Author: Loren

Don’t Block the Plate

Not only do I have writer’s block, I have way too much on my plate right now. Now that I’ve been writing this blog for nearly a year, I’ve been considering redesigning it, not in the small ways I’ve been redesigning this page constantly, but in some major ways I’ve been trying to avoid.

In order to make most of the changes that I want to make, I’m going to have to go to another ISP provider besides AT&T, something I hate to do since I’m already paying AT&T for the right to host a web page.

What I really want to do is switch to MT and have permanent links and comments. In order to do that, I’m going to follow Jeff Ward’s advice and switch to his ISP at some pretty reasonable rates.

I hope to divide my new web site up into different areas. The main focus will still be In a Dark Time, because personal philosopy and literature remain my main focus.

But another major focus will be environmental, and necessarily political, issues as that is another of my passions in life. I’ve been reading several web sites regularly that cover environmental issues but have been struggling with how to integrate these issues into my site. Until I do get the new page up, I suggest you visit Michael Webb’s MLWebblog site for interesting commentary and links on environmental and political issues.

Meantime, I’ve finished writing the review of To Kill a Mockingbird which should appear on the Banned Books Project in the next few days. Eventually I will probably archive it on my new website but not right now.

I’m still working on a more detailed analysis of the book which should also be coming shortly.

Diagramming Writer’s Block

Wow, that was some great tech service from Omni, especially considering I was using a trial version. I went out and purchased OmniGraffle immediately. Here’s the graph I was working on in trying to write The Mockingbird essay.

As you can tell, there are some problems with parallel structure. Nor am I sure all my causal links are truly causal links. At least it gives me some ways to start writing. Better than looking at an empty page.

Oops, Stuck Out Here Again

When I used to teach writing courses and students would say that they had “writer’s block,” I would tell them to just keep writing and something would come out. (Of course, I didn’t bother to tell them it might be pure bullshit, but I’d read too many student papers not to realize that possibility)

Maybe that’s why it’s hard to take my own advice. But, if the truth be known, I’m stuck. I’m within a few pages of finishing To Kill a Mockingbird, and I‘ve been thinking about it for days. I even followed Jeff Ward’s example and tried making a flow chart, but that has created its own problems.

First of all, I’m not sure how ideas are connected in the novel, or even if they are connected. I think one of the weaknesses of INTP’s is that they want things to be connected, even if they really aren’t connected at all. But believing that there must be a causal relationship when there isn’t one is probably as wrong as assuming there is no relationship when there really is.

Second of all, OmniGraffle is new to me and I haven’t been able to make it export the chart to something I could post on my blog. I even did the unheard of and emailed support to see if there was something I was missing. Of course, I still haven’t gotten a reply back. However, this has become its own obsession, providing me with another excellent excuse not to write an entry for my blog.

See how easy it is to avoid the real question?

The truth is maybe I care too much about To Kill a Mockingbird to just write about it. I invested too much energy in teaching it to take it lightly. If I could only require one book to be taught in high school, I think that book would be To Kill a Mockingbird. It contains the values that I would like every student to have when they left school, with perhaps a few that I would just as soon they didn’t have.

Since I started reading this novel to write a defense of it for the Banned Book Week, I’ve also seen the novel in some new ways, seen some things I just glossed over the first four or five times that I read it. In trying to be “objective” I’ve found some things I’m sure that would offend certain people, people I would probably disagree with, of course, and I’ve even found a few things that offend me.

When I used to teach this novel, I taught it thematically. I emphasized what I considered the most important themes in the novel. It’s relatively easy to pick out important themes in the story. It turns out, though, that it’s much harder to tie them all together.

Lately it’s been easier to read other people’s weblogs and write short comments than write anything here. (Have you ever wondered why wood s lot doesn’t have comments? I mean, I could do some serious commenting on his page.)

However, after reading Jonathan Delacour’s comments on Burningbird’s comments on Doc Searles, I might have put my foot in my mouth without realizing it. I only glance at Doc’s page occasionally and obviously didn’t have the background Jonathon had to put the comments in perspective. Personally, I read the comment entirely different than most people and, after reading the columns referred to, felt insulted that saying these were the "smartest babes" on the web was an insult to those intelligent women writers I link to in that column over there on the left. Actually, I still feel that way, but I was still taking Doc Searles’ comments out of context.

Maybe running around commenting on other people who are able to write isn’t the best use of my time, but heck since I’m not getting paid for this there’s no one here to keep me on track.

I’m trying to get back on track, but the train seems to have left the station without me and I’ve got those lonesome writer’s blues.

Owed To George Bush

I can’t really speak for David Wagoner, but, if I’d been invited to speak at George Bush’s speech on logging practices in Southern Oregon, I would have read this poem by Wagoner:

Report from a Forest Logged by
the Weyerhaeuser Company

Three square miles clear-cut.
Now only the facts matter:
The heaps of gray-splintered rubble,
The churned-up duff, the roots, the bulldozed slash,
The silence,

And beyond the ninth hummock
(All of them pitched sideways like wrecked houses)
A creek still running somewhere, bridged and dammed
By cracked branches.
No birdsong. Not one note.

And this is April, a sunlit morning.
Nothing but facts. Wedges like half-moons
Fallen where saws cut over and under them
Bear ninety or more rings.
A trillium gapes at so much light

Among the living: a bent huckleberry,
A patch of salal, a wasp,
And now, making a mistake about me,
Two brown-and-black butterflies landing
For a moment on my boot.

Among the dead: thousands of fir seedlings
A foot high, planted ten feet apart,
Parched brown for lack of the usual free rain,
Two buckshot beer cans, and overhead,
A vulture big as an eagle.

Selective logging, they say, we’ll take three miles,
It’s good for the bears and deer, they say,
More brush and berries sooner or later,
We’re thinking about the future-if you’re in it
With us, they say. It’s a comfort to say

Like Dividend or Forest Management or Keep Out.

They’ve managed this to a fare-thee-well.

I guess I like this poem so much because it doesn’t require much interpretation, though a series of photographs might compliment it .

No Higher Than a Shrub

If President Bush has his way our grandchildren may very well never see a tree taller than a shrub.

Bush’s “no-nonsense” attempts to save the forests of the West from fire seem to come down to cutting down the trees before they get tall enough to cause serious wildfires. No denying that kind of logic. There’s certainly no denying this would put an end to forest fire.

Neither can anyone deny that there are serious problems in western forests. With the worst part of the traditional fire season still upon us, the West has seen some of the worst fires in history. There is little agreement on the best way to solve these problems even among experts in the field.

The Bush administration wants to blame these fires on precisely the people most interested in saving the trees, environmentalists. However, it strains creditability to argue that these people are to “blame” for the fires. Most of these environmental groups have been urging thinning and other steps to ameliorate the fire danger for years. For instance, here are three short-term suggestions by the Sierra Club to lessen these dangers.

The Bush plan would emphasize logging as the preferable means of controlling wildfires. According to Time magazine,

The "Healthy Forests" [you gotta love the guy who makes up these titles for Bush, he must have a degree in creative writing] initiative calls on Congress to pass laws that would "expedite procedures for forest thinning and restoration projects" and "ensure the sustainable forest management and appropriate timber production."

According to the Oregonian Bush’s message to a hand-picked audience of loggers and firefighters was that “His forest plan equals jobs”

One can only suppose that those jobs are “logging jobs.” The kind of thinning that’s based on logging practices has to include the cutting of the largest trees because they are the trees that bring the most money from logging companies. The smaller trees cost money to cut and get rid of, so there is no incentive to cut them down.

Nature’s suppression of wildfires has been diametrically opposed to this strategy. In nature, the smaller trees have been burned down by forest fires and larger trees, through the thicker bark’s natural resistance to fire, have actually benefited from the nutrient’s left by the fire and by the increased exposure to sunlight.

The Pacific Northwest’s forests thrived for millions of years when left to these techniques. The forest industry almost to today has relied on these trees, not the ones man has planted, for their livelihood.

It seems ironic that Republican conservatives who so often claim the moral high ground on religious grounds would put their faith in Mammon rather than natural forces when attempting to solve the problems in our nation’s forests.