Burnin’

A couple of weeks ago I flew out of Hilton Head airport for the first time. A few minutes after take off, I noted Fripps Island and Hunting Island on our right, then a big body of water, then a beach community that I couldn’t quite place. After consulting the map, I learned it was St. Helena Sound and Edisto Island that I saw from the US Air twin-engine prop.

Yesterday, we drove to Edisto Beach. What took five minutes in the plane, took more than an hour and a half by car. Such is the nature of watery land. More times than not one goes around, not over.

While our nearest beach is but 20 minutes away, we like to see what the different beach communities offer. Since moving to the Lowcountry 16 months ago, we’ve visited beaches on Sullivan’s Island, Edisto Island, Hunting Island, Hilton Head Island, Tybee Island, St. Simon’s Island, Sea Island, Jekyll Island, Cumberland Island and Amelia Island. Edisto was most reminiscent of Fernandina Beach on Amelia Island in the northeast corner of Florida. Both have a laid back, old school beach town feel with relatively modest, but still high-priced homes on the beach.

It was a sunny day with a strong breeze. We saw dolphins just offshore, swam in the inviting ocean waters and read our books under the umbrella.

Sy Safransky is the founder and editor of The SUN magazine, an award-winning independent, nonprofit journal that has maintained itself and its readership for more than 28 years. It publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and interviews that live up to its motto, a statement by Viktor Frankl: “What it is to give light must endure burning.”

Darby loves The SUN . She’s always saying, “I can’t believe you don’t read The SUN .” For the record, I do pick it up from time to time. She loves the purity of the pub. Presumably so do the other 70,000 subscribers that help keep the Chapel Hill, NC operation afloat.

In a fund raising letter from Safransky, which I have before me, he discusses his battle to keep The SUN’s pages ad free.

As the planet staggers from catastrophe to catastrophe, do we really need yet another magazine filled with the kind of ads that romanticize the destruction of the natural world, deny moral complexity, and perpetuate the status quo?

He mentions in the letter that his methods may be quaint. That’s honest.

As a person who works in advertising, my reaction is why draw such deep lines in the sand? Selling ad space is not selling out and it’s not going to move the editorial direction of The SUN one iota.

I’m not saying The SUN should run ads, after all it is nice that such a magazine exists. I’m saying I would, faced with like circumstances. When brands sponsor great content, artists get paid. And everyone, especially artists, needs to get paid.

John Updike caused a stir at BookExpo America in Washington, DC last Saturday. According to the Washington Post, “without warning, he opened fire on the technorati.”

“I read last Sunday, and maybe some of you did too, a quite long article by a man called Kevin Kelly,” he began. He proposed to read a few paragraphs so that listeners who hadn’t seen the article might “have a sense of your future.”

The reference was to a piece called “Scan This Book!” in the previous week’s New York Times Magazine. (The title echoes activist Abbie Hoffman’s 1970 provocation, “Steal This Book.”) In it, Kelly described — in the messianic/hyperbolic style favored by Wired, the magazine with which he has long been associated — the inexorable march toward an “Eden” in which the totality of human knowledge will be downloadable onto a single iPod-size device.

Reading further, Updike noted Kelly’s assertion that “copy-protection schemes” are helpless to hold back the technological tide. “Schemes,” he repeated sarcastically, drawing a laugh. As his audience well knew, the Association of American Publishers filed suit last year on behalf of five major publishers alleging that Google’s library scanning project is a massive and flagrant violation of copyright law.

Updike went on at some length, heaping scorn on Kelly’s notion that authors who no longer got paid for copies of their work could profit from it by selling “performances” or “access to the creator.”

Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of “information” on the Web, he said, “books traditionally have edges.” But “the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.

“So, booksellers,” he concluded, “defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.”

I’m a Willamette Valley Pinot Noir fanatic. The wines from this region are world class, but more importantly to me, I feel connected to them. I believe it is the French conept of terroir at work.

With this in mind, I’m pleased to report there is another wine producing valley of note in the great state of Oregon. The Umpqua Valley, south of Eugene. In the small town of Elkton, Brandborg Vineyard & Winery is producing incredible pinot noir (if the two bottles we’ve recently enjoyed are any testament).

Here are their tasting notes:

2003 BENCH LANDS Umpqua Valley pinot noir

Aromas abound with cherries, sweet strawberries with a hint of forest floor, mushrooms and well integrated vanilla and caramel oak. The flavors echo the aromas with the addition of raspberries, spice, good acidity and finely grained tannins for such a young wine that carry through in a long and pleasing finish. Not a big wine, but very pretty and it would make a fantastic partner with duck confit, pate or fresh grilled wild salmon.

Bottled September 20, 2004 13.8% alcohol 745 cases

Per Bottle $18.00 ~ Per case $194.40

Drier and warmer than the Willamette Valley wine region to the north, and cooler than the Rogue and Applegate wine regions to the south, the Umpqua Valley features seven family-owned Oregon wineries that showcase this region’s viticultural versatility.

Do animals merely mate? Or do they also love? This question (and the answer) is at the center of Academy Award wining documentary, March of the Penguins, a moving portrayal that makes the story seem much larger than “a nature film.”

Prior to watching this film, I had never given much thought to the habits of Emperor Penguins in Antarctica. Now that I know something of their lives, I’m astounded by what they go through. For instance, after the females lay their egg, the males then guard it non-stop from the frigid cold, while the exhausted females walk for days over the ice to the open ocean to feed. By the time, the mother returns to care for the newborn penguin, the father hasn’t eaten in close to four months.

Emperor Penguins are noble creatures, often human-like in their upright stance, walking and behavior. It was good to learn about them.

Lowcountry Blogs, a nicely rendered Typepad blog published by the Post & Courier in Charleston, questions the Lowcountry’s physical and cultural boundaries.

I’m wondering if there aren’t actually TWO “lowcountries” within the larger set “Lowcountry.”

The idea goes like this: That if you look at the area between Winyah Bay and the Savannah River and define it by the cultural centers to which the residents orient their identities, then there’s a Charleston-centric lowcountry that picks up Berkeley and Dorchester while extending south into parts of Colleton County.

But by this definition there’s also a smaller, distinctly Beaufort-centric lowcountry, where residents might even be more oriented to Savannah than they are to Charleston.

In other words, we share a Lowcounty with Beaufort, but do we share a community?

Beaufort-centric lowcountry? Charleston-centric lowcountry? I don’t know. I think it’s more local and more complex than that. The center of the Lowcountry is where you find it. If you live in Bluffton, like I do, it’s right here between the May and Colleton Rivers. For my friends on Hilton Head, it means something else.

As for Savannah, I find it hard to think of the city as somehow apart from the Lowcountry. Savannah is 25 miles away and clearly a different place in another state. Yet, are we to let rivers and state lines be such serious dividers? Perhaps we are, but I’ve taken to saying “I’m from the Savannah area” when people ask where I live, because it registers with them, allowing us to move the conversation forward.

According to the BBC, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, asked President Bush what his best moment in office has been.

“I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5lb perch in my lake,” President Bush said.

Was he joking? I’m inclined to think so, yet fisherman are a breed apart. It’s entirely possible this was W’s biggest thrill of the past five years. 7.5 pounds is a big perch.

Cusato Cottages, LLC wants to house victims of Katrina in cute but functional little cottages. And the idea has traction on Capitol Hill.

According to the Jackson Clarion Ledger:

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., won approval of an amendment doubling to $1.2 billion the $600 million Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran set aside for a pilot program to build Katrina Cottages, tiny homes resistant to flooding and strong winds.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco have asked Congress to approve money for the cottages, which would replace thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers now housing hurricane victims.

The smallest cottage, a 308-square-foot unit, is estimated to cost about $35,000 to build, compared to roughly $75,000 FEMA spends to buy and deliver a trailer.

The cottages, built in the traditional Gulf Coast vernacular, can be placed on a lot while rebuilding of the main home is underway. When all is said and done, the family has gained a valuable guest house.