Nature "Cooked" and in Ferment

Just read Cooked, by Michael Pollan, the guy who wrote Omnivore's Dilemma, which I have not read but intend to read now, although I can already hazard a guess as to the overall theme; mass produced food is bad and makes you fat and diabetic and prone to heart disease. In other words, it will make you an American.
That was his general point in Cooked anyway, which was written to persuade Americans to cook, and it worked, even on me. Now I want to cook, or at least I wish I already learned how to cook, which is what I usually mean when I say I want something.
In any case, back to Cooked. Its a journalistic book in the best sense of the word, even handed and thorough, and the author even successfully came up with a beautifully designed and esthetically pleasing outline and stuck with it to the end, a feat of perseverance which as an amateur writer I find even more miraculous and unbelievable than the ancient fire water air earth theory of the elements that he pays homage to with his outline structure. It's a pleasing idea, but to be perfectly honest it forces some arbitrary and unhelpful categorizing in his book, as does any outline. I think he got overexcited with the pleasing dichotomy he worked up between fire cooking as masculine and water cooking as feminine, but didn't have a third gender on hand to categorize fermentation with, and at that point he had to find something in fours.
But the book is interesting. I bought most of his argument against processed food, and for home cooking, even if I think American obesity and health issues is a fairly trivial problem, on the scale of things. If there are children actually going hungry in some parts of the world, who cares that more Americans could die in their forties and fifties instead of their seventies and eighties? I say this, of course, as an almost fifty American male who would himself prefer to live for at least a few decades more. But who cares what I would prefer? I had an awesome childhood, and only went hungry at scout camp (by choice).
But I mostly agreed with him. I did take issue with all the times Pollan uses the words "Nature" and "Community-based" in the book. It began to seem a little calculated after a while, as if an editor suggested more buzz-words or something. If it wasn't calculated, and Pollan honestly believes in Nature as the source of all goodness, then it's a little worse in my view. Journalists should be cynical and atheist, which is how Pollan comes across for most of the book, except for his "what have we lost?" nonsense.
I could go on about the true "nature" and source of modern Nature worship, but I will be dissecting Nature Worship in my massive thesis on The Hierarchical Nature of Homo Sapiens, which constitutes the fruit of twenty years of thought, still in ferment. Please note that I will be incorporating the word "Nature", as it should be used, in the title. Also please note that I used the word "ferment" to describe it. I use that word in a calculated fashion because the main success of Cooked, for me, was that the third section (divided unnecessarily into two parts just to fit Pollan's Fire Water Air Earth outline) goes into fermentation of food and induced me to purchase the Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Katz. I am excitedly delving into Art of Fermentation, and will hopefully soon be reporting on the success or failure of my own preliminary fermentation efforts!

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Tribute to Top Notch "Snowy Day"

New picture from the Art Department, a Tribute to The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats. This is part I of a new series I've been planning, a Hyper Critical Review of Children's Literature, complete with pictorial tributes to Top Notch Books. There will also be some suggested improvements for other books that require them.
The Snowy Day has that dreamlike, fresh from the subconscious feel that all the really Top Notch kid books have, especially the Margaret Wise Brown books, without going overboard like The Night Kitchen. The Night Kitchen is like a funny uncle who wears T shirts and puts food on his face for a laugh and gets really into the Lego Star Wars battles and the kids laugh and laugh but with some nervous starts and they never feel quite safe around him. And no matter what people say, kids should always feel safe and openness can go too far. But I know it's won some awards. It was written to win awards. It's very poetic and would make an interesting spoken word piece and the pictures are good. It just doesn't tell a story.

The Snowy Day is just as deeply meaningful, and the pictures are good, and it was obviously written for children to understand and enjoy, or even if it was written to win awards, it doesn't read like it was written to win awards. This makes it Top Notch.

This review would make a good advertisement for the Snowy Day, but the true test of a successful Ad Firm would be to write a glowing review of a book that sucked, or needed improvement. This worrisome element of the Ad business, discussed in previous hagenart blogs (link not necessary), has come to haunt Hagenart Advertising, even as we celebrate the planned renovation of the Art Department. The renovation will be based on Peggy's office from Mad Men Season 4 (if the blueprint graphic was done it could be linked here. Another missed Opportunity - unacceptable!)
Hagenart headquarters will be based on Don's office as far as the couch and the liquor cabinet and the uniforms, Season still to be determined.
But as exciting and challenging as these business plans are, the spin issue is casting a pall over Hagenart staff, highly trained for Esoteric Criticism in college


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New Verbal Progress Bar Feature

It's taking me too long to try and find time to draw a proper picture for my Douglas Adams entry, so I've basically given up on the authors series for a while. For those one or two readers who may have been looking forward to the next installment, have no fear. I fully intend to move on with the series, and I actually do perform work on that project every week, but I should communicate, as clearly as I am able to, the available free time per week that I am able invest in the authors project, in a sort of written verbal version of the progress bar that is universally used in all GUI software to give the user a quickly apprehended conception of a particular application's progress towards a particular task. I believe that this graphic may not always be imparting a perfectly honest image of the actual progress to the user, but I am firmly believing that the image has prevented more psychotic rages than any medication devised by man, simply by increasing the length of a colored bar by a few pixels every few seconds. But in cases where the process may be progressing at a rate too slow to be visibly indicated by the bar, the information imparted by the image can be agreeably enhanced by a numerical percentile or even absolute quantity of bytes loaded, indicated on or near the bar. This number or percentage can indicate slight change when the bar appears to be frozen, assuaging many an agitated nerve ending.
My verbal progress bar for this week is -90 minutes. The hyphen means "minus" or "negative", like "negative 20 degrees". Obviously this means I was not able to donate any time to the Douglas Adams tribute picture this week. I did not indicate zero minutes because that would indicate that if I had managed to spare 10 extra minutes of free time, I would have been able to briefly work on the Douglas Adams tribute picture. But any spare time up to 90 minutes or so last week would have been devoted to completing a project for a client of my advertising business. Only after working on the project for 90 minutes or so would I have felt justified in devoting some time to a personal project like the authors blog series. So I would say the current value for my verbal progress bar, or VPB, is -90 minutes. I hope this exercises a calming effect on any reader or readers who are overcome with anticipation for the next installment in the authors series.

19 Fathers: Progenators of My Psychic Litter, part 1: Richard Dawkins

I promised to end this blog a year or so ago, but even then an idea for a magnificent new series had been planted, by what agency I do not know, in my mind, and had been slowly growing, unnoticed by my conscious self at the time. It grew and grew, like an unexpected pregnancy, until the psychic swelling and mental nausea declared itself unto me, and I have been quietly preparing for the birth of: " 19 Fathers: Progenators of My Psychic Litter"
This series will delve into my mental relationship with the writers who spawned my mind, beginning in reverse chronological order with Richard Dawkins, who is the most recent writer who I could not stop reading until I read everything he wrote, almost. I had seen references to Dawkins for many years before I read anything by him, and had no desire to read any of his stuff for a long time, partly because I thought of him as an atheist crank, from the title of his book The God Delusion, which I found eerily similar to the spoof titles referenced in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, "Where God Went Wrong," and "Who is this God Person Anyway," attributed to "Oolin Colluphid," and obviously, it seems to me making a spoof of pompously titled philosophical books. It was surprising to me to find that Dawkins and Adams were friends, and I concluded that the title might have been some kind of ironic play on Adams's original joke titles, but I think that sort of thing is best left between friends, or between Englishmen, perhaps, because the irony is mostly lost on Americans, and the title of The God Delusion always put me off as marketing. Its funny, or should I say ironic, because Dawkins complains about people misunderstanding his titles in several of his introductions to his own books, most notably in my memory in the most recent re-printed Selfish Gene. So I avoided him as an atheist crank, but I mainly avoided his stuff because I kept associating him, uncontrollably, with the game show host and co-star of Hogan's Heroes, Richard Dawson, and with NBA star (from the time of my youth), Darrell Dawkins. It was especially confusing for me because Dawson is British, whereas I would categorize Dawkins as English. This designation will require some explaining, both for those who do not know the standard definitions of British and English, and for those who do know those standard definition and who actually use them, and who will therefore find my use of the terms British and English to be incorrect and confusing. Also of course there is that majority of Americans who have managed to pass their entire life in perfect ignorance of the geography of the British Isles. Since most of those Americans will not have read this blog at all, I will explain the terminology only: British people are technically any people who live on the island of Great Britain. Since Wales, Scotland, and England are all on the island, the Welsh, the Scottish, and the English are all technically British. But no one ever calls a Scottish or a Welsh person British. As far as I have ever seen or heard, only English people are ever called British, maybe because the Welsh and especially the Scottish feel touchy about being ruled by the English. So there really aren't any British per se, just English people. There is a type of English character depicted on TV shows or in movies like Star Wars, which is what people usually refer to as British, and some English people may imitate this character to be appealing to American audiences, who like foreigners to be easily identifiable as Evil or Funny. But there arent really any British people. They're just English. I have always regarded Richard Dawson as this type of TV British (funny, except for those chilling moments when he told someone the actual survey results) and since I could not for a long time separate Dawson and Dawkins, I considered Dawkins to be British, and either Funny, and not much of a writer, or Evil, and a sinisterly persuasive writer of Atheist literature, ie a communist.
The association with Darrell Dawkins, well, I can't explain it in logical terms, but no, that is deceptive, because it implies some kind of intuitive connection, some interesting leap, but there is none. Whenever I saw a book with Dawkins on it, a part of my mind imaged the game show host, while another part executed the synaptic equivalent to background music for the word "thunder-jam" without even internally verbalizing it, and any temptation to buy the sighted Richard Dawkins book was gimped.
Until I saw a used copy of "The Ancestor's Tale" for super cheap at Central Book Exchange. By that time it had recently become clear to me that the author was a different person than the actor and game show host, and I furthermore had ascertained that Dawkins wrote science books for lay readers, which knowledge provoked both curiosity and fear within me, curiosity because I love science writing, fear because I hate bad science writing, and most science writing is really bad. But Dawkins is very good, and after reading a ways into the Ancestor's Tale, past the well written but not compelling introduction and the first bit about canterbury pilgrims and other not that interesting stuff, I came to the really wonderful stuff; which is Dawkins talking about animals and the tooth and fang competition stuff, the details that you can tell Dawkins himself loves to mull over - tactics. Sexual selection. Arms races. You get the feeling he kind of drools over that competitive stuff, and he goes over the interesting mathematics of game theory and competition between genes in very compelling terms and he's a fun read, and when I say "you get the feeling he kind of drools over the stuff," what I mean is that as a good writer he gives you the feeling he's kind of drooling over it when in fact you are drooling over it as you read and the book has executed the prime magic trick that good books do which is to create an illusion of a drooling narrator/ author in the reader's mind, even while they are the one drooling.
And wanting to have fur and claws and fight cheetahs over a juicy gazelle in the forest, which brings me to the second qualifier for this list of 19 writers. The first which I have mentioned is that after reading one book by the author, I wanted to read everything by the author, and I did read everything by Dawkins, including the God Delusion. The second qualifier for this list is that after reading the author a bit, the alteration to my mental landscape effected by the insemination of new ideas from the writer tends by some mysterious process to conceive a novel/ tv series/ motion picture/ comic book in my mind, loosely based upon those new ideas, which becomes more vivid as I continue to read the author, and fades away after I move on to some other writer. In the case of Dawkins, I've titled the inner book "Parkland," a world in the future, where humans have been genetically modified, with fur and claws and antennas for Internet access, to live in the wild in huge national parks, in small family units. It is a personally pleasing picture, with no clothes, no clock but the sun and stars, eating nuts and berries and other animals- especially animals I personally dislike, like bears and large cats. "Take that, mister cheetah! Have a bit of claw." That's one of the lines from Parkland.
I'm not going to recap or summarize or seriously critique Dawkin's works, because that kind of writing is, well it's too hard. I prefer to record fleeting impressions from a few bits of some of the books; The Selfish Gene appears to have been the book that made him famous, which means he wrote it before he was famous, so according to one of my pet theories he probably tried harder when he wrote it than when he wrote the others. Also, when publishers re-print a famous book, they like to get the author to write a preface or introduction, to get people who may have already read it to buy it again. Dawkin's introduction to the re-print, as I mentioned above, contains a hilariously defensive rant on people misunderstanding the title of The Selfish Gene.
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Sklog X + 1; the sklogs revisited

So when i began this series i spoke as if it would actually be a series, a la star wars or lord of the rings, where
the genius creating the series follows a powerful creative vision of his own magical universe and has an alternate history all worked out and just cranks out episode after episode of material, and i thought that maybe instead of working out an entire alternate history i'd just pretend and make it up on the fly and it's been over eight months and this is installment two, which is fine if you're producing movies or books but not so impressive for 2000 word blog posts, which some people in an advanced stage of masochistic mental affliction do more than once per day! But they don't keep that up for long, and twitter has finally given those poor souls a long deserved release.

So I've given up the series idea, as a beautiful but ultimately impossible vision of the world as it should be, and in any case the whole series thing was my attempt to give some kind of unity and coherence to a blog that really doesn't deserve even the appearance of seriousness. There's just no escaping the fact that this is a silly blog and it has no real purpose except to replicate.

So i intend to cease all operations on this blog, or i should say i intend to stop worrying about why I've already ceased all operations on this blog a long time ago, and leave it as a kind of fossilised remnant of a kind that someday future anthropologists will study and wonder and speculate about like it's a dinosaur bone or the delicate impression of a leaf in an ancient rock. And those future electronic anthropologists may take a bit of this blog and put it in a virtual petri dish and mix it with some html or something vaguely analogous to whatever asinine point or comparison i was trying to make before I kind of lost track of the metaphor because I'm older now.

So check out this old sklog! I have a soft spot for this particular sklog - the picture, that is, not the words, which as usual are crap! But I remember the warm glow I felt while I was drawing this picture because at first I thought the scene, a construction site behind my friend's co-housing condo unit in Boulder, was far too hard to draw, at least for me, but I tried drawing it anyway because I was trapped in the tiny upper loft of the unit for mental health reasons, and then for a little while, about 75% through the actual drawing part, I began to notice that the composition on this picture was not too bad, it actually was beginning to look like a picture or illustration like a real artist might draw, and I felt for a few precious minutes, before I got excited and destroyed it all, that I might actually be on the point of producing professional-standard work. It was a wonderful feeling, the apeothesis, apothesis, apotheosis, that's a tough word to spell, the apotheosis of my life up to that point. Then as I said, I got excited and put the picture down and relished the feeling of professionalism and achievement and financial security and began to wonder where I would buy a nice big house and maybe vacation home and colored pants and a hat and security guards and secret archeological digs that I would finance and then mysteriously order a stop to, and spirit away all the relics and bribe the scientists to keep quiet about and then I'd hide the secret mummy cases in the basement with the skulls that I would finger while I drank scotch in my safari pants, and then I thought maybe that would make an interesting picture (I still do) and then I never finished this picture and used it for a sklog instead, meaning I wrote silly stuff in the unfinished white parts of the sketch to give myself a false sense of completion and went to bed and had nightmares about mummies walking around in the basement drinking my scotch and wearing my safari pants.

(X number of) Pictures; A Quick Jog Through Sklogs

I originally meant to just upload all the sklogs I have onto this blog so I’d have an online chronological record I could show them to friends after we’d all had a few beers but it turned out that I’ve never bothered to go through and name the files with dates that make any sense, and after looking through the long list of files in my sklog folder I lost my will and sense of purpose and so I decided to just upload a certain number of them and call this new autobiographical series after a number in the tradition of “6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator” and “6 Migrations…” because it is after all a continuation of my life story begun in those previous series, and I was even thinking it would be cool to call it “6 Pictures…” which would be even more in keeping with the tradition, and is a very small and manageable amount of Sklogs to upload, and furthermore, having three consecutive series titles beginning with the number 6 would be cool from a rebellious I’m-so-bad kind of way, except that I have serious family responsibilities now and can’t go around having people think I’m a devil worshipper or even worse, having people think I’m immature enough to think that pretending to be a devil worshipper makes me cool or attractive to college girls.
So with some reluctance I gave up on beginning the title with “6” and thought that maybe I’d begin it with something ambitious, like 20 or something, but that wouldn’t fit with the other titles at all and what’s more the thought of all the work associated with uploading that many Sklogs made my stomache churn and I lost my will and sense of purpose until I came up with the idea that I wouldn’t promise any number and would just see how it goes.
This Sklog happens to be the second file in the folder, which recommended itself to be uploaded, and I also happen to like the picture, which includes my beloved mother. The words are garbage, like they are in all the Sklogs, but since I’m supposed to be reviewing them I will say that most of the letters are legible and they don’t obscure the picture. I also remembered this visit to my parents’ house as particularly pleasant, if it was a visit. There is also the strong possibility that I was actually living there at the time and just described it as a “visit” because I was still single, and didn’t want any women who saw the Sklog to know that I was living with the my parents because that had caused me trouble in the past with women who were shallow enough to find my lack of direction and purpose and career prospects and financial situation to be unattractive instead of loving me for who I was and giving me happy good time in private grownup sense of the words without expecting me to pay for any dates and contribute anything to the relationship beyond a pleasant attitude, which I was prepared to provide in abundance!
Anyway, I enjoyed this picture but none of my friends seemed to think much of the Sklog. I don’t blame them, now that I read it. There’s no good joke or punchline. The graphic novel referred to, Antelope Island, was a previous Sklog series that I’d had tremendously big plans for, because I’d re-read some of my old comic books and decided to write an incredibly powerful graphic science fiction novel with strange twists and otherworldly characters and maybe some sexy scenes, and I would include three characters that I’d drawn in a previous picture and that I’d built up a whole history for these characters, as the childhood friends I never had…I did actually have childhood friends who were actually fairly normal people, but for some reason I began to like to point to the original picture of the three characters and say that they were my childhood imaginary friends even though they actually had nothing to do with any real or imaginary friends I’d had in childhood. I gave these imaginary imaginary friends names that I thought were funny and cool but in retrospect I don’t know why I thought they were funny, because I’ve never read any book where - no matter how funny the rest of the book was - the names made me laugh or even tickled my fancy in any way, but authors seem to try it all the time anyway. So I put these three characters; Gunthor, Frank, and Eddie, into the graphic novel for no good reason other than obsessiveness, and then I really didn’t know what to do with them, and the series became for me an obsessive drawing exercise, drawing horribly bad renditions of the characters from the original horribly bad drawing into the usual hurried sketches that I put in the Sklogs. It was an interesting challenge because I have no idea how to organize a drawing and make it proportional, I just kind of try to draw from one edge of the page to another, and the proportions and perspectives are all out of whack, and a person standing in front of a tree ends up far from the tree on the page, and seems to be taller than the tree, but the grass he’s standing on is still back under the tree, which leaves the person in a difficult predicament. So putting the imaginary characters into the pictures of real rooms and scenes was an interesting exercise that I never completely succeeded at, although I was fairly pleased with one of the pictures I did of the bathroom at my work, I felt the rabbit looked fairly believable on the toilet.
But since I hadn’t had any friends like Gunthor, Frank, and Eddie in real life or even in my imagination, I couldn’t think of anything for them to say that even sounded like something a real imaginary friend would say.
This new series is a continuation of my life story, begun in “6 Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator,” and continued in “6 Migrations” and “Fish Lake Oddyssey”. As Winston Churchill once said; “This constitutes my life’s work…. and I am content to rest my reputation upon it.” He wasn’t talking about the Sklogs, though. I believe he was referring to his leadership in the fight against Hitler.

Drawing of the Three; part 1

There haven't been any sklogs lately or even updates to this ancillary author's notes kind of half-arsed blog because the hagenart staff has been in a kind of mid-life crisis which consists of being overcome with angst about the inevitability of death and the decline of American values. I've also come to recognize that all effort is futile and that all those people that maintain real blogs with all those posts and research and blogosphere concerns are almost certainly mentally ill and should qualify for state assistance. It's just too much work, and seriously, for what? I myself only read comic books now. So I've decided that from this entry on this blog will be dedicated to a serious purpose, not just random nonsense. The serious purpose will either be a daily log of my experiences as a parent or a kind of home fixer upper type journal of my planned renovation/development of my backyard and crawlspace.
Another idea just hit me: the world's longest novel! I'll have to find out what the current record holder is..Since all three ideas are very good ones, I've decided to alternate the entries between the three themes until one wins out by popular vote or if I get tired of the other ideas.