Organically yours

Okay, so Anheuser-Busch is apparently going to launch (or perhaps has already done so) an "organic" beer. And there's been the usual hand-wringing from some circles: "Oh, no! When Big Business gets into organics, there goes our warm fuzzy safe food!" Eg, all the fuss last month when Wal-Mart announced it planned to start stocking its grocery shelves with organics, etc.

To which I say: get a grip! What did the hand-wringers THINK Big Business was going to do with this resurgence of interest in organic food? Ignore it?? (For the younger set, the first wave of organic mania was back in the 1970s. This second one is prompted in part, I believe, by the growing size and number of Whole Food outlets.)

Of course Wal-Mart, Anheuser-Busch, whoever isn't going to ignore it! It's the nature of capitalism to give the customer what he or she wants. And if middle class America wants enough organic stuff to allow what was once a small hippie outlet -- Whole Foods -- to become a national chain, well, OF COURSE other food purveyors are going to jump on board.

According to some hand-wringers, this is bad news because, well, farmers can only produce so much organic food. Once they've been stretched to their limit, then regulations will ease up and farmers will be allowed to produce slightly less "pure" crops but still call them organic. (I'm simplifying a more complex argument, but you get the drift.)

Translation: if Wal-Mart does it, it MUST be bad. I'm not sure I agree. I think the only reason Whole Foods hasn't fallen prey to the same sort of criticism lobbed at W-M (and soon, I'm sure, at A-B) is because Whole Foods has this "image" of being a birkenstocky, pure sorta place. When in fact it's just a big corporation whose main intent is to make money for its owners.

But in the minds of a certain segment of the population, WF is "pure" because that's its image. And image, friends, is everything. Well, okay, maybe not eeeeeeverything, but it counts for a lot. (Think of actors: the more famous and well-paid they are, the harder their handlers work to persuade us that they're just plain ol' folks like the rest of us.........)

So what's the point? Well, I don't really have one, except this: Big Business is gonna go where the middle class goes. And if that means organic foods are more accessible and affordable, well, that can't be all bad!

That Ben Franklin quote

Okay, so I'm still perusing some beer blogs -- and I see a link to "beer quotes." Which sounded worth checking into.

And sure enough, there was my old friend, the Ben Franklin quotation. You know the one I mean: "Beer is living proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy." Or: "Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy." Such a cute quote. Has made certain t-shirt printers rich, happy, and fat (Ben Franklin would approve!) O

nly problem, of course, is that Ben Franklin didn't say it. As near as I can tell, the quote was concocted by a bunch of guys who own a t-shirt printing company in (I believe) Delaware.

How do I know that Franklin didn't say it? First I did my own research and in the space of about 15 minutes discovered that this alleged quote only shows up on undocumented websites.

That set off my historian's alarm bells, so I decided to dig deeper. One of my best friends is a Franklin scholar, and he, in turn, is friends with nearly all the Franklin scholars working in the U. S. So I asked my friend to check into it -- and he asked his friends for some help. Including the kind folks at the National Archives who are busy digitizing all of Franklin's works (your tax dollars at work!) They all confirmed what I already suspected: Franklin didn't say it.

One of the scholars said it actually sounded more like Samuel Johnson, so I did some more digging. Nope, Johson didn't say it either........ So "beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy" is quite possibly the most famous fake quote on the planet!

Today's lesson is.........

Yesterday I had occasion to have someone read a beer-related piece to me over the phone (I don't have a fax machine, and this person wanted me to hear the content of this piece sooner rather than later). (Okay, the piece in question was a review of AMBITIOUS BREW from one of the publishing trade magazines.) (Yes, it was a good review. And this is the rag known for its incredibly snarky reviews. Whew!)

Anyway, the person reading the piece to me knows zip about beer and apologized in advance for "butchering" some of the names.

I was reminded of that by the July 6 entry at A Planet Full of Beer Blogs Yuengling is pronounced "Ying-ling." Uihlein (the family that built Schlitz Brewing) is pronounced "E-line." And Greisedieck is pronounced "GREE-see-dick" or "GREE-sa-dick." Take your pick. No rhyme intended.

Random Musings of a Random Mind

Okay, this is what's bugging me about blogs and blogging (and let me say at the outset that I'm not an expert on blogs, bloggers, or blogging. Mostly I'm fascinated by the enthusiasm that blogging generates: What compels an ordinary schmo to set out his/her thoughts for the world at large??):

The standard rap on blogging is that blogs provide two things (well, probably more than two, but two MAIN things): First, they provide an alternative viewpoint, alternative, that is, to "mainstream" media coverage of people, places, and events. Eg, an erudite blogger with a purple mohawk (or whatever hairdo passes for hip-chic these days) and seventeen tattoos dishes up a perspective on the war in Iraq, the economy, Democratic party politics, etc., that diverges from the view presented in the New York Times or on CNN.

Second, blogs create links between and among ideas and "dialogues" that might not otherwise be connected out in the "real" world. The resulting ideas and dialogues are layered with texture, text, and heft that they would otherwise lack.

But I wonder: are either of those assumptions accurate?

Take writers' blogs. As near as I can tell, MOST (not all) writers' blogs are about -- writing! Now I don't know about you, but if I weren't a writer, I would find a writer's blog to be dull, dull, and still more dull. Or, to put it a bit more grandiosely, a writer's blog about writing is self-referential. Which is not surprising, but it's also, well, hardly novel (no pun intended) or particularly exciting.

Similarly, if you look at the links listed alongside most writers' blogs, those links lead to other writers' blogs, or to blogs produced by editors, agents, and booksellers.

In short, most writers' blogs exist to link to other writers' blogs and thereby generate more name recognition for all concerned. (In the political world, say the one that revolves around Capitol Hill and The Beltway, this is known as back-scratching.) Meaning that most writers' blogs exist within a web of insularity and self-reference that can't possibly be interesting to anyone but the initiated (other writers......)

(I should also add that M. J. Rose made this same point in a blog entry in April, a blog that was pointed out to me by an editor. Rose's blog that day was about a more important topic: namely, writers need to think twice before they waste their time blogging if the only point of the blog is to link to other writers' blogs. A point with which I whole-heartedly agree.)

Now it's POSSIBLE (and even likely) that there are some bloggers who link to bloggers beyond their own worlds. Eg, a blogger interested in the wired world links to or comments about neuroscience or quantum mechanics. And the person who originally read that particular blog in order to keep up on events/ideas in the world of cyber-politics ends up learning about the ways in which neuroscience influences and affects the creation and design of computers and the internet.

But I'm guessing that those kinds of blogs are the exception rather than the rule. (I'd be happy to be proved wrong.) If you read an article somewhere about some buzz-generating blog, it's likely only generating buzz amongst an insular group. The choir preaching to the choir, as it were.

Which brings me (finally!!) to my point: What IS the point of blogging? Especially for writers.

Frankly, I don't wanna waste my time blogging away in hopes that my blog will be linked to that of other (better-known) writers. I belong to two online writing groups and get all the writerly chat I need from them. And frankly, I don't want to spend ALL MY TIME hanging out with a bunch of people who are just like me! I need some variety, if you know what I mean.

The problem, of course, is that if someone blogs about what's on her mind, well, the human mind being what it is, the content of the blog will be all over the place. Point in case: my own blog -- which so far has discussed beer, conferences of brainy people, and proofreading. Hardly the sorts of topics that are gonna get me far on technorati's search engine (I kinda doubt there's a search term for "musings on the human condition").

And the things I'm writing about are certainly not going to bring me to the attention of people who might read my blog and then, GASP!, buy my books........ (Because let's be honest: the other reason writers take up blogging is so that they can grab the attention of the book-buying public. But of course that almost never happens because, well, see my point several paragraphs above.....)

So at this particular moment (early July 2006), I'm not convinced that blogging is the Next Great Thing in human interaction. I suspect that mostly, it's the Next Great Thing destined to push our society to the next level of bowling alone: namely, a place where we think about bowling alone, rather than actually getting out there in the lanes and knocking down pins, alone or otherwise! Indeed, here I am, blogging for an audience of one!

Beer Blogs R Hip?

Well, I dunno how hip they are -- given that there are, what?, fifty-seven bajillion blogs out there.......but here's a nice article about beer blogs. Thanks to Hedonist Beer Jive for the tip.

Insiders R Us

It's natural, I suppose, for people intimately involved with something to forget that the rest of the world is not as obsessed or knowledgeable as they are. We've all experienced it: we ask some computer geek to show us how to do something. The geek executes 15 keystrokes in 2.5 seconds and says "There! See how easy that was?" And of course, we're still clueless because we have no idea what just transpired. And then the geek gets annoyed because we're not catching on!

People in the publishing industry are like that: We're an insular community with our own jargon and own ways of doing things. Anything we do and say looms large in our lives and minds and we assume that the rest of the world is as knowledgeable and obsessed as we are.

The truth is that the rest of the world doesn't give a rat's ass! They don't understand how our particular "system" works, and we shouldn't assume that they do.

The other day I experienced a humbling reminder of those facts. A woman I met recently wanted to read my first two books. So she went to the local public library and didn't find either book there (one is a scholarly book unsuited for a public library and the other is a book about Florida and why would a library in the middle of Iowa have a book about Florida?)

So she emailed me and asked me if I had any copies she could borrow to read. Now if I were a better self-promoter, I would have explained to her that, hey, do ya think I'm doin' this for free? No! Go BUY the damn books. But I'm a softie and a lousy self-promoter. So I rifled through my shelves and found a copy of the plumbing book to loan her and then I gave her a copy of the Key West book to keep (because I have about twenty copies of the paperback on hand). She's a truly lovely person person and I just didn't have the heart to tell her that I only earn money from writing when people BUY my books.

The encounter was a good reminder that the average person has no idea how publishing and writing work. And why should they? It's not their business to know!

Yeah, it's frustrating when people ask me to loan them copies of my books. Yeah, it's frustrating when I have a new book come out and people ask me for free copies. They don't realize that I only get a handful of free copies and that I must give those to give to people who assisted the venture in some way. (For example, I get twenty free copies of the beer book. But my list of people who contributed in some way contains 45 names! So I'll have to buy 25 extra copies just to give to them.)

Or people say to me, "Gee, are you ever going to finish that book? What's taking you so long?" Or, "How hard can it be to write a book about beer? Just find some facts and write them down!" They don't understand (and again, why should they?), that researching the history of beer or Key West or whatever takes years. That once I finish the research, then I start an even more challenging (and time-consuming) project: taking hundreds of thousands of "facts" and weaving them into an interesting story.

I'm not complaining. I do what I do because I love to research and I love to write. Nor am I being critical of the public at large. Most people aren't writers. There's no REASON why they should understand how the system works.

I do wonder, however, if writers have themselves to blame. Certainly I blame myself. Here I had a chance to educate someone, who might in turn educate others, and I blew it. Writers could -- and SHOULD -- do a better job of explaining themselves to the rest of the world. Of making it clear to "outsiders" that we don't work for free. That we only earn money when people buy the results of our labor. (That, by the way, is why I'm such a fanatic about "stealing" music. I won't download music for free, nor will I accept CDs of music copied from a disk owned by someone else. Musicians work hard for their money. When we steal their music, we're stealing their income.)

So what's the point? Well, there's not one. Except that I hope that the next time someone asks to borrow one of my books, I'll stiffen my spine, summon my courage, and explain how the "system" works.