Category: Other

We have sweet corn tonight. Of all the crops you can grow for yourself, sweet corn is the one that is always clearly and unmistakably superior when grown at home. Even corn bought from a farmer wearing black suspenders and an old panama hat on the roadside, even if the tobacco chewing old geezer pulled the ears that very morning, the corn has begun to deteriorate by the time it is at table.

I pulled the first half dozen ears of corn from our sweet corn patch before I sat down to write this and Rebecca is heating water now. The ears are not as ripe as I like them. They remain at the blister stage; the milk in the kernels is still watery. In another three or four days, the milk will be opaque, but not starchy yet, which is  perfect for me. Rebecca and my father (when he was still alive) prefer the corn at the blister stage.

I planted two varieties of yellow sweet corn, just like my father always did: Kandy Korn and Golden Jubilee. Kandy Korn ripens a little earlier for us than Golden Jubilee, but I think Golden Jubilee has better flavor even though Kandy Korn is an “extended sugar” variety which is purported to be sweeter than the old style Jubilee. By planting two varieties that mature at different times, the corn season is a little longer. There will be plenty of corn for us and a few others, but the crop is nothing like the bounty I imagined when I planted. I had hoped to take bushel after bushel to the food bank. There may be a chance for that yet, but I have doubts.

I’m not a good farmer for a number of reasons. I travel too much, which means I am discussing computer configuration management in San Jose or New York when a farmer would be out in the garden. A flush of Canadian thistles will not wait for the return flight from SFO. A loose coupling that holds the Alaska run from Las Vegas to Bellingham on the runway in the desert for 4 hours does not slow up the quack grass. I marvel that I travel at six hundred miles per hour thirty thousand feet above the ground, and the weeds sit still at zero feet, they win.

Second, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and the after effects of the septal myectomy which I had last November  tire me easily. Many evenings, I am too tired to weed and hoe like a serious farmer.

Finally, I lack knowledge and skill. I am a computer programmer and a crypto-chinese scholar, not a true farmer.  I did not adjust my cultivator properly and plant accurately. The rows in my corn field are uneven and hard to follow, wandering like a dog on a hunt. Unlike my father who operated his tractor with delicacy and refinement that demolished weeds without ever touching a crop, I am clumsy and obliviously destroy great swaths of corn in seconds as I wollow through the cornfield on my tractor.

No matter. We have sweet corn tonight.

Anthony Trollope is a risky subject. My daughter, Athena, whose opinion I respect, rolls her eyes and gets embarrassed at the utter density of her father when I mention Trollope. But I can’t help it. To begin with, I am partial to Victorians. I don’t have much patience with skirts on piano legs and prigs who must say white meat instead of breast when the turkey is carved, but I respect the society that first recognized that women are not chattels and poverty is a condition to surmount, not a crime to punish.  Anthony Trollope was born to a family on the edge of respectability. His mother wrote novels to support her family after Trollope’s father’s law practice failed. His family sent Anthony Trollope to the right schools, but he had to withdraw when funds ran out. Anthony had a distinguished career in the post office, inventing the letter box still seen all over Britain. Eventually he withdrew from the post office to pursue a full time literary career, but only after he was thoroughly established as a civil servant in the post office.

As a writer, Trollope was a novel machine. He wrote an allotment of pages a day, every day, whether at home or traveling for the post office, as he frequently did. When he finished a draft of one novel, he started the next immediately and he claimed never to revise. He was the most prolific of the Victorian novelists, far exceeding the output of Dickens and Thackeray, with whom he is often compared.

Of the great Victorians, I think Trollope is my favorite. Dickens was clearly a master and a genius, but his characters are exagerated, better, worse, or more comic than the real people I know. Trollope’s genius is in the way he captured characters that are exactly as you might meet them at your job or in your home: interesting, sympathetic, but not overdrawn or exaggerated.

I have posted one of Trollope’s short stories, The Panjandrum, to give you a sample of his skills.

I posted the last four chapters of Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark today. I will be very pleased if I have introduced someone to this delightful book by posting it here.

A friend of mine has been exploring the possibilities of writing non-fiction narrative prose. I pointed him toward Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, which was published as fiction but is frequently cited as autobiographical, and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Blackhawk Down”, forgetting that I was in the process of posting the Cruise of the Snark. That was an egregious lapse. Jack London is occasionally described as a pioneer of twentieth century journalism, and I think the Cruise is a wonderful example of his contribution. The scenes of the Cruise are as carefully plotted as those of any novel and London always finds an element of drama to highlight.

I often judge a book by its atmosphere. Some are closed in and stuffy, like business and technical literature that piles cliche on cliche apparently trying to avoid a hint of an original thought. Others, like my old standby, Anatomy of Melancholy, are richer than an over-priced slice of chocolate cake at a pretentious lunch counter.  The Cruise is open, wide open, looking past the horizon, beyond the next port of call, without regrets, without illusions. What an idiot! What a fantasy! What a way to live!