This Episode of Silence

Two years ago on this date began an unusual episode in my life — an episode that I marked largely by observing silence here and elsewhere on the Internet.

During this episode, one who wished to provoke me I left unanswered. This person's supporters then did what they could to discredit my March, 2010, book on Amazon; and they, too, I left unanswered. Amazon on its own pulled one supporter's comments, while leaving a few others there.

Since I was being demonized -- for such seemed the object of their efforts -- my book undoubtedly lost sales. Such is life. They made their attacks and I hope enjoyed their minor victories. For my part, I wrote my book not for the moment but for our time; and my book continues its existence just as our time does. What it said at time of publication it still says. Where it stood then, there it still stands.

A silence once set into place cannot be broken, in a real sense. Time passes; and when it passes it admits none of us back into its fold, and allows no alterations besides those of our thoughts and depictions.

All the same, I have it within my power to allow a different episode to begin. As perhaps I will.

Errors abound, in this brilliantly idiotic on-line world. Since I know more about the subject of my book than anyone else alive -- I say this not out of pride, but out of believing it to be the unfortunate truth -- I could mount a campaign to straighten matters, correct mistakes, point the way toward accuracy ...

Would such be possible? Would such be desirable? Is not part of the charm of this central edifice of our Age of the Masses, this over-arching monument to the Misinformation Age, the very fact of its nearly infinite potential for fallibility? As the Internet is, perhaps it must be. If ever it should suffer itself to be corrected, rebuilt and rehabilitated, to be spoon-fed the curative waters of Albion, to be given the therapeutic pocketbook-massages of the Holy Molar smiling televisionaries ... then likely the Internet would collapse in upon itself.

The world that I have changed, and that I believe I have changed for the better, is the world of the understanding. Some people now on Earth see some matters differently because of these efforts of mine -- just as I see some matters differently thanks to their efforts.

A tangled and intangible invisible world ... information-born, information-borne and information-bearing ... spotty, spontaneous, unpredictable ...

A fine place to be, this world of ours. I mean the world of the understanding.

I mean the world where I have not observed silence -- not at all, during this episode of silence.

Rediscovering Victorian Drinking

What motivated me to attempt the discovery, or rediscovery, of the winemaking techniques available to the pre-automotive farmers and householders of America?

Partly it must have been that very lack of Martha's and mine, of the necessary equipment for Age of Masses winemaking. I was simply making do -- while trying to think how early-Modern winemakers made do.

I was also curious about what it is that they drank. I have studied some of their lives ... but how did their kitchen wines taste? What was it that they served to one another, in their Sunday-afternoon circles of visiting and socializing? What did they sip, on a convivial evening?

Another aspect to the situation is the almost inescapable presence of sulfite additions to the commercially produced wines being sold here in our Age of the Masses times. Did sulfites come into use as stoneware jugs fell out of use? (I would guess not, since books such as Bravery's will include mention of both Camden tablets and jugs that were presumably stoneware.) Whenever the transition did happen, sulfiting became an industry standard, and, perhaps soon thereafter, a household and farm standard.

Sulfiting seems to have made possible the mass-shipping of cheap wine around the globe -- as anyone knows who, like Martha, reacts in the lungs to their presence. Cheap imported wines bring on a worse bronchial reaction than do domestic ones. The sad aspect of the situation is that sections of organic wine, such as found even in our local-boosting Viroqua Food Co-op, are dominated by foreign wines.

We have come to dismiss cheap and inexpensive import wines out of hand. The mega-production that makes the prices possible seems to lean heavily on sulfiting practices that compromise one's chances of enjoying the wine.

What is the use of wasting those fewer dollars per bottle, when you might be fruitfully spending a few more dollars for a better experience?

Cheers ...

Oil and Soil

Once you have begun to realize that local products are often superior to nationally or globally distributed ones, it becomes an ethical choice on multiple levels to use those local products.

Normally as consumers we adopt a non-ethical viewpoint, which we call "cost-economy" -- which is money-cost economy. Money-cost economics are deceptive economics because of Western industrial society's continuing habit of deferring debts into the indefinite future by the expedient of assigning zero monetary value to nonrenewable resources. The cost of "cheap" mass-farmed corn, for instance, is based not only on price-supports for the intensive use of petroleum products in the corn's growing, harvesting and distribution, with those price-supports helping raise at an ever-greater rate the real debt related to that dwindling resource -- but also on soil cost. In the U.S., the soil cannot be brought back to farmland from the Gulf of Mexico. Yet money-cost economics means that the sole sensible activity for the consumer is to buy the corn that is "cheapest."

Money-cost economics is the bedrock philosophy of our Age of the Masses. It has been a cheap age in many senses of the word.

Cheers ...

Automated Writers

Although Cyril Kornbluth lived only to age 34, the amount of material I had to review, absorb and fit into the life-and-career story that became C.M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary was fairly sizable. The book itself became sizable, too -- some 240,000 words, as I recall. I ended up doing much of the writing directly to electronic file. I regret this, since a few repetitions and other problems resulted that I might have avoided, had I fleshed it out on paper, first, at a more leisurely pace.

Although I type with some rapidity, I find that the slower nature of the manual typewriter, as against the faster electronic keyboard, results in cleaner, more interesting writing. The eye and mind are not hypnotized by the radiant screen. The light of day, usually, illuminates the page.

Handwriting sometimes goes more slowly but sometimes as quickly as typewriting; yet in the long run it may lead to the shortest writing times. Handwriting seems to lead the mind to produce its most thought-out, most interesting, most well-wrought sentences -- so that the time spent in rewriting is all the less.

For deadline writing, word-processing -- a term of significant homeliness, quite in keeping with our Age of the Masses -- has its advantages.

Yet as with other automations, it offers increased production of diminished-quality results.

I suspect our age, so prone to look down upon the productions of earlier ages, has produced record quantities of writing not worth reading.

Cheers ...

Fresh from Cradle, and Cribbing

The news last week about "novelist" Helene Hegemann, of Berlin, Germany, seems less like news than a re-run confirmation that our Age of Masses is insane in a way quite different from the way the Modern was. Hegemann has used cut-and-paste methods in "writing" her novel -- a natural outcome, perhaps, of living in a global culture in which cut-and-paste refers to an activity no longer restricted to kindergarten.

Hegemann's being up for an award worth $20,000 from the Leipzig Book Fair, however, gives belated recognition to the artistic success of the Activity Book of our childhoods, which usually was printed on newsprint and was meant to be "read" with blunt-tipped scissors and colored wax crayons at hand. We can only hope the Leipzig Book Fair judges have these essential tools within reach; and we can hope the local kindergarten can spare a teacher to supervise judging.

Hegemann's "novel," of course, is only a pimple on the face of a society that has been eating factory food. It comes in for mention here as an example of what this effort of mine, this discussion, stands against.

With all due respect I would suggest Hegemann try to write a short story using a pencil. Writing is the finding of a line to follow -- usually a line that is invisible until the setting of pencil to paper. While a pencil may be used in cribbing, it is such a fine tool for finding lines that reveal inner worlds as well as outer ones that its use might shame even a plagiarist into removing the horrifying mask of Age-of-Masses stupidity.