The Moldboard Plow

One of the books I am reading right now is called Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012) by Helena Hamerow, Professor of Early Medieval Archaeology at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University. Reading? Well, in truth, it's pretty dry, and I am in fact skimming it.

At any rate, a footnote on p. 90, says, "To gain maximum yields from bread wheat, the crop must be kept dry; for this, the ridge and furrow achieved by the use of a moldboard plough was needed (see Banham 2010)."

Now the moldboard plow (American spelling, vs. English spelling plough) appears in Small Talk in my post, "Monticello Soup," August 3, 2013. There I said "With his son-in-law the plantation manager, Jefferson invented the mouldboard plow for the hilly ground of Albemarle County. As you plow a furrow, the topsoil lifts up and over the mouldboard, falling in a strip to one side only. The mouldboard plow made faster work of plowing a field on a hill and left ridges deep enough to help drain off snowmelt and heavy winter rain."

Not bad, as far as it goes, and, like Banham, my explanation does mention that a moldboard plow helps keep the seed dry. But, first, Jefferson may have invented a moldboard plow that worked well in Albemarle County, but he certainly did not invent the moldboard plow, and my writing does not make that clear enough. And, second, the moldboard plow does more than keep the seed dry or let you plow hilly soil more easily, and my writing hints at that, but again does not make it clear.

The moldboard plow also helps, as Wikipedia remarks in the entry Plough, to "grow crops . . . in less fertile areas" by bringing nutrients to the surface, burying weeds, and incorporating the remains of the previous harvest.

The technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, Machine Age, and Computer Age seem monumental to us, and so they are, but earlier ground-breaking technology (sorry, couldn't resist a joke in the midst of stating the obvious) in agriculture, warfare, industry, knowledge, and other fields is what we have built on.

And speaking of Internet research and book research, both of which I do a lot of, it drives me crazy when an explanation of technology is not exact and complete--because often, being a poet rather than a physicist, I cannot tell the difference. But, when I start to pick the words apart and get at the meaning, the explanation does not hold, and I have yet another loose end to try and find more details on.

Spine Poetry

Think "spine poetry." Now close your eyes. What comes to mind? Turns out you're supposed to take book titles as printed on book spines and arrange them in a stack so that they can be read as poems.

Spine poetry is the creation of artist Nina Katchadourian, who began her "Sorted Books" project in 1993 and just published, with Brian Dillon, twenty years of her own images in Sorted Books (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013).

I first heard about spine poetry during National Poetry Month, April, when the local city library I volunteer at had a brief presentation introducing the "Spine Art" installation at the Library of Congress. (Although I would like very much to create timely posts, for example, a just-pre-April post to coincide with National Poetry Month or the "Spine Art" installation, I'm not sure I can commit to that. And then, where does it end? Do I write a themed post for every calendar event in the fields of Literature and Language? You see the dilemma.)

My musings on spine poetry: First note that a picture person, not a word person, came up with it. A lovely idea, very fun, according to which books become objects, just like they do when interior decorators arrange books on the coffee table by cover photo or on the bookshelf by color or size.

Objects as opposed to what?  Of course books are objects. But they are, and especially were, also the keepers and purveyors of civilization. And the more we are aware of that, as we are during a time of extreme change, the more books also become objects, whether to be collected, published in attractive series (like Penguin's modestly priced "Hardcover Classics'), cannibalized (as by publishers who depart from the 500-year-old principles of book design by placing an index, for example, with the front matter), or used as building blocks for structures or works of art.

We (civilization, such as it is at this point) are in the midst of a change of untold proportions in moving our print archives to the Internet. Assuming, that is, that we can keep track of the technology, a nagging problem for those of us who have lived through the transition from slides to celluloid film to digital "film" or records to tapes to dvds.