Cover your eyes when you read this
Continuing with writers’ behind-the-scenes stories…
Warning: If you’re one of the sensitive readers the editors of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living were protecting from naughty words, better plug your ears, cover your eyes, or simply skip this and come back next week.
CIG to Self-Sufficient Living really isn’t so much about self-sufficient living as it is about saving the planet through sane living. Most readers seem to miss that, which sorely disappoints me, because I leaned over backwards to weave that into the “self-sufficiency” theme the publisher wanted. (What makes it worse is that the very first sentence is “This book is not what you’re expecting.”)
In Chapter 1, “What’s It All About?” I list all the varieties of self-sufficiency, most of which are connected with Saving the Earth in one way or another. And I close out the chapter by saying if you don’t fit into any of those categories, maybe you’re not a crew member of Spaceship Earth. You’re just a passenger… or perhaps even a mutineer. “They refuse to accept the finite and nonrenewable nature of many of the resources we consider essential to our way of life. They don’t believe that everything is connected to everything else, and that their actions, and inactions, have widespread repercussions. They are, in effect, mutineers. They are pissing in our ship’s freshwater casks, and we have no way to replace that drinking water. It’s time, and past time, to stop these mutineers. It’s time to become more self-sufficient.”
I wanted to emphasize, as strongly and dramatically as possible, that the most important reason for self-sufficient living is to save Spaceship Earth. That required strong language.
But in the edited version it came out “urinating.”
Although I’m an ex-Marine and have a very extensive colorful vocabulary, I’ve always been very careful about my writing. After all, my mother used to read what I wrote. But doggone it, “urinating” is such a piddly word, where I wanted something bold and robust.
By some odd quirk, even though I had never used that word in more than 50 years of writing for publication, it turned up again in the same book. It was on page 205, in Chapter 16: “Adam and Eve Did It.” Their “Garden of Eden” was no garden: they were foragers. This chapter is about wild foods —and again, not so much about scrounging for them as a means of self-sufficient living-off-the-land, but to demonstrate how recently we have come to rely on industrial agriculture, and how easily we could go back to stalking wild asparagus after unsustainable agribusiness collapses.
The book mangles one of my father-in-law’s standard jokes. He would have said, “Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys: they boil the piss out of them.”
Again, an editor questioned my choice of words. This time I admitted that it was merely meant to be humorous, and could easily be deleted. But I warned, “if you take out that word, leave out the entire joke, or it doesn’t make any sense.”
So what did we get in the book?
“Some people prepare dandelions and any wild food like kidneys; they boil them.” Anyone who thinks that says the same thing as the original is not an editor. An editor should know something about the function of a kidney, a little about cooking… and a whole lot more about humor.
Here’s a weird and overlong footnote: an example of why writing takes me so much longer now than it used to. It involves having a lifetime of memories, not all of which are accurate.
I vividly recall a passage from one of the first “farming” books I read. We Chose the Country was written in 1948 by Herbert Jacobs, a Madison newspaper reporter who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and was teaching at the U.W. School of Journalism when I was a student there —all of which is mentioned in CIG to SSL, for various reasons. Jacobs told of a neighbor who described how to sow alfalfa using a horn seeder— a sack suspended from your shoulder, with a long tube extending from the bottom. “You just swing it back and forth like you was pizzn.”
When I first read that in the 1940s (or so I thought) it was extremely daring language. To be honest, I distinctly remember pondering the meaning: having been brought up in a home where naughty words simply were not allowed, it took me awhile to figure it out. I was definitely thinking of that when I wrote about the Spaceship Earth water keg problem.
So imagine my surprise (and dismay) when I decided to check the exact wording of that quote for this blog… and couldn’t find it. Here’s what that passage actually said:
“How do I work this thing?” I asked Tony.
“Nothing to it,” he said. “Swing it from side to side, slowly. Just pretend —“ and here he whispered in my ear, chuckled heartily, and whacked me on the back.
I’m absolutely certain I did not make up the word “pizzn.” However, Herb’s wife and daughter were nearby, watching the operation, so I assume that’s why Tony whispered. No doubt Katherine later asked Herb what Tony had whispered, and that’s when I heard it.
But that’s speculation, because I don’t have time to read the entire book again to solve the mystery, much as I’d like to. And I already got waylaid because I discovered that my copy belonged to my father-in-law, which means I couldn’t have read it before I met Diane, in 1953.
In addition, in the process of writing this I learned that an original copy is now worth $45, and it’s #5,087,536 on the Amazon “Best Seller” list, which makes even my 1990 book, The Place Called Attar, look pretty good, at #1,280,634.
But hey, enough of this. I gotta go.
—Jd Belanger
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