Newell Cotton and News Items

In an earlier entry, dated Dec. 5, 2009, I wrote about the northern New Hampshire farmer Newell Cotton, whose diaries from the last twelve years of the 19th century are in my possession. I've been re-reading those diaries for January, seeing how he spent his time. This was a period when most of his labor involved working with wood to ensure a continuing supply of heat, getting in the ice that would keep his food supplies cold for a period further into the year, and then writing, which was not a chore for him but represented an attempt to take part in a literary life, as he was a reader of books and magazines and newspapers, and he wrote stories, some of which he had published in newspapers and magazines. He hoped to write a book, but in the diaries there is no evidence that he completed one. He also regularly wrote "items" for local newspapers, and at this relatively slack work time of year he wrote more than usual.

I had wondered what he meant by "items," and I came to realize that these are short pieces of interest that made up much of the newspapers, particularly the local papers, in the old days. They included death notices and obituaries, event announcements, reviews, and the like; they also included news items, local and also from away. I was reminded of that today when reading Doris Grumbach's Life in a Day, where she reports that an old clipping of a news item (undated) fell out of a travel book she was reading.

The item read as follows: "Muskegon, Mich., Jan. 15. Mrs. J.F. Andrews, who was fraudulently placed in a private insane asylum near Detroit by her husband, who then eloped with Miss McGregor, a wealthy young woman of Jacksonville, Ill., has been released on the demand of her sister. Mrs. Andrews is perfectly sane, but is prostrated with grief. She married Andrews here and he has squandered her large fortune leaving her penniless in a madhouse with two small children, the youngest of which was born in the asylum. Andrews and Miss McGregor are living in Paris, France."

Doris Grumbach imagines what life will be like for J.F. Andrews and Miss McGregor in Paris, and how long it will take for him to run through his second fortune. I began wondering whether this was the sort of item Newell Cotton wrote about for the local papers. I'd assumed that the items he wrote were local news and announcements, events, obituaries. One of his diary entries concerns the difficulties he is having writing an obituary for a friend. Perhaps he also wrote this other kind of item, news from away, but where in the late 1800s would he have gotten this other news except from other newspapers? Once he found it, all he would need do is copy it and, like Doris Grumbach, he would imagine these little plots fleshed out into fiction, perhaps his own. And even if he didn't write or copy this kind of item, he surely would have read quite a few of them. I am still hoping to find his stories, but I will wait until I return to Providence to begin to search for them through the resources of my  university library.

The dividing lines among facts, gossip, story, and fantasy are plain in items like this one about the Andrews family and Miss McGregor. How impoverished is our news today, where we either read fact or opinion in newspapers, or gossip and hype about celebrities in magazines--and, of course, on line--but an item such as this would be hard to find, anywhere.

The radiance of wood heat

Heat coming from a woodstove feels nicer, warmer, more comforting than heat from other sources except, perhaps, the sun on a pleasantly warm day. Wood is also much less expensive. Other sources have just about everything else going for them: convenience, ease of use, evenness of heat, set it and forget it. The modern way.

The woodstove is a great improvement over the campfire and the fireplace: no smoke, more concentrated heat, and an airtight woodstove burns all night, while a fireplace draws cool air into the house at night. After that it's a tradeoff. Even the modern passive solar house with radiant heat in the floors offers convenience as well as using much less carbon than wood, even, although unlike gas, oil, and coal, wood is a renewable resource. But the radiant floor heat doesn't have the radiance of the woodstove, the feel on the skin.

After the snow last weekend we had a fairly warm week and for a variety of reasons I let the oil furnace do the work of heating the house for a few days. Now that it's turning colder--it will be around ten degrees F tonight--it was time to go back to the wood, and it's so much more comfortable. Important to realize this as wood requires so much work, even now, after felling and bucking and splitting and stacking, moving to storage and then moving into the house and then into the stove. And so much attention: in this cold weather, every few hours the stove needs re-loading, except of course at night while sleeping.

But these are good interruptions, conducive to breaks in other work: reading, writing, cooking, and the daily mail and record keeping. And the pleasures of walking and playing music betweentimes. Newell Cotton's diaries show he was able to do much more writing in the winter times, when he wasn't working with wood. His northern New Hampshire house burned wood in fireplaces and a cook stove, some thirteen cords per year, year after year. He'd have been happier with a few woodstoves.

A grower's gaze

The big storm is over; it lasted three days and dumped a little more than a foot of snow, which drifted to a couple of feet in spots, but was no worse than some of the big snows of past years, and not nearly as bad as feared. Nor did the power go out, despite everyone's expecting it. This illustrates the principle that the first few large storms of the winter season are oversold by the weather forecasters. A corollary is that once the snowstorms start coming in earnest, they are under-predicted.

Yesterday I was reading Foucault's history of the birth of the medical clinic, chiefly to explore more deeply his concept of the "gaze," in preparation for a seminar in music and cultural policy that I'll be teaching this spring. In the course of thinking about it I realize that among the many "gazes" there are growers' gazes. The gaze, for Foucault, is both penetrating and authoritative; it describes itself as moving inductively from  observation to pattern-fitting and understanding. In truth it is not so empirical, not so inductive; the known patterns pre-empt the observation, and guide it to a pre-ordained, if not foreknown, conclusion. So the doctor's gaze observes the patient in attempting to diagnose a disease. In the early days diagnosis was done chiefly on the basis of a pattern in symptoms; after the nineteenth century and scientific testing, symptom-diagnosis is confirmed (or not) on the basis of lab tests, whether blood tests or today's MRI or CT-scan.

The grower's gaze involves the health of the plant in its ecosystemic context. Increasingly the authority of the factory farmer's gaze is undermined by the enormous inefficiencies (not to mention dis-ease) of the product. University agriculture schools that used to support factory farming--as Earl Butz said, "Get big or get out!" (Butz was secretary of agriculture under Eisenhower, or was it Johnson?)--now develop and encourage natural and organic methods, though not exclusively. I can recall a time in the 1980s when along the roadsides signs with N/S printed on them were stuck up here and there. The N/S stood for "no spray"; that is, the transportation department sprayed the roadsides with weed-killers to keep the vegetation down, but they wouldn't spray if there was such a sign. The property owner then had the responsibility of taking care of it by mowing. Today on the island the roadsides are mowed, not sprayed. Times are changing.

The new year

I'm attuned to two calendars, neither of which marks January 1 as an important date. The seasonal calendar here on the island marks the winter solstice, a little more than a week before January 1, when the sun begins drawing closer to the earth, the days grow longer, and the seasons hold the promise of a harsh winter followed by a wet spring and then a spirit-lifting summer and autumn. The academic calendar, which I also follow, begins the new semester late in January. To usher in this new year, the winter is bringing a large snowstorm. With the newest computer modeling for the weather, it's now possible to predict storms well in advance. Early in the week the forecasters were excited about the possibility of a "historically significant" storm, if everything set up properly. Now, a day into the first of two storms, a light storm, the forecasters are not so excited but predicting a two-day storm starting tomorrow, January 2, producing anywhere from a foot to two feet of wet snow and winds up to 50 mph and a coastal flood watch because of the full moon and high tide. Surely the power will go out at some point tomorrow or tomorrow night; the question is how long it will be before power is restored.

I was down at (to, in local parlance) the local hardware store and BJ, the owner, was talking to me about how it seemed like there were more power outages this year than before. I reminded him that in the 1980s the local power company on the island sold out to Bangor Hydro, with the promise of better lines, and fewer outages. In truth, the lines are better, service is better, and perhaps there are fewer outages. The island power company didn't generate its own power; rather, it bought it from suppliers and brought it to the island. If it had generated it on the island and distributed it to the people here the costs would probably have been prohibitive; yet if I peer 50 years into the future I see an island power company here, with windmills generating local power.

With the electric power out in the sub-freezing winter life becomes elemental. The furnace and water pump depend on electricity, not to mention lights and computers. The phone usually goes down when the power does. A small minority of locals have electric generators for power outages. I'm thinking of getting one. When the power goes out, heat in the house depends on the wood stove, plus a kerosene heater. Water is bottled and rationed for washing, drinking, and coffee. Some of the contents of the refrigerator are placed outside. Toilets are not flushed. If possible during breaks in the storm I will go cross-country skiing out the door and back on the woods trails. It's never soon enough before the power is restored.

I am still hoping that the storm won't be as bad as the forecast.