A bunch of writers started hanging out in a virtual treehouse when the pandemic hit and now don't want to leave.
The Edge of Chaos Blog Symposium, which is bringing complexity thinking into concepts of social justice, is ongoing. This symposium was put together by author and economist Beth Plutchak. Contributors include Dr. Clare Hintz, Debbie Notkin, Steven Schwartz, and Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore. Five essays are up and more are coming. Comments appreciated.
Starting today (November 5, 2020), the website Social Justice at the Edge of Chaos is presenting a blog symposium. The symposium is curated by Beth Plutchak, a writer and visionary thinker with a background in economics and social justice.
As the introductory post explains, this symposium is part of an effort to bring the science of complex adaptive systems to bear on the difficult problems facing us today.
Treehouse resident Nancy Jane Moore will be participating in the symposium. Other participants include Debbie Notkin and Dr. Clare Hintz.
New essays will go up each day, followed by responses. The symposium continues through November.
You can sign up for email notifications here.
Once the mandatory evacuation order was changed to a warning (aka “it’s okay to go back, just be ready to skedaddle at a moment’s notice”) we went back to our place several times to check things out and make plans on priorities before moving back. Although we were immensely relieved to have a house to come back to, we noticed the light coating of ash on the foliage and the smoky odor inside. Our insurance adjuster came out to the house a couple of days later and we did a walk-through. He pointed out a little ash here and there on the inside window sills, and among other things offered the cost of a professional smoke damage restoration company as part of the settlement. After speaking with several local companies, and returning to take a more careful look inside and out, we decided to clean it ourselves, with the help of local house cleaners, and use the difference to buy a HEPA filter vacuum cleaner, a shop vac, and several air purifiers.
The refrigerator and chest freezer had been without power for three weeks by this time. We hauled the refrigerator on to the back porch and, armed with rubber gloves and doubled trash bags, emptied it. This was a bigger operation than it sounds because we had to take the refrigerator freezer door off in order to fit it through the sliding glass door. The smell, while qualifying as “stench” was not as bad as we’d feared. More “funky” than “rotting carcass.” Most of what was in the fridge was either in glass or plastic containers or vegetables. Our friend up the block, a strict vegan, said hers didn’t smell that bad, more fermented than putrid. Within a short time, the freezer interior was covered with black flies. We left them to their work, freezer door open, and went back to our hotel. When we came back the next day, the smell had largely dissipated and the flies were gone.
The next step was to sanitize and deodorize the refrigerator. Up and down the block, folks were just trashing theirs, but we wanted to at least attempt to salvage ours. My husband did a first pass on the interior with pressure spraying full strength degreaser/cleanser, rinsing with (non potable) water, then wiping it down with dilute bleach. With the doors open, there was no smell, but when we closed the doors and left it for a time, the funky smell returned, albeit not as intense as before.
On social media, neighbors were comparing experiences cleaning their refrigerators. I felt heartened that some had had success. We did some research and found the following resources:
By mutual agreement, I took over the next phase. After studying the UFlorida article, I took a Costco-sized tin of decaf coffee grounds, which no one in the family drinks any longer), spread a thick layer on 3 old cookie sheets, put one on each rack, closed the doors. And turned on the refrigerator. The fridge was now in the house but not plugged in. I’m not sure why we didn’t think of that, but it turns out that circulating the air within the fridge is important to deodorizing.
I let the coffee grounds do their work for three days. By the second day, though, we could smell a distinct coffee tang but no other odors. The final steps involved re-enlisting my husband to clean the condenser, where icky stuff had dripped and then dried, and then do a two-day stint with baking soda to remove the coffee grounds.
The result: a clean-smelling, extremely clean refrigerator with quite a few years of life left in it.
The chest freezer was another matter. Because the interior had seams, it wasn’t possible to sanitize or clean it thoroughly. We called our trash collection service for a bulky item pick-up, then bought a new one. We got a frost-free upright this time.
Besides all this cleaning, we all went through a bit of unexpected grief about the loss of the contents of the appliances, particularly the blackberries my daughter and I had picked all summer, and the squash and green beans that were at the beginning of their harvest. We consoled ourselves that the blackberries would indeed return next summer, and this time we would be able to see them in the freezer better. Our squash plants had flourished in our absence and burst forth with a second harvest (actually on their third now) so I’ve frozen a dozen or so pints of summer squash and the same of green beans.
During this time, we had a small, office-sized refrigerator with a tiny freezer that we bought (with the money saved by cleaning the house ourselves), which has now gone to live in the garage beside the upright freezer. It was a great thing to have because it allowed us to take our time with the refrigerator clean-up, and we will now have a bit of extra cold space (for pears next year and overflow produce).
Through all this, we’ve developed a new appreciation for the convenience of being able to keep foods cold (and to grab an ice pack for a bruise). It’s a luxury that so many of us take for granted. Through most of human history and today in many areas of the world such a thing is unknown. Oddly enough, having my familiar refrigerator back makes this place seem much more like home. I wonder why that it is so.
We’re less than a week from the US National Election, which should be the end of a long haul but–knowing the tenor of the current times–will not be. I will not rehash the details, because we’re soaking in them and I don’t need to raise my anxiety level* any higher than it already is.
In these unprecedented, times, as they say on TV, outside of the odd volunteer activity, there’s not much to do to soothe my soul. I find myself reverting to Fluffy Bunnies. Continue reading “Fluffy Bunnies”…
Roger Zelazny was one of the greats. I had the immense good fortune to be acquainted with him, and to learn about what I call Roger’s Rule for Writing.
Only one rule. If he had others, I didn’t know about them. But this rule is pretty perfect on its own.
It’s this: He had to sit down at the typewriter three times a day. Each time, he had to write at least three sentences.
If he did that, he’d done a day’s work.
The hope was, of course, that at least one of those three times, he’d write significantly more than three sentences. But if he didn’t, it was all right. He’d made the effort. It wasn’t a highly productive day, but he’d shown up, and that was what mattered.
Word count gets a lot of emphasis these days, and daily word count goals are a fact of life for many writers. I’ve been there, done that. I wrote four pages a day for years…literally. I think it was eight years. Every day, four pages. I wrote on vacation, when I was sick – every single day.
I just finished up an online class in conflict transformation. I stumbled on it by accident scrolling through the Coursera class catalogue and decided to sign up on the spur of the moment.
Conflict transformation is part of the growing movement in conflict resolution and other kinds of peacemaking efforts that work to address conflicts ranging from neighborhood disputes to all out war.
The transformation aspect emphasizes two major points. First of all, conflict is not inherently bad; it points out where deep-seated problems are and can lead to a path to do something about them.
And secondly, many conflicts involve people in very unequal situations. By approaching the problems with an eye toward transformation, rather than simply resolution, those trying to find a peaceful answer must consider that inequality in helping the parties find a solution.
To quote a phrase often heard at demonstrations: “No justice, no peace.” An ordinary mediation session at which both parties give something up is not going to resolve a conflict when major injustice is on the line. Continue reading “Transforming Conflict (and Myself)”…
The other day, we were chatting, in the usual Treeehouse way, about one of our favourite topics. The question we asked each other was not “Which books do you like?” but “Why do you like this book in particular?” We were talking about elements of a book where the author had put the finger on something so precisely that that author and that trait give us pleasure, even years after we first read it. We decided that when one of us remembers something about a favourite book, we might write about it here. We all need comfort right now, after all, and comfort reading is right up there with chocolate as something worth sharing. I’ve eaten some excellent chocolate today and I have a cup of tea at my right hand.
The book I want to share is one that’s really not very well known these days. I’m not sure it was even published outside Australia. It’s by Ray Harris The Adventures of Turkey. Boy of the Australian Plains. I have the 1960 edition, but didn’t read it until some years later. My school library had an earlier edition. I learned about space travel in that library and dreamed of becoming a science fiction writer. I learned about history in that library and dreamed of having history as part of my life. I watched the moon landing in that library, in 1969, when I was eight, and I read The Adventures of Turkey in that library.
Turkey was a schoolboy who lived outback, in an Australia I thought I visited on holidays. When I was a teenager, I was on a school exchange programme and discovered that almost everything in the novel either never existed or was in the past. Mostly in the past. I spent a lot of my early history quests trying to find out about Turkey and his life.
What is it in this book that still grips me? It’s a perfectly created world. It’s what most fantasy novels dream of being, but it chronicles the apparent everyday of school children from way out Woop Woop or from back of Burke. This is an Australian fantasy place, where the climate is tough and the people tougher, and where snakes are dealt with calmly and the real hero is a lanky boy who looks like a bush turkey.
The conversation us Treehousers (I’m now stuck in Australian English, sorry) had, was about writing techniques.
What writing techniques did Harris use that makes me dream about this non-existent Australia every time I read the book? (Do not ask how often I’ve read the book: I’ve owned this copy for about 45 years. We are talking about ultimate comfort reading.) This is not about what the book gets wrong. It’s about what it gets right.
One of my favourite openings of novels is in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising. In the first paragraph we learn so much about a family that everything that happens to Will Stanton happens in that family context. The events are more startling because we know his family, intimately, from Will’s reaction to them in that first paragraph.
Ray Harris uses a similar technique.
“Turkey, me toe’s sore!”
Without speaking, the lanky fourteen year-old slid his school bag in front of him and took his small stepsister pick-a-back. He carried her easily enough. She put her perspiring cheek against his not neck, pushing his hat on one side. He made no protest.
It’s at once very Australian and very simple.
Everything in the novel is Australian and simple. We were just getting used to the idea that we could use our own dialect for protagonists in the 1950s and 1960s, so Harris used a voice even in that opening paragraph and that voice is what comforts me.
It’s my father’s voice.
Dad was brought up in country towns. I’m very much a big city person and I’ve never spoken the way Turkey does. I use a bit of dialect (‘Strine’ is its official name) now and again, to tease people, but I actually had to learn it from others as a child. The Adventures of Turkey was one of those others. It helped me to understand my father’s jokes. It helped me to see that there was an Australia outside my suburb and that I wanted to find out more about that Australia. It did all this by presenting the often-humorous life of Turkey, one day at a time.
While as a school story Turkey was new to me, the humour wasn’t. My father’s jokes are in it, and the entire novel lovingly embraces the narrative style of CJ Dennis (The Sentimental Bloke is another story I visit and revisit when I need comfort – it’s an Australian retelling of Romeo and Juliet) with hints (mere hints) of the adventures of Bunyip Bluegum (Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding) and the short stories of Steele Rudd about Dad and Dave.
If you find the common elements in all of these, you will see what gives me comfort in The Adventures of Turkey. Whimsy walks alongside stern practicality. There’s an acceptance that even simple prose can be used to share the reality that ordinary life is tough but still worthwhile.
All of this was communicated through a writing style that supported resigned humour. The comfort comes from Strine itself, in a way. When I first discovered it, I was reading British school stories and dance books and horse books and I was reading about Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was reading science fiction and fantasy and anything that contained history. None of them gave the firm foundation that Turkey did.
It’s the sense that the everyday can be story, I think. Even if it’s an everyday that is so unlike my own that it felt ultra-real.
That opening says it all. Susan Cooper’s opening said that the everyday can be turned upside down and inside out. Harris said that the everyday didn’t have to be turned upside down and inside out to make good story. This is the comfort.
I get my news from Twitter.
I know that sounds silly. Social media is infested with bots and trolls and people who retweet conspiracy theories and outrageous claims without checking them out.
Let me assure you that I am not getting my news from that part of Twitter. I am very careful about who I follow; in fact, I curate my Twitter feed with an eye to getting information from reliable sources.
For me, this started with local news. It is a sad truth of the San Francisco Bay Area that the only use for most of the local print publications is lining the compost bin and their digital sides are no improvement.
When I first moved out here, I read the venerable free weekly East Bay Express, but I gave up on it a couple of years ago when it was endorsing pro-developer candidates against progressives for state assembly. It fell apart pretty spectacularly after that and the good reporters found other jobs. I don’t even know if it’s still publishing during the pandemic.
So when I wanted to know what was happening in Oakland, I searched on topics on Twitter. Somewhere along the way I stumbled onto Jaime Omar Yassin, known on Twitter as @hyphy_republic. Continue reading “Modern News Consumption”…
My Driver’s Ed teacher, Paul Menin, insisted that every girl in his class had to be able to change a tire, check the oil, and diagram the basic workings of an internal combustion engine*. I have had occasion more than once to bless Mr. Menin’s curriculum: at the time I was in High School this was unusual, and empowering, information for a woman.
My father wasn’t much of a car guy. He could check the oil or change a tire, but his idea of car care was to find a decent mechanic. I’m not sure he observed a maintenance schedule: you waited until there was A Noise or a light came on, then went to the garage. This is in contrast to my husband, whose father taught him from boyhood all about cars. Danny’s the kind of guy who wants to know how his tools work and how to take care of them. The scheduled maintenance visits are religiously observed. When our daughter got her car, Danny gave her a book about car maintenance (and he agonizes over the fact that four years later she still has not read it).
I’m afraid–my ability to change a tire notwithstanding–that I tend more toward my father’s attitude than my husband’s. Continue reading “Tool Love”…
[I wrote this a few years back and published it on another blog. It’s still relevant.]
When I was sixteen, I developed a passion for a yellow Lincoln Continental convertible with a black leather interior. Not a Corvette, which was the hot car of my youth (why, yes, I did watch Route 66), or one of the adorable tiny English sports cars of the ’60s. A Lincoln Continental, the ultimate land yacht.
In my dreams, I would have this car by my mid-20s, when I’d be living in Kemah, Texas (on Galveston Bay), and working at some job or another (the details of employment were not part of this fantasy, though it must have been well-paid). I would also have a shrimp boat, though I wouldn’t be a working shrimper.
Why a shrimp boat, you may ask? Possibly because I really, really liked (and like) to eat shrimp. But also because it wasn’t the sort of boat the wealthy acquired. That is, I wanted a rich person’s car, but a working person’s boat.
It should go without saying that I never achieved this dream. In my mid-20s I was finishing law school and pretty much broke. The car I did have – a Plymouth Valiant – had bit the dust and I was commuting around Austin by bicycle.
Even if I’d had the money, I didn’t want that car or that lifestyle by that time. Kemah was no longer a sleepy bay town but a bustling suburb and I had developed my life-long allergy to commuting. And I had other dreams, few of which involved cars. Continue reading “Car Culture”…