Burnin’

For the past several days on my way home from work, I’ve taken notice of three wild turkey hens walking alongside ever busy Highway 278. They don’t seem to mind the traffic, even though I do.

The wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) became South Carolina’s official State Wild Game Bird in 1976. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation there are over 5 million Eastern Subspecies turkeys roaming our hardwood forests.

From We-Make-Money-Not-Art:

A man has been banned from hunting for 20 years after shooting a robotic moose.

Robert Lee McLaren is the first person in Nova Scotia to be found guilty of the crime after shooting Bullwinkle, a full-sized moose decoy used by the Natural Resources Department to help combat the poaching of mainland moose. The animals became an endangered species in 2003.

Eight Guysborough County residents also charged with shooting the decoy will go to court later this spring.

Meeting Richard Ford

Even though his face sears
itself into your mind
blue eyes like campfire coals
it’s the shoes that give him away
Chuck Taylor high tops
on a man his age tend to pop
maybe not in a more colorful setting
but here we are in the corporate confines
of the Minneapolis airport
sitting across from each other
waiting for a shuttle to take us
90 miles to Rochester
where the best minds in medicine
can fix just about anything.

Ford has with him a weathered leather shoulder bag
the kind that only looks humble
you can tell it’s a comfort to him
when you’re finally seated in the van
he pulls from it a notebook
and starts scribbling madly
you finally say, “Excuse me, are you Richard Ford?”

The conversation between writers
does not appear to interest the other passengers
maybe they’ve not heard of Frank Bascombe
or worse, the Pulitzer Prize
perhaps they’re just shy
anyway it’s not Harrison Ford on his way
to the Mayo Clinic, it’s Richard Ford
who kindly puts his note taking on hold
to encourage you, a writer with no books to share.

The van pulls up in front of The Kahler
of course he’s staying here
you wonder if anyone inside will notice
his casual, but classic, footwear.

We were introduced to Guenoc at a party in Chicago a few years ago. For the money, I don’t think there’s a better wine from California. This is particularly true of the vineyard’s Petite Sirah.

Guenoc’s commitment to Petite Sirah reflects the vineyard’s resources, yet it also demonstrates the winery’s willingness to do things a little different. Guenoc could have converted its Petite Sirah and Sauvignon Blanc vineyards to Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay years ago, but the winery believed strongly in the future of these varietals and in their ability to set new standards for quality and character when grown in Guenoc Valley and Lake County.

Guenoc is one of Californias leading producers of Petite Sirah in both volume and quality. Guenocs primary source of Petite Sirah is the Serpentine Meadow Vineyard at the winery estate in Guenoc Valley. Planted in 1980, these low-yielding Petite Sirah vines grow in sandy loam soils, which have a notable magnesium influence due to the blueish serpentine soils from the surrounding hills. Though seemingly insignificant, this trace magnesium has a profound affect on the Guenoc Petite Sirah, as it limits vine vigor and crop levels, which in turn tones down the aggressive flavors in the wine. As a varietal, Petite Sirah has a reputation for being overly tannic and aggressive, but at Guenoc, the combination of the distinctive Serpentine Meadow soils and winemaker skills result in a Petite Sirah that is soft and round with bright, berry fruitinessa tribute to what the varietal can achieve. Guenoc makes three Petite Sirahs: an estate series, a reserve from the Serpentine Meadow Vineyard and a Port.

Guenoc is no Johnny-come-lately to the wine biz. The winery dates back to 1854 when wine grapes were first planted in the Guenoc Valley. Victorian actress Lillie Langtry, a colorful theater star in Europe and America, owned the property from 1888 to 1906 and made wine which she claimed would be the greatest claret in the country. Her face graces many of the estate’s bottles today.

From IndyBay:

When South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds signed HB 1215 into law it effectively banned all abortions in the state with the exception that it did allow saving the mother’s life. There were, however, no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women.

“To me, it is now a question of sovereignty,” she said to me last week. “I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction.”

From New York Times:

Publishers say there is no harder sell in the world of books these days than literary fiction. Even critically acclaimed literary novels often have a short shelf life in hardcover, with one-half to three-quarters of the books shipped to stores often being returned to the publisher, unsold.

That has a growing number of publishing companies, from smaller houses like Grove/Atlantic to giants like Random House, adopting a different business model, offering books by lesser-known authors only as “paperback originals,” forgoing the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life.

The paperback original is not an entirely new concept, of course. European publishing companies have been doing it for years; in the United States, Beat writers were often published only in paperback in the 1960’s. Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” the seminal novel of the 1980’s, was first released as a paperback in 1984 by Vintage Contemporaries, a Random House imprint. More recently, in 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri’s volume of short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies” was released only in paperback by Houghton Mifflin’s Mariner Books. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

You see clearly that the linear is a hoax and the last thing the tectonics of consciousness follow is our world of letters and numbers. The bursting of your nuerons follows paths that make the grandest computers look like McGuffey’s Readers. This doesn’t make me pessimistic about the usefulness of computers only that they don’t create works equivalent to Shakespeare of Mozart nor are the meant to. Curiously humans have always been more interested in process than subject. A laptop at base is a stick used by a chimpanzee to get the delicious ants out of a hole in a log. -Jim Harrison, Off to the Side, p.125

I’m reading Jim Harrison’s memoir, Off to the Side (which I picked up for $2.00 at Bluffton Coffee House). Harrison has long been one of my literary heroes.

He’s such a learned man. In fact, as I progress through the book, I’m compiling a list of words he’s using that I do not know well, nor use. Fitzgerald is another author I do this with. One of Harrison’s words that resonates is “pablum”. Pablum means trite, insipid, or simplistic writing, speech, or conceptualization. In other words, it’s the exact opposite of Harrison’s work.

Harrison’s fiction has been translated into 23 languages. He’s particularly big in France. Bookpage explains why:

“I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that,” Harrison says, and then adds, “I read a lot of memoirs to see how people did it a couple of years ago. A lot of them are too full of whining and they pretend they didn’t have a philosophical, mental or spiritual life and just describe what happened. I couldn’t do that.”

Barry Ritholtz–Chief Market Strategist for an institutional research firm, and the Fund Manager for RCP, a NY based hedge fund–posted about our pending economic crisis on his blog.

Over the next 20 months, more than two trillion dollars worth of adjustable rate mortgages will reset at higher interest rates.

Now, I don’t want to be accused of being a perma-bear or anything like that, but I am having a hard time trying to figure out exactly how anyone can spin this into a positive: Dark matter? Credit Surplus? Real Estate Boom?

I’m at a loss for words spin.

One title insurer ran the numbers, and they project that of the adjustable rate mortgages written over the past 2 years, as many as 1 in 8 (12.5%) will end up in default.

I rent my home. But I faced this same predicament with my vehicle. I leased it in 1999 so I could afford the payments. After five years the lease ended and I opted to finance the remaining $15K. So, I’m buying the car twice. After years of suffering from financial stupidity, I finally learned the hard way. If you can’t afford the payments, buy something cheaper.

I’m listening to Ike Carter’s “Nothin’ but the Blues” on Savannah State University Radio, WHCJ 90.3 FM. It airs every Sat. morning from 8:00 to 12:00.

At the moment, Mr. Carter is kicking a lot of Muddy Waters from the 40s and 50s. You can’t ask for more than that from a DJ.

According to Wikipedia, The station just recently started broadcasting 24 hours a day. The station’s signal covers all of Chatham County, and can also be heard in Effingham, Bryan, Beaufort, and Liberty counties.

WHCJ plays jazz, reggae, gospel, blues, and salsa music in addition to featuring a lineup of talk shows, commentary, and cultural enrichment programs that provide a major source of programming for the African-American community.

Given that music is the universal language, I’d say the larger community is also well served by SSU’s radio station. Lovers of the blues, gospel and jazz would do well to make sure this station is properly funded.

Photo by Larry Downing of Reuters