First corn

This is the second year in a row that we have planted a garden in the yard of our new house - for which we are and will ever be grateful.  Last year we had some tomato plants and herbs.  This year we have tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, corn, beans, squash, herbs . . . and a cabbage.  I'm constantly making plans for improving, and since I'm doing a no-till approach for most of it, I've got cardboard boxes laid down over more land to expand.

We have two kinds of corn growing: Painted Mountain and Hopi Blue.  I timed their planting so they wouldn't cross-pollinate, and it worked: the Painted Mountain, which I planted in April, came up in the beginning of May, and its ears are ripening as the Hopi Blue is just starting to pollinate.

This evening I picked the first two ears of the Painted Mountain corn, and here are some pictures.

Thanks to my sweetie for taking this picture.

These were the early birds.  The rest of the ears will probably be ready in a week or so.  We'll hang them up to dry, use some as decorations in the fall (along with the blue), and then . . . 

We will eat it!

If you want to see a little tour of our garden as it looked about three weeks ago, you can watch the video below.  The tomatoes and blue corn have grown a lot since then.

Magic and Religion: an LDS Perspective

I wrote these two blog posts for the Jung Society of Utah; unfortunately their website seems to have just gotten hacked and I can't link to my posts there at the moment.  Also, I had to cut the length of my second post to publish on their site.  Here I'm posting its original version.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 1

Far away, across the fields
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
-Pink Floyd: “Breathe (Reprise),” Dark Side of the Moon

Christianity has an uneasy relationship with magic, to greater or lesser degrees among its branches. Mormons are some of the wariest of all, which is ironic when you consider the origin of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The regions of North America that nurtured this faith have also hosted folk magic practices for hundreds of years. Since the rise of various new age movements, notably Wicca and Neopaganism, modern aspirants to magic have been attracted to these homegrown systems. In response to this, people who work to preserve these traditions take pains to point out that they are firmly based in Christianity, and are not to be taken for any kind of crypto-paganism. The purpose of all these charms, incantations and concoctions was to bring about miracles – usually healing – by the power of God.

Along with this went a very real belief in and fear of witchcraft: if God could give power through special rituals, then so could the Devil, and much of the work of a Cunning Person (of whatever tradition) is to protect against evil enchantments. (As a side note, the notorious “heavy metal sign” with the index and little fingers extended comes from an Italian gesture of protection against the “evil eye.”)

Mormon attitudes to magic range from dismissive to fearful, with a healthy dose of defensiveness along the spectrum. Such defensiveness is perfectly understandable: the difference between “faith” and “miracles” on one hand and “magic” on the other looks entirely relative from a psychological perspective. Much depends on what words are chosen to describe phenomena and experiences – and who chooses those words. Any given group may identify its practices and rituals as religion and others' as magic – and in so doing, project its shadow.

And it came to pass that there were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics, and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land
- Mormon 1:19

These are they who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie. These are they who suffer the wrath of God on earth. These are they who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire.
Doctrine and Covenants Section 76: 103-105

Church members should not engage in any form of Satan worship or affiliate in any way with the occult. ‘Such activities are among the works of darkness spoken of in the scriptures. They are designed to destroy one’s faith in Christ, and will jeopardize the salvation of those who knowingly promote this wickedness. These things should not be pursued as games, be topics in Church meetings, or be delved into in private, personal conversations.’ (First Presidency letter, Sept. 18, 1991).
-Handbook 2: Administering the Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Official teaching holds that Satanic minions do in fact roam the world seeking to do mischief, and in popular understanding, “messing with magic,” even experimenting with common divination tools like Tarot cards or Ouija boards is a perfect way to open the door to such mischief. While Joseph Smith canonized instructions on how to tell if an otherworldly messenger is trustworthy or not (Doctrine and Covenants Section 129), and the early days of the Church were noted for angelic visitations and dramatic manifestations of spiritual gifts (like speaking in tongues), in today's church that sort of thing is greatly downplayed.

Still, from a psychological perspective many rituals and practices still exist in the LDS Church that could be considered magical. The Mormon version of the Eucharist lacks the dogma of transubstantiation but is still seen as a potent renewal of baptism, itself a ritual that enacts a transformation of the soul through a symbolic enactment of death and rebirth.

Mormon fear of magic goes along with a general unease with ceremony. For the most part the really important thing in Mormon ordinances is the faith and worthiness of those taking part. As such, the working of miracles through faith in Mormon belief might not look very magical: “no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations.” Though there are points of mechanical procedure that are prescribed with some precision, in the non-secret rituals these are minimal to the point of austerity.

The secret rituals are another matter (and Mormons get touchy about the use of the adjective “secret” even though it fits). These are understood as a gift of power from heaven which enable a soul to reach its final destination in unity with God. And then there is the remarkable “Patriarchal Blessing.” The title, so unfortunate to modern ears, is a metaphor of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their prophetic blessings to their sons. The practice offers an individual a private prophecy to help direct their life, given by a man with a special calling (in the early days of the Church, such men were referred to as “evangelists").

Describing these rituals as “magic” might seem very disrespectful or offensive to those who identify strongly with the tradition. While a psychological imagination can see the kinship between magic and religion, some believers find this hard to take: Dr. Jung constantly defended himself against accusations from Christian clergy that he reduced the message of our faith to nothing more than a working of the mind.

Jung's work gets it from both sides: believers who resent their faith practice sharing any names with what they regard as devilish counterfeits, and skeptics who despise magic and religion alike as a pathology unbecoming enlightened and civilized people.


Since Jung's great work was the reconciliation of opposites, I write in service of that goal.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 2

In 1994 the journal Dialogue published an article by Dr. Lance Owens: “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection.” One of Owens' sources was Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn – who had been excommunicated the year before. Quinn's work had been used as source material for the popular anti-Mormon comic book The Visitors, so Owens was hitting a nerve.  The mid 1990s in the Utah Mormon culture zone were also marked by lingering fears of Satanic cults (anyone who lived in Provo at the time probably heard all sorts of urban legends about goings-on in the old Academy building before it was renovated as the new city library). The word “occult” had picked up plenty of negative baggage through popular media already, and the use of it in such a context at such a time was bound to ruffle some feathers, as Owens himself anticipated.

In 1996 William J. Hamblin wrote a footnote-laden dressing-down of Owens' article. In pointing out its scholarly shortcomings he elegantly missed the real point, because after all the purpose was not only to deflect suspicion of any “occult” connection to Joseph Smith's experience or mission but to continue deprecating and depreciating any similarities between the two at all – similarities which I for one came to find inspiring rather than alarming. It took another nine years for the Mormon establishment to come around to admitting Joseph Smith's magic background, after a fashion: in Richard Bushman's authorized biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling we read that “Magic and religion melded in Smith family culture” (p. 50) and there is even a frank admission of the seerstone “blending magic with inspired translation” of the Book of Mormon (p. 131). Even so, Bushman downplayed the association, casting magic as a “preparatory gospel” for Smith's prophetic calling (p. 54).

The original meaning of the word “occult” after all being “hidden,” it would behoove us Mormons to consider how often our unique scripture mentions hidden knowledge. One striking example comes from the “Word of Wisdom”:

And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments . . . shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89:18-19, my emphasis)

We might consider Alma's sermon to the Zoramites, with a beautiful metaphor of a Tree of Life growing in each individual soul (Alma 32), the gnostic experiences of several Lamanite rulers (Alma 19, 22), and disciples of Christ at the time of his visit (3 Nephi 26, 28). Sometimes people shared what they learned through their experiences, sometimes they were told to keep it a secret, like Nephi (1 Nephi 14:28), Alma the younger (Alma 12:9), Mormon (3 Nephi 26:11), the Brother of Jared and Moroni (Ether 4).

Our religion is of God, their magic is of the Devil – this is too easy an accusation to make. Even in the Book of Mormon there are several instances of the true prophets being accused of deceiving people by their “cunning arts” (1 Ne 16:38), “the power of the devil” (Alma 15:15), and “the cunning and the mysterious arts of the evil one” (Helaman 16:21). Accusations, labels, meanings, are so easily used as weapons against those whom a group fears or distrusts, that an earnest truth-seeker can't afford to take such words at face value.

A psychological understanding, or a psychological imagination, helps us understand that magic and/or the occult is a way of engaging with the unconscious or the realm of the imaginative (one modern practitioner calls it the science of experiencing Truth). To recognize this means to admit the close kinship of magic and religion as branches from the same root – indeed interchangeable depending on one's point of view. There can be two ways of dealing with this: 

1. a fundamentalist rejection of any religious expression outside one's own, 
2. or a curiosity about the different ways that Truth is perceived and sought from different perspectives.

If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul?  Why this fear of psychology?  Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber?  (Jung: Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works Vol. 12, p. 19)

In a series of lectures on the gnostic myth of Sophia, Dr. Owens talks about this secular age and its intolerance for transcendence. Fueled in part by absurd fundamentalist insistence on impossible dogmas as fact, a rationalist attitude has grown which pathologizes myth and gnosis (an attitude reflected by Korihor, one of the most notorious figures in the Book of Mormon). To believe in any religion or myth in light of modern scientific knowledge requires setting aside or overcoming both the rationalist dismissal of myth and the fundamentalist dismissal of fact.

When we open our mind to the possibility of revelations of something from outside the secular or even religious ego – and if we also open our minds to a pragmatic means of measuring the claims of such revelations based on the criteria given in Alma 32 – then we have the opportunity to see the dogmas of our professed creeds with new eyes: to recognize their value as myth (here I would also recommend Dr. Owens' lectures on Tolkien's mythopoeia). This means ceasing to disparage or even define myth as false distraction from truth, and instead seeing it as a way to approach Truth. This is how we can truly recognize the value of others’ myths, and our own.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning, and beauty and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such experience is not valid and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about ultimate things than the one that helps you to live? (Jung: Psychology and Religion - Collected Works vol. 11, p. 113)


We might evaluate the ways our neighbors engage with myth and the psyche by truly perceiving the fruits of their actions rather than relying on rumor or applying the yardstick of dogmatic correctness like a punishing rod. We may still have the option of holding out faith in metaphysical facts concerning the “ultimate things,” but even if that loses traction to a more pragmatic approach, might we not find that the humility, empathy, respect and compassion we gain in return is after all the treasure our faith enjoined us to seek?

Those who found these posts interesting might also be interested in a pagan's view of Joseph Smith in this article.

Typecast: Pipe organs in Utah Valley

Sunday check-in: tomatoes

When we moved into our house this past May, we were so busy with all the unpacking, painting and other maintenance that we didn't get around to much garden work, but we did manage to plant nine tomato plants.  Since they were in a part of the yard that doesn't get as much sun, they only ripened a handful of their fruits before the frost.  But we were able to pick a good harvest of the green fruit, which we have been keeping inside.  They have been ripening gradually, giving us fresh tomatoes through the month of October, and we'll see how far into November they go.

We planted four varieties: Early Girl, some sort of beefsteak, Supersweet 100 cherry, and Old German.  These last ones are supposed to get pretty big but none of them did; I plan on putting in more of them next year in the sunny spot of the yard and hope we'll get big ones.  I like their flavor and their yellow color (tinged with red).

Some pictures:

The still-ripening big ones, and the ripe ones, sorted out as of yesterday

The ripe big ones (please excuse my pajamas)

And of course with Idaho's latest potato crop in, it's also hashbrown time again!  I devised an "October Breakfast" of hashbrowns surrounded by fresh homegrown tomato wedges, with a slice of cheese (Havarti) on top.

 

My "October Breakfast" - I know it could be fancier, maybe with some radishes and sprigs of herbs.  I'll keep working on it.

I have eaten this several times - one big Russet yields a batch of hashbrowns, so if we bake a few extra then I've got a variety of hot breakfasts for a week (along with grits and Scottish oatmeal - ground at home on the Corona mill).

This isn't even mentioning all the apples we've got from our untended old tree: a box still in the garage and almost a gallon of applesauce in the fridge - just puree these apples and they make a wonderful sauce, no need to add sweetener or anything else!

Here's wishing everyone a spooky scary Halloween!  Snake's Knees and Ratchafratch!

Quest cooking: Rice pilaf

Yesterday I decided that too much time had passed since I'd used my rocket stove, so I cooked a simple meatless pilaf on it.  It had been a while since I'd done rice on this stove.

Here's what I put in:
About a tablespoon of ghee
Half a yellow onion, sliced
A carrot, sort of julienned
Salt
Cumin (about a half teaspoon?)
Two cardamom pods, shelled and ground
Red chile (a teaspoon or two, my hand slipped) - in honor of a departed sister of mine who used to live in New Mexico, may she rest in peace
1 cup basmati rice
1 2/3 cups water

Here are some pictures, taken by my sweetie.

Tending the flame while sauteeing the onions.  For the initial hotter flame I used twigs cut from our quince bush earlier this year.

Carrots and spices waiting to go in

After frying the dry rice with the vegetables and spices for a bit, add water . . .

. . . stir, and simmer over a lower flame for about 15 minutes.  For the lower flame I used dead branches cut from our plum tree, about half an inch thick, two at a time.

By moving the pot around the stove every so often I hoped to avoid getting a burned spot in the middle.  I still got a darkened spot, but despite what it looks like here it wasn't really burned, and didn't adversely affect the flavor of the dish.

At church we've been attending a meeting dedicated to emergency preparedness (something that Mormon culture can sometimes take to extremes).  With recent events reminding us both of the necessity to be prepared for disruptions of all kinds and the appropriateness and limitations of different strategies for this, I want to keep my skills up in strategies not only for preparedness where we live, but also self-reliance and voluntary simplicity.  I'm glad we have neighbors on our street who are also interested in this kind of thing.

Typecast: a Sunday check-in

Preserved lemons

I haven't got apricots this summer, and I might have missed my chance, which is too bad.  I wanted to eat some fresh, dry some, and pickle some like I did last year.  I still have some of the ersatz umeboshi that I blogged about, and they're still good and salty and potent.  I've used them to flavor beans, grits and sauces, only rarely eating them straight because they're so salty.  It looks like I'll run out of them and not have any to replenish, unless I can quickly get some apricots.  The harvest has been meager around here this year, so I might have to settle for store-bought trucked-in - bleah.  But for the sake of the brine, it might be worth it.

I wanted to report on another food project I did this spring: preserved lemons.  These are a tradition in Morocco and other places (my Lebanese cookbook has a recipe).  I've been wanting to try them and when we visited Mesa, AZ this April I had my chance: the last of the citrus was on and some neighbors of in-laws had a tree that was burgeoning with more fruit than they could use.  So my older daughter and I went and picked huge lemons and grapefruits.  I'm really getting spoiled for fruit: I don't want to buy lemons or grapefruits from stores any more either.

Anyway, I took some pictures.  Here are some of the lemons:

Some of the smallest ones - barely fit four in this jar

 I did two jars: the smaller one you see here, and a larger one.  The smaller jar had more salt - I thought it might be too much - but it kept fine at room temperature after the first month curing.  The larger jar developed a skin of mold on top but I scraped it off and the lemons are fine.  I keep the larger jar in the fridge, and the smaller jar has been used up by now, from sharing with others and using in recipes.

The juice - lovely salty sourness - is excellent for hummus and guacamole.  The peel gets really soft and is easy to mince, crush and grind, and I like to put it in dressings and sauces, though I'm still getting used to the flavor.

Also in Arizona I picked a bunch of little ornamental oranges from my in-laws' tree.  They're sour and not very juicy, but while we were staying there I found that their juice made a wonderful pasta sauce with olive oil and garlic.  So I decided to preserve some of them in salt too.

The mini oranges - on the table you can see bits of cloves from some pomander balls I also made that day (I must not have done them right because they went bad - the pomander balls I mean).

Packing them in salt

Trying to squish them down so they'd be covered in juice

The two fruits in their jars ready to cure, with more lemons in the background

The preserved mini-oranges combine the tangy complexity of orange peel flavor with intense saltiness, bringing a surprising bright taste to savory dishes.  It's not something I'm used to but it''s delicious.  I particularly like to use them in peanut sauces.

I don't know if we'll go to AZ again next spring, so in case we don't I might have to pay for family to pick and send more fruit.

My hiking sling

In 2002 I went on several hikes in the mountains of Utah, including a four-day backpacking trip to the Uintas with an ascent to the summit of King's Peak.  On that hike I came up with an idea: what if I used one of my Mexican blankets for a sling to carry my stuff, instead of a backpack?  On that particular excursion I had carried my tent and other gear to our camp site in a large framed pack, and I didn't want to have to haul that to the peak, so something stripped down and minimal like a blanket sling made sense.

It must have been in one of my custodial jobs that I worked in college that I acquired a very large safety pin, which I had used at times to fasten a wool blanket around me like a cloak.  If you're interested in doing this yourself, I recommend doing a search on ebay for "laundry horse blanket safety pin," and you should be able to find one.  (I could have put a link here, could even have made it a commission link, but I've stopped doing that stuff.)  I'm going to share with you the basic method for rigging one of these up:

First, take your blanket and fold it lengthwise into thirds.

Photos by my sweetie.

 I might have tried folding in half twice, but thirds seems to work the best, giving a close-able pocket effect.

Next, drape the ends of the blanket over your shoulder (whichever you choose: during a hike I switch from one to the other every so often).  Holding one end on the front, bring the other up from behind . . . 

. . . and pin it.

 Here I want to point out that it has worked better to leave it as seen here: on a recent hike I tried gathering the ends into more of a taper.  It didn't work very well: the bunched cloth actually cut into my shoulder more than the simple pinning did, and somehow it messed up the neat pocket effect I had enjoyed on my previous hikes.

Although I got my inspiration for this from old depictions of people carrying bedrolls to camp with, I've never attempted to carry camping gear in this, always keeping it strictly to day hike use.  I carry food, water, extra clothes and first aid supplies, and it does pretty well I'd say up to maybe 15 pounds - I'm not very good at guessing weight.  On my most recent hike up to Timpanogos Basin I included a small stainless steel cook kit (1 lb) with an alcohol stove and fuel bottle.  If memory serves aright, I've used this rig to get to the summits of King's Peak, Squaw Peak and Mount Timpanogos, as well as several shorter hikes.  Here are some views of it in action:

King's Peak, July 2002, in the clouds.  Man, I was in such good shape back then.  Photo by one of my hiking buddies.

 

Organ Mountains, New Mexico, 2007.  The blanket can get hot in hot weather, but I've never found it unbearable.  Photo by my brother.

Timp, 2007 - the last time I made it to the top.  Photo by my other brother.

I like the advantage this device affords of having my trail snacks and sundries within easy reach.  By shifting sides regularly I avoid getting my shoulders sore.  Besides, it has that anachronistic simplicity that I love.

Recently I read about Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone - and carrying her gear in a sling bag held over one shoulder.  Not exactly the same thing, but even so I feel like I'm in good company.  I've long felt that people set too much store by fancy modern hiking and camping equipment, and I feel vindicated by examples like hers - or the Timp hikers of the early 20th century.

Here's to many years of hiking yet to come!

Type/brass cast: rocket relaunch and other things

Parching red corn over the rocket stove, photo by my eldest daughter

Quill/brasscast: Thoughts about roots, cut short

I wrote this with a quill and with two metal nibs, trying out some "new" old paper, while keeping track of a two-year-old.

Fictional foods: apricot experiment update

So last month I posted about salting a bunch of apricots.  I've done some more work on them.  A few days after I started, I saw that the brine was slowly leaking out from the bags, and so I combined both batches into one and put them in a pickle jar.  So much for trying out different kinds of salt.

This is what they looked like after sitting for a month.

 The umeboshi recipe I was working with said to sterilize the vessel with vodka before putting them in it, but we don't keep vodka in the house, and besides, I kind of thought the whole point of people discovering how to preserve food in salt was so that you could, you know, put it in things like jars and barrels without it spoiling?  I've made sauerkraut before in glass jars after just washing them in hot water, and my dad grew up making sauerkraut by packing the cabbage and salt into the barrel with the end of a baseball bat.  So I took a risk: as long as my jar, cup and rocks (to weigh the fruit down and keep it in the brine) were clean, I'd see what happened.  As you can see, they looked fine, and as you can't smell, they smelled just like vegetable matter fermenting in brine should smell.

The next step was to dry them in the sun.  Since I currently have Wednesdays off from work, I decided to let them sit out that day last week and see how dry they'd get.  After all, strictly speaking I'm not making umeboshi, just something very close.

Just out of the jar, drying on a cut-up old undershirt (washed, of course) and paper bag.

At first I kept moving them to stay in the sun while keeping them close to the house, and then when my sweetie had finished running errands, I put them on top of the car.  I thought they might dry out more at the end of the day, but after bringing them in, I decided to pack them into a clean dry glass jar and see what happened.

After a day in the sun.

After a few days in the jar, after drying.  You can see the thicker brine that's seeping out in the bottom.

So they've been sitting in their jar for a week, and so far they're doing fine.  I used one in a bowl of beans I took to work, and I have to say they work very nicely with pinto beans.  Their flavor is not quite like umeboshi: its almost metallic, and is taking some getting used to, but I'll keep experimenting to see what they go well with.
 I'm looking forward to tasting them in a few months and finding out how the flavor develops.

Quest cooking: calabacitas

About a year ago I started a Wordpress blog called Quest for the Flame, wherein I started writing about my experiments with efficient wood stoves, among other things.  It's been months since I posted there, and lately on reflection I've found it redundant and too much effort to keep up so many blogs with so much else demanding my time.  So I've more or less abandoned that blog.  Today I'm going to post here about my most recent experience cooking with one of my homemade stoves.

This stove is a rocket stove, made with a #10 can and some smaller food cans.  You can read instructions on making your own here, if you're a cheapskate like me and don't want to pay for one of the really nice ones from SilverFire or Ecozoom; and/or you like to make things yourself.  I've experimented with woodgas stoves too, which I love the idea of, but I've found this rocket stove the easiest to use for cooking.  (BTW, those instructions show a dremel and fiberglass insulation; I used tin snips and perlite.)

After having cooked several pots of rice over this, I scored a big stainless steel wok at the local DI, and since a traditional wok stove is very much like a rocket stove, I thought that using the wok for stir-frying would be a perfect way to use mine.  Yesterday I did my second stir-fry using this, and it turned out beautifully.  The setting was Nunn's Park, close to the beautiful Bridal Veil Falls in Provo Canyon, a favorite picnic and walking spot.  It was crowded, but we were lucky enough to find a table with a grill, where I set up.

The stove is so efficient that I cooked the dish with only these three sticks - and didn't even burn them all up!

This was a simple dish, more or less a version of calabacitas, using some of the plentiful summer produce we're swimming in.  First, zucchini and yellow crookneck squash, with some garlic:

- next, tomatoes with salt and Turkish Seasoning from Penzeys:

- and after that had simmered a bit, scallions and cilantro:

When it was all done, I doused the stove quickly (park regulations forbid open fires during this dry summer) and we enjoyed a nice compliment to our other picnic fare.

Almost no smoke, a good consistent hot flame making for a quick cooking time, and a tasty result.  I hope this gives some useful ideas, and thanks to my beautiful and talented sweetie for taking pictures!

If you want to see more food you can cook on a rocket stove, watch the youtube channel Solid Fuel Cooking, from the Netherlands.

A writing milestone

A few weeks ago I received my first rejection notice as a fiction writer.  I had submitted a short story to a local contest back in March, a story I had drafted last year and spent a great deal of time working into what I thought was a nicely polished state.  I sent it in, and then I went back to creeping ahead on my novel.

Every once in a while I'd wonder when I might hear something; it seemed like it was taking a long time.  And then the message arrived in my inbox.  At first I was quite hopeful - I thought I'd written a pretty interesting story, or at least a well-told one.  So I'm ashamed to admit it, but admit it I will: I was crushed.

And then I went and had another look at that story I was so proud of, and you know what?  It's crap.  It's hastily written, it's vague, it's boring, it's irrelevant . . . what ever possessed me to enter it into a contest?

So, there's just one thing to do, isn't there: go back and revise it, and this time take my time to do it right.  I might just be old enough by now to accept this as a necessary part of the process of getting published - after all, I've been through it before, from the academic side.  It's been a few years, and I had forgotten what it was like.

Writers who get published often amass large collections of rejection notices from their early attempts.  I like to think that getting this first one was a breaking of some kind of ice, and now that I've started on this stage I'm that much closer to my goal.

Fictional foods: experiments with apricots

I've spent a lot of time building my world, and part of the process of making it as rich and realistic as I can is thinking about what people eat there.  Over the years I've done quite a bit of experiments in the kitchen as I've concocted and invented recipes that I imagine might be on the tables of various lands and peoples.  Something that I'd like to do some day for LTUE would be to help organize a potluck meal with participants bringing dishes from stories they liked - or wrote, or are writing.  M.K. Hutchins, whom I met at the 2014 meeting, had that idea, and I need to talk to her about it again.

You should read her blog: she puts recipes up there, for fictional foods as well as for authentic Aztec chocolate.  And you should read her stories.

So it's apricot season here in Utah, and a nice neighbor let us go and pick from her tree.  This was last week, and the fruits were only just starting to ripen - everywhere I drive I see trees loaded with fruit and it makes me sad.  There's more than I can ever pick or use, and apparently more than most people want to pick or use - one more lamentable loss of pioneer values.  I'll make a quick plug here, to any readers in the Wasatch Front area, for the Glean Utah and Glean Provo Facebook groups.  They need a lot more attention, as do the fruit trees around here.

So, in my tiny attempt to do my part, and enlisting the help of a zealous seven-year-old, I ended up with a lot of apricots that are not quite ripe.  I ate as many as I could, and I still had all these others sitting here, and outside there are still more and more ripening.  I thought about what I could do with these, and I decided that with the ripest ones I would make freezer jam.

And with the unripe ones, I got this crazy idea: what would happen if I packed them with salt and let them sit?  My Japanese cousins had introduced me to umeboshi years before, and I remembered that those aren't really plums but a certain variety of apricot.  Would plain old apricots work?  I did a search and found exactly what I was looking for: yes!

I thought to myself: this is Japanese, but the ingredients - apricots and salt - are plentiful in Utah, and of course also in the environment where much of my work in progress takes place (one of the states there owes its wealth to the salt trade).  So why wouldn't the people in my world preserve some of their apricots in this way?  How they might use these pickled fruits in their cuisine?

So I got started: washed the fruits and picked out the unblemished ones,

packed them in bags with salt (and a bit of vinegar)

I used sea salt for the one on the left, and Himalayan pink salt on the right.  I didn't have enough Real Salt (from Redmond, UT) left to use on this.

and put the bags in a dark cupboard where they'll sit for the next month.

Meanwhile, I also found out that Mexico has a similar food tradition: saladitos and chamoy.  After all, why not?  If you have certain ingredients available, people are going to figure out different ways to combine them.  It just goes to show that while we might identify certain foods or ingredients with a certain culture or place, the world is wide and varied, and the human imagination even more so.

Happy Pioneer Day!

A very short Sunday post

It's late, I'm tired, I go to work very early in the morning, so I should be going to bed soon, but I don't want to go to bed soon because I just got my children down and I have some quiet time to myself.  That is an extremely rare commodity these days - no, not a commodity, a luxury.  Two weeks or so ago I wrote about doing a post every Sunday, so naturally Sundays have made themselves very difficult to post here.  But I'm crawling along, and so here are these words.

This evening we all went for a walk in a local park which we like very much.  It has trails among tall trees (mostly elm, I think, with some maple and scrub oak) and on summer evenings when the golden light of the lowering sun hits those trees it creates a magical effect.  But depending on where you go in there it can also be kind of eerie: there are bits of old rusted discarded things in odd places, and there are also bits of old concrete constructions that look almost like long-abandoned war fortifications.  We explored some of the narrower trails going up the dirt slopes under the elms, and at times I was strongly reminded of the Tarkovsky film Stalker, which I haven't seen for years.

It's the sort of place I can imagine being afraid of when I was younger, or that some older people might be afraid of, the sort of place you can well imagine people gathering for all kinds of sinister purposes.  But in fact, it's a disc golf course, so the greatest dangers are: 1. falling down and 2. getting in the way of people throwing their discs and annoying them.

I like the town where we live.

Zhneshtotmatlitszeth-n'

Today I'm feeling grateful for not taking a bad path in my life.

This has to do with the kind of music I listen to. Music is such an important part of life for so many of us that it's important to be mindful of what music we're listening to and why. I feel good about the music I listen to, which gives my life more richness than I can know. I know I take it for granted most of the time, especially now with the internet.

When I was young I was in danger of going down a wrong path with my music, allowing other people to shape my listening choices in regrettable ways.

I'm talking about rock and roll.

Specifically, I'm talking about how some people tried to stop me from listening to rock and roll, and for a while I was in danger of following their misguided warnings.

I was young and impressionable when I first heard scandalized reports of the evils of rock music: bands with names like Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead – horrors! It wasn't quite like the movie Footloose – I didn't live in a small town and the church had no problem with dancing (of the right kind), but the knee-jerk fear of the strange and different was just as strong at home and at church. I remember telling my younger sister that rock and roll was devil worship and that I wasn't going to listen to it.

I didn't keep that resolution for very long, for two reasons: my older sister's discovery of MTV and my older brothers' record collection that they left behind when they went away to college. It was a treasure trove, full of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes and the like. And as my sister continued to sneak views of MTV at night, she started buying more records of the bands she was hearing: mid-80s stars like Ratt, Cinderella, Poison, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses . . . my parents were very worried. I could tell that there was illicit subject matter in some of the stuff, but I had no clue that “Pour some sugar on me” was supposed to be a sexual metaphor, and I thought that Van Halen must be heavenly messengers after I watched the video of the Blue Angels stunt flying to “Dreams.”

This went on for some years, and as adolescence eroded my innocence I did sometimes suffer pangs of conscience for listening to some of the music that I did. Every once in a while I had to confront some explicit warnings from the authorities. Some I could shrug off without too much guilt, like my youth leader who thought that Queensrÿche's nifty logo looked Satanic. Others were harder to ignore.

One Sunday when I was 17, the Priests' Quorum lesson consisted of a recorded talk by some minor general authority about the perils of inappropriate music. I don't remember the who or when or where the talk had been recorded, but I had heard plenty of this kind of thing over the years, and progressing through my youth I had developed quite a selective ear for the rock music I liked so much. I knew the Rolling Stones were right out, of course, because of the story of Gene R. Cook talking to Mick Jagger on an airplane and hearing out of Mick's own mouth that their music was calculated to drive teens to have sex. (You can read about this in several places, for example here and here.)

In truth, I've always found the Rolling Stones a bit boring, so that wasn't really a problem. I had put aside a lot of rock and especially pop music that I decided was not worth my time – in fact, my 18^th year of life was when I was most heavily into Rush and Queensrÿche, and had decided that a lot of other rock music just didn't measure up to those standards. Not to mention that I could see how many of my youth leaders, in being worried about heavy metal, completely missed the more blatant sexual messages in the more mild-sounding pop music they listened to.

So I was feeling pleased with myself as I listened to this talk, and allowed myself a bit of arch amusement at this old guy's immoderate hysteria about rock music, and then he dropped the bomb. He mentioned a song that everybody knew about which had the hidden lyric “Here's to my sweet Satan.” He mentioned this as an example of the really dangerous rock music out there that we just couldn't afford to dabble with.

But he didn't name the song or the group!

I was seized by doubt. Who was it? I didn't ask if anyone in the room knew; I wasn't that outspoken. Besides, I was truly afraid of finding out: what if it was a band I really liked? What if it was Rush? I could already tell that Neil Peart was skeptical about God, and there was that 2112 album cover with the pentagram. I had come to terms with Neil's expression of his beliefs in his lyrics, and I didn't listen to "Ghost of a Chance" or "Anthem."  I could forgive Neil for not believing in God, I could even forgive him from preaching selfishness in his youth, but what if . . .

No, it couldn't be Rush. Could it? Well then who? Maybe it was Black Sabbath? I didn't listen to them, only “Iron Man” when it came on the radio.

The question sat at the back of my mind for years. I wanted to know who had done it, but at the same time I didn't, just in case I might find out that I really had been dangling from the devil's hook unknowing for years. So over 20+ years of the World Wide Web I've never looked it up online – until just a few days ago.

Actually, I stumbled across it, as I was reading about something else, viz: the recent lawsuit brought against - and won by - Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement, for the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.”  (I won't discuss that in this post.)

I feel like I'm late to the party in discovering this weird little nugget in The Greatest Song in the World, but, it's sad to admit, I have a history of unease with “Stairway to Heaven” and Led Zeppelin generally. The first time I heard it (I was young and impressionable) was with a family member who was analyzing the lyrics and mentioned the possibility that instead of being a song with a Good Message, as seemed plain to me, it might actually be a song with a Bad Message. In other words, what if that “piper” were really the Devil? She never said anything about the supposed hidden message in the recording; I don't think she had heard about it.

And that album cover – well, it was certainly mysterious, wasn't it? Kind of spooky, with those arcane-looking sigils. My due respect for Led Zeppelin was retarded by that initial suspicion, so that the timeless wonder and quality of their music took a long time to erode my wary defenses. On the way, of course I heard a bit of schoolyard and lunchroom rumors (though never the one about the backmasked message): “dude, they wrote the song while they were high on some drug.” “Isn't that song about the devil or something?” “Didn't they sell their souls to the devil?” In the pre-internet information-scarce environment of public schools, any scandalous rumor seemed as likely to be true as the next. It didn't help that I saw a record-burning on the news with Led Zeppelin albums prominently displayed.

By the time I was 17, I had shed almost all of my unease or guilt at listening to Led Zeppelin – I had taped just about all of their songs that got regular radio airplay, and I spent my senior skip day listening to my brothers' old Zep LPs (including #4) on a friend's turntable. Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I had been told at that age that “Stairway to Heaven” had the hidden message “Here's to my sweet Satan” in it, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I might not have been able to play it backwards for myself to check, but knowing how credulous I was I might have believed it. And that might have caused me even more psychic retardation. As it was, I got rid of a CD I bought of symphonic arrangements of Led Zeppelin songs when I was in my early 20s partly because the artwork made me uncomfortable. It was too . . . magical. I regret getting rid of that CD, partly because of my silly squeamishness, partly because the crushing rendition of “Kashmir” was worth the price alone.

Because the thing is, of course, Led Zeppelin is magical! Good British lads, they tapped into the same rich soil of Faerie that J.R.R. Tolkien did in their own way – after all, Tolkien was one of their big inspirations. I've written already about how much I loved fantasy fiction and role-playing as a teenager, and during that time I vehemently defended these hobbies against the accusations of Satanism that came from “ignorance andprejudice and fear.” I assuaged my feelings of guilt at listening to “Stairway to Heaven” with the thought that a new day dawning with laughter echoing in the forests could be understood not only as an image of the Millennium but also sounded like Bilbo and his buddies having a great time in the Shire (I'd be willing to bet my lunch tomorrow that Plant was thinking of something out of Tolkien when he wrote that line). Forests echoing with laughter sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in.  I want to pack my bags for the Misty Mountains!

If I had had cause to believe seriously that all of this was really tainted by an earnest profession of allegiance to Satan I might have turned decisively and ventured too far down the path away from all that: away from the color, vitality and wonder found in so many creative expressions influenced by or alluding to magic, whether labeled as fantasy or otherwise. I might never have picked up Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung; I might have decided to really sever my relationship with fantasy fiction for good and all, I might have never started listening to King Crimson . . . who knows, I might have even decided that Harry Potter was of the Devil.

I don't like to think of myself in such a state.

Fortunately, my exposure to this strange and amusing sonic coincidence has come at a stage in my life where I'm more skeptical than I've ever been and also seldom shocked or offended by anything I see, hear or read. And I had already been inoculated against taking backmasking seriously. When I first heard about the “my sweet Satan” hidden message I thought the man was talking about a subliminal message that you might have to turn the sound up or speed up or slow down to hear, not a silly backwards thing. I don't know if I misheard or misremembered, or if the speaker was misinformed and simply took his bad information as a reliable report not needing any questions. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

Being curious, I've still done my own investigation. I've heard the section of “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, listened to it slowed down, made phonetic transcriptions, heard multiple versions and gotten to the bottom of how that vocal line can sound like “my sweet Satan” backwards. Because I do have to admit: hearing it for the first time was unnerving. After all, hearing any human speech backwards gives an uncanny effect (as David Lynch exploited to hair-raising effect in Twin Peaks). If your mind is primed to hear “Satan” it's possible to assign that word to three utterances in the clip. This whole thing has been a good chance for me to reflect on what I learned in Linguistics about the brain's way of picking meaning out of sound, and the weird things that can result when we impose our need for pattern recognition on random stuff (think of A Beautiful Mind, for example). For years I've enjoyed reading mis-heard song lyrics, and the other day I just about wet my pants laughing to this video of Orff's “O Fortuna.”

Back to "Stairway."  Listening closely and repeatedly – as digital technology makes possible – shows that only the first utterance that you might parse as “Satan” really comes close to having all the right sounds. The others are really just “say” - reversed from “yes” and “fiy” reversed from “if” pronounced with a diphthong. But the glottal stop that Robert Plant started each does sound like a hasty N in reverse, giving those backwards utterances a resemblance to the Standard American pronunciation of “Satan.” In the first (or the last) Robert Plant led off from the glottal stop with a little nasal hum before articulating the dental fricative in “there's still time.” On the reversal that sounds like an N, giving the backwards “there's” a really close resemblance to “Satan,” priming the ear for the “yes” and “if.” Since he pronounces “time” more like “tom” the vowel keeps its purity in reverse and can sound like “my” or “mah” instead of “miah.” That makes it easier to hear “sweet” instead of the “tleet” that's really going on. The L is slightly rounded too, and with some aspiration (the common leaky articulation) of T forwards, there's your SW resemblance backwards. Also the background instruments obscure the vocal sounds, giving an even more vague input for the mind to try to process into something. With such mushy uncertainty, the pattern-making mind could fill in all sorts of weird things – like the nonsense of the rest of the supposed hidden message.

If it had been recorded today, someone might have parsed the reversal as “jest my tweet Satan.” Whatever meaning anyone might extract from that could make as much sense as that silly toolshed. (Now if it had been seeing something nasty in the woodshed, we might have a case here. Though I can't think of any lyrics that would make any sense to backmask “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” The closest I can get is “the stove and tea, it's on, meat sauce, yeah.”)

Now why anyone would think that the mind's desperate attempts to make sense of backwards singing should mean that those improvised meanings are actually assimilated unconsciously going forward is hard to imagine . . . until you remember that people who come up with these kinds of scenarios aren't generally in the habit of thinking scientifically or even critically.

I feel silly admitting a need to have done so, but feels good to fully debunk this rumor through my own sonic/linguistic analysis. Like a Hogwarts wizard dispelling a boggart, I say “Riddikulus!” and laugh.

And I play the song for my children, glad that they are hearing it in its glory, without prejudice.