A whale’s tale 27 Jul 2010, 11:21 am

(Apologies for the title of this post! I’ll bet there have been more bad puns and bad titles and terribly rhymes with the word whale than anything else in English. It’s just too easy.)  I’ve been thinking about whales since visiting Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard over the weekend. Another east coast whaling town, like Salem, MA, where the World History Association met last June. What a huge industry whaling must have been. We tried to remember details from Moby Dick, but not a lot of detail came to mind (it has been a while). I did remember a fatty substance into which one of the characters falls during the on-board whale processing. But I was able to learn much more by turning to Berkshire’s Encyclopedia of World Environmental History 2003 for an article on the “Whale.” We’re going to include more about this in the Encyclopedia of Sustainability’s Volume 4: Natural Resources and Sustainability. What intrigues me in the article I’m including here is that the whale has in recent decades become one of the best-known symbols of environmentalism. I wonder what the whalers of times past, in Salem or Edgartown, would have made of that?

Whale

Whales are a group of marine mammals that includes seventy-eight species in the order Cetacea, which traces its evolutionary path back 40 to 50 million years to forebears that lived on land. Biologists classify whales in two general groups: toothed whales and baleen whales. The former range from sperm whales to the smaller dolphins and porpoises, and the latter, named for the large fibrous plates that they use to strain food from the ocean, range from minkes to the blue whale, the largest organism ever. Cetaceans are distributed over all of the world’s seas and a few of the rivers.

It is, perhaps, ironic that the largest whales eat the smallest food. The Antarctic baleen whales, which have adult weights of from 10 to 100 tons, subsist largely on krill, a crustacean only a few centimeters long, with the occasional small fish thrown in. The smaller toothed whales generally feed on larger sea creatures, from midsized fish to giant squid and other mammals. The baleen whales tend to migrate from the equator toward the poles, where they spend the summer feasting on the rich aquatic resources and building up a layer of fat, whereas the toothed whales have a more general distribution.

Just as whales can be classified in two groups, so, too, can whalers. For untold years, people around the world have used small boats to catch whales close to shore, dragging them onto land for processing; for at least one thousand years, since the Basque whalers first began hunting right whales in the Bay of Biscay, others have pursued whales on the high seas. Those who operate shore stations have to choose their locations carefully and take what comes by, but the pelagic whalers can be much more effective and selective as they seek out specific species. Pelagic whalers need to be more effective because they have to take elaborate equipment with them to process their catch, a very capital-intensive process.

A Source of Meat and Oil

Whales have supplied two main products for people: meat and oil, although a host of other products has evolved from the whaling industry, such as ambergris (a waxy substance used in perfumery), scrimshaw, bone meal, and liver oil. Whale meat has long been a source of food for people and their animals, and in the last forty years it has been the main product of the whaling industry. Whale oil was a very desirable commodity from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s. Oil from the head cases of sperm whales has been used as a high-quality industrial lubricant. Oil from the blubber and flesh of baleen and sperm whales served into the twentieth century as a fuel until the rise of the petroleum industry made it uneconomical. Then, in the 1920s, scientists invented a way to refine baleen whale oil into margarine. This refining technique was one of several breakthroughs that revived the whaling industry. It was perhaps the most important because it created a new market for the whalers, but without new technology in hunting and processing of whales, whaling would have continued its decline. The whalers of previous centuries had been so efficient that the only major pocket of whales left was in the Antarctic seas, where hundreds of thousands of huge blue and fin whales lived. Given their size and speed, these species could not be caught by men in small boats throwing harpoons. Instead, catching and killing them required an exploding harpoon mounted on a small steam-powered ship that could travel at at least fifteen knots. Flensing (stripping blubber) and processing such huge animals presented new challenges that were solved by the invention of the floating factory: a huge vessel with a stern slipway for dragging the behemoths on board and an array of equipment for rendering them into oil.

Conservation Efforts Begin

In the 1930s the industry boomed, leading to a series of efforts to conserve whale stocks and culminating in creation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1946. Whaling on the high seas proved to be difficult to regulate, and despite efforts by conservationists the catch of whales grew until, in the 1963<N>1964 season, whalers took more than sixty-six thousand whales. The industry declined after that because blue, fin, and humpback whales had all been driven to the edge of extinction, with the Sei and Bryde’s whales following shortly thereafter. Most striking was the decline of the blue whale, from perhaps 200,000 before whaling began to about 3000 today. Likewise, there may have been as many as 125,000 humpback whales before widespread commercial hunting, but there are only about 20,000 left in 2002. Today, only the minke whale exists in numbers that might make commercial whaling feasible, but those numbers are a matter of some debate. In 1982 the IWC voted to ban all commercial whaling, but Japanese whalers in particular continue to catch minkes in the name of scientific research, a highly controversial practice because the meat ends up on the market in Japan.

Until the 1970s most people saw whales as commodities to be exploited rapidly or slowly, depending both on how many were left and the demand for their products. Since then, though, whales have become a symbol of environmentalism, species with special qualities that deserve protection under most circumstances. This change in attitude was in part also a product of technology as people in 1967 heard for the first time recordings of humpback whale songs and soon became exposed to many television shows about whales, all of which suggested that whales are more than just really large slabs of meat or tubs of margarine. The clearest sign of this new attitude toward whales has been seen in the rise of whale-watching, which draws millions of participants each year.

But even as environmentalists have celebrated the growth of whale-watching, they have been struggling to reconcile the whales’ new status as icons with the continued desire to hunt whales among some Native peoples in North America. The Inuit in Alaska won a bruising battle with the IWC, environmentalists, and the U.S. government in the 1970s and 1980s to allow continued harvesting of bowhead whales, and in the 1990s the Makah tribe of Washington won a similar fight to take one gray whale per year.. Environmentalists frequently argue that whales are sentient beings and that even one killed is too many, but the native peoples contend that whaling is an integral part of their culture.. Because Japanese and Norwegians often make similar claims, the victories of the Makah and Inuit have compromised the argument of the United States government that Japan and Norway should cease whaling. This problem was quite clear at the 2002 IWC meeting in Shimonoseki, Japan, when the Japanese delegates made a strong case that aboriginal whaling in the United States should face similar levels of scrutiny to Japanese whaling.

Kurk Dorsey

See also International Whaling Commission

Further Reading
Connor, R. C., & Peterson, D. M. (1994). The lives of whales and dolphins. New York: Henry Holt.
Ellis, R. (1991). Men and whales. New York: Knopf.
Evans, P. G. H. (1987). The natural history of whales and dolphins. New York: Facts on File.
Scheffer, V. (1969). The year of the whale. New York: Scribner’s.
Starbuck, A. (1989). History of the American whale fishery. Secaucus, NJ: Castle Books.
Tønnessen, J. N., & Johnsen, A. O. (1982). The history of modern whaling. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press.

From Berkshire’s Encyclopedia of World Environmental History 2003. All rights reserved.

My three-turbine weekend 26 Jul 2010, 2:41 pm

The wind turbines are only one of the memorable things about our wonderful weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, but it was striking to see three of them, in different places. The first was along Interstate 95 south of Providence, causing a serious slow-down in traffic. We thought there must be an accident but instead drivers were gawking at the turbine. The second was out at sea, to the southeast of Martha’s Vineyard. The third is on the Mass Turnpike and because I was driving west while it was still light I finally got a look at it.

These contraptions are part of our future, and I’m trying to get used to them, and wondering how best to deal with the aesthetic problem they pose. I know that environmentalists are trying to get us to see them as attractive – at least that’s how I take the profusion of books with turbines on the cover – but we were talking this weekend about how the Martha’s Vineyard turbine – which is just a trial, presumably to be joined by more – changes what was an unspoiled seascape. Plenty of people would argue that this isn’t just a NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) issue, but that we humans need unspoiled wilderness. Or, to take a deeper green position, that the other living things that call wilderness home have a right to be left alone.

I find that I am being more pragmatic: I don’t want to look at wind turbines, but they’re better than power stations, or than the clutter of power lines outside my house. My more immediate concern is about how much energy and raw material it takes to build them, how long they will last, and whether they have parts that can be remanufacturered.

And I’m keen to see smaller scale power generation, which could be far more flexible and efficient. The Meatpacking District in New York strikes me as ideal for wind power generation, and there’s Chicago, the Windy City. How about using El Nino to light the streets of Los Angeles, or Beijing’s spring storms to power its new subways?

Cloud to Cloud Lightning 19 Jul 2010, 9:24 am

Carl Kurtz: “All of us have had the opportunity to observe lighting in daylight and in darkness, and in the distance and likely when it was too close for comfort.  Lightning is immense charge of static electricity between a positively charged cloud and the negatively charged earth’s surface.  Lightning which within clouds or between clouds is actually more common than cloud to ground lightning.  If it occurs within a single cloud it is called intracloud lightning.  If it occurs between two clouds it is intercloud lightning.  This effect is also sometimes called sheet lightning since it may not be possible to see the actual lightning streak.  Be sure to observe from the safety of a building or a vehicle.”

This photograph comes from the ongoing observations of the natural world by Carl Kurtz, whose photograph of fireflies on the Iowa prairie graces the cover of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. Carl can be contacted through Berkshire Publishing.

Call for Papers on “Perceptions of China,” AAS/ICAS conference 2011 16 Jul 2010, 11:07 am

The panel titles are “Global Representations of China” and “China Sees the World ,” and the papers are to be presented at the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in 2011. The convenor is Qing CAO of John Moores Liverpool University. The conference is being held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 31 March – 3 April 2011. PDFs are linked at the bottom of the email (for posting) and the text is pasted immediately below. Please feel free to post in your department or forward to colleagues who are working on these topics.

Sign up HERE for updates on the panels and Berkshire’s China books and other publications.

Karen CHRISTENSEN
Berkshire Publishing
karen@berkshirepublishing.com

1: “Global Representations of China”
International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Honolulu, Hawaii, 31 March – 3 April 2011 Images of China have always been complex, fluid, and controversial, and China’s rapid rise in recent years has not led to significant improvement in how the country is perceived abroad, especially in the Western media. Joshua Ramo recently observed that China’s image abroad could become her “strategic threat.” With the continued emergence of China as a global power, especially in the wake of the Olympics and in the context of the current global economic slowdown, it is more important than ever before to improve the understanding between China and the world. With this in mind, the panel “Global Representations of China” examines important factors in the way China is represented, portrayed, and explained, especially in the Western media. Western media is particularly important because popular perceptions of China are largely shaped by the mass media. Popular perceptions in turn influence the actions of government and corporations.
This panel brings together papers that reflect on global representations of China, contemporary and historic. It aims to present critical analysis and to assess key issues that affect the coverage of China, as well as to explore how the representations of China could be improved. We are calling for panellists to present papers that are historical, theoretical, or practical, ideally including specific case studies from any disciplinary areas. We seek varied perspectives on how China is perceived, constructed, and represented to audiences outside China. The panel is most interested in how the image of China is produced and then reproduced through various media. The panel is organised in association with Berkshire Publishing Group which is publishing a series of books on China.
Please send (1) a 150-250 word proposal, with (2) your full name, (3) title, (4) postal address, (5) e-mail, and (6) institutional affiliation for all authors before 29 July to:
Karen Christensen, Panel Chair (through dave@berkshirepublishing.com) CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group and to:
Dr. Qing Cao, Panel Convenor (q.cao@ljmu.ac.uk) Liverpool John Moores University

2: “China Sees the World”
International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) and the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), Honolulu, Hawaii, 31 March – 3 April 2011, Honolulu, Hawaii, 31 March – 3 April 2011 Since its collision with the West in the early 19th century, China has come under sustained pressure to change itself in order to survive in the modern world. Chinese elites have been deeply divided on the issue of how to meet the challenges posed by the West. Behind the broad consensus about “Chinese learning as essence and Western learning as instrument” (zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong) lies a shared and deep-seated inclination to rely on China’s indigenous values to see the world. Today, following three decades of economic reform, China is rapidly rising as a global power in the context of a changing international order, and has renewed confidence in its traditional (Confucian) values, boosted by economic performance and a growing role in international affairs. As a result, how China sees the world has become increasingly important.
This panel brings together papers that reflect on Chinese views of the global order and on its self-perception in the contemporary world. It aims to present critical analysis and assessment of such key issues as Chinese worldviews, China’s self-image, and China’s self-promotion. Examples may be traditional ideas of tianxia, tatong world, and its modern variant ‘harmonious world.’ How do these various worldviews relate to the nation-state system? How will Chinese images of itself affect the current transformation of the world order? What role, if any, do these Chinese conceptions play in reshaping the world order? The panel welcomes papers from different theoretical and epistemological backgrounds and diverse perspectives, and from Western and Asian scholars. The panel is organised in association with Berkshire Publishing Group which is publishing a series of books on China.
Please send (1) a 150-250 word proposal, with (2) your full name, (3) title, (4) postal address, (5) e-mail, and (6) institutional affiliation for all authors before 29 July to:
Karen Christensen, Panel Chair (through dave@berkshirepublishing.com) CEO, Berkshire Publishing Group and to:
Dr. Qing Cao, Panel Convenor (q.cao@ljmu.ac.uk) Liverpool John Moores University

Panel 1: Global Representations of China
Panel 2: China Sees the World

Sign up HERE for updates on the panels and Berkshire’s China books and other publications.

Discounts on _This Fleeting World_ 13 Jul 2010, 5:19 pm

David Christian’s This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity is available directly from Berkshire (with discounts on multiple copies -  students can order together and save 10-30%, see below), from Barnes & Noble bookstores across the United States, and at bn.com and Amazon.com. Copies ordered from Berkshire will come from the third printing, which features this quote from Bill Gates on the cover: “I first became an avid student of David Christian by watching his course, Big History, on DVD, and so I am very happy to see his enlightening presentation of the world’s history captured in these essays.  I hope it will introduce a wider audience to this gifted scientist and teacher.”

Special combined offer with the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History also available to AP World History schools. Click here for details. Discounts are made automatically in Berkshire’s Shopping Cart. Click here, enter the number of copies you want to order, and press Recalculate. These are the discounts available:

Questions? Contact Amy Fredsall, Customer Service Coordinator, +1 413 528 0206 or +1 888 520 0071 toll-free, or by email: amy@berkshirepublishing.com.

Free teaching guides and study questions for AP World History and college world history classes are available online.

More China reading recommendations 10 Jul 2010, 7:31 am

Some little-known China books recommended at China Beat:

1) Jay Denby, (1910) Letters of a Shanghai Griffin, Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh – China books are all so horrendously serious and self-important these days – Denby just made fun of taipans, pompous Shanghailanders and stupid diplomats, venal businessmen, etc. – we need a bit more of that.

2) Jacques Marcuse, (1968) The Peking Papers: Leaves from the Notebook of a China Correspondent, London: Arthur Barker. – a lot of memoirs these days are written by people who spent a year or three in China. Marcuse originally arrived in Shanghai in the 1930s to work for Le Monde and was still representing AFP in Peking in the 1960s. He was a member of the Chunking Contingent during the war but never became a fellow-traveller; though he was not slow to comment on those who did, describing Rewi Alley as “eminently useable rather than eminently useful”, the best description of him to date I think.

3) Ralph Shaw, (1973) Sin City, London: Everest Books – they’ll never be another memoir of Shanghai like Shaw’s – he switches from some useful analysis of the Japan invasion of Shanghai to his wild nightlife and sexual shenanigans in the space of a couple of paragraphs. This really should be reprinted to show all those hacks that write about Shanghai returning to the riotous thirties why they’re talking nonsense.

4) Ilona Ralf Sues, (1944) Shark’s Fin and Millet, New York: Garden City Publishing. – her politics went a bit dodgy towards the end but she has some great stories – interviewing Big Eared Du for instance and getting down among the opium smugglers.

5) Teddy White and Annalee Jacoby, (1946), Thunder Out of China, New York: William Sloane. – Thunder out of China sold by the bucket-load when it was published – over half a million copies at its first printing. White and Jacoby were under intense pressure throughout the war from Henry Luce to big up the Generalissimo and ignore the corruption – after the war they wrote what they’d really seen.

Algae to Risk Management & more in the Encyclopedia of Sustainability 8 Jul 2010, 3:59 pm

I asked Bill Siever to send a list of some of the topics in the Encyclopedia of Sustainability he finds most intriguing and surprising. I’ll be using these in some of the copy about the 10-volume set, and thought you might like a preview:

Agroecology
Algae
Bioethics
Carbon Sequestration
Cities
Confucianism
Dark Sky Initiatives
Disposable Products
Energy Security
Energy Sustainability Index (ESI)
Fire Management
Food Security
Frozen Food
God
Green Taxes
Indoor Lighting
International Green Construction Code (IgCC)
Irreversibility
Jordan River Project
Keystone Species
Manure (Human and Animal)
Nanotechnology Legislation
Nonpoint Source Pollutants
Nuisance Laws
Packaging
Product Carbon Footprint (PCF)
Rain Gardens
Rare Earth Elements
Remanufacturing
Risk Management
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
Telecommunications Industry
Transboundary Watercourses
Urban Agriculture
Weak vs. Strong Sustainability Debate
Wilderness
Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y)

Future food and sustainability 7 Jul 2010, 4:18 pm

Sushi isn’t future food but I guess sea plants are. Bill just cc’d me on a message to the scholar who will write on “Algae” for the Natural Resources volume of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability. He wrote, “One of the editors mentioned to me that algae is both a food source and an energy source, which I was not aware of, so I’m looking forward to reading it,” which reminded me of a conversation last week. Tom and Rachel were regaling our friends in Beijing with stories of how much of a health-nut I was when Tom was a baby. “She fed him spoonfuls of cod liver oil and handfuls of kelp tablets, and raw-grain muesli with nutritional yeast in it.”

I pointed out that Tom has never been really sick in his life. He got through all his school years, from age three, with barely a sniffle. “You were living in the future, Mum,” said Rachel, “when we’ll all be living on algae and yeast.”

Best China books 6 Jul 2010, 9:35 am

Today I’ll be sifting through the extensive responses to our Best China Books survey, which was a very short questionnaire tied to the very short reading list in our very short new book This Is China. The respondents gave us *lots* more suggestions, as well comments on and criticisms of the books we selected, which I’ll be incorporating in a new and longer survey where we’ll start breaking the list down by level of familiarity with China and also by subject and study goals. We’ll keep a current list posted online, too – I may do this at Librarything, to make it easier to find books.

In the meantime, you can see how respondents rated the books we listed at Best China Books. The top rating for history was a well-known standard: Fairbank, John King, & Goldman, Merle. (1998). China: A New History. More generally, Jonathan Spence’s books are leading the lists. Across the board, he and Peter Hessler got top marks, but many other friends and colleagues aren’t far behind. For business readers, Tim Clissold’s Mr. China holds the top spot. In fiction, Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q is in the lead for fiction. It’s set in the revolutionary China of 1911.

Only one respondent who reminded me of the people who write most of the “answers” on Yahoo and other online Q&A sites, with comments like, “I don’t know much about this but in my opinion….” or “Just guessing but maybe it’s….”

The survey is still open, so do join in if you haven’t already by clicking here.

The greenest places on earth 5 Jul 2010, 4:52 pm

I suppose Great Barrington, the small New England town where I run Berkshire Publishing, might be said to qualify as one of the greenest places on earth. Not only because it is so beautifully, lushly, abundantly green right now, but because it’s in the heart of the only region on the planet that has been reforested over the last century or so. I was stunned by this when I first moved to New England in 1991. England, where I’d lived till then, is of course a “green and pleasant land.” But it’s far more densely built than even this densely built part of the United States. On my first drive down to Yale, through the backroads of Connecticut, I couldn’t get over how much open land there was, fields and hillsides and river meadows. The reason is quite simple: when the West was opened, with far more fertile farmland than these rocky hills offer, people left, and the trees grew back. The woods are filled with the roughly piled stone walls that used to delineate pasture from farmland.

But I saw another kind of greening recently, in Beijing. My son Tom thinks Beijing is going to be the greenest city on earth, as the planting continues. There are small and large gardens everywhere. In the hutong where he lives, there is a charming garden strung along the outside, a welcome relief in the June heat. There are much larger gardens nearby, and in Dongzhimen, where I stayed, we saw canals being restored with extensive plantings along the pathways. The healthiness of the trees surprised me: it’s a fierce climate, but with the right trees, a city can be made more beautiful, and more liveable.

Here’s a little more about New England, from “Thoreau’s country: a historical, ecological perspective on conservation in the New England landscape” by David R. Foster:

. . . many parts of the New England landscape have become wilder and more strongly dominated by natural processes (McLachlan et al., 2000). Forest area increased dramatically through the mid-twentieth century and, with forest growth exceeding harvests (a fact still true for most of the eastern USA except northern Maine and portions of the southeast; Irland, 1999), a vast expanse of maturing forest covers much of the land.

Berkshire Blog back online 8 Apr 2010, 6:13 pm

We were hacked, but I’m back at last, with more secure password, plug-ins disabled, and apparently other secure measures taken. I see that China is probably going to relax its currency controls, at least a bit. I’d had this article, “Less income disparity ‘helps economy’”, in line to write something about because China faces a considerable problem in the divide between rich and poor, east and west, and it’s important to understand this in order to understand China today. It’s quite useful to read articles from a few months’ back – surprising how things can change in a brief span. And one can read an article written 50 years ago and think, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

At 92, William H. McNeill goes to the White House to receive National Humanities Medal 26 Feb 2010, 9:52 am

The rhythm of my country life includes evenings with a long-retired world historian, William H. McNeill, who has in many ways inspired Berkshire Publishing. I drive southeast, often with one of my children, to the farmhouse Bill’s wife Elizabeth inherited from her aunts. It takes about 35 minutes. I telephone Bill when I get in the car, both to give him an ETA and to make sure someone knows I’m on a country road with no cellphone signal and few houses–and even fewer occupied in winter.

We sit around the woodstove, warmed by firewood he’s chopped in the basement and pulled up on a kind of dumbwaiter, with nuts and drinks and whatever books and manuscripts we have to share. Then we have a supper he’s prepared, or something I’ve brought along–a casserole, or spaghetti and meatballs. My daughter says the conversations there may have spoiled her for college–no lecture or class discussion ever came up to the standard of discussion at Bill McNeill’s table.

Last night Bill was in more elegant surroundings and enjoying, I hope, the warmth and hospitality of the White House as he and the other recipients of national arts and humanities awards waited for President Obama to arrive from the Health Care Summit. You can see him here with the president. The press stories and announcements (Washington Post here) mention Bill’s book, Plagues and Peoples, rather than his first, and bestselling and National Book Award winning, Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. But that would have been a hard choice to make, as Bill has written rather a lot of books, including the remarkable Moving Together in Time and his latest work of world history, written with his son J.R. McNeill, The Human Web. Bill is also the senior editor of Berkshire’s Encyclopedia of World History, which comes out in June in a second edition–with several new articles by Bill, including one on “Economic Cycles” (known in the office as our “Boom and Bust” article) . Perhaps that would have been something for him to give to President Obama. (The president’s remarks are here.)

I cannot resist mentioning his latest book, a childhood memoir set on Prince Edward Island, and published by Berkshire. Summers Long Ago: On Grandfather’s Farm and in Grandmother’s Kitchen is as precisely and elegantly composed as any of his other books but different from them in being a personal account about places and people he loved, and early experiences that shaped him. The cover shows Bill at eight, displaying a prized pocketknife. I guess I need to get a similar photograph of him now, displaying his newest prize, the medal presented to him by President Obama.

Limited hardcover special edition signed by the author available only from Berkshire and can be ordered in a standard hardcover edition from Amazon.

The O’Reilly Factor, Great Barrington conservatives, & “bridging” social capital 16 Feb 2010, 3:48 pm

Great Barrington got national press in December 2007 when the conservative television program “The O’Reilly Factor,” which provides the inspiration for Steven Colbert’s wacky parody “The Colbert Report,” came to town. I wrote about it here on the Berkshire Blog and made the assumption that local conservative George Beebe had been recruited ahead of time for the program. But George called me this morning, over two years after I wrote the post, to correct the historical record (as I see his son John has done in a comment – George doesn’t use email but he has web-savvy kids, who found my post and showed it to him). George said that he and his wife had just happened to be in town that day. He saw the news crew and went over to see what was going on. The rest is history – sheer serendipity (or fate or an answer to prayer, depending on your religious or philosophical persuasion) that O’Reilly got the ideal spokesperson for what in Great Barrington is the minority point of view.

I’m an environmentalist and a liberal, but in this case I suspect I might have been closer to George than to others in town if I had been asked about the Main Street Christmas lights. The selectboard, rarely a model of high good sense, was particularly absurd when it came to this issue.

There’s another bit of serendipity in this. I was writing this morning, just before George called, about the difference between “bonding” and “bridging” social capital. Bridging is more important, and more rare: it is the connections that develop between people and groups that do not share the same views or values. And just yesterday I was telling someone that I have connections with some of the conservatives in town, unlike most newcomers from the city (yes, after 15 years, I’m still a newcomer). I don’t always side with the so-called progressives, and I’ve tried to see things from the point of view of people who grew up here. One of George Beebe’s ancestors is mentioned in W.E.B. Du Bois’s autobiography, as the man who came down from the hills to rant about the school budget at annual Town Meeting. George has carried on the family tradition, a fiscal conservative, and I’m delighted that he called me and that we can talk, though I adamantly disagree with most of what he had to say. I restrained myself from asking what his views are on China-United States relations!

Retrospectives on Pancake Day 16 Feb 2010, 3:16 pm

Yes, Shrove Tuesday is known as Pancake Day here at Berkshire Publishing and we’ll be gathering for the English variety later on. But in the tiny town of Sheffield to the south (a town so small I drove straight through it on my first visit, never dreaming that its small collection of buildings could be a whole town) there is a Pancake Supper tonight, with New England or American pancakes, I suppose, and maple syrup. The English Mardi Gras pancake is a crepe, served with lemon and sugar, or with jam, or, says Trevor Young, with orange and brown sugar.

Two retrospectives today: one of a February snowstorm past, about this time of year. The view from my former office in the Mahaiwe Block down on Main Street, in 2007. It’s snowing today, too. A”mood snow,” someone called it, a steady gentle fall that makes all the brown tree branches beautiful.

The second look to a past blog post is the result of a phone call this morning from George Beebe, a Great Barrington farmer and staunt conservative whose family has lived here for nearly 200 years.

Eliot Letters published at last 17 Nov 2009, 5:08 am

I’m over the moon that the second volume of the T S Eliot Letters, which I helped edit over 20 years ago, are published! Here’s the memoir I wrote for The Guardian’s Review section in 2005 about the experience: “Dear Mrs. Eliot….”

And here’s a review of the new volume (which is published in the UK, but not yet in the US)  that makes a good point about the new huge academic publishing venture that has grown up round the Eliot Estate.

Eliot is, beyond question, a hugely important writer and an intriguing man, but the spirit does not leap at the prospect of some 10,000 pages of elaborate politeness.

It seems as though what Mrs Eliot called the PhD industry has taken over.