Vermont, wood, silver lining

Earlier this year I joined ANUFF Wood, a loose group of people in Windham County (VT) who turn up at each other's houses to cut/split/stack firewood.  The idea is roughly that if you turn up for 4 or 5 you can ask them to come to you, though I don't think this is very strictly enforced, and the core members seem to turn up for many more sessions than they possibly "redeem."

I've been to a fair number (wd go to more if I had a car), and recently asked the organizer, Michael, whether it might be possible to have three dying beech trees at the edge of my clearing felled etc.  Someone had told me years ago that I should have them down, and had then left the business, and each year I had meant to do something and left it too late.  And I'm not confident enough of my chain saw skills to fell trees, especially if alone on the hill in a place with no cell phone access.

Michael came about a week ago to have a look, and said the trees were manageable, and a session is now planned for Sunday.  On Monday I managed to reach Mark Russ, a local workman with a pickup truck, who agreed to get some palettes for stacking (for which he thought $10 was a reasonable fee). Today I rode my bike to the supermarket 4 miles up the road to pick up provisions, and when I got home Michael's car turned up in the road - he had decided to fell the trees early to make sure there were no problems.  He headed off to the edge of the clearning.  Meanwhile Mark Russ arrived in his pickup truck with the palettes, courtesy of Ron's Husqvarna.  He said Ron had said he expected to have more palettes and offered to bring more if needed.  We shook hands on this (that is, I did not have change for a $20, and cd definitely use more palettes for other things). 

Mark headed out.  Meanwhile Michael finished felling (or rather dropping) the three trees.  The last, with a wedge in its trunk, refused to fall, so he went out in front to pull at various long branches, which eventually worked. (Timber!)

No one reading this is going to understand - I was so happy!  I had meanwhile received an email from a foreign rights agent at the agency that did not work out, declining to provide a contract template for a deal they had declined to see through on the basis that it was proprietorial.  This is the agency that managed to take over a year to handle paperwork for a French publisher who had been publishing an illegal reissue of Le dernier samouraï - I should have known better than to approach anyone who worked there, because they were all toxic and it had taken months to get maybe 70% of the nastiness out of my system.

So the fabulous thing about ANUFF Wood (ANUFF = A Neighborhood Uniting For Fuel) is that everyone is so generous with their time, so happy to turn up on a weekend morning to help out, and by the end of a couple of hours two or three cords of woods have been stacked.  Something has been ACCOMPLISHED.  Within, maybe, a week or so of the beneficiary putting in a request.  And now someone has actually come to my place and solved a problem!  And the whole thing will be sorted out by Sunday pm!

Of course, from a professional point of view, it would be better if my neighbors took a Not my circus, not my monkey approach to their fellow man, while someone who has actually agreed to represent me is a miraculous of competence and efficiency AND anxious to help.  Also from a professional point of view, it's in some ways a handicap to have Vermonters as a point of comparison when dealing with the biz.  Perhaps I am not really, in the long term, better off knowing that 15 minutes is about the time it takes to drop three trees.  But for now, no, this was the highlight of the year.  It is my substitute for the highlight of yore, which was visiting Best Dentist in the World (Roz Tritton has now retired).

They warned me

I was recently interviewed by Jeremy Kitchen and Michael Sack for Eye 94 Radio (105.5 FM in Chicago), Lumpen Radio's books and literature program. Shortly before the interview began I got a call from someone at the studio to run through things that should not be said on air (basically various bad words, which would be tricky to bleep out).  This helpful person reminded me that this would be a live show, not a podcast.

If I had been writing my replies for an email interview, for example, I would probably have edited them down for brevity and coherence, but instead (in my memory, at least) I babbled madly on.  I've now been sent a link to a recording; needless to say, I can't bring myself to listen to it.  Still, what's done is done.  YOU can listen to it here.

you take paradise, put up a parking lot (John D. MacDonald cover)

Terrific piece by Craig Pittman on John D. MacDonald, the Travis McGee series, and Floridian environmentalism smuggled into the adventures of a knight in tarnished armor:

The more I read, the more fascinated I became. MacDonald’s books weren’t just straight-ahead puzzle mysteries like my grandfather’s Perry Mason books. This author digressed. He quipped. He had a lot to say about a lot of things—particularly about the greed and carelessness driving the bad decisions being made about my state. What he had to say was a revelation to teenage me. I’d spent lots of time hunting and fishing with my dad, as well as camping and canoeing with my Boy Scout troop. Until I read MacDonald, I didn’t realize that the places I’d enjoyed visiting might someday be turned into cul-de-sacs and convenience stores, or that such changes might not be for the best.

My experience with MacDonald’s writing is shared by a lot of my fellow Floridians.

“I read all JDM’s books in my early 20s,” non-fiction author Cynthia Barnett (Rain: A Natural and Cultural History) told me. “My father and grandfather had both read them all and it was a point of inter-generational connection for us. We didn’t agree on many things, but Travis McGee and Florida and rapscallions, we could agree upon.”

The whole thing here.

I read all the McGee books in Jan 2018 (2C2E); it's interesting to me, at least, that both Carl Hiaasen and Lee Child took him as a starting point.  It's interesting that lifestyles that have mass appeal are so scandalous to the people representing the people who dream up these gloriously marketable gigs. Interestingly or not so very, it's seen as dodgy if influencers who promote, as it might be, brand of makeup don't use it, and A Good Thing if they do.

the paranoia of celebrities

If totalitarian regimes greatly restrict public language, pushing people toward coded language but making codes problematic by taking away the shared platforms where they could be unambiguously decoded, then a fraying totalitarian regime where people are bolder with their codes but still lacking the platforms for decoding is doubly problematic.

(Think of a situation where any attempt at alignment, at “clearing up", could constitute an act of transgression in itself, threatening with high costs all participants.)

So while doublespeak and expected complicity were becoming commonplace in the city of my childhood, people were still rightly worried that 1) their codes may be misconstrued, 2) any innocent remark would be interpreted as a code by someone wishing them harm.

Amazing piece on Medium by Anna Gát (Three Prologues to Language), the whole thing here