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My father accidentally introduced me to Barry Hannah in the mid-70s when he bought Hannah’s first novel, the Faulkner award winning Geronimo Rex. For some random reason I read it — we never discussed the book, my father never recommended it or even mentioned it, it just appeared on a shelf in the bookcase and I read it.

It is one of a few books which makes me laugh out loud, a book I push on people to read over and over as one of the most wickedly funny examples of Southern American writing ever penned.  A tale of coming of age in 1960s Mississippi, it actually more like Animal House on paper — a very sophomoric story of three misfits rooming together off campus at Ole Miss.

In 1977 I was accepted into a writing class taught by Gordon Lish, fiction editor at Knopf and short story editor at Esquire. He championed the new wave of post-modern writers like Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Hannah. In one of the first classes he handed out copies of Hannah’s amazing short story anthology, Airships and read out loud the extremely short story, “Coming Close to Donna.” I was captivated.

Barry Hannah never broke out as a best selling author, nor did he go on to achieve great things like others of his generation. But he did write beautifully, crafting his sentences with the precision of a Haiku. He was earthy, his humor was located south of his belt, but he was entertaining as could be. I loved his writing.

I walked most of the eastern shoreline of Cotuit yesterday, breaking the hike into three sections. One at 7 am. One at lunch, and the last in the late afternoon around sunset. All told I covered six and half miles of mostly sand, with some Main Street pavement mixed in. The dogs accompanied me for half of the distance, their favorite thing in the world is a beach walk. Indeed, all I have to say to them is “Do you want to …..?” and they start bouncing off the furniture and assault each other in anticipation.

The new camera is a nice thing to bring along, especially its high definition video capabilities. I find myself very fond these days of Flickr’s video hosting for two reasons: the Flickr uploader application bundles the videos on the camera up with the still pictures so I don’t need to upload stills to one place and videos to YouTube; and second, Flickr is not normally blocked in China or Turkey — two places where YouTube is dead.

First, a video of some Canada Geese exploding off of the marsh when I surprised them at Handy’s Point. Good thing Captain Sullenberger was not on the ascent in the neighborhood.

I started at the town dock right at sunset — which at the start of this week at this latitude is 5:15 pm. By Sunday it will be 5:31 — so we’re gaining two minutes of daylight every day now. There’s still ice in the harbor — it comes and goes depending on the wind and temperature. This sheet stuck against the town dock makes an interesting ringing sound as the waves wrinkle underneath it.

Then along the beach to Lowell’s Point. Above is the abandoned home of the former president of Harvard, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, also known as the arbitrator in the Sacco-Vanzetti case early in the last century.  The cement sea wall and old wooden groins are disintegrating.

Then along the shore to the boat ramp at the foot of Old Shore Road, where this old sign warns people not to anchor on the submarine cable that runs across the bottom of the bay to Grand Island.

My father always advised setting the mooring of the family boats to the south of the cable, in the belief that in a blow they would drag through the black mud and fetch up and hook onto the cable. So much for warning signs. I think the old man was right though. Stay to the south of the cable.

Then around the fresh water springs at Hooper’s Landing where Conrad Geyser proves the best use for an O’Day Daysailor is to be reborn as a clamming catamaran named the Thermoplayae.

The rest of the walk is smooth sailing down the broad sands of the yacht club beach to Handy’s Point. Ducks cruise along, the winter sticks on the moorings look like crosses in a military cemetery, and critters rustle in the underbrush under the bluff. The dogs get freaked out by something at the same place along the beach. I think a coyote must have killed something there  because they sniff at the spot and then cling to me like something bad is going to happen.

Handy’s Point is where my great-great-grandmother used to live, before she sold the place to be closer to the village in the winter. Can’t blame her, husband at sea, infants, big drafty house on the beach. Her descendants may wish for the view, but the salty old timers wanted nothing to do with the beach. That’s where bad things happened during storms and where the lower class clammers and watermen made their livings.

I find myself needing beach time more this time of year than the middle of summer. It’s just me and the dogs and no pissed off waterfront property owners, few ticks, and a vacant harbor to gaze out on.

I marked the end of 2009 by retiring my blue backpack that has accompanied me through the last decade beginning with its first trip to London to McKinsey’s offices in January 2001 to its final brokendown trip to San Francisco two weeks ago.

It was a fine pack, one I purchased at the Hyannis Eastern Mountain Sports store along with a padded laptop sleeve. From McKinsey to 21i.net and my Zurich days, to my ghostwriting days at Gartner through my eight months at IDG, and finally — for the past four years at Lenovo, that blue bag has carried the following cargo (give or take a few exceptions).

• ThinkPad (usually an ultraportable like an X60 or an X200, but lately a big T500)
• The aforementioned padded laptop sleeve with four mesh compartments (which is obsessively managed to provide me with the perfect “in-my-seat” experience from ChapStick to iPod and white cable, Shure headphones to mini-usb cables, wireless mouse, and 4gb “Clouds of Promise” commemorative 2008 Summer Olympics memory key from Lenovo Chairman Yangqing Yang.
• Lenovo power adapter in zip up mesh bag with power tips, airplane plug, and 12v car charger adapter
• A clear plastic folio for holding receipts and travel documents
• Moleskine notebook
• Pack of 3″x5″ index cards
• Business cards
• Laser pointer and LED flashlight from Qualcomm
• Passport
• Stamps
• Four personal notecards and envelopes for real thank you’s, congratulations and condolences
• Restoril (temazepam) for sleeping on jet lag intensive trips
• Immodium and Pepto-Bismal tablets for dysentery
• Advil gel-caps
• Claritin
• Blackberry and charger
• FlipCam
• Mifi wireless hotspot and charger
• refills for my Lamy Swift
• A mechanical pencil
• A spare ballpoint
• A few packages of spare contact lenses
• Gum
• Wad of foreign currencies held together with a paper clip
• Handful of spare change tossed in willy-nilly whenever I approach the TSA metal detectors
• Soylent Green protein bars
• Wad of frequent flier cards held together with a paper clip
• Checkbook
• Office keys
• Lenovo ID badge on a zing-it
• Leather “pocket briefcase” with index cards,  business cards, and taxi receipts
• spare American Airlines red checked baggage tags
• Kindle

The faithful EMS bag has been heading downhill for a few years, beginning with an ill-conceived bottle of SuperGlue packed to Phoenix Arizona in 2001 for a McKinsey partner’s meeting at the Biltmore. I had the idiotic idea that I would tie saltwater flies while traveling by packing my Renzetti Traveler vise, and the feathers and others materials to make a series of Bob Popovics Shady Lady Squid patterns (one of the most deadly early season striper patterns on the South Cape). Somehow the Superglue  discharged prematurely inside of the pack’s front compartment and permanently welded shut half of the zipper and created an amazing frozen sculpture of junk inside. I did tie a dozen of the pattern and caught a gorgeous 36″ bass in the rip at Succonnesset Shoals with one in the spring of 2001.

The right shoulder strap adjustment buckle was caught between the tailgate of my car and shattered, necessitating a permanent figure-eight knot in the end of the strap. The very front key compartment simply lost its zipper and has been gaping open for the last year. The blue fabric is still fine, but a bit grimy, and I admit I feel like a bit of an overgrown schlub carrying around a big knapsack like a 12 year old boarding the school bus. I looked at various briefcases — from Coach to Glaser — but none had the infinite capacity of the EMS, and none could be fully shouldered and humped in times of forced marches through the endless concourses of the world’s airports (I refuse to use wheeled luggage or take moving sidewalks as part of a silent protest against the Wall-E vision of fatsos being carried to-and-fro in electric wheelbarrows).

My son and I started poking around San Francisco for a replacement during the interregnum between Xmas and New Year’s, starting at the REI south of Market Street. I told him as we entered that I would not purchase anything less than a perfect replacement for the dying EMS; that I couldn’t accept any compromise because  it had to last another decade, and that I would be very picky. The problem with pack shopping is that it can’t happen online. Sorry, but there is no way to fully experience the heft of the zippers, the utility of the compartments, and the possibility of fitting under an airplane seat unless one pulls it apart and ignores the salesman’’s pitch.

REI had an impressive assortment of bags ranging from little day packs to hardcore backpacks with metal frames and enough capacity to handle a tent, sleeping bags, stoves, fuel, water bottles, and clothing to complete a passage of the Appalachian Trail. There was a couple contenders, but no winners, and for an hour I fretted and unzipped one bag after another. I came close to committing to an Eagle Creek pack, but came to my senses and walked away. Then we hit a Sports Basement in the Mission and there was even less of a choice. The old blue bag would have to do, and no, EMS doesn’t make it anymore, offering a great selection, but none so great as that original winner.

Yesterday, New Year’s Eve, found me on the road along the coastline to Santa Cruz and eventually Monterey. I stopped at the Patagonia outlet in Santa Cruz and found nothing in the way of a back pack. But I did find perfection and it’s name is MLC (Maximum Legal Carry-on)

This sucker is a briefcase/suitcase with a shoulder sling strap and two stowable shoulder straps — permitting me to convert it from a bag with a handle to a bag with straps. I might be able to do away with my duffel bag and fit my clothing into this bag for the usual two-night stand to Raleigh or New York City. Even without clothing it easily ate the list above and then some. The zippers aren’t as burly as the EMS, but I can feel myself falling in love already. Of such simple things is contentment built.

Woke up at 4 am in California to take East Coast calls. Stumbling around pre-coffee in the dark in my mother-in-law’s Potrero Hill kitchen I grabbed a baguette and smeared some Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk cheese on it.

I needed a gas mask. This stuff is seriously toxic (but good). Reminds me of a French Epoisse,  the cheese that is reputedly banned from French public transportation. I am totally ruined for public consumption. Mere breath mints will not erase this issue. Now to figure out how to smuggle a few of these things back to Boston on Sunday without a) ruining my suitcase and its contents and b) setting off the nerve gas detectors at the security checkpoints.

A band I have been keeping my eyes on for a few weeks — Them Crooked Vultures — is a week away from releasing their debut album. It’s one of those celebrity rocker projects — John Paul Jones from Led Zeppelin, Dave Grohl from Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss. In keeping with the trend set by Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and others, the band has done an interesting job in building demand for the music through a web site, email newsletter, and the release of a sample song …. through YouTube.

This morning the band notified me via email that the entire album was on YouTube. The website is a great example of leveraging social sharing tools to spread the word — a real time Twitter feed — Facebook integration. So very smart interactive marketing happening behind the scenes.

So I went to YouTube — which is not surprising given that I heard the experts at YouTube/Google once confirm that the most viewed type of content on the service is …. music — and indeed, there were all 13 tracks from the furthcoming release.

Now it gets interesting. I’ve been playing with DoubleTwist all summer — a content “synchronizer/player” developed by DVD Jon. This is a very very very intriguing piece of software that has freed me from the locked tyranny of iTunes so I can manage my digital assets across multiple devices — in other words, I can put iTunes music on my BlackBerry Bold thanks to DoubleTwist. The program has a cool function that also allows one to paste in the url of a YouTube video and import into a local playlist.  Five minutes and I had the entire Them Crooked Vultures album on my iPod a week early (I will buy it, the quality of the MP3s is obviously low and sub-par).

So what? Well, the so-what is that the artists are sharing stuff for free on free platforms and I can collect and manage that free stuff using free tools. If I were a credit-card challenged 25-year old who was compelled to build a music library I think I would need look no further than YouTube and DoubleTwist. I look forward to the insights of noted Music Economist Uncle Fester on this “freemium” tactic.

… I slept an hour later than usual, woke to grey skies, ate bacon and eggs instead of beneficial oatmeal, did rapid-fire errands, stopped by the herring run just as the day turned awesome (I saw a big school of herring waiting in the top pool), installed a new mower blade and mowed the lawn, bought a six-pack of Offshore Ale, strung up my rod with a new lure, and hit the prettiest beach on Cape Cod for two hours of casting practice (no fish yet) in the setting sun before rushing home and catching the last five innings of a four-hour classic of a baseball game against Yankees (who also lost a nailbiter to the Sox the night before), cooking the entire time (rillettes, duck leg confit, vegetable stock, hummous) screaming at the TV in the kitchen, and scaring the dogs.

I congratulated my esteemed neighbor for doing the right thing, and she told me about an profile of your humble narrator in the Barnstable Enterprise.  I couldn’t find a copy, but someone dropped it by the house while I was running errands. I feel conspiciously auspicious. I’d point to it, but it’s not online and I am not in the mood for personal promotion.

A good friend dropped by and we got on the topic of seagull attacks and the time I watched a seagull poop into someone’s agape mouth aboard the Hyline ferry M/V Point Gammon when I worked on there as a deckhand in college.

Tomorrow I paint the bottom of the yacht and continue my gardening. My spring peas have sprouted and my arugula is showing itself.  The tulips have opened and the alcove reeks of hyacinths.

On a day like today it does not suck to be me.

My first pate de campagne is in the oven, cooking slowly in a bain marie, assembled per the recipe in my new favorite cookbook, Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. This is basically a French meatloaf, but a really, really, really good meatloaf. Pate has the reputation of being cruel liverwurst because of the iconic cliche of pate de fois gras, but the campagne version is the country version of essentially a big pork sausage without the casing, sliced, and served cold.

I’ve been itching to make one since an unforgotten meal some ten years ago in Paris, with my wife’s godfather, at a little hole in the wall in a neighborhood somewhere on the southwestern side of the city. We sat down and the waiter brought over a terrine — a rectangular earthenware container — with a baguette and knife.  I dug in and have been on a crusade to find that experience ever since.

I had to buy a meat grinder attachment for my KitchenAid mixer, and I just nuked the kitchen putting the recipe together, but little does my poor wife know what lies in store for I also purchased the sausage stuffing attachment so I can get real serious and start pumping out some andouille and other smoked tubes of goodness. I won’t be doing the salami, dry-cured stuff. Flirting with botulism is not my idea of culinary fun. Now I have to hit up my nephew for use of his mega-smoker that he got for Christmas a few years ago. This book has it all — how to use every part of the pig except for the veritable squeal.

For baseball fans it is hot stove season, the interregnum between the World Series and the call up of pitchers and catchers to spring training. I’ve got my wood stove roaring and my bookshelf groaning with winter reading. Here’s a quick list of what’s in the backpack, on the nightstand, and on the Kindle these days; and then what I’m watching on the DVD player.

What We Had:  A brief memoir by James Chace of life growing up in the southeastern Massachusetts city of Fall River — once the largest cotton spinning city in the world — now a sad hulk and husk of its former self. This is where Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her father forty whacks, but Chace writes an amazingly poignant story of the decline of a Yankee family from privilege to irrelevance. From his grandfather, the former president of the Massachusetts State Senate to his brother, a crazed World War II war hero, Chace tells a elegant story of a family, a city, and a society in decline.

Not on the par of “Goodbye to All That” — but nevertheless a good book about the slide of a Yankee family and one man’s determination to make sense of it.

Going to See the Elephant: Rodes Fishburne’s first novel. He worked at Forbes ASAP when I was at Forbes.com but I didn’t know him. He edited the annual “Big Issue” — a compendium of essays by big thinkers and celebs — and that most shows in his brilliant portrayal of the mad scientist/big thinker that seems like an amalgamation of Dean Kamen, Nathan Myhrvold, Esther and Freeman Dyson, and every other digital visionary to draw breath and haunt a podium the last twenty years. This is a good San Francisco novel — worthy of the canon that includes McTeague and rolls through the ages — but being a comical effort, it may irritate on occasion as it reaches for laughs that are not always (but occasionally) there.

Movies

I decided to dig through my son’s amazing 50 DVD collection — Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, and have been toting around some discs as I travel. This past week I viewed:

Brief Encounter: 1945 David Lean directed this Noel Coward weepie starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Listed among the best efforts of all time in British cinema. Amazingly effective, melodrama aside, in terms of Lean camera work and impeccable editing, but mostly in the pre-WWII depiction of adultry and morals in suburban England. I wasn’t boo-hooing in my hankie, but it’s interesting to see how to do a weepie right.

Ballad of a Soldier: directed by Grigory Chukhraj. 19-year old Russian soldier in World War II destroys two tanks, is hailed a hero, asks for a leave to go home to fix his mother’s leaking roof. Makes his way through peril and travail, falling in love along the way with the awesome Zhanna Prokhorenko (with whom I have a crush now). Interesting flick released in 1959 during the post-Stalin thaw, so not a lot of propaganda weirdness. Apparently a major sentimental favorite in Russia to this day.

Richard III: Laurence Olivier as the deformed evil tyrant and usurper Richard in Shakespeare’s masterpiece of treachery and lust for power. All I can say, is whoa, I mean I know Olivier had the reputation, but for some reason I had never full appreciated why (and it isn’t for his role as the Nazi dentist Dr. Zell in Marathon Man). This confirms why. The dude can act. Directed by him, this is considered his cinematic Shakespearean masterpiece. Technicolor makes the sets and costumes bizarrely gorgeous.

I wish I could memorize his “Now is the winter of our discontent …” soliloqy for my next staff meeting. Watch this piece of acting:

M. Hulot’s Holiday: Faithful French readers will doubtlessly say, “Duh, where have you been?” — but this is the funniest movie I have seen in a very long, long time. Jacque Tati, director and star, has to be one of the greatest physical comedians ever — up there with Chaplin and Keaton. The tennis scene made me pee my pants.  See this.

This weekend one of my favorite authors – science writer James Glieck – wrote in the New York Times an interesting homage to books in this day and age of digitization and “fungible” storage.

“One could imagine the book, venerable as it is, just vanishing into the ether. It melts into all the other information species searchable through Google’s most democratic of engines: the Web pages, the blogs, the organs of printed and broadcast news, the general chatter. (Thanks for everything, Gutenberg, and now goodbye.)

“But I don’t see it that way. I think, on the contrary, we’ve reached a shining moment for this ancient technology. Publishers may or may not figure out how to make money again (it was never a good way to get rich), but their product has a chance for new life: as a physical object, and as an idea, and as a set of literary forms. ”

Gleick’s piece brought to the forefront an issue I’ve had since last summer. I’ve been a Kindle user since early September and have, to date, read the following titles through the $350 device:

• Baseball Between the Numbers
• Moneyball: Michael Lewis
• The Audacity of Hope: Barack Obama
• Oblivion: David Foster Wallace
• Genghis Khan: Jack Weatherfield
• The Glass Castle: Jeannette Walls
• World Without End: Ken Follett
• What is the What: Dave Eggers
• Execution: Lawrence Bossidy, Ram Charan
• Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen

I like the Kindle. Indeed I love it. But I can’t indulge my penchant for giving away books thanks to this selfish device. I can tell people to read “Moneyball” but I can’t back that up by emphasizing my desire to share that experience by giving them my copy. The Kindle, ultimately, is a selfish device that cannot be loaned. Last week, while driving my son home from college, I sang the praises of “Shadow Country,” this year’s National Book Award in fiction. But I can’t lend it to him and indeed, tragically, I don’t have a physical copy to park on my favorite shelf next to the previous three books in the Watson series.

Oh the agony of the modern bibliophile. On the one hand my wife isn’t yelling at me for bringing more bricks of paper into the house, heavy rectangles that need to be stored someplace. I also don’t need to cram them into my backpack when I travel.

But, now I have a plastic device in a leather sleeve that isn’t half as ergonomically satisfying as a book, one that needs electricity to survive, and which I can’t lend to other people.

So I am conflicted. Like Glieck, I am delighted Google is digitizing the world’s libraries, giving a second life to millions of titles doomed to acid based paper and the physical barriers of getting inside of the Widener Library at Harvard. On the other hand I envisioned myself retiring, a wealthy man, into a lavish library with a leather chair and a roaring fire, and no other responsibilities in my dotage than to read my collection while getting sipping expensive eau de vie and shuffling around in my smoking jacket, a snoring terrier at my feet. Instead I get a glowing panel casting, in the words of Tom Wolfe, a “tubercular blue glow.”

This four-day break I tried to find a couple hours each day to sit down with a great book or film and unwind from the sometimes bloodless world of marketing, powerpoints, conference calls and key performance indicators. This vacation has been a particular relief from a season of grueling bad news and I took advantage of the time to put my gardens to bed for the winter, exercise, cook, and spend as much time outdoors as possible with my family.

FILMS: Two films worth noting. The first, Andrei Rublev, was highly touted by my son Eliot, a senior in the cinema studies program at NYU’s Tisch School. He specializes in the obscure, but has guided me to some amazing movies in the past, including my all-time favorite, Ordet. Eliot is a good guide to difficult films, providing a smart narrative during the film to keep things in context. Andrei Rublev is by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and is based on the life of a medieval Russian icon painter, a monk who actually is less at the heart of the narrative than the era itself. The tale unwinds in a series of chapters, all presented in a strange impressionistic fashion where plot and exposition of the story are discarded in favor of long lingering tracking shots of roots and mud, flaming cows, holy fools, and rapacious Tartar hordes. As Eliot himself admitted, on first viewing he thought the film was unwatchable, indeed he fell asleep, but on subsequent viewings he has rethought the film to the top of his ever mutating list of great films.

I would not recommend it unless you are seriously into new experiences. Let me say that a patient viewer will be well rewarded by the last vignette, in which Rublev, existentially blocked from his art by doubt, is reinspired by the raw passion of an orphaned teenaged boy who is called upon to cast a massive bronze bell for the medieval capital. Tarkovsky depiction of the process, of the insanity that besets the young bell maker as he tries to recall the secrets of the craft that were barely passed on to him by his late father, the forging of the bell, the drama of its first ringing. Serious stuff. A very important scene I would watch several times.

Movie two has been long awaited since I read the masterful novel it is based upon, The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I blogged about the book last summer, reading it just before I departed for Beijing and the Olympics. This is the tale of a Sicilian prince in the late 19^th century, and the film adaptation, by the Italian director Luchino Visconti is pretty amazing, but I would caution incomprehensible or wasted on someone who has not read the novel. Burt Lancaster plays the Prince and nails the role, despite Visconti’s apparent preference for an Italian actor in the role and dislike for Lancaster who was forced upon him by the producers (Lancaster went on to be cast in the masterpiece, 1900, by Bernando Bertolucci, and ultimately reconciled with Visconti who was his friend for the rest of his career). The role of Tancredi is played by Alain Delon, and the leading lady is Claudia Cardinale, for whom I’ve always had a serious crush since seeing her in Once Upon a Time in the West.

The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) is a gorgeous film that rises to a crescendo with the final ball in Palermo. Visconti’s treatment of the costumes, the interiors, the amazing scene of a room filled with chamberpots brimming with urine from the ball’s dancers …. Read the book, then rent the film.

APPLETV: I watched The Leopard on the new AppleTV video on demand device which downloads the content from the iTunes store. Pretty good stuff, but there’s a long way to go before AppleTV or video-on-demand is going to win my heart over. DSL based WIFI connectivity and interminable download times is not a real game changer in this day and age of instant gratification expectation, and the library is not amazingly comprehensive enough to be interesting to a film student like Eliot (let’s just say it will be a long time before iTunes offers Andrei Rublev). We also downloaded The Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s awesome western, in HD. That was good as always.

BOOKS: I’m juggling a few books as is my habit. I have started Constantine von Hoffman’s copy of Lives of the Popes (which I borrowed from him three years ago and have yet to return, earning the epithet, “David Churbuck, Book Thief of Lenovo” on his blog). This is good stuff as I am a big fan of Byzantine history and need to expand my studies into Catholicism and early Christianity having been lopsided towards the Greeks due to Gibbons and Norwich’s excellent Byzantium trilogy.

The high point of the recent reading season has been Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, his fourth novel about the controversial Florida murderer, settler, and pioneer, Edgar Watson. I was a devout fan of Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, regarding the set to be among the most important works of American fiction in the 20^th century. I will go way out on a superlative limb and say that Shadow Country is a masterpiece, the first work of fiction I would put on a syllabus of American literature were I teach such a course (along with Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, etc.). Matthiessen is often viewed as an “environmental” writer, a zen craftsman, but in his Watson series he proves himself a master of much more, exposing, through a tale told by many narrators, the literal end of the road of America, a place so hostile and brutal that it remains to this day. I have made a pilgrimage to the scene of Watson’s murder by neighbors, the beach in Chokoloskee, and I have journeyed into the abyss of the wilderness below that Indian mound into the island and channels verging into the Everglades. Nothing I have seen is more wild or closer to America’s own heart of darkness.

Shadow Country is, by Matthiessen’s admission, a reworking of the first three novels into the book he set out to write. I would nominate him for the Nobel prize in literature for the result and have long maintained it is a subject Hollywood should make into a film. The book just won the National Book award this month.

FOOD: I did a lot of cooking this past week. Of particular note.

1. A classic quahog chowder made according to Capt. Chatfield’s recipe.
2. A daube de bouef derived from Julia Childs: I would default to her beef bourguignon next time, but it was quite good.
3. Brussel sprouts with pancetta in a balsamic reduction with shallots. This came from a New York Times article a few years back featuring a dozen side dishes by top chefs. I can’t recommend it highly enough and I am an inveterate hater of brussel sprouts.
4. Leftover turkey converted into a turkey marsala with mushrooms over farfalle with pesto.
5. My new addiction/affliction: armagnac. I dunno, I’m a big fan of anything French. This is basically French moonshine made from grapes. Less refined than cognac but a lot more interesting.

WALKS: A few standard beach walks under gorgeous pink salmon Cape light, a great trek through the Crocker Neck conservation lands, a roadtrip to Nyes Neck on Buzzards Bay in West Falmouth to seek the Churbuckian manse, Windsway, as noted by Facebook pal, Frederick Churbuck. I think we found it, not sure. I will upload photos anon. The Churbucks of Falmouth are best known for Leander Churbuck, a painter of some repute and note.

My fashion sense is officially vindicated by the New York Times. In an article today, the Times declares that the classic utilitarian clothing of the past — Woolrich, Barbour, Topsider, Carhartt, Filson — is back in fashion as we slip into the Great Depression Redux.

Hell, right now I’m wearing:

1. A pair of Carhartt carpenter pants picked up for $29 at Sears.
2. A Filson wool shirt that cost over $100 and has to be dry cleaned, but is something that my grandchildren will fight over. 
3. A Filson wool vest that looks like it was ripped off from Elmer Fudd (red and black checks) that was a gift from my pals at Lenovo.
4. A pair of Sperry Topsiders

As Cousin Pete put it best — as I grow older and become known in the village as “Old Man Churbuck,” I need to declare whether I am going to go all green or khaki in my usual uniform of Dickies. There’s a certain Clamhead sartorial statement that involves Dickies, a white web/brass buckle belt, and baseball hat that is indicative of guys who work at the boatyard or drive the harbor launch. I’ve gone khaki big time. Welcome to the 1920s.

What could be finer?

1. There is no wind at 8 am so I am about to go for a pleasant fall scull around the harbor.
2. The dogs are frightened and avoiding me because of my bellicose behavior at 1:30 am when J.D. Drew homered to bury the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in the second game of the ALDS.
3. Hence my new motto, courtesy of Surviving Grady is: “WE ARE THE MOTHERF@#KING BOSTON RED SOX, CHUMPS, AND THOSE WHO OPPOSE US WILL TASTE THE LIGHTNING!”
4. I am on vacation. Ten days of being and nothingness. It’s time for the Fall Run and I am off to the Great Backside Beach to stand in foamy surf, sling eels into the darkness, and ponder my existence while staring across the Atlantic at Portugal.
5. I am going to cook a roti de porc au lait for my dinner tonight.
6. Perhaps I shall seek bivalves in the mud later today. Must check tides.

So, whereabouts this coming week? Going nowhere. How to contact me? Don’t. Blog probabilities? Low, except to lie about fish I haven’t caught, and to gloat about the BoSox.

Last night’s first game of the American League division championship between the Red Sox and the Angels  was a classic post-season game that began at 10 pm and ended around 1:30 am, insuring that I only got two-third of my required allotment of sleep. Today will be a long one.

Following the Game through Twitter and the “#redsox” hash tag (twitter is a 140-character “microblogging” system, think of it as open instant messaging) was an unrewarding experience. Keeping an eye on the laptop and an eye on the television made me miss some important plays, and none of the tweets, or comments, were particularly insightful or hysterically funny.

I’d rather read a live blog account from Red and Denton at Surviving Grady, or hang out with a bunch of smartass friends at a local dive, get messy, and call in sick the next day. The virtual bar of #redsox, while occasionally funny, had just enough lag to make it unfun. Then the volume of baseball chatter overwhelmed the usual Twitter torrent of Palin and Obama talk and the system started to lag. By midnight on the east coast, the Red Sox was dominating the Twitter buzz, but the content was … well, making fun of the color of one guy’s salmon colored sport coat, simultaneously cheering good catches and homeruns, and making fun of television ads for Viagra.

Facebook buddy Chris White (fellow Cotuit Skiff sailor) posed a question in his status that he was seeking the “most superlative” Terrapin Station (Grateful Dead song from the same-titled 1977 album). That was easy — San Bernadino. The question was what date? Off I went to the bookshelves where I took down this old bible ….

Deadbase III

I was right. Turned to the listing of songs, saw the DeadBase poll ranked the San Bernadino debut on February 26, 1977 as the top ranked, and was able to reply to Xtopher that he indeed needed to seek out that version at the Internet Archive.

DeadBase was published out of Hanover, New Hampshire (home to Dartmouth College) by John Scott, Mike Dolgushkin, and Stu Nixon. It was compiled on a Dartmouth mainframe, but back in the day when I purchased a hardcopy, was not available online. I searched, and yes, it is online today.

I was delighted to find, folded inside, a dot-matrix printout of my tape collection which I used to trade in the pre-internet days on a BBS called Terrapin Station and on the W.E.L.L. Talk about dating myself, my list, which was available as a plain ASCII .txt file, has this introduction:

“This list is also available in TBAQSE format. See BROKE.ARC in this directory. I tape on Maxell XLII and XLII-S. No Dolby, no fast records. Because my machine (Aiwa AD-WX808 dubbing deck) is on my desk, I turn trades around fast! This deck automatically dubs the target tape with the same levels and noise reduction scheme of the original, hence I have no control over what you get. If I received a show taped in Dolby B, then that’s what you get. I’m looking for complete shows 1965 through 1977 and any sets to fill out my incompletes. I rate technical levels out of a 5.0 scale with 5=unbelievable … 1=really bad sound or bad show (don’t worry, if it sux, I’ll warn you). If you’re new to trading, or just want a few shows, mail me a couple blanks but email first.”

Up in the attic are three big wooden racks filled with about three hundred 90-minute cassettes. Not much use for them now. I’d digitize them but …. I can get everything pretty much online or on CD. Still, nothing like the Dead to bring me back to my “social media” roots. Even my colleagues over in India are into the action. I owe them some music.

David Foster Wallace was my favorite living author and now he is dead, by his own hand, at 46, found hanging in his California home on Friday. The author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster (among others) he redefined digressionary erudition, made an art form of the footnote, and was one of the great shared pleasures in life between my son Eliot and me.

I am pretty devastated. Newsweek’s David Gates writes a great appreciation.

Here’s Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech, 2005.

David Foster Wallace: Photo by Steve Rhodes

Today’s WOD (Workout of the Day) for Crossfit is my new favorite thing to do — essentially picking up heavy stuff.  Crossfit, for the unitiated, is a fitness program developed by a guy named Greg Glassman which combined elements of gymnastics, Olympic weight lifting, and “functional movements” to build a definition of fitness which is pretty primal and controversial. CrossFit is used by the military, police departments, fire fighters, to build “elite” fitness (whatever that means). Me, I am trying to prep myself for old age and retain what dwindling muscle I have left before I enter that danger zone of elderly falls, broken hips, and nursing homes.

I started doing it in April at the suggestion of my rowing coach, Tom Bohrer, who occasionally contributes to the CrossFit Journal on rowing (CrossFit favors the Concept2 ergometer for building anaerobic fitness). Since then I’ve lost twenty pounds and developed some some serious upper body strength thanks to the first big weight workouts since I was on the heavyweight crew in college. It has taken a lot of time and ugly effort, but in a weird way it appeals to the sense of rower’s masochism which generally has propelled me.

My favorite exercise is the ominous sounding “deadlift.” As Coach Glassman says in his inimitable way: “this movement is baked into our DNA.” I guess cavemen practiced it by picking up big rocks.

You bend over a bar, you grab it, one hand gripping in, one gripping out, you curve your lower lumbar, and then you stand up. That’s it. Grab weight. Stand up. Put it down.

Having had my share of back problems in the past, I approach the lifting of anything with great care and trepidation. I was once bedridden for two weeks after lifting a television set. One bad move and twang, I’m down for the count. Years of rowing — a decidely back unfriendly sport — have set me up for issues, so when CrossFit put me back behind a weight lifting bar, I was terrified of the consequences.

Fortunately CrossFit’s site is loaded with good demonstration videos and coaching advice. The inhouse lifting coach — Mark Rippetoe — has a great book called Starting Strength which focuses on the technique used in Olympic lifting. I bought a copy, watched the videos, and set myself up in the garage gym.

The result? Well, let’s say I am not going to lift 1,000 pounds ever in my lifetime, but I am happy to say I can now pick up, and set back down, without injuring myself, over 300 pounds (I think I can do more, but I ran out of weight and need to buy more) And I don’t feel like one of those body builder meatheads with a big leather belt around my waist when I do it.

As my old cycling buddy Marta puts it — “Strength is about three things. Pick heavy stuff up. Pick heavy stuff up and push it over your head. Pick heavy stuff up and carry it around.”

The net result of three months of hard work with the CrossFit program is a total vanishing of my lower back pain. The return to very elemental movements — true situps, pushups, pullups — and the emphasis on back-to-basics exercise based on lifting one’s own body weight has been a revelation. There’s no membership, no gym, no machine. No fad. Just stuff our grandparents did  like the Walter Camp Daily Dozen — only more evil because a lot of CrossFit is done against the clock to make it interesting.

This is all inspired by today’s NYT article on the great benchmark of fitness — the simple pushup. I’d include in the mix the humiliating pull-up, and now my new fave, the dead lift.

Gardeners know them as stray plants — flowers or vegetables — that magically pop up where they weren’t planted. This morning, as I walked the dog around the yard, I saw this splash of color in the brown monotony of the April lawn, a Pansy from some past planting. “Volunteers”  seem like nice little miracles, better than a sneeze, up there with finding money in the pockets of some old pants.

The classic Arab imprecation: May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits comes to mind today as I migrate my corporate email from one system to another and regard this notice from corporate IT — “You will have to maintain two inboxes until further notice” — with the kind of migraine that one can’t knock down with mere Advil.

Anyway — if you need me, you know how to find me. My first name at my last name dot com always works. The new corporate address is davidchurbuck AT lenovo dot com.
And given my mood, and pounding headache, I thought it appropriate to acknowledge this band, Mission of Burma, who dominated the raucous Boston music scene in the early 80s (Spinal Tap: “So the Boston gig got cancelled, who cares? Not much of a college town….“) but faded away when their lead guitarist, Roger Miller, developed hearing problems because they were that loud.

Check out this video and you’ll see Miller wearing ear-muffs to try to save his ears. It was a shame — this band was beloved by critics and held up as being as influential in their own way as Sonic Youth and the Pixies (another Boston classic indie band). Moby covered this tune and gave it wide notice, but here’s the original.

Instapaper
Get Instapaper. Best browser plug in for reminding me what to read when I finally find time to read it. This is not a del.icio.us replacement, just a personal “string around the finger” tool. From the Instapaper FAQ:

“We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

“Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.”

Google Notebook

Sits in the lower right corner of my browser and as that browser becomes my desktop, having a note taking capability is crucial. I like this and wish it would embed in all of my local apps as well.

‘Tis the season of desiccation, a New England winter, some serious wind chill, zero humidity, and I start to crack and split like a stream bed in a drought. Since real men don’t use lotion (… the prisoner puts the lotion in the basket), I have usually just let my hands suffer, abused by gloveless clam digging, wood splitting, and the wearing of monstrous wool mittens like a giant four-year old would wear.

I found a yellow tin of this stuff over the sink last month, abandoned there by my wife who said it smelled foul.

Yep. It stinks but I like it. Take two hurting hands, smear a concoction of olive oil, rosemary, eucalyptus and beeswax all over them, and proceed to smear big greasy fingerprints all over the mouse, the keyboard … I use it on my face too. Is that wrong? At least I’m not using Bag Balm, the infamous Vermont goo and your cows’ udders.

I just opened tin #2 and have one on my desk in North Carolina. Burt’s is based in Durham, N.C. but was founded in a turkey coop in Maine. Burt was an actual beekeeper and his face is the one on the can. Louise Story wrote in the New York Times on Jan. 6:

“IN the summer of 1984, Burt Shavitz, a beekeeper in Maine, picked up Roxanne Quimby, a 33-year-old single mother down on her luck, as she hitchhiked to the post office in Dexter, Me. More than a dozen years Ms. Quimby’s senior, the guy locals called “the bee-man” sold honey in pickle jars from the back of his pickup truck. To Ms. Quimby, he seemed to be living an idyllic life in the wilderness (including making his home inside a small turkey coop).

“She offered to help Mr. Shavitz tend to his beehives. The two became lovers and eventually birthed Burt’s Bees, a niche company famous for beeswax lip balm, lotions, soaps and shampoos, as well as for its homespun packaging and feel-good, eco-friendly marketing. The bearded man whose image is used to peddle the products is modeled after Mr. Shavitz.”

Ms. Quimby walked away with $300 million after Clorox bought the company. Burt? He still lives in the turkey coop (with $4 million) but it still doesn’t have running water or electricity.

There’s a Burt Blog.