~b

more on outlining, then i'll shut up.

i have three narrative lines going in the tarot book. in the plague book, it was just one narrative line, but it still managed to sprawl out all over 776 pages. hi. i'm barth, and i'm a wordaholic. (hi barth. welcome. we love you, barth.). so while i'm told the 776 page story reads like a roller coaster ride, never the less, i gotta get leaner. so the three lines in the tarot story, i decided, would run 10 chapters each, 10 pages each. 300 pages. still an epic, but hey, i'm in the epic biz, so i'm not sweating. besides, if i can cut that in half this time, then perhaps the next book's 200 pages will seem like a dream.

but after multiple drafts of the outline, i'm finding places where i can condense. late in narrative #1, a chapter isn't necessary when you, the reader, want to gallop to the end.. in narrative #2, 10 full pages aren't necessary for the flashback chapter. i'm learning to compress parts of the story which will make the whole adventure more fun for you and me both.

so while i've been writing on the novel when the mood hits, mainly it's been a process of discovering the joys of outlining. meanwhile, this also allows me to stay limber with short story writing.

enough navel inspection?

ok then. let's talk about your navel instead. most of you come here from either a blogspot product, gwenda bond's site, or michael jasper's site. 62 of you visit here daily on average. judging by the key words that bring you here, you're either obsessed with the lusty lady strip club in san francisco, the word "blog," my name, or mad cow disease (some of you actually come here for the food talk apparently). you hang out for about three minutes. on tuesdays. probably during your lunch hour. you come back 5 times per day, you netjunky.

ok. that's enough about you. now back to work.

i've been outlining like mad on the tarot novel, which is very unlike me. outlining is helping me envision how to tinker with the parameters of novel writing, ironically enough. for me, short stories are more the more comfy venue in which i can let my freak out. i've also read more experimental short stories than experimental novels, so i don't yet have a sense of how to imprint my weirdness into the novel's form. but it's coming.

and outlining helps me see where the playfulness can come in. it's one of the "tools" i got from the ratbastards, i'd say, the ability to let loose in short stories, treat forms and process with a no-sacred-cows mentality. maybe by my third novel, i'll be able to take the attitude i have with short stories and apply it to books. we'll see.

for now, it's just exciting to see the outline, the grid, and how i might be able to write "off grid."

in baby news, isaiah started a new peek a boo game yesterday. while we're both on the couch, he stands right behind me, right in line with my spine. i say, "where's my boy? where is he?" head turning left and right. isaiah apparently realizes that if he can see my eyes, i can see him, so he stands right in my blindspot, the cunning little goblin, giggling to himself. when i finally turn and make eye contact, he falls back on his butt and holds up his hands, ready to fend off the tickling. which is very wise on his part...

the opening of light rail was a bust of a day. every yahoo from outstate minnesota who figured a free light rail ride was as good as taking the kids to six flags showed up. 30K on the first day alone - so many that they only let 9 people on at a time, and it was taking 20 minutes to go from platform to platform. yeesh. i'd wanted to ride downtown to hook up with lisa who was working at the library, but the whole scene got thrown suddenly into theme park mode, not public transportation, heaven forbid. so isaiah and i rode down to the next stop in the crush of yokelism (everyone going "oooooo" when the train started up - what year is this? 1854?), then we road back to the stop in our neighborhood and walked home.

but far worse was the homeland security mindset of the guards and metro transit rent-a-cops working the platforms. at one point i took out my camera to take a pic of my friend melissa, and a guard came and stood right behind me in a pretty threatening i'm-a-watchin-you-bub posture. felt like saying, "dude, i lull my kid to sleep with national anthem. back off!"

and no beer! no brats! whatever. i'll drop a buck seventy five this week and ride it in peace once the hubaloo dies down.

metro transit light rail opens in minneapolis. free rides all weekend. the nearest stop is about 10 blocks away, so isaiah and i are going on an excursion with melissa this afternoon. i'm hoping the swell weather holds and that there's beer and brats at all the stops...

in the news, i love all the headlines reading "cheney curses senator." what? warts? leprosy? seven years of locusts? with all the fresh children he eats every morning for breakfast, you'd think dick could conjure up quite a curse.

in the world of food and co-ops, i got in a shouting match with an organic farmer yesterday. in three years of my position as organic certification coordinator, i've never come across a serious violation of the USDA organic regs, let alone one this bad. dude said that, because he was certified, whatever he sold from his farm was therefore "organic" - even if he didn't grow it himself. (um...no.)

his certifier was very interested to hear what this farmer was saying in their name.

are you like me? do you like to bitch-slap someone when you know they are completely and utterly in the wrong?

we're nearing the end of our high holidays, lisa and i (the yearly "jesus christ superstar" at first avenue; mocking charlton in "the ten commandments"; the may day parade and puppet show; wiscon; gay pride). gay pride is this weekend, and we plan on gathering as many mardi gras beads for isaiah as possible, since they're a favorite toy of his. that, and we'll probably go bawl our eyes out at the mass commitment ceremony.

in food news, i offer you sojourner magazine's interview with wendell berry (couldn't link to the article itself for some reason). on language, christianity, food, and socially just economics, berry offers a pretty lush reading, so it's difficult to isolate only one enticing passage for you. but in honor of chris and gwenda, i'll offer up this one about kentucky:

"BERRY: Tobacco acreages have declined here because the companies can fill their needs more cheaply elsewhere. The other products we grow are thrown into the world market to compete as best they can. With the help of subsidies, of course. In Kentucky we have always raised for export. One of this state's problems is that it hasn't added value to its agricultural products. I would say we are adding less now than ever. Louisville used to have two or three packing plants, for instance, and a stockyard. But no more. Most of the things that are produced in this state are shipped out, to have the value added elsewhere.

"When you take away the subsistence economy, then your farm population is seriously exposed to the vagaries of the larger economy. As it used to be, the subsistence economy carried people through the hard times, and what you might call the housewife's economy of cream and eggs often held these farms and their families together. The wives would go to town with eggs and cream once a week, buy groceries with the proceeds, and sometimes come home with money. Or they'd sell a few old hens, that sort of thing. So that's the first lesson to learn about agriculture, as far as I'm concerned: It needs a sound subsistence basis. People need to feed themselves, next they need to feed their own communities. That's what we're working for now. We want to develop a local food economy that local producers will supply and that the local consumers will support. It's ridiculous that we should be importing food into this state while our farmers are suffering."

(not to single out kentucky of course. wendell is telling an american story.)

i toured an all-natural chicken processing plant located about 2 hours north of the twin cities yesterday.

all-natural or no, it was a rough tour. i'll spare you the gory details. even the grace notes that make this plant humane are hard to stomach. suffice to say, i'm still mentally and emotionally sorting through a couple of the things i saw.

don't get me wrong, i'm not suddenly a vegetarian or anything (for the record, i did eat meat later in the day). but you can't see something like that, a plant where 1600 animals are "processed" in a day (that's small by industry standards), and not have a bit of an existential moment, you know? later, i found myself surly and pissed off after i got home to take care of isaiah. took me a while to realize where my emotions were coming from.

1600/day. all i can say is "yikes." but i mean, how else are you gonna feed concentrations of several million people?

and this plant was the groovy option, after all, run by very consceintious folks. it's supported by 7 small, "all-natural" poultry farms (if the various farm owners had the money, they'd be certifiably organic - no pesticides on the farm - very neat and well-tended - but cerification costs). after i saw the slaughtering, i visited one - a poultry farm owned by a mennonite family. what an idyllic minnesota scene, with a rambling old farmhouse and the classic red barn. rare, these days. inside the barn were flocks of white chickens, uncaged, free to chase and peck and fluff their feathers at each other (you won't see that in a tyson-owned farm). beyond the barn, a green field swelled beneath a deep blue sky. cloud-shadows floated across the land, and the mennonite farmer told me how the native grasses forced out the weeds once he stopped spraying chemicals on his hay, and while he talked, his little girls in gingham dresses marched off into the high prairie to have a picnic. silent and sunny.

yes, a very surreal day.

i've been taking pics of produce with greg for the wedge wesbite (however, not many of the fruit photos are his, currently).

greg sends along these inspirational, sunday-morning thoughts from photographer edward weston, who had a produce period himself:

From Edward Weston's Daybooks:

"But the pepper is well worth all time, money, effort. If peppers would not wither, I certainly would not have attempted this one when so preoccupied. I must get this one today; it is beginning to show the strain and tonight should grace a salad. It has been suggested that I am a cannibal to eat my models after a masterpiece. But I rather like the idea that they become a part of me, enrich my blood as well as my vision. Last night we finished my now famous squash, and had several of my bananas in a salad."

"Sonya, as Ramiel did last year, keeps tempting me with new peppers! Two more have been added to my collection. (...) I still had the pepper which caused me a week's work, I had decided I could go no further with it, yet something kept me from taking it to the kitchen, the end of all good peppers. I placed it in the funnel, focussed with the Zeiss, and, knowing just the viewpoint, recognizing a perfect light, made an exposure of six minutes, with but a few moments' preliminary work, -- the real preliminary was done in hours passed. I have a great negative, -- by far the best!"

"--4:30-- wide awake with thoughts on my yesterday's negatives: squash-- winter squash-- marvellous cream white forms-- one like a starfish- one a pointed comet sweeping through space-- another, fluted like a Greek column: solid, smooth, absolute, -- abstract? I am fishing for words to give my feeling for their detached quality-- their gesture of complete beauty."

"Getting closer-- using a five inch Cooke lens on the 8x10-- making the heart of an artichoke to fill the entire plate-- a celery heart becomes heroic-- a new field is opening to me-- on the horizon I see a microscope! Celery is great material: the stalk done close-- a twisted tree trunk-- white as a palm-- fluted like great pillars. I see celery as a staple, even as peppers have been!"

ok. here's a happy, non-depressing food and farming story.

so i've been waiting on natura farms' strawberries ever since i had their blueberries and currants last summer. paul otten is a berry god, and i just knew he'd come through on the strawbs, which are tough to grow without chemicals in the brief, 3-week window available to farmers in minnesota.paul isn't certified, but his berries are clean. i've seen his operation and trust him implicitly.

but i really felt chagrined, because i had to ask him for $18/per flat of strawbs. that retails at $2.49 per pint, which is pretty steep to the average strawberry consumer. these weren't even organic strawberries after all (organic CA strawbs retail at $1.99/pint or less). paul wanted $24 per flat, but wanted my business, so he gave me what i asked for.

well, when he brought the first batch in today (15 flats worth), i couldn't believe my eyes. big. fat. plump. deep red. oh. my. lord. in 9 years of MN produce work, i have never seen such stunning local strawberries anywhere outside of a garden. no, not even there! these were like something out of a california strawberry council commercial. and best of all: no refrigeration flavor-sapping. they tasted like they'd been dipped in sugar. hell, they were picked this morning. they were fresher than fresh.

anyway, these strawbs were so drop-dead gorgeous, we couldn't keep them on the shelves. paul brought the 15 flats in at 330pm and by 5pm, we only had 4 flats left. i immediately called paul and told him we had to raise the price, just to keep his berries on the shelves, and that on the next delivery, he should charge us the $24/flat that he was origincally asking for.

win/win. ever-body happy!

so my good friend kevin tells me i'm a shockingly depressing blogger lately, and dora tells me she wants more baby anecdotes.

proud fathers don't have to be asked twice. here ya go:

so i shaved off my beard a couple weeks ago. i grow a patchy, refugee sort of beard, and after a couple months of convincing myself it looks ok, i eventually reassess in the mirror, thinking, "do i really want to look like an extra in the road warrior?"

so off it came. this was really a bummer for isaiah the hair-fetishist. he's absolutely obsessed with hair, keys in on long-haired men and women like they're his long-lost tribe. lisa keeps an "iko braid" for him, one thin braid that he can hold while nursing. when i had the beard, he'd grab handfuls of facial hair and look into my eyes and melt me down to nothing. post-beard, he sort of soft-patted my clean-shaven face as if he were placating me. "oh boy. bare skin. yeah, that's great, man."

so i started growing my beard back because i felt like i'd been completely dissed by my own baby. yesterday, i was bottling iko with formula and he reached up and felt my stubble. not yet enough to grab, but it's coming along (i'm "pre-refugee," at the moment). anyway, while he nursed, he got this air of interest and spent the whole time sucking on the bottle and working the short stubble on my jaw between his delicate little fingertips, like he was considering buying some.

but then he finished nursing, sat up, and just looked at me. he got this absolutely lovey expression, like, "daddio, where HAVE you been?" it was hysterical. his big blue eyes pooled. he cooed at me like some tv commercial, gerber baby - stroking my face and beaming at me. a show of love he usually reserves only for his mama.broke my heart wide open.

end result: form follows function. the beard stays.

from oneworld.net: Coca-cola Benefitting from Child Labor in Sugar Cane Fields

"Child labor is rampant on El Salvador's sugarcane plantations," said Michael Bochenek of HRW's [human rights watch] Children's Rights division. "Companies that buy or use Salvadoran sugar should realize that fact and take responsibility for doing something about it." [yeah right.]

and

"[C]hildren who are injured in the fields often must pay for their own medical treatment despite another provision in the labor code that makes employers responsible for medical expenses for injuries incurred on the job."

and

"The Coca-Cola Company exists to benefit and refresh everyone it touches." [from the cola godhead site].

i know, i know: you're probably shocked, *shocked* to discover such abuses from a warm and fuzzy company like coca cola. mainly, i offer up this article because well-known child-abusers in the cocoa and chocolate industries aren't alone: america's whole processed food industry is built on Big Sugar, and Big Sugar is built on labor abuse.

what can we do about it? not much. since Fair Trade sugar (more popular in canada and europe than in the US) is up to four times as expensive as "free trade" sugar, developing a market the way, say, FT coffee and tea were developed in the 90s, will be very difficult. since US manufacturing in all its incarnations demands cheap parts/ingedients and labor, and since individual consumers don't buy nearly as much sugar as Big Food does, it's not likely that the sugar industry will entertain alternative business and trading methods any time soon.

so supersize that coke, america!

sorry to keep directing your attention to the guardian, but it's been a good source of what's actually happening in the world while the US pretends it's still morning in america. here's an interesting article on the red cross demanding that the US charge or release saddam hussein - remember him? - by june 30.

The ICRC [red cross] is angry that it has not been given exact figures for releases or the whereabouts of those who are moved from Abu Ghraib and it is hoping the end of the occupation will put pressure on the authorities to clean up their act. "If we consider the occupation ends on June 30, that would mean it's the end of the international armed conflict. This is the legal situation.

"When the conflict ends the prisoners of war should be released according to the Geneva conventions," Ms Doumani said.

to which the bush administration responded with 35 minutes of sustained laughter.

a quizzilla quiz via www.mememachinego.com:

Grammar God!

"If your mission in life is not already to<br>preserve the English tongue, it should be.<br>Congratulations and thank you!"

(couldn't make the HTML crap work here, grammar god though i may be.)

i freely admit that my lie/lay answers were flying stabs in the dark.

but obviously i don't take my grammargodhood very seriously - he said, in all lower case letters - having worked on student newspapers where every late-night copy editing argument begins and ends with "well that's the way *i* do it!" i'm more interested in breaking the rules, now, though i do recognize how important it is to know them in the first place.

hey, do you know peter sis?

his books "tibet through the red box" and "the three golden keys" are big favorites in our house. i can't wait till isaiah can read so that we can explore sis' worlds – his bizarre whimsy and gorgeous artwork – with iko's fresh eyes.

that, and if i have to read "so say the little monkeys" one more time, much as i like it, my brain is going to dissolve and dribble down my back.

"The Corporation," a new documentary by canadian film-makers, sounds like the kind of movie i'll either love or hate. i get annoyed by lefty documentaries hanging their arguments like pinatas and then taking wild swings at em for 90 minutes.

but like anyone else, i need my retreats into likemindedness now and then, especially after this past week's disgusting dead-reagan cannibalism - where i'm reminded how badly the eighties completely and totally sucked, how real the nuclear nightmare felt back then with a red-baiter in the white house, and how hypocritical republicans today can puff and rant until MN sen. paul wellstone's memorial is a political rally, but then get all misty about this nationwide media blitz to rewrite reagan's legacy of covertly dealing arms to iran and bankrolling bin laden's jihadist movement into a cozy-quilt of heartwarming lies.

bad is good. up is down. wrong is right.

bring on "the corporation," says me. bash those pinatas. yeah.

phoebe. phoebe. phoebe. no matter how many times i type that word, it still looks messed up. phoebephoebephoebephoebephoebephoebephoebephoebe.

isaiah walks himself around the sun room now, holding onto the edges of chair seats and coffee tables. yesterday, he'd walked half the circumference of the room before i realized how well he was doing. then he started his little prairie dog bark, which usually means, "dig me."

and i was all, "whoa!"

in other news, i kinda dug "the jury" this week on fox. it's sort of the inevitable, last possible permutation of the courtroom drama: the POV of a different jury every week. but they pull it off pretty well. natural to non-acting from the jurors, which is always a relief on television. employing the archetypes of big group dynamics to identify characters in the mass of 12 otherwise anonymous faces (the indignant one, the spoiler, the cynic, the mom, the brat, etc). it might be that it's just a parlor trick of a tv show, but it's a pretty good one from barry levinson who otherwise irritates me.

if you were at wiscon, you may have noticed a decided lack of champagne mangos at the ratbastards party - but their absence wasn't for lack of trying on my part. just before the big weekend, i put in an order for 5 cases but then the champagnes gapped in availability. i wasn't terribly surprised. they often peter out by the end of may.

but then, yesterday, we got 170 cases in the warehouse. which is, as we say in the industry, a buttload.

maybe this is a big, mocking bummer for us fruit-crazed drunks at the con who wanted a juicy mango slaughter, but it's also a milestone worth noting. one of the cool things about working produce is watching a product, like champagne mangoes or heirloom tomatoes, take off in rockstar-esque popularity. when that happens, the season slowly extends a week or two in either calendar-direction for the first couple years, as farmers in different growing regions plant the crop in question and get a jump on the season as it's been established. and then voom, as shipping connections are strung across the country/globe, all of a sudden the product is available for half the year or longer. when i started in produce, for example, asparagus was only available in its "true season." now, even when the snow sails, you can buy asparagus green and fresh .

oh and by the way. the new batch of "summer" mangos is luscious: flesh the color of cheddar and sugar-shock sweet. get thee to your shee-shee fruit market, go!

i've been thinking about the john w campbell award for best new writer, ever since levine, pratt, and lake had their smackdown at wiscon. entertaining as that was, boys, i think the real rock/paper/scissors match is between chris moriarty and karin lowachee - with advantage going to karin. while writers have earned the campbell for mad short story skillz in the past, in recent years, a big novel has carried the day for the winner (nalo, wen, mary doria russell). and karin lowachee is racking up big novels fast fast. i imagine more voters will have heard of her than the eligible short story writers, fine as they might be.

just a hunch.

i've been reading lots since wiscon: "sun," by v. anne arden, in the most recent lady churchill's rosebud wristlet, absolutely rocks me. i've read it three times now and i have a completely different and powerful reaction to it with each reading. doug lain's "music lessons" also got its hooks in me - pulpy in an experimental way: my very favorite flavor.

ok. there's no delaying it any longer: "hi-ho, hi-ho...."

if the FDA (under bush, kerry, clinton, or whomever) has its way, shoppers won't be able to tell "genetically modified organism" food from non-GMO food. international markets will be legally prevented from banning GMOs, and so will small towns across america. GMOs are a contracted service, like cable tv according to US laws, so farmers who save seeds would be violating patent and intellectual property laws.

if you're paying attention, you already see the hypocrisy in the FDA's argument: on one hand they say that GMO foods are not unique (they're identical to their natural counterparts, so they should not be labeled for consumer edification). on the other hand, GMO foods are unique in regards to patent and must be legally protected.

the FDA can't defend both positions at once. all it will take is one lawsuit like canada's monsanto v schmeiser - with monsanto this time suing an organic farmer (or an organic farmer suing monsanto for polluting her certified crop with GMO seed) - to expose the double-edged sword of patenting life.

not much time. but i had to tell you something.

i had the fruit salad of a lifetime last night. sublime moment. everything was perfectly ripe, like a pantheon of gods descending into avatars of fruit. nectarines. pineapple. strawberries.

but here's the key. i also opened a bottle of castle rock pinot noir and poured in about a glassful - not enough to turn it into sangria. this is a risky maneuver, as bad wine will simply make the whole affair miserable - the wine should be good enough that you feel a little pinch in your heart when you pour it in with the fruit. the castle rock pinot is a good choice, inexpensive, and yet big enough to stand up to bullying fruit flavors. the wine suffused into the pineapple and nectos immediately but the strawberries resisted and provided a giddy counterpoint. damn. i can't put it into words. nirvana. shangri-la. lisa took a spoonful and immediately started slapping the floor with one hand and eating with the other.

and it's june! it's only going to better and better...

(the rainier cherries arrive tuesday!)

wanna rearrange the way you do cons, permanently? have a kid.

i've gone to wiscon every year for the last five years and i look forward to it far more than christmas - but with isaiah in tow, it might as well have been a completely different con in a foreign city. stimulating. lots of belly-laughs. but i felt pretty disconnected from the experience as i once knew it. baby comes first, now and always.

people were great and the panels, fantastic, don't get me wrong. plus, it *is* a kid-friendly con. but you can't get around the basic fact that scheduling, feeding, baby-crankiness, diapers, and naps throw a fastball right at the con experience's head. ok. the iko-induced naps are a big improvement on how i used to do cons. but you get the idea.

highlights:

meeting the very funny comedy team of hannah and celia; being threatened with balloon hats by pat murphy; the high-quality of stories and crit in the wiscon writers workshop; hanging with deborah layne, trent walters, david schwartz and ben "lord of the flies" rosenbaum; listening to ellen klages make funny noises at isaiah; the pregnant haddyr shaking it through whatever song she was singing when she was shaking it; bourbon from minz; sidecars from minz; galois from minz (wait….those turned out to be lowlights the next morning…); laughing with dave and rachael about the sunglasses, till i thought i was gonna pop an artery; rowe's reading; tim pratt's bear hug and heather shaw's big grin; the stunning sunset over mighty lake mendota.

also, our old friend kaet teaching isaiah sign language. isaiah knows baby sign language – or at least, he knows the sign for nurse. commie lesbian and tattooed-pagan auntie kaet tried to teach him the sign for bitch, which led to a sentence i'd never heard at a feminist sf convention before:

nurse, bitch!

but best of all, eleanor arnason's guest of honor speech. ominous and powerful. she laid out her case for the so-called "war on terrorism" in effect being our third world war, in all the devastating implications of the term. however, it wasn't "doom and gloom" or lefty posturing – it was a speech that employed common sense arguments as to how the western-style, capitalistic State is at war on every front across the globe and at risk of even greater upheaval in the next 50 years – and her charge that science fiction writers must write stories that address the uber-culture's coming transformation. i love eleanor and was very proud of her (and wiscon) for delivering such a politically charged speech.

lowlights:

jay lake sleeping, or pretending to sleep a la the "oh-so drunken writer" routine, while three of his colleagues read stories. come on, brother! lose the sunglasses, sit up straight, and treat your peers with the respect you crave.

a far bigger bummer: i missed the dancing at the ratbastards party. just too durn late for a new daddio.

i got hit with an avalanche of work as soon as i got home. now i'm swamped till next week, when the wedge's new website goes up. i'll link it when it's up.