Morris Pelzel's Profile

They thrive in a highly organic, well-drained soil with a pH of 4.5 to
5.2.

Most soils can be amended with finely ground sulfur or aluminum sulfate to
adjust the pH to the optimum 4.5 to 5.2. Soil samples from potential sites should
be submitted through your county Extension office. Ask for the test for available
calcium per acre, as well as standard soil tests. If available calcium is below
2,500 pounds per acre, the site soil can usually be effectively acidified.

Cultivars differ as to when they ripen. If they are properly selected, a continuous
supply of fresh berries will be available throughout the fruiting season.

Blueberries bloom about the same time as strawberries,
and highbush blossoms will withstand 28°F in full bloom. As a rule, berries
will ripen 60 to 80 days after bloom. Each cultivar will normally supply fresh
fruit for a two- to three-week period.

Plant at least two cultivars to assure cross pollination. Group cultivars by
ripening dates so that harvest will progress in an orderly fashion. For example,
'Duke' and 'Spartan' are good early-season cultivars. 'Ozarkblue', 'Sierra',
'Toro', and 'Bluecrop' are good mid-season cultivars, while 'Nelson', 'Darrow',
and 'Elliott' are good late-season cultivars.

2-year-old plants that are 18 to 24 inches high. These may be bare-rooted or
potted. Purchase only virus-free or virus-tested plants from reputable nurseries
because several easily transmitted blueberry viruses can destroy the planting
if they are brought in.

Plant blueberries in early spring before growth starts or in late fall after
frost

10 to 14 feet between rows and 4 to 6 feet within rows

18 inches in diameter and 24 inches deep

We recommend using
a sub-soiler or ripper to mark off the rows the fall before planting when the
soil is dry. Sub-soiling helps loosen the soil and will improve internal drainage.
On many heavier soils in Kentucky, blueberries should be planted on a slightly
raised bed (4 to 6 inches). This will improve drainage during wet winter months.

wet peat moss

The idea is to open a Web site where students and professors can post their IT woes and share their solutions. College officials tell me they hope it will grow into a self-service support center for colleges nationwide—a kind of Wikipedia for campus computer problems.

professors and students everywhere suffer from the same digital headaches: glitches in Blackboard's online grade book, corrupted Microsoft Word files on the day a term paper is due, problems checking college e-mail messages on their iPhones, and the like.

can the it-takes-a-village approach that built Wikipedia work for the narrower world of technical documentation?

And many colleges already have well-stocked databases of technical-support documentation online. Indiana has something called the Knowledge Base, with more than 15,000 articles on just about any technology installed on the campus

Though anyone can search the Knowledge Base (it gets about 18 million hits a year), the primary audience is help-desk staff members, who use it as a reference library when they answer calls. The new idea is that the expert at the other end of the line—or Web site—could be you.

A couple of years ago Mr. Latimer attended a college-technology conference and had one of those aha! moments. The keynote speaker was Barry Libert, a co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, who talked about how companies like Amazon.com were tapping into user recommendations to increase sales. "I was sitting there in the audience," Mr. Latimer said, "and I thought, This concept was very applicable to the higher-education space—it just needed somebody to recognize it and run with it."

consortium to build a national IT-support database.

bulletin published in April by the Educause Center for Applied Research. "While the private sector has quickly caught on to the power of crowdsourcing, higher education has not yet recognized those benefits as fully

when possible, published items in Indiana's new open database will be reviewed by staff members. Contributions that check out will be given a seal of approval. Other entries will be 'Use at your own risk.'

The expert-approved Knowledge Base should remain separate from the crowdsourced one, he recommended.

While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:

loss of thymos among Americans

The opposition of Europeans to the Iraq War, from a neoconservative perspective, all but epitomizes the inability “to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers” that Fukuyama warned about.

He dwelled, in terminology purposefully reminiscent of Nietzsche and Fukuyama, on the psychological frailty, the thymotic decay, of contemporary European society. “The real question,” he writes, “is one of intangibles—of fears, passions, and beliefs.” Kagan’s much-quoted formula, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus,” is a more or less overt accusation of European effeminacy. Or, as James Sheehan puts it, in more value-neutral terms, in Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: “The eclipse of the willingness and ability to use violence that was once so central to statehood has created a new kind of European state, firmly rooted in new forms of public and private identity and power. As a result, the European Union may become a superstate—a super civilian state—but not a superpower.”

Precisely because novels are not, and should not be, political documents, they offer a less guarded, more intuitive report on the inner life of a society. And when novelists from different European countries, writing in different languages and very different styles, all seem to corroborate one another’s intuitions, it is at least fair to wonder whether a real cultural shift is under way.

Europe that is cosmopolitan, affluent, and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest currents of rage and despair coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe, gorged on historical good fortune, must defend itself against an envious and resentful world.

spiritual state of contemporary Europe

The Elementary Particles (1998)

the ironic message of The Elementary Particles is that it is precisely the plenty and safety of French society that make it intolerable to inhabit. All the qualities that European social democracy prides itself on—its sexual liberation, political tolerance, and economic equality, free health care and the long paid vacations—become instruments of torture to Michel and his half brother, Bruno, the novel’s unlovable heroes.

Bruno and Michel are the prime exhibits in Houellebecq’s programmatic indictment of modern European sexual mores. Starting in the 1960s, he writes, “a ‘youth culture’ based principally on sex and violence” began to drive out the ancient Judeo-Christian culture that valued monogamy, mutual devotion, and self-restraint.

The innovative element in Houellebecq’s argument is to link this new hedonism with the triumph of the European welfare state. Freed from all concern about politics and economics, men and women had nothing to occupy themselves with but the pursuit of sensual gratification. But this pursuit quickly developed into a Hobbesian war of all against all, in which the young and attractive are the objects of worship while the ugly and shy, like Bruno, are utterly despised. “Of all worldly goods,” Bruno rages, “youth is clearly the most precious, and today we don’t believe in anything but worldly goods.”

As the lovely world ‘household’ suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market.

No wonder that “in the last years of Western civilization,” the “general mood [was] depression bordering on masochism.”

Houellebecq’s powerful nostalgia for the “household,” for genuine love and romance instead of sexual adventure, naturally leads him to an extremely sentimental view of women. Michel and Bruno each encounter a saintly, self-sacrificing woman who longs to heal their psychological trauma. But both of them are unable to return the love they are offered, so profoundly have they been ruined by their mother and the age she represents. By the novel’s end, Bruno has gone into an insane asylum and Michel has withdrawn to a hermit-like existence in Galway, Ireland, where he works out the scientific discoveries that will lead to the abolition of mankind. It is not a coincidence that Galway is the westernmost city in Europe, the point where the West culminates and disappears. Nor is Houellebecq’s reader surprised to learn that, in the future, humans greet their own extinction with “meekness, resignation, perhaps even secret relief.” The leisure-world that is contemporary Europe, Houellebecq argues, is a trial that human beings cannot bear.

To turn from The Elementary Particles to The Rings of Saturn (1995) is to exchange the passionate complaints of an outraged teenager for the quiet, hypnotic monologue of an old man.

“I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility,” he confides matter-of-factly.

In other words, Sebald is drawn to stories of abandonment and loss, to sites where Western civilization seems to have died out, to obsolete technologies and unrecapturable pasts. As the book goes on, he assembles so many of these tales as to become a Scheherazade of destruction

The mood of the book is beautifully captured in one of Sebald’s many quotations from Sir Thomas Browne, the Renaissance polymath whose meandering, encyclopedic works are models for his own: “The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so . . . one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn—an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.”

This vision of a world turned into a graveyard is Sebald’s metaphor for the Europe he knows.

But what makes The Rings of Saturn uniquely powerful in his oeuvre is the way that even the war comes to seem like just another manifestation of the entropy that is constantly at work in human affairs. The book evokes a Europe where simply too much history has taken place, too many lives have been lived and lost, so that it is no longer possible to make sense of them all or even remember them properly.

The Elementary Particles and The Rings of Saturn both depict a civilization collapsing from within, unable to stand what it has become. It makes perfect sense that both were published in the 1990s, during the West’s brief holiday from history, with no external enemy on the horizon. Saturday, on the other hand, published in 2005, at the height of the “war on terror,” when the West once more felt itself under threat, this time from Islamic fundamentalism. Ian McEwan plunges his novel into this particular historical moment by dramatizing the conflict between a privileged, guilt-ridden, indecisive civilization and an angry, jealous barbarism. He asks in the form of a parable the same question Kagan asked in Of Paradise and Power: can Europe defend its values from its enemies, when those values include a principled aversion to violence?

Perowne is a stranger to “untroubled certainties” of any kind. His ability to see both sides of the war debate, his refusal to make snap ideological judgments, is one mark of his maturity; it is part and parcel of being civilized. For McEwan makes clear that Perowne represents the best of modern European civilization. He is healthy, handsome, reasonable, generous, a good father and devoted husband and concerned citizen. His work as a brain surgeon is described in minute technical detail, to underscore the miraculous prowess that science and skill have endowed him with: in the book’s first pages, we see him save one life after another with his state-of-the-art surgical tools. And what Perowne does and is on the individual scale, McEwan suggests, London is on the grand scale: “Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece—millions teeming around the accumulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work.”

The problem, of course, is what to do about the people who don’t want it to work.

more quotidian kind of conflict, in which the resilience of Perowne’s civilization finds itself equally tested.

Perowne, despite all his surgical skills, is unable to overcome the intruder, thanks to a fatal deficit of thymos:

“His attitude was wrong from the start, insufficiently defensive; his manner may have seemed pompous, or disdainful. Provocative perhaps.” If he could only have appeased Baxter’s crazy, touchy pride, he might have been left alone in the cocoon of his culture and wealth: just the same calculation that, Kagan suggests, Europe as a whole made after September 11.

“Dover Beach”—Matthew Arnold’s great meditation on the uncertainty and loss of confidence of modern European man: “And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” And Baxter is so overwhelmed by the beauty of the verse, by the high culture he has never known, that he lets Daisy go and drops his guard, allowing Perowne to tackle him.

spiritual diagnosis,