobic it can feel to live in a place where you can’t really get away from those people you’d like to escape. Cities allowed people for the first time to reinvent themselves, which meant you weren’t destined to go into the exact same line of work as your father, and your grandfather, and your great-grandfather. Escaping those kinds of communities gave us increasing amounts of freedom, but what did we lose in the process?

The Facebook article suggests that one of the things we might lose is our health. Lonely people are more likely to be put in a geriatric home at an earlier age than a similar, and not lonely, person. Lonely people are less likely to exercise, and not surprisingly, more likely to be obese. The lonely are less likely to survive a serious operation and more likely to have hormonal imbalances. If you’re lonely, you’ll have a greater risk of depression and inflammation, but poorer memory. Finally, lonely people sleep worse and are more likely to suffer dementia and general cognitive decline. On all this evidence, we might conclude that if loneliness is indeed where our society is headed, we should be preparing for yet another looming health epidemic.

I have to say that both the rise of loneliness and the health costs associated with it come as little surprise to me. I was lucky enough to grow up in a town that was also still a community, and I’m lucky enough now to have both found and forged a community for myself and my family. I live in a place where making community is considerably easier than it is in many places, and I have a lifestyle that allows me to prioritize community in ways that I probably could not if I had a different kind of job, a different kind of husband, a different kind of child.

But all of that, of course, is more than just luck. I chose a job as a college professor that is high on autonomy if relatively low on the years of schooling to salary ratio. I like to think that I spent 6 years after finishing my college degree earning not a lot of money, but the ability to largely set my own schedule. This is why you will find me wandering the streets of my town on a Tuesday afternoon rather than sitting in an office.

I chose to buy a house in downtown Madison, a walkable community where my neighbors are so close that we share a common wall. I did not choose to buy a house with a great deal of distance between myself and other people. I did not choose to live somewhere that would require huge portions of my life to be taken up with driving somewhere else in a car by myself. In the summer, I sometimes have to think hard to remember the last time I got in my car.

I chose a husband who likes people. He says hello to them, he introduces himself. Of course we know the neighbors with whom we share our Madison double, but because of my husband, we know the woman across the street who owns the florist shop down the block and the couple who rent the apartment and like to sit on their stoop and let their cats wander around when the weather’s nice. My husband knows the names of everyone who works in the local coffee shop. When we go to a big city, I sometimes have to gently remind him not so say hello to everyone we pass on the street.

Our daughter is just as gregarious, but she’s also not particularly interested in going, going, going all the time, so we don’t spend all of our weekdays or weekends taking her to various activities. And quite frankly, if she did suddenly want to be involved in countless activities, we would probably say no, as awful as that might make us sound as parents to many people. When would we go to the farmer’s market, then? Or hang out at the coffee shop after school? Or eat at our favorite restaurant, where, literally, everyone knows our names?

As Stephen Marche, the author of the article points out, interacting with people takes time and commitment and the willingness to risk annoyance and intrusion and disappointment, and well, all the bad things that can result from human relationships. Marche admits that he can’t even be bothered much of the time to stand in line at the grocery store next to other people, let alone have to interact with the grocery clerk; it’s all self check-out for him. Wouldn’t it be so much easier just to comment on our neighbors’ Facebook page rather than having to talk to them in person?

I can’t speak for what’s happening in other parts of the world, but even before reading Marche’s article, I would have posited that most Americans today are lonelier than we have ever been in the course of human history. In the United States, we have maxed out on loneliness. I believe it is making us sick and unhappy, as well as wasteful and empty (from an environmental standpoint, many of us soothe our loneliness with stuff we buy). You can read whole hosts of claims about the basic components of our human nature rooted in evolutionary arguments. We are by nature greedy, or selfish, or self-interested, or altruistic, or competitive, or sexist, or racist, or violent. I am a sociologist, so here is the only thing I believe is true about our human nature: we are social. We need each other. We need interaction, and interaction that involves more than just, as my friend says, glowing rectangular boxes. Outside of those boxes, interaction is messy and unpredictable and frustrating and sometimes painful. But I believe it also satisfies our needs in a way that, at least for now, Facebook cannot.

I believe we need a National Talk to Your Neighbor day to remind us that by and large, we are still living in communities. Unless you are truly out in the middle of nowhere, there are in fact people around you. And they are, in fact, people. They are not people exactly like you. They might not mow their lawn as often as you would like them to and they may not have voted for the same person in the last election. But like you, they have joys and sorrow and good days and bad days, and more than likely, sometimes they feel lonely.

What if for just one hour every week–not even every day–we turned off the tv or the Wii or Facebook and found someone in our community to talk to? It doesn’t even have to be the person who lives right next door to you; I use neighbor in the most generous sense as anyone you might bump into when you’re moving around your town or city. It could be the person behind the counter at your local Starbucks, or that guy you see at your gym, or the parent who picks up their kid at the same time you do.

In one of my sociology courses we read about the San, a group in southern Africa who up until about the middle of the 20th century we’re still living as relatively isolated hunter-gatherers. The San lived in the Kalahari desert, and they had a lot of room to move around. But when you saw a picture of them sitting together, they were packed in tight, shoulder to shoulder, bum to bum. They had all that room, but they wanted to be close to each other. We spent most of our human history as hunter-gatherers, and thankfully cars and suburbs and Facebook have not been around long enough to change the fact that some part of us wants to be right up on each other, sitting close together, talking and sharing stories.

We can’t all become hunter-gatherers, as much as I sometimes try to convince my students that we should. We probably can’t give up our big lawns that need to be mowed, our children who need to be driven places, or our jobs that demand we work more and more for less and less. But maybe we could talk to each other a little bit more and maybe that would stem the tide of loneliness for someone. Or maybe we would remember what it feels like not to be lonely. Maybe we would recognize that kind of joy, different from what you can get from Facebook or video games, or even (dare I say it) blogs. The joy of finding your own little tight circle of people who want to be shoulder to shoulder, bum to bum. Maybe we would rediscover the joy of being together.

Madison Monday: The small, downtown garden

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:47:00 +0000

It was another busy weekend in Madison, with many exciting events still on the horizon to look forward to. At the Thomas Family Winery, it was the 16th Annual Hot Luck and Fiery Foods Marketplace. Saturday was the first day for the outdoor season of the Farmer’s Market, where we purchased some fresh asparagus, spinach, lettuce, and soap (from All Good Things Soaps and Such, who set up at the market every Saturday). After our Farmer’s Market trip, my husband dutifully headed up to the community garden to help put the electric fence up. This will hopefully signal the end of the ominous deer hoof prints in the middle of the row of beets. Saturday night we attended a lovely party on the east end of town...or at least, the end of town even farther east than we are, past the bridge. Sometimes past the bridge feels like it may as well be another country in our little town, but it was a lovely affair–the kind of party that reminds you how very much you like your neighbors. This is especially true when your neighbors have a seemingly infinite supply of wine and culinary abilities that belong in a five star restaurant.

In just a few short weeks, River Roots festival will be upon us. Look for more reviews of River Roots artists soon. The first ever Poetpalooza at Village Lights Bookstore is fast approaching on the weekend of April 27-29. The bookstore will host hourly readings, book signings, and live music, featuring a plethora of regional poets. The event includes five poet laureates of Indiana and Kentucky. Here is my haiku in honor of Poetpalooza:

Poets everywhere
On the streets of Madison.
Assonance abounds.

Feel free to contribute your own haiku in honor of Poetpalooza.

The very warm and early spring this year in Madison, combined with all this produce-related activity has me feeling very enthusiastic about another year of gardening. It’s always easiest to feel enthusiastic in the spring, before the real heartache has begun. But I feel certain my husband and I are on top of things and ahead of the curve.

Two springs ago, we broke down and got rid of the beautiful yet troublesome mimosa tree in our backyard. Mimosa trees are quite lovely...at a distance. In a small backyard, they are something of a nightmare. First, there are the blossoms. Beautiful pink things adored by hummingbirds which fall all over your yard and deck for at least 2-3 months at a time. When they land, they don’t dry up and blow away like some other flowers. They form a kind of disgusting goo that sticks to your deck, the side of your house, and yourself if you don’t move quickly enough. When the blossoms are finally gone, you get the pods. Think of all the creepy associations the word “pod” has; they all apply perfectly to the pods of the mimosa. These pods fall and they do dry up. They just leave legions upon legions of little mimosa seedlings in their wake. I recently read a novel, The Caretaker of Lorne Field, in which one family spent generations weeding a field full of monster plants called Aukowie’s, which grow a foot in a day and if left untended, will destroy all life on the planet within a month. I think the author of this novel had a mimosa tree somewhere in his past.

Star of Bethlehem

In addition to the flowers and the pods, the mimosa tree was also creating a great deal of shade. In our second year sans mimosa, all the flowers in my garden are considerably more prolific in their blooming. In fact, the peonies which I thought I should just dig up are about to bloom more than they ever have, and the azalea bush which has never bloomed did quite respectably this spring.

Here’s my favorite thing about my little backyard garden–the dearth of grass. When I lived on campus my first three years, I spent more time than I’d even like to talk about mowing grass. And do you know what happens after you spend about 4 hours mowing your grass? You have to mow it again. I’m not particularly fond of grass, and my feelings are strong enough on the subject to warrant a whole separate post, which you might be seeing later this week. Our backyard has just enough grass to stand on and wiggle your feet in, but not enough to spend more than ten minutes at most contemplating in any meaningful way.

Even with the mimosa tree gone, in a small, downtown garden there is a constant battle with shade. The sunniest spot in our yard is right where the deck sits. This year, I imagine the deck filled with beautiful pots containing various edible plants. Two of them are already occupied by brussel sprouts. This is what I imagine and whether or not it will actually happen is a whole other matter.

Brussel sprouts

Our community garden plot up on the grounds of the State Hospital allows us to dedicate whatever sunny spots we have down here to herbs. Last year I bought one Kentucky Colonel mint plant, which my husband swore by as the only mint worth having. Despite everyone warning us and warning us about the pathological dangers of planting mint, we’ve never had any luck getting it to spread. Well, the removal of the mimosa must have been key, as we are now deeply committed to fighting with the mint for the rest of our lives. But what a lovely fight to lose sometimes. We also have a nicely well-established sage plant, some oregano, lemon balm, and dill that magically appeared in the front bed.

I like to think I grew up as my mother’s assistant gardener. I certainly loved looking through her garden catalogues and helping her plan her beds. At some age, I carved out for myself a little bed next to the swimming pool, hauled rocks up from the creek for an edge, and began filling it with perennials. This was good practice for my own little garden, which is all perennials. Many of the plants were gifts from previous owners. The lilac, clematis, the azalea, the lilies, the sedum (or live forever), peonies and spiderwort were all here already. I added the yarrow, coneflower, lily of the valley, grape hyacinth, balloon flowers, black-eyed susan’s, daisies, obedience plant, false indigo, Japanese anenome, ferns and probably a few other things I’ve forgotten. Have I really fit all of that into this small little space? Yes. The hardest part of having a small garden is reminding yourself that there really probably isn’t room for that one more thing. The best part of having a small garden is knowing that there probably isn’t room for one more thing.

Kentucky Colonel Mint, ready for Derby Day

I have a gardening book which includes detailed instructions for how to plan a garden from the bottom up. It includes information about double digging, and soil composition and color and height balance. I very much like to look at this book and the lovely pictures of formal verus informal gardens. I like to pretend that I will make very elaborate and detailed plans for my garden. And then I remember the advice of Henry Mitchell in The Essential Earthman, which boiled down to this: you plant it and see how it goes. Gardens are in a state of constant evolution while plans exist mostly on paper. The most beautiful gardens are arrived at mainly through a process of many years of trial and error.

Here are a few things I have learned in both my garden reading and my garden doing:

- Don’t underestimate foliage. As Henry Mitchell wisely points out, very few plants bloom all season. But if they look beautiful even when they’re not blooming, that’s quite alright.

- Consider timing. It seems that spring blooming flowers dominate our gardening consciousness. Perhaps this is because they are such bright spots after (usually) a long season of gloom. But one of the things I keep working towards in my garden is continual blooming. Right now, it’s hard to get excited about the obedience plant and the Japanese anenome. They’re not doing much but taking up space. But come August and September, I’ll be happy I left them alone.

- Color is seasonal. This is also a Henry Mitchell insight. Sometimes, one becomes obsessed with variety of color in your garden. There are too many purples, I’m always thinking. But there is a seasonality to colors. Spring tends to be pink and purple. Summer moves into orange and red. Fall is more yellow, at least in my garden. A garden in the spring with pinks and purples is okay, and in fact, yellow might just end up being out of place.

- Replace weeds with weeds. A “weed” is, of course, a social construction. Go with that. I love plants with weed-like qualities, as in, they spread like mad. The mint, some bee balm I planted last year, black-eyed susan’s, Japanese anenome. Do you know what these wonderful plants do? They choke out the “real” weeds. And yes, okay, they require thinning and control themselves. Well, I don’t know about you, but I personally feel much less resentful pulling up mint or bee balm than I do pulling up poke weed or dandelions, or any number of the unidentifiable scourges that propagate my flower beds.

- Accept your complete lack of control. Now, different folks have quite different philosophies about gardening. Mine is that putting things in the ground and expecting them to grow is a kind of prayer sent out into the universe–a prayer that may or may not be answered. Though experts may claim to know the answer to the question, “What went wrong?”, I am skeptical. Repeat this phrase to yourself–“It just didn’t grow.” Gardeners must accept chaos and become habitual starters. My philosophy is always cut or trim the hell out of it, and if that doesn’t work, plant it again. And if that doesn’t work, move on.

What are the lessons you’ve learned about gardening and what are garden dreams are you dreaming this spring?

Look for more pictures of the garden here, on my Facebook page.

Mystery Book Review: My Foe Outstretch'd Beneath the Tree and No Case for the Police

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:21:00 +0000

In my never-ending quest for a good mystery to read, I came upon V.C. Clinton-Baddeley reviewed by Yvette at In So Many Words for her Friday’s Forgotten Book. Indeed, V.C. Clinton Baddeley must be forgotten, as he doesn’t even merit an entry on Wikipedia. The old-fashioned author biography on the book jackets tell us that Clinton-Baddeley was a historian and editor of Enclopaedia Brittanica, as well a star of British radio and theater. In addition to having written several plays, pantomimes, operettas and a history of the Burlesque tradition in the English theatre, Clinton-Baddeley wrote five mystery novels featuring Dr. R. V. Davie. The two I’ve read so far are the ones my local library could get a hold of, and they were both pretty old editions.

Here’s what I can tell you about Dr. Davie mysteries. They’re kind of about someone whose been killed and figuring out who killed them. But they’re mostly about Dr. Davie and his particular view on life. He is dismayed by a particular style of gardening. He is delighted by a proper creme brule (in fact, there’s a recipe for such at the end of My Foe Outstretch’d). He quite enjoys cats. He can remember riding in a hansom cab. He belongs to a gentleman’s club in London.

As I’ve written before, my never-ending quest for a good mystery is really mostly about trying to find an exact replica of Agatha Christie. In the process, I have read many, many wonderful mysteries that are nothing like Agatha Christie. And some that were not like Agatha Christie at all and were also not very good. So far, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley is as close as I’ve come to Dame Agatha, and here’s why. What I loved about Christie’s mysteries were not really so much the construction of the mysteries themselves. I did like that she wrote her novels in a way that allowed you, were you so clever, to figure out “who did it.” I did like her recurring characters, and especially Miss Marple. But what I really loved was the view onto English life of a certain time period and from a certain class background which Christie gave you.

It was from Agatha Christie mysteries that I got my first glimpse of what the British Empire meant. Ah, yes, all those Colonel’s and Major’s who’d spent time in India. It was from Agatha Christie novels that I learned about the sweeping social transitions in English social life brought about by the two wars. You know, no one wants to go into service anymore. But I don’t think it was ever Christie’s intention to provide this kind of window into an English sensibility. It just happened, and in its casualness, it was delightful. Reading Agatha Christie mysteries as a young girl and teenager, there were so many things I didn’t understand, but sometimes they made more sense if I just kept reading. What exactly were they doing with torches? Didn’t they have flashlights? In Christie’s mysteries, it was as if I were seeing the world through English eyes, and even the things I didn’t quite understand were still exciting.

Like Agatha Christie, V.C. Clinton-Baddeley is as interested in conveying to us Dr. Davie’s view of the world as he is in solving any mystery. Is Dr. Davie a typical kind of bachelor instructor of history from Cambridge for the time period? I have no idea. But isn’t it a lovely diversion to hang out with him, tottering around the English countryside or London or Cambridge, and see the world from his point of view? I finished No Case for the Police just last night, and this morning I can’t even remember who the murderer was. But I can remember Dr. Davie’s aversion to a certain kind of flower bed and his love of a good afternoon nap. That’s more than enough for me.

Madison Monday: River Roots Preview--Hayes Carll

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 22:03:00 +0000

It’s a little over a month until what, for me, is the premier summer music festival of, if not the Midwest, than at the very least Southern Indiana. River Roots Festival (formerly known as the Ohio River Valley Folk Festival, which was a mouthful, but locally known simply as the folk festival, a name which you may find me relapsing to at times) is in its 7th year, which means the festival has been in Madison for about as long as I have.

I can say with certainty that River Roots is the most eclectic of our local music festivals. Depending on your perspective, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Ribberfest in August is all about the blues (this year’s headliner is Robert Cray). River Roots used to be called the folk festival, and there was sometimes a great deal of confusion about exactly what that meant, given the spectrum of groups you were likely to see over the course of the weekend. I heard a board member once describe folk music this way–“It’s music made by folks.” This definition works just fine for me; I’m all about mixing up my music, as long as it’s all good.

At the River Roots festival you’ll hear some straight-out old-time music. I’d put Uncle Earl, one of last year’s groups in this category. You’ll hear some solid bluegrass music. Sam Bush, also a former performer at River Roots, would go in this category. And then you’ll hear some stuff that’s a bit harder to place. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are old-time music–they’re inspired partly by the tradition of African-American string bands. But their sound is probably not what a lot of people think of when they hear “old-time music,” unless your definition of old-time music is broad enough to encompass some hip hop influences. And then there are groups like The Greencards, who were told at one bluegrass festival, “Your stuff is weird, but I like it.”

It’s always interesting to me when I download an album on iTunes what shows up in the “genre” spot. Neko Case’s album with the Cowboys, Furnace Room Lullaby, is “country,” but Middle Cyclone is “alternative.” Uncle Earl is “singer/songwriter” even though most of the songs on their album, She Waits for the Night, are traditional songs like “Ida Red” which they did not write. Jubal’s Kin, a fantastic brother and sister duo out of Florida, are “country and folk,” but The Decemberists, whom Jubal’s Kin covers, are “alternative and punk.” Did anyone listen to "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Again)" before they decided that’s partly punk? Anyway.

Hayes Carll

Hayes Carll shows up on iTunes as just plain old “country,” and that’s pretty accurate to how he sounds musically speaking. Carll grew up in Texas, in a suburb of Houston, and went to college at Hendrix College in Arkansas (shout-out to liberal arts college graduates) where (my husband would insist I include) he majored in history. So he has authentic country credentials. And he definitely has the voice for the country genre. Songs like "Chances Are" sound exactly like someone sitting on a bar stool, crying over their beer and lost love.

Now I have to interrupt here for a brief confession. For most of my life if you asked me my least favorite kind of music, the kind of music which I would possibly choose to go deaf in order to avoid having to hear, I would have said country music. Forgive me, but I grew up during the height of Garth Brooks dominance. I came of age with The Dixie Chicks, yes, but also with all the flack they took from the country community for not conforming to the dominant political views. With wisdom and perspective, I’ve come to the realization that before Elvis, almost all the music I listen to now probably would have been called “country” music. Maybe trying to put a genre on music is itself a misguided endeavor. At any rate, I no longer reject everything with the “country” label or even a country-ish sound.

To get back to Hayes Carll, this is all to say that given my tendency towards country music aversion, I quite like even Hayes Carll’s songs with the very highest amount of what you might call “twang quotient.” I’m not sure if I would like Hayes Carll quite as much if not for the particularly unique direction in which he takes that twang.

First, there’s what you might call the “tongue in cheek twang,” or maybe that should be “twang in cheek.” On his newest album, KMAG YOYO, I would put "Another Like You" in this category. Carll’s website describes this as a “depraved” love song in the “he said/she said” tradition. Well, "Islands in the Stream" this is certainly not. Here’s just a sampling of the lyrics:

Woman: Well you’re probably a Democrat.
Man: What the hell is wrong with that?
Woman: Nothing if you’re Taliban.

From another country artist, you might take these lyrics seriously. But one listen to the title song off this album, KMAG YOYO would quickly change your mind, which I’ll get too in a minute. One of the first Hayes Carll songs I heard is also in the “twang in cheek” category–"She Left Me For Jesus." Here’s the chorus:

She left me for Jesus and that just ain’t fair
She says that he’s perfect, how could I compare?
She says I should find him and I’ll know peace at last.
If I ever find Jesus, I’m kicking his ass.

Now that’s some country music I can get behind.

As you can tell, Carll’s not afraid of politics or religion, and his take on them probably isn’t representative of your typical country star. KMAG YOYO is military slang from the recent war in Afghanistan which means, “Kiss my ass, guys. You’re on your own.” So it’s the new version of fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition) or snafu (situation normal, all fucked up). You have to appreciate the American military’s master of the snarky acronym, don’t you? The title song on KMAG YOYO has been described as this generation’s "Subterranean Homesick Blues." I would add to its musical lineage "Alice’s Restaurant." There’s not much I can say about this song that isn’t best said by just listening, so check it out here. KMAG YOYO also reminds me of (Antichrist Television Blues) from Arcade Fire’s album, Neon Bible. It sounds nothing like it, except in the urgent sense of fear and, well, shit gone wrong. Kiss my ass guys, you’re on your own.

So, in conclusion, I am very excited about seeing Hayes Carll in person in May, along the banks of the beautiful Ohio River in Madison, Indiana. Could you guess, readers, how much you might have to pay to see Hayes Carll, along with eleven other musical acts, including Cincy band Over the Rhine, The Band of Heathens, Charlie Parr, Roosevelt Dime, Carolyn Martin, and The Black Lillies, just to name a few? Would you guess $75? At least $50? A mere $26 will get you in for three days of music at River Roots, and if you buy your tickets before April 30, you also get 10 free food and drink tickets. Did I also mention that the New Albanian Brewing Company sells beer at the festival? Well, they do.

River Roots Festival is May 18-20 and you can get more information and buy tickets here. Look for more previews of River Roots artists in the next couple of months on You Think Too Much.

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Book Review: The Song of Achilles

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:55:00 +0000

It’s Easter Sunday, and I don’t know, is it only me for whom a review of a book about the Trojan War seems perfectly suited to an Easter blog post? The New Testament was written in Greek, after all, and Christianity borrows from gnostic philosophy. Perhaps only someone who seriously contemplated a classics major and comes from a liberal arts background would associate Easter with Achilles, but whatever.

The Song of Achilles, a novel by Madeline Miler, is told from the first person perspective of Patroclus. Does anyone out there remember Patroclus? Best friend of Achilles, the guy whose death finally propels Achilles out of his tent where he’s been sulking away for months and months? In Miller’s novel, Patroclus is also Achilles’ lover. Through Patroclus, we meet all the major figures of the Trojan War...Hector, Priam, Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and, of course, Achilles. And then you know what happens in the end for almost everyone–bloody death. Except for Odysseus, who wanders around for a long time, and then I confess, I don’t know what happens to him after he gets back home and gets rid of all those pesky suitors.

I read this novel in fits and starts, before a trip, during a trip, a little bit after a trip. Doesn’t the particular way in which you read a book matter so much to your experience of it? I read Invisible Man once during a weekend stay in Jackson, Mississippi, sleeping on a mattress on the floor in an empty apartment with no television, no telephone, and no computer. And boy, did I love that novel. In Cold Blood crept up on me during another weekend in Mississippi. Perhaps being in Mississippi makes for especially good reading experiences. I wouldn’t be surprised.

In fits and starts, The Song of Achilles crept up on me. If you’d asked me whether I liked it while I was reading it, I probably would’ve shrugged. But once the Trojan War got started, things definitely picked up. In fact, I kind of wish the Trojan War had been longer, and all the stuff that came before about Achilles’ life had been shorter. How often do you hear that? “I really wish the Trojan War had been longer.”

Achilles attending a wounded Patroclus

If you’re familiar with the Iliad, it’s fun to see the characters from a different perspective. I especially liked Miller’s take on Odysseus, who is clever, but not always particularly likable. Agamemnon is pretty much how you’d expect, full of himself and blustering. But you also get to meet an actual woman, Briseis. She’s in the Illiad, too, but not as an actual human being with feelings and intelligence and, you know, a personality.

I guess for a lot of folks the big deal in The Song of Achilles is that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers. Miller certainly wants to suggest that it would have been problematic for them. I did not actually become a classics major, but it’s my understanding that two men loving each other and having sex with each other wasn’t really very unusual in Ancient Greece. The Iliad, as far as I know, takes place in a time before the rise of the Greek city-states, so it’s hard to say exactly what they thought of men loving each other back then. It probably was unusual if the two were equals in status, which is why Achilles’ son, Pyrryhus, assumes that Patroclus was Achilles’ slave.

I think the larger point is, who wouldn’t fall in love with Achilles? He’s half-divine, right (though, also kind of a divine pain in the ass sometimes)? Patroclus’ question is really, out of all the people Achilles could have had, why did he pick me? And this is a question that faces even people who are not the lovers of semi-divine, Greek heroes like Achilles. Even though both Achilles and Patroclus annoyed me at various points in the novel, I still found myself tearing up at the end of the book. Yes, they both die. No spoiler there. But there’s more in Miller’s telling, and that more was quite moving.

The corner store and the coffee shop: sociological reflections on place

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:11:00 +0000

The following is the text of my speech from the closing session of the National Main Streets Conferences in Baltimore this Wednesday:

Thank you all so much for having me here today. It’s good to be in a room full of people who love place, appreciate place and are working to build great places.

I’m here because I’m a sociologist who studies places and community. But I’m a sociologist who studies places and communities because I’m personally obsessed with places and people and the connections between those things. I loved places long before I loved sociology, and in fact, my love for places is part of what led me to sociology.

I’m a placist. This is a word invented by a friend of mine-Sara Patterson-who is a historian of religion and is also obsessed with place, but with place and religion...with sacred places. Placist is not in the dictionary....yet. I give you all permission to start using it freely. There is a word in the dictionary that describes love of place. Topophila. Topophilia is a good enough word, but I think topophilia sounds like a disease. Like something you contract or a kind of madness. “I’m sorry, I can’t come today. I’ve come down with topophilia.” Or, “I’m a topophiliac.”

I like placist instead. It is an ideological stance. It is a conviction, a passion, a movement you choose to align yourself with. It is an “ist.” My students today are very scared of ‘ists’ and ‘isms,’ but I believe we need more ‘ists’ in the world. I am a feminist. An environmentalist. An anti-racist. A place-ist. I am unapologetically committed to places. My love for them sometimes makes me inarticulate, so let me warn you. Sometimes I think there are no words good enough for places and what they do.

It’s the end of the conference, and I’m sure you’re on the brink of information overload, so I’m not going to stand up here and summarize sociological research for you. Instead, I’m going to talk about my own experiences with places and how those experiences are informed by my sociological perspective. As a sociologist, I’m interested in how places shape social life. So, I ask questions about how places shape our social interactions and the kind of communities in which we live. I’m interested in how places create or contribute to existing inequalities and in how places shape our identities, the way we understand who we are and how we fit into the world. So I’m going to start with the place I’m from and end where the place I live now and consider some of the sociological questions raised by these locations. I want to think about what the places we create, and the places we preserve and the places we love say about us as people.

The Corner Store

I am haunted by places. I am haunted by places I have lost. The first place I lost was the corner store in the town where I grew up, Burlington, Kentucky. I grew up in the country outside of town, but my grandmother lived two blocks down from the corner store. This was in the days when farmers would still turn their farms over to their children at a certain age and take up a house in town. The two most important landscapes of my childhood are the woods around the house where I grew up and the streets of downtown Burlington. And specifically, the corner store. And, okay, the candy at the corner store. If you grew up in a town with a candy store or a corner store, or anything like it, you know that it wasn’t all about the candy. Of course, the candy was part of it. But a corner store with candy is also a destination for children, a place to go. Going to the corner store is all about that experience of independence and exploration and possibility. Anything could happen in the two blocks between grandma’s house and the corner store. You could run into people, some you’re happy about running into, and some you’re not so happy about running into. You could take any number of different routes to the corner store, some of them more acceptable to your grandmother than others. The possibilities for what could happen are endless. But nothing dangerous could happen, because everyone sees you and knows you. As a sociologist, I’m interested in places as caretakers. Good places create caretakers. They create a community of caretakers, and therefore a safe environment for children. The sociologist William H. Whyte in his study of small urban spaces found that the best predictor of the safety of a place was the presence of women. If you find women in a place, it is generally a safe space to be. I would say the same of children. If children can walk around in your town on their own, you are probably in a safe community.

About the time I was in graduate school, the corner store closed its doors. And then the church down the street bought it and tore it down. Can you guess what they put in its place? Think of the Joni Mitchell song if you need a clue. A parking lot. Of course. There is never a shortage of parking lots in the world. We could always use one more.

My dissertation was about the loss of community and belonging in that town where I grew up. It was about the process of suburbanization. But really it was about the ghosts of place. The folks I grew up with mostly weren’t much upset by the loss of that corner store. Community to them was the people they knew, and they didn’t think that the corner store had much to do with that.

Now it’s almost 10 years later, and a lot of the people who made up that community are gone. And so is the corner store. Community shifts and changes. People move in and people move in out. People are born and people die. If you preserve places, though, something of the community goes on. A little essence disappears that might not have had you left that building standing. There’s research that backs this up, that supports the notion that places serve physical markers for our memories, our identities, our communities. But if you’ve ever lost a place like this, you don’t need the research to tell you that. When I go home to Burlington, I’m haunted by the corner store and all the other places that have been lost.

The Coffee Shop

I am held together by places. Places give me hope and sustain me.

By some set of circumstances beyond my control, I ended up living in Madison, Indiana. Madison, as I’m sure many of you know, was one of the three pilot towns for the original Main Street pilot project. I moved to Madison for a job, but I stay there because it is a place that gives me hope. You know that scene from Beauty and the Beast, where Belle walks around town singing about this Little Town? It’s supposed to be all about how much Belle wants to get out of the town, but it makes me want to move there. When I first moved to Madison, I would walk down the streets and want to break into that song. I could just imagine that everyone would join in, like the opening scene in a big production musical. I could imagine swinging on a lamppost or two. Or in the winter, when there’s a little snow on the ground and the lights are on all the buildings on Main St., I want to run down the streets screaming, “Merry Christmas, Madison! Merry Christmas you old Madison Coffee and Tea Company!” Living in Madison is a little like living in a Jimmy Stewart movie.

I want to tell you about a particular place in Madison, the Madison Tea and Coffee Company. Most of the time I spent thinking of what I would say here today, I was sitting in the coffee shop in Madison. It’s where I get all my best work done. Let me tell you what you might see and hear on a typical morning or afternoon. You might here a conversation between Cary, who works at the coffee shop, and an elderly woman who is telling her about the furniture store that used to be where the coffee shop is now when she was growing up in Madison. And if you hang out there as much as I do, yes, you probably know the names of most of the people who work there. The elderly woman talks about how nice it is in the coffee shop, and then she and Cary gossip a bit about people they knew and where they live now. In good places, you’ll hear lots of gossip, lots of people talking, because that’s part of what good places do. They foster interaction and gossip a kind of social interaction that makes up the fabric of community; it’s sharing knowledge and creating community. The coffee shop would be a great place to study gossip. You’d think people would lower their voices, but they really don’t, so you can imagine all the interesting things you might hear sitting there.

At the coffee shop, you can sit on a nice stool looking out the window onto Main St. Across the street is city hall, and then a sports bar, and a Chinese restaurant. You’d probably see elderly people walking by. Madison is still a town where you can age in place instead of being shipped off to a nursing home, and people of all different levels of mobility can live in Madison, get their groceries and their drugs from the pharmacist down the street. It was just spring break in Madison, but even when it’s not, you’d see kids. Sometimes I see gaggles of teenage girls or pre-teen girls. Some of them live here. Some of them are driven down to downtown Madison from up on the hilltop. We are mall-less in this part of Southern Indiana, but before they had malls, we just had Main St. The kids and teenagers sit on the bench or get smoothies in the coffee shop. Sometimes there are couples on the bench across the street, just sitting in the sunshine. There are regulars who stop and talk to each other. Business owners from down the street. Tourists who stop and ask about a place to eat. There are special people like Vernon, who delivers the local paper and stops in at the coffee shop every day to talk to someone. There is mingling of all different kinds of people. Different races, different class backgrounds, different ages, different political beliefs. Important business happens, and sometimes nothing happens at all. I believe for some people who come into Madison Coffee and Tea Company, it may be the only conversations they have all day long.

Now, Madison is a town with a much stronger preservation ethic than Burlington, so no one there is talking about tearing down the coffee shop and putting up a parking lot. But there’s still always talk of the need for more parking lots. Personally, I’d rather spend some more time teaching people how to parallel park. And I’m not saying all parking lots are bad. But parking lots are a whole different kind of place, if they are places at all. And yet, we live in a world where many people seem to feel an irresistible pull towards the parking lot. The parking lot calls to them about ease and accessibility, but not particularly about conversation and interaction.

Internal and external landscapes

I recently read a speech given by the mother of the Main Street movement, Mary Means. In it, she talked about her father, who was an architect, taking her to see beautiful architecture as a child. We all have those places, don’t we? Those places we carry around with us from childhood, or maybe later. Places that shape the way we see the world.

In her memoir of growing up in the Austrialian bush, Jill Ker Conway discusses the ways in which the external landscape of that country shaped her internal sense of her self. She says: It took a visit to England for me to understand how Australian landscape actually formed the ground of my consciousness, shaped what I saw, and influenced the way a scene was organized in my mental imagery. I could teach myself through literature and painting to enjoy this landscape in England, but...My landscape was sparer, more brilliant in color, stronger in its contrasts, majestic in its scale, and bathed in shimmering light.” Conway is talking about natural landscapes, but what if we assume this is true about built landscapes as well? What if we take seriously the idea that the places in which we live and work and socialize...the places in which we gossip or the streets we travel on our way to the corner store, shape the very ground of our consciousness? Then what would we think about tearing down a corner store to build a parking lot? What would we think about parking lots in general?

Here is what I want to tell you as a sociologist who studies place. You are all in the business of shaping and molding places. Of preserving them and making them vital and successful and sustainable. You help shape and build external landscapes in cities and small towns across the country. As they did in the town where I grew up, people will tell you that the corner store is unimportant. That this building or that doesn’t matter. That what a place looks like is just window dressing. That no one really cares about Main Streets. Don’t listen to them. You are in the business of creating external landscapes, and those landscapes have great power. They can make community easier or harder. They can make a place where no one gets out of their car or a place where people sit next to each other and sometimes strike up conversations. They can help people to care about each other and the place in which they live. These external landscapes, as Jill Kerr Conway said, shape the very ground of our consciousness, the way we see ourselves, the wider world, and our relationship to it. I can’t imagine a more important job or a more important calling.

Thanks to everyone from the National Trust and Main Street organizations. It was a great time in Baltimore and a wonderful group of people. Did I mention that we could see Camden Yards from our hotel room?

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Madison Monday: The National Main Streets Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:30:00 +0000

It’s Monday, and I’m not in Madison. The husband and I are at the National Main Streets Conference in Baltimore, where on Wednesday, I’ll be giving a speech at the closing session. As I write, we’re sitting in our hotel room which looks out on Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the original and beautiful throwback ballpark. Every few minutes my husband has to get up, look out the window, and say, “That’s Camden Yards!” Just now, he had to look again because the shadows have changed in the last 20 minutes or so.

Since getting in to Baltimore this afternoon, we’ve had lunch and a couple of beers at a pub around the street and walked down to the Inner Harbor, where we watched the paddle boat action. (My husband just looked at Camden Yards again).

Until I was asked to speak at this conference, I confess I was unaware that Madison was one of the three towns chosen by Mary Means for the Main Street pilot project back in the 1970s. So in some ways, all of us in downtown Madison are living in Main Street central, or ground zero for the Main Street movement. The Main Street program is under the National Trust for Historic Preservation and uses a four-point approach to transform the way people across the country think about their downtowns and neighborhood commercial districts. There are all kinds of great workshops and tours, and tomorrow night, the Main Street Bash at the historic B & O Railroad Museum.

Paddle boats in Inner Harbor

It’s always great to be in a city again. There are certain experiences you just can’t have in Madison, as wonderful as it is. Riding public transportation. The diversity of people. Watching families in paddle boats (though paddle boats on the river would be very cool...perhaps a little dangerous with the barge traffic, but definitely exciting). And of course, Camden Yards.

When I first took my job and was living on campus rather than in downtown Madison, I would sometimes feel when I traveled during the summer to places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and New York that everything important in the world was happening somewhere that was not Indiana. It was as if life were a river, and I could go and watch the rapids and the waterfalls. But my life took place in a little eddy along the side, a place where floating things got stuck and never got out again.

I’m happy to report that I don’t feel like that anymore. When my husband and I left the pub where we had lunch this afternoon, it was very hard for me not to turn around and say good-bye to the man behind the bar who had served us. In my life in Madison, I am always saying good-bye when I leave a place; it seems rude not to do so. And I like living in a place where folks expect you to wave good-bye.

When I travel now, I don’t feel like a piece of floatsam that’s been left behind by the larger stream of life. I feel like someone whose swimming out into a different stream, exploring a different part of the river. It’s good to see what’s going on out here. And it’s also quite nice to go home.

Look for more reports from the National Main Streets Conference this week, and my speech.

Sunday Salon: A Shocking Confession about Jane Eyre

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:23:00 +0000

Tomorrow the husband and I are off to Baltimore, where I’ll be giving a speech at the closing session of the National Main Street Conference on sociological perspectives on place. It’ll be very exciting to be back in Baltimore, and look for a report this week on the conference and Baltimore.

But before I go, I have a confession to make. Last Sunday, I reviewed The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey’s modern day re-telling of the classic, Jane Eyre. In that review I reflected on the urge to re-tell a classic, and the dangers of such an endeavor. And I concluded that though The Flight of Gemma Hardy was interesting, it didn’t hold up to the original. And then I declared my renewed interest in re-reading the original, Jane Eyre. So last Sunday, I picked up my copy of Jane Eyre, which I was certain I had read at least once, if not several times.

Reader, until last week, I had never read Jane Eyre, though I was deeply convinced that, of course, I had. As evidenced in last week’s posting, I could quote lines from the book. Or at least one line. I felt I had a definite sense of Jane Eyre as a character. And yet, as I read the novel this week, all I could think was, “I don’t remember this happening!” Several times I thought to myself that perhaps I had somehow come upon a drastically altered edition of Jane Eyre, in which whole sequences of events had been inserted, it was that surreal. But, no. As vivid as my memories are of certain scenes in Jane Eyre, I feel fairly convinced that I had actually never read the book until last week.

I found it puzzling that I had not actually read Jane Eyre up until this point...I’ve always checked it off on those lists that go around of all the books you should have read. But the really shocking part is that now that I have read it, let me tell you that the version of Jane Eyre I had in my head is much better than the version that exists in the real world. Jane is mildly annoying as a character, by turns priggish and, well, kind of stupid. Really, how does she wind up roaming the roads of a strange town completely penniless and starving? Why didn’t she go to Miss Temple or someone?

And what the hell is up with Rochester? Really? He finds it amusing to convince the woman he’s madly in love with that he’s going to marry someone else? Why exactly was that the proper thing to do? And he cross-dresses as a gypsy to tell Jane’s fortune....why?

Looking back, I think I must have seen a film version of Jane Eyre. It must have been quite a good one, too. And I think I’ve confused Jane Eyre with Wuthering Heights in my head. I am now convinced that Wuthering Heights is the really good novel, though next week I could re-read it again and change my mind. Or maybe I’ve never read it, either. But I feel moved to say something so deeply sacrilege about Jane Eyre that I cringe even when I think it in my head. The novel reads like a rather stilted romance novel. With much less sex, though she does sit on Rochester’s lap. At any rate, I can now say for certain that I have read Jane Eyre, but not that I particularly liked it.

I also have more sympathy for Margot Livesey’s attempt to re-interpret the novel. Her Jane at least gets an education. And goes to Iceland on her own. But now I wonder if Livesey wasn’t trying to tell the better version of Jane Eyre that was in her head? Maybe she, like me, re-read Jane Eyre and realized that whatever she remembered loving about the novel wasn’t actually there and decided she could do it better. I applaud the effort, but have to say, now that I've actually read the novel, that it might have been best to have just come up with your own story.

Madison Monday: The Birdhouse Concert Series

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:32:00 +0000

On any given weekend, Madison has a hopping music scene. Just on St. Patrick's Day weekend, there was Irish music to be heard at Thomas Family Winery, or That Book Place, or The Electric Lady, just to name a few. This weekend, Tom Roznowski could be heard at the Thomas Family Winery, and next weekend is the RiverRoots festival Pub Crawl kickoff event featuring Jimmy Davis and Lewis Mathis.

On the Sunday night of St. Patrick's day weekend, my stepdaughter and I attended my second Birdhouse Concert Series, this time featuring Chicago musician Edie Carey.

I guess the whole house concert thing is old news to those who are hip and in the know, but I am neither hip nor particularly in the know. For example, I just signed up for Pinterest, but I’m still not exactly sure what I’m supposed to do now. My first house concert was last fall as part of a dinner to raise money for Girls, Inc. here in Jefferson County. There was delicious Mexican food and then we all settled down in our hosts’ living room to hear Greg Ziesemer and Kriss Luckett-Ziesemer sing for us.

Cover of Edie Carey's latest album

Not too long ago I read a fantasy (or speculative fiction, I guess) novel in which there’s a certain tribe of people for whom singing in front of people is kind of like...having sex with someone you don’t know? Or maybe it’s like watching this youtube video my students showed me just today of a couple having their first ever kiss on their wedding day. Oh, ugh, this is by far the most embarrassing thing you will ever see.

In this novel, singing is something you do with people you are very intimate with—lovers and family members–but something you never do for strangers. Someone who performs in public is for them kind of like equivalent to a prostitute.

Let me just say right now that in no way am I arguing that musicians are prostitutes. Just to be safe, let me that say again that in no way are musicians prostitutes. But when you go to a house concert, you kind of get the point about how intimate singing in front of someone is, without the crowd of thousands, or hundreds or even like much more than twenty people between you and the folks who are performing. This is probably especially true when, as the last two performances have been at the Birdhouse, the performers are singer/songwriters.

Singer/songwriters like Danny Flanigan (who performed in February) and Edie Carey are pouring their whole lives out to you when they sing. And then, also, they’re singing! Loudly! With their eyes open most of the time, making actual eye contact with audience members who are sometimes sitting less than two feet away from them! Can you imagine?

Now I, myself, am not without some experience singing in front of an audience. The last time it happened I believe I was probably about eleven years old in front of members of my church singing a solo called, “In His Time.” I can actually probably still sing some of it if you’d ever like to hear. I could record it for you and send it you as an e-mail attachment, because the idea of singing in front of people, let alone a small group of people in a small room is, well, horrifying.

Watching someone else do this is entrancing and quite beautiful. You could argue that perhaps this is the way music is meant to be heard, in places where you can see people’s faces, hear their breathing, watch them fidget or smile or laugh. You can, in fact, interact with them as human beings rather than as teeny, tiny little figures up there on the stage. As part of the bargain at The Birdhouse Concert Series, you also get to have a chip-in potluck with other folks who love and appreciate music.

As scary as the prospect of singing in front of such an intimate group of people seems to me, I have to say the performers that I’ve seen so far seem to really love it. Maybe they’re faking, but I don’t think so. Both Danny Flanigan and Edie Carey talked about the kindness of the audience and the intensity of their listening. In this kind of format, there is no ambient noise from the bar, or people coming in and going out, or having conversations to distract you. There is just the music and you. And I suppose if making music is something you so very much love to do, then having that kind of intense attention given to it must be heaven. Like a really good comment on your blog post (hint, hint).

At any rate, I’m sure all the hip and happening places that are not Madison have house concert series. I’m personally quite happy and grateful we have one here in Madison, too. You can find out more about The Birdhouse Concert Series by going to the Cultivate webpage, here and if you're interested in attending future shows in the Birdhouse Concert Series, contact Kriss Luckett-Ziesemer, here at birdhouseconcertseries@gmail.com.

Book Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:34:00 +0000

This novel by Margot Livesy has been on my to-read list for so long that I had forgotten why I was so excited to read it in the first place. I vaguely remembered it was in the category of those “modern day adaptation” novels, and thought it was a Jane Austen novel at first. Maybe Emma. It was only when Gemma left Yew House for her horrible boarding school that I remembered it was, in fact, a new version of Jane Eyre.

Let me say that I very much liked The House on Fortune Street, also by Margot Livesy. But I have to sadly say that The Flight of Gemma Hardy was, well, not the masterpiece that is Jane Eyre.

Why do you decide to re-write a classic novel? I imagine it could be out of incredible love for the original story. Or because as an artist, you see something in the story that’s missing, some part of the story that isn’t being told that should be. I think of Wide Sargasso Sea, a beautiful novel from the perspective of Bertha, the madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre.

It’s a brave, brave thing to do, because you have just made it incredibly easy for all your readers to compare your novel to one of the greatest works of fiction of all time. Yikes. And though I can imagine wanting to re-create Jane Eyre out of an incredible love for the story, wouldn’t there also be a kind of sense in which there is no way to improve upon the original?

The Flight of Gemma Hardy made me very much want to go back and read Jane Eyre again. I have the vague memory that I discussed Jane Eyre in a college English course, though I can’t remember which one. I remember making connections between Bertha and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." There seemed to be so much to say about Jane Eyre from so many different theories of literary criticism.

Why are there so many things to say about Jane Eyre? Is it because it is truly and objectively a masterpiece, or is it because Charlotte Bronte got lucky? Or is it a combination of the two? I’m likely to say some combination of the two. You can wax on and on about the deep symbolic meaning in almost any piece of art if you’re clever enough. And let us confess that we never come to a book as blank slates; how much of our love of Jane Eyre or any other classic is conditioned on growing up in a culture that tells us this is what we should love, if we are smart and discerning and intelligent people? Who doesn’t want to be a smart, discerning and intelligent person?

All the same, I love Jane Eyre. I love the novel and I love her as a character. The phrase, “Reader, I married him,” is one that bounces around in my head like a ghost. The directness of Jane Eyre summing it all up for you right there at the end.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Jane Eyre, though obviously it looks as if I’ll have to correct that soon. I don’t remember what else I like about Jane so much. There’s just the simple fact that I do. And I didn’t feel the same way about Gemma Hardy. Or her Rochester, Mr. Sinclair. I think I’m meant to think that the obstacle that keeps Gemma from marrying Mr. Sinclair at first–the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre–is supposed to be a kind of equivalent. But it isn’t, and so mostly I think Gemma’s being priggish and silly when she leaves Mr. Sinclair. And I think the people she encounters are a lot meaner and colder than they need to be. Or maybe it’s easier to accept meanness and coldness in a novel set in the historical distance than it is to accept those things in a novel that is more contemporary.

I’m glad I read The Flight of Gemma Hardy, as it makes me think about the nature of classic works of literature, and will bring something new to my re-reading of Jane Eyre. But I don’t think it does as well at telling a new version of Jane Eyre as other novels in the same category. I think of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which moves King Lear quite seamlessly onto the Iowa farmland. Or for that matter, O Brother Where Art Thou, which takes the Odyssey in a very entertaining direction.

As a final thought, here’s what a re-telling of a classic story does have going for it: the comfort and familiarity of seeing your favorite characters and favorite stories in a new light. If you don’t believe that we like to hear the same story over and over again, you’ve never spent time with small children who will ask you to read the same book or watch the same movie over, and over, and over, and over again. Literally, until you feel that you would like to smash said movie or book into a million tiny pieces. But a familiar story re-told is like meeting old friends again in a new and different setting; like traveling half-way around the world only to find your next door neighbor or your best friend from high school. And that, Reader, is a lovely pleasure indeed.

Madison Monday: Greatest Hits

noreply@blogger.com (Robyn) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:09:00 +0000

Madison Chautauqua of the Arts

Madison Monday is over a year old! The first Madison Monday post was in January of 2011, but that birthday just passed me right by. So now seems like as good a time as any to celebrate over a year of Madison Monday and give what I think are some of the highlights...you be the judge. Feel free to let me know which Madison Monday posts have been your favorites, or check out some you may have missed. In over a year of writing about Madison I certainly haven't come close to running out of things to say, which is a testament to the beauty of this town. In April, I'll be giving the closing keynote speech at the National Main Street Conference in Baltimore, and you can believe I'll be talking about Madison, which was one of the pilot towns in the original Main Street Project by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1977.

Zombies at the JayC Store (January 3, 2011): A sad post, looking back. I still miss the JayC store. And the zombies.

All We Had Was Each Other: The Black Community of Madison, Indiana (January 17, 2011). This is such a great book and the author, Don Wallis, passed away just recently. It's odd to say, but this book helped me love Madison, in the way that I find it easier to love things that are also flawed. If they are flawed, you know they are also real.

The 605 Grille and the great good place (January 24, 2011). I still get a little teary thinking about mornings at the bar with my cappuccino at the 605 during sabbatical. Mostly it's the sabbatical I'm missing. The 605 keeps me sane, and it's not just the beer. If the apocalypse comes, look for me here.

Our local art scene and lessons from a self-portrait (January 31, 2011). You should check out this post just so you can see my attempt at a self-portrait...and the things I learned from trying to paint a self-portrait from a very good local art teacher.

Lord willin' and the creek don't rise (February 28, 2011): I could probably write a post almost every day about the river. I like this post for the actual barge footage at the end. I know not everyone finds barges going by as fascinating as I do, but I think it's very high on my own list of the perks of living in Madison. Also, bonus points for a post which includes the word "placist."

Spring has sprung (April 2, 2011): I had to look this one up this weekend to verify that spring is, in fact, two weeks early this year. The pictures you see of 2nd St.? That's exactly what it looks like now only it's March 19th and not April 2nd. Still beautiful, but also a bit eerie.

The Madison Coffee and Tea Company (April 11, 2011): Eventually everyone in Madison ends up here. Assume about 50% of my posts are written from here.

Sushi comes to Madison (April 19, 2011): My celebration of Sakka Blue and all the things I can cross off my Madison wish-list. Beer brewery can be crossed off now. Still waiting on a place for yummy cheese and good bread. I don't care so much about beads, anymore. A nicer restaurant on the river would also still be good.

Our lovely library (May 16, 2011): My love song to our local library and to the whole concept of public libraries in general.

The 6th Annual Ohio River Valley Folk Festival (May 23, 2011): The height of the spring and summer for us in Madison, now renamed the RiverRoots festival, though it'll be hard for me not to continue calling it the folk festival. This year's headliner is Hayes Carll, so very excited and keeping our fingers crossed that we'll get a tent again.

Broadway Fountain

I love our farmer's market (July 26, 2011): With this weather, we'll have fresh fruits and vegetables for the farmer's market in no time. Art, music, food. The perfect place in the summer.

All Good Things Soaps and Such (August 15, 2011): I can't say enough about this place...the perfect local business where you can feel good in every possible way about what you're buying. Also, it smells soooo good.

Shantyboat on the Ohio (September 12, 2011): Who says small towns aren't exciting places? You never know who will show up floating down the river in Madison. I just love the idea of a shantyboat. I probably wouldn't like actually being on a shantyboat as much, but it's fun to see them.

Steamboat celebrations and more (October 17, 2011): This was such a great event, a wonderful night, a perfect cruise down the Ohio River. If you ever get a chance to cruise on a riverboat, do not turn it down!

Village Lights Bookstore (November 23, 2011): My profile of the best community bookstore ever. They just finished their Rock and Read Event to raise literacy awareness and donate books to The Clearinghouse. Oh, if every town had such a bookstore, the world would be a better place.

A Year on Trail 3 (January 2, 2012): Month #1 of my year on Trail 3. I think things will look significantly different in March.

The Daryl R. Karns Natural History Trails at Hanover College (January 9, 2012): A beautiful spot on campus for a wonderful person who will always be missed.

Yoga IN Madison (March 12, 2012): A good yoga studio wasn't on my list of things we need in Madison, but sometimes you don't know exactly what it is you need until you have it. When I go to yoga class here, I feel cared for and healed. What else can you ask for in life?

There are a lot more Madison Monday's that didn't make my cut, but you can check them out by clicking here. Or suggest your own favorites. Or you own topics for future Madison Monday's.