Sunday, March 09, 2003

Who'd have thunk it?
Andrew Curry provides an interesting biographical piece in US News on Victor Davis Hanson:
SELMA, CALIF.--Victor Davis Hanson's grape farm here is 3 miles straight down Mountain View Road from the Sun-Maid raisin plant his vineyards supply. Orderly rows of Thompson grapevines, dry and bare in the chill of California winter, surround a modest, two-story gray farmhouse. Inside, black-and-white family photos stretch back five generations, evidence of a family clinging to this land since the railroad brought them from Missouri in 1872.

There is no room for nuance here. With just 135 acres of vineyards, equivocation has immediate and very real consequences. Vines are tended properly, or grapes don't grow; fields are irrigated, or orchards die; the decades-old tractor in the shed runs, or the farm fails.

Such clarity may be common in California's fertile Central Valley, but it's rare in the groves of academe--one reason the 49-year-old classicist says he feels more at home here.