This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.

(via NYTimes)

Trip Report: the Everglades

Being as it's wintertime for many of you right now, I thought I'd take time to share some highlights from my time in the Everglades this month.

A little backstory: I've recently taken up an occasional gig helping guide backcountry trips into Everglades National Park and the Ten Thousand Islands, so that's how I was able to score two weeks in the Glades on a nonprofit salary! I'm also from Florida, so I love to share my enthusiasm for what's left of its natural landscape after so much development.

Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve, and the Ten Thousand Islands National Wildlife Refuge are unique: The Everglades is the world's only river of grass, the combined area is the largest stand of mangroves in North America, and their combined area is 2.26 million acres - somewhere between the size of Delaware and Connecticut. The original Glades covered essentially all of South Florida from Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee River on down, but only a fraction remains. The environment is like nowhere else in the US, a great flat sawgrass prairie across which water from Lake Okeechobee slowly sheets, broken up by cypress strands and domes, gradually given over to a dense maze of mangrove swamps, bays, and rivers as the water turns from fresh to brackish to salt in the Ten Thousand Islands and the Gulf of Mexico. And yet you could drive right across it on I-75 or Highway 41 and never know what you were seeing - or missing.

After all the time I've spent amidst the crush of humanity at Yosemite or Yellowstone, the Glades feel empty - we never shared a campsite and passed only a few fishing guides along the way. It's a notoriously lonesome place, especially in the dead heat of the day when even a winter sun burns and every living thing seems to be taking shelter elsewhere. But it's also gorgeous, and, if you know where to look, full of amazing things:

-- Every morning we went out at dawn to watch the birds take off into the sunrise. The pre-plume-trade days of skies black with birds are long gone, but if you know where to look you can still find an entire island festooned with birds - ibis, egrets, herons, cormorants, pelicans - and watch thousands of ibis alight at once and move in great white skeins above your head, silent but for their wingbeats.

-- Birding on the whole was outstanding. Highlights: flotillas of white pelicans, an array of herons, white-crowned pigeons, nesting osprey, shy limpkins, and the occasional wood stork pair feeding along the shore. We paddled down to Gopher Key along a waterway popular with the birds, and around every corner flushed squawking herons (such a graceful bird, such an awkward SQUAWK) and ibis.

-- Piloting the skiff, laden with kayaks and gear, through the bays was no joke. One reason so few folks get into the Everglades backcountry is it's challenging to boat - a long, often arduously windy trek by kayak and/or a navigational nightmare by motorboat. The bays don't look it, but they're often inches deep at low tide, and rarely more than 4 feet deep, making knowledge of the sandbars and channels essential. Roaring across Sunday Bay, Oyster Bay, Chevelier Bay, Alligator Bay, all you can see in any direction is blue sky, black water, a long thin line of mangroves, and the occasional osprey overhead.

-- If you know where to find them, there are narrow waterways and mangrove tunnels so tight you can only use half a kayak paddle - or just pull yourself along by the dangling limbs overhead. From the outside, the mangroves look impenetrable, their arched "walking" roots revealing only muck and black water underneath, but the tunnels are used by birds, gators, and kayakers like us. Even big gators - ten feet or more - are scared of people this far back, and we startled a few big daddies coming around a bend; they slipped silently underwater (toward the kayak!) to safety. In one clear pond between tunnels, I looked down into the water to see a sandy bottom and the clear shapes of two gators as big as my boat just as still as could be on the bottom, just inches below my boat. In another pool, spotted gar circled beneath our boats, and elsewhere along the way dense schools of grunts glinted past.

-- Epiphytes - they cover the mangrove limbs effusively, a mishmash of cardinal wild pine, resurrection fern, spanish moss, and orchids. Some are as small as your pinky nail, others with a span of two feet or more. Most of the orchids don't bloom this time of year, but we did find some blooming night-scented orchids, in addition to butterfly orchids, helmet orchids, cigar orchids, and a snakelike leafless orchid, vanilla barbellata, close relative of the plant that gives us vanilla beans.

-- Sometimes you can paddle up from the mangroves into the sawgrass flats, where the sky opens up and the water is fresh.

-- Everywhere we went, the mullet jumped and slapped against the water. In one place the bay through which we paddled was so shallow the mullet kicked up swirls of mud and flashed their tails as they hustled away from our boats. Nearby, a couple of pelicans made a killing paddling in the muddy water, scooping up fish. What I wouldn't give for some smoked mullet out in Oregon!!

-- Follow the salt water far enough and you'll hit the Gulf of Mexico and the Ten Thousand Islands, tiny mangrove islands with spits of sand covered in worm-rock coral and pristine shells (no pre-dawn beachcombers here!). Nothing like a horizon that's all sky and water.

-- Campsites along the Wilderness Waterway - the route from Everglades City to Flamingo, 7 hours by boat, 7 days by kayak - are either old homesteads or Seminole-style chickees, raised platforms with thatched roofs above the water. The mosquitoes are omnipresent year round no matter where you camp. It was hard to believe our main camp, Darwin's Place, was once the home of a series of pioneer families, a patch of farmland, and finally the last full-time Everglades hermit (there were many - I guess they don't all go up to Alaska seeking solitude), who kept hundreds of fruit trees and a small cottage until the late 1960s, of which only the crumbling foundation remains. Ruined cisterns are wrapped by the limbs of strangler figs, and an array of voracious jungle plants hold court on what was once cleared land. I was particularly taken with the old Watson Place on Chatham Bend, a popular campground that was first a sacred Calusa site and then the home of the infamous E. J. Watson, brilliant businessman and farmer, caring family man, notorious Key West and Tampa roustabout, and cold-blooded killer of an unknown number of souls. Peter Matthiesson's fictionalized account of Watson - starting with Killing Mister Watson - is a must-read for Everglades visitors.

-- When I wasn't out on the boats, I was either in Everglades City taking in the local nightlife at Leebo's with the rest of the staff (basically a big screen porch with ice chests of Bud, a couple bottles of liquor haphazardly stacked on the bar, and that particular breed of old Florida fishing folk with thick leather-brown skin and worn-out baseball caps and a penchant for offering protective words of wisdom to young women whose skin and attire bely many years gone from the Florida sun. My parents made the trek down from my hometown 2 hours to the north, and we did the day tripper's circuit of cypress dome boardwalks and gentle walks through the sawgrass, plus local stone crab and king mackerel for dinner.

It was a mighty good trip.

I had the pleasure this month of spending 2 weeks in the Everglades. Trip report coming soon. Freakin love that place.

In any event, a good excuse to have a beer with dinner, right?

the girl fits her body in
to the space between the bed
and the wall. she is a stalk,
exhausted. she will do some
thing with this. she will
surround these bones with flesh.
she will cultivate night vision.
she will train her tongue
to lie still in her mouth and listen.
the girl slips into sleep.
her dream is red and raging.
she will remember
to build something human with it.

Lucille Clifton

Something funny I have noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and do not disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (add to shopping cart), they will do it.

(Harper's)

This is everything that crosses my mind after I stop with the excuse. I think about all the throw-away phrases I use where I could have actually said something valuable. I once wrote, "Every time you say blah blah blah, a creative writing teacher dies," and I meant it. Each time you open your mouth, you have an opportunity to build something. That's the perspective you want during the uncomfortable dead silence, not the victim-based emotion of excuse.

(via Rands)

I concur heavily on the Sweet Juniper front:

The wild things aren't nearly wild enough. They are scary, sure, but only because they act like bitter, angry, divorcing parents. I was particularly disturbed when my daughter turned to me and said, "Why are all the girls in this movie so mean?" [...] But even worse than not being very wild, the wild things are a total buzzkill. They are joyless.

In the Internet age, David can go on Facebook to help him bring down Goliath.

That's what happened in Morrisville, Vermont, where the tiny Rock Art Brewery, maker of Vermonster beer, marshaled a wave of public opinion to help in a lawsuit against Hansen Beverage, which sued for copyright infringement on their Monster Energy Drink.

In this action, Hansen violated a cardinal New England rule: Do not mess with Vermonters. They are well-insulated, wear generally supportive footwear, and are armed to the teeth. Last month, when Rock Art owner Matt Nadeau received a boilerplate "cease and desist" letter from Hansen Beverage, he told me, he decided not to take a simple action like putting an extra "t" in the name of his beer.

"I could do that," says Nadeau, then pauses. "Don't want to."

(via The Atlantic Food Channel)

From Van Gogh's early letters to his brother, Theo:

You mustn’t, whatever you do, think that I have great expectations regarding the appreciation of my work — I believe one must be satisfied if one gets to the point where one can persuade a few people of the soundness of what one is striving for and is understood by them, without exaggerated praise.

And the rest is a matter of, if something comes of it so much the better, but something that one should even think about as little as possible. But still I believe the work has to be seen, precisely because the few friends can settle out from the stream of passers-by. One doesn’t have to be guided by what the majority say or do, though.

The early sketches and roughs of paintings he sent to his brother are lovely and reflect a side of him, and his art, that I never knew.

(via BibliOdyssey)

And the recipes, the recipes.. Sorry Bon Appetit, you can't compare.

Tom Philpott, spot-on as always, on the demise of Gourmet:

And this brings us to the real trend behind the Gourmet story: the power of axe-first, ask-later consultants in molding the media landscape in a time of crisis. For weeks now, according to various reports, grim-faced outsiders in suits have swarmed the Condé Nast offices. Employed by the consultancy McKinsey, their evident task is to scrutinize the books and hack away at anything not turning a profit.

Yet in their search for maximum short-term profit and return on invested capital, they tend to be myopic, unable to see beyond the next quarter’s bottom-line prospects.

Sigh.

(via Grist)