potato culture

First up, some words of gratitude:

Thanks to Brenda Weber and Doug Slaymaker and all the fine folks at the Kentucky Women’s Writers Festival last weekend. It was great to be part of your company …

Thanks to Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore in Milwaukee, and to the University Bookstore in Madison. I was happy to come back to Wisconsin with a finished book since I did a lot of the research for “All Over Creation” here. More on this below…

In Wichita, thanks to Sarah and Beth and all the very cool people of Watermark Books for such a very warm welcome. I’d been to every one of the United States except for Kansas, so this stop completes the country for me. And thanks to the kind woman who handed me the USA Today article about genetically engineered soybeans. I’ll return to this topic, too.

And finally, thanks to the Boulder Book Store in Boulder, Colorado, and the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. It’s always wonderful to come back here, and it was especially fun this time because I finally got to meet Donna Gershten, author of the Bellwether Prize winning novel, “Kissing the Virgin’s Mouth.”

Now, back to spuds. During the tour, many people asked me what kind of research I did for "All Over Creation." I did quite a bit of research, but in the end, with a heavy heart, I decided to cut out the more arcane bits of potato trivia from the novel, for fear of sinking it under the sheer weight of my obsession. However, now I see that a weblog is the ideal place to recycle this material, and the more obsessive among you can read it if you'd like.

One of my main stops was Wisconsin. There is a thriving potato culture in the state of Wisconsin, and one of the hotspots is the USDA Potato Introduction Center in Sturgeon Bay, also known as NRSP-6. It is the point of entry for all potato germplasm into the nation’s potato breeding programs and thus into America’s food chain. I often slip up and call it the Potato Induction Center by mistake, because I have this stupid image in my mind of all the little potatoes lined up, saluting, and marching off to enlist.

However, the Introduction Center does not dabble with tubers. Their motto is “Genes, not Genotypes,” and they deal in seed. As a gene bank, their job is to reproduce and keep germplasm alive, to maintain sufficient quantity for distribution, and to keep stock lists of active seeds. When I was there, they were maintaining 4709 collections of potato germplasm.

In order to reproduce the seed, they must do extensive hand pollination, which is very cool. In nature, the bumblebee is the only pollinator of potatoes. It buzzes the flower, causing the anther to vibrate, which knocks off the pollen. Chico, the head gardener at the Center, made a little contraption from a door buzzer, which he uses to simulate the bee and to fool the potato flower into releasing its pollen. I imagine it's very sexy, if you're a male potato plant.

The mandate of station is to seek useful things, collected from the wild, and to disseminate these collections to users. Most users are professional plant breeders and researchers, affiliated with university, and occasionally corporate, breeding programs, but non-affiliated individuals and amateurs can receive germplasm, too.

The Sturgeon Bay station is a part of National Plant Germplasm System. In 1990, it joined Intergene, an international association of genebanks. The operating premise is one of basic co-operation. They share their techniques and the secrets of potato culture in order to create a global potato database.

The Potato Introduction Center, in keeping with NPGS policy, does not to keep patented materials or materials protected as intellectual property. The operating principle seems to be that germplasm is part of our "commons" and that anyone should be able to have free access to it. In a world of increasing privatization, I like this policy a lot.

Facts

It’s been just over a week, and this war has become historical fact, as inevitable as the sun that set over Baghdad last Wednesday night. And now that it has become fact, it must be paid for. We must pay $75 billion dollars for it, and that’s just the down payment. There go social services. There goes the budget for educating the next generation of American minds. I’m not being unpatriotic, but it seems to me that if you’re prepared to spend $75+ billion dollars, surely there must be a more creative way to liberate the people of Iraq, which doesn’t require killing them, and sacrificing American lives. But hey, what do I know…

In “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” Chris Hedges talks about how war, once launched, creates facts, which in turn create war’s inevitability. Every death or wounding becomes a new fact that justifies, retroactively, war’s start. Every bombing or attack provides a reason to continue. Once sparked, facts become stories, stories become myths. War is a feedback loop, growing more powerful with every round of suffering. Canny aggressors throughout history have always known this and have been careful to co-opt the cuture's myth-makers. To in-bed them, as it were.

I’ve been traveling everyday to the relentless, mind-numbing soundtrack of CNN’s Orwellian war coverage, pumping through the PA systems of hotel lobbies and airline terminals across the nation. I’m glad to be moving, though. Glad to have an excuse to escape the television and to spend the evenings in the company of readers. I’m grateful to the bookstores for providing us with the space to congregate, and to everyone who comes to listen and to share. So...

Thanks to Book Passage and to A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, and to Dutton’s in Los Angeles.

Thanks to The Toronto Woman’s Bookstore, Spa Ha Restaurant, Food Share, the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre, and Polaris Institute (wow…talk about diversity!) for sponsoring a really fun evening.

Thanks to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York for the on-going advocacy and support for our voices, and to Barnes & Noble at Astor Place for welcoming me home.

And here’s a little story about media and reality. The other day I had an interview at the Toronto Star. When I walked into the vast newspaper office, the largest in North America, I was amazed at how perfect it was, a seemingly endless expanse of desks and cubicles, covered with piles of paper and files and coffee cups, and reporters in shirtsleeves threading their way purposefully through the maze. I exclaimed something dumb like, "Oh gee, this is so authentic! It's exactly what a newspaper office should look like!"... at which point the journalist who was doing the interview smiled and informed me that it had been used as the location for the Washington Post pressroom in the film “All The President’s Men.”
Right.

chicks

First up, thanks to Village Books in Bellingham for a great reading venue on Friday! You are a very cool bookstore, and Bellingham is a very happening book town.

Now, some news from home. Just got word that our Silkies have hatched out the first chicks of the season. The first clutch, in early March! This breed is phenomenally prolific. They’re an ancient Chinese chicken, first introduced to Europe by Marco Polo, and prized in China for their docile nature and the health-giving properties of their meat. Their feathers are downy-soft, and come in different colors, some blue, some buff, some black. Underneath, their skin is black, and they have brilliant sapphire spots on their cheeks, and fluffy puffs on the tops of their heads, like little pillbox hats, which make them look like mod fashion models from the Sixties. Okay, maybe that’s stretching it.

The secret to their long survival is their implacable maternal instinct. These hens will go broody at the drop of a hat. They’ll sit on a stone and try to hatch it. Even the roosters will hunker down on a clutch of eggs.

Isn't it amazing, that the same egg that we scramble and eat for breakfast can, in a mere 21 days, organize itself from a liquid yolk and a tiny spot of blood into a living, breathing, peeping, self-propelling organism, with an appetite, and a will to continue? From a single large cell, to a complex, multi-cellular life form, in 21 days! Not to make you feel bad or anything, but think back on the last three weeks of your life. What have you managed to accomplish? Even with these great big brains of ours, in our high-tech labs, we still can’t begin to replicate something that a chicken does with such casual off-handedness. I mean, it takes me years to write a novel. In 21 days, I might write a page or two, or twenty, but it’s still only words, marks on paper, like the scratching of a chicken. It doesn’t have a beating heart.

Of course, since chicken brains are about the size of a bean, they come up short in the imagination department. This is some consolation.

Here’s a question that I’ve always found puzzling. I’m sure there’s a simple answer, but I don’t know what it is, and I’ll send a free book to the first person who can clue me in:

I’ve read that if you weigh a fertilized chicken egg that’s just been laid, and you weigh it again just before it hatches, it will be heavier, which makes sense because it has a whole baby chick inside with bones and muscles and body mass. But where does all that mass come from? Not from the mother, clearly, because there’s no umbilical connection, therefore no material transfer. The egg is a closed system, so how does that additional matter get into the shell? It can’t come from nowhere, because according the Law of Conservation of Mass, in a chemical reaction, matter can neither created nor destroyed; it can only change it’s form. Clearly, an embryo changes form, but how do you explain the increase in mass? Where, for example, does the calcium come from?