A 2023 Update

I no longer write blog posts. I’m too damn old to do everything.

I am, however, still alive and working.

What prompts this update is my recent departure from Twitter (on December 12, 2022, I deleted an account I’d had for 13 years and ten months. It broke my heart—I loved Twitter—but it’s important to stick with what matters and I did not want to empower or enrich the current owner of Twitter. I am now using Bluesky.

Which meant I needed to update this site. (Delete bird; insert blue sky.)

So. Here I am. Updating.

To wit: I spend much of my time writing a new book and revising an old one (In Meat We Trust, currently out of print).

As to The New Thing (it has no title yet):

For what I will only describe as a painful number of years, I’ve wrestled and bashed and often hated a project that has morphed three times. I finally figured out what I’m doing this year, but as always, this stuff takes tiiiiiiiime.

The new book is about “alcohol.” As an idea; as a bit of human culture.

It thinks about how humans in the Minnesota River valley responded to alcohol over the course of several centuries.

The book opens in the 1650s with the people who ruled the valley, and region, for centuries: The Dakota. Part One is the tale of their encounter with a new wakan/spirit—brandy—and people with pale faces, from the French in the sixteenth century to the Americans in the early nineteenth.

Part Two is set on a terraced, wooded bluff on the right bank of the Minnesota River, on a site loved and worked by centuries of Dakota. Today it is identified as New Ulm.

There, in 1860, a German immigrant family built a brewhouse. In 2023, the Schell/Marti family is still brewing in the same brewhouse on their ridge near the river. (Amazing, people, amazing!)

Don’t ask me when I will finish it, because I don’t know.

However: given where I am now, I expect it will see daylight in 2024. I’ve written huge chunks of it, but some of those chunks required what amounted to a master’s degree worth of research and study. And one big chunk requires dealing with 19th century German newspapers. And I don’t read German. (Thank you, Google translate.)

So. That’s what I’m doing right now, December 22, 2022.