I WAS PRETTY SURE I hated Saul Bellow, vigorously and justly. Hated him for his sexism, which is to say he seemed to hate me first. My gag reflex was not Bellow-specific. I felt the same revulsion toward other macho American novelists, who struck me as oversexualizing and insulting and apelike.
However I had at some point to admit that I also found these same writers: fascinating. This attraction-repulsion required further investigation, preferably in post form. So here goes.
Bellow seemed like a fitting launchpad for said investigation, and I picked up a copy of his renowned 1964 novel Herzog. Both being Jews, I figured Bellow and I could bond over quaint Yiddishisms, having little else in common. Which worked out nicely when his character Moses Herzog reminisced on singing "Ma Tovu" with his brothers as a child. I was humming it all the next day. ("Ma Tovu" is a pleasant song to have in your head, since it means "How Good." Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mish'knotecha Yisrael: How good are thy tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.)
I opened the test case macho novel with apprehension. The plan was to face the erection, hoping I'd know what to do with it. And mostly I did, noting the sense in which the hyperactive male sex drive ought to create a happy situation for us heterosexual women. I suppose the rub lies in our ambivalent role as object of those desires. Desire can beget derision, as I am wont to lecture. And too, horniness may beget creepiness. Reading Bellow was at times like being inside the head of some lecherous great-uncle; I did not want to know what was going on in there.
In the Herzog era, the Mad Men era, there seems to have been some glamorous sexual crackle, and simultaneously the sexes were warring. Usually it seems we get along better nowadays, but sometimes it seems men are stewing in their caves while women appear smugly victorious but are privately unfulfilled.
And I worry that our present era has warped and vilified some of the natural distinctions of gender, and that certain prevailing wisdoms attempt to subdivide relationships into unrealistically tidy, sterile compartments (sex, communication, housework, and so forth), neglecting the pulsating, organic whole that is the ever-tenuous but uniquely magical bond between men and women.* I kept these ruminations to myself, however, until I read a wonderful essay in the book review section of the New York Times. *Sorry, beloved gays. This one's not about you. IN HER ESSAY "The Naked and the Conflicted," Katie Roiphe observes that today's male novelists "have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors." Predecessors like Norman Mailer, John Updike, Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. (Among these Bellow is, incidentally, the most demure, as indicated in the below graphic, which accompanied Roiphe's essay.) She goes on:
The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex...Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.
Of that last she provides an excellent example from Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections: "He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using." Ladies, if we have given guys the impression that their sexual aggression is loathsome, we have failed grievously to communicate. And communication is supposed to be our specialty. Furthermore, if we have given such an impression, that we want our men de-balled, does that not betray a cowardice of our own?
It is fashionable to speak of men being *threatened by strong women,* but what of insecure women feeling threatened by strong men? Mightn't we women be quick to judge a delicious specimen of masculinity as a jerk or a dolt or a cad, similar to the way some men are quick to condemn a dauntingly attractive woman as dumb or bitchy?
Speakinawhich, check out Herzog's flagrantly displayed desire/derision vortex in this passage from the book:
He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of a woman in a shining black straw hat which held her hair in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray--he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment--a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. [Emboldenings mine.]
Sheesh! What threat can this stranger possibly represent? She's just like sitting on a bench in a train station and he hates her.
I found a possible answer in a description of Herzog's ex-wife, Madeleine. Recalling the beauty of the woman who left him, Herzog is flooded with venomous resentment. "Such beauty," he thinks, "makes men breeders, studs and servants." Stands to reason that Bitch Eyes, likewise, would be a threat to power. A threat to freedom. Bell Biv Devoe said it straighter: "Never trust a big butt and a smile."
Here's another Bellow desire/derision gem, describing a photograph of Madeleine as a child: "In jodhpurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt." I assure you, no twelve year-old girl has ever thought any such thing.
But I appreciate knowing Herzog has these notions. What makes the insidiousness of the contemporary male novelists is their reluctance to be real for fear they'll be caught thinking wrong. This is artistic cowardice, though also understandable. By contrast, in Herzog Bellow ruthlessly exposes the twisted consciousness of an often-despicable character who seems a damn lot like Bellow himself. It reads like plain truth; artless, and thus good art.
Funny thing--Franzen tries to do this, or something akin to it, in The Corrections*: creating a mildly despicable doppelganger with whom the reader must inevitably empathize. But Franzen's Chip comes off wanting to be pitied or sheltered or something. He backhandedly begs absolution, whereas Herzog is (at least in his stream of consciousness narration) guileless. Herzog's not trying to manipulate the reader into secretly liking him; he owns to being half schmuckish and is strong enough not to whiningly finagle your forgiveness. He only asks that his faults be accepted. Who can say no to that.
*I read The Corrections several years ago and did not re-read it for this essay. That was wrong, I know. Just I was loathe to rekindle so odious a relationship. By way of apology, I offer this interesting recent Franzen article.
At any rate, this business of shipping one's self-loathing out into the world in charismatic written package is an excellent trick, one I use often. But I digress from the point, which is: I'd sooner do Saul Bellow than Jonathan Franzen. And the former is dead. (Counterobjectification. Try it.)
I LEARN things from Bellow because he tells the truth, however ugly. I have some idea now how a person of Herzog's ilk, a muddled misogynist mid-century man of ideas thinks. Communication can only be born of honesty, of course. If someone avoids saying in order not to be caught harboring incorrect (politically or otherwise) thoughts, only frustration can result.
But it wasn't only Bellow's honesty that I appreciated. Reading Herzog, I felt a less inhibited version of the attraction to mid-century macho novelists that had formerly evoked feminist shame. Indeed the very things that might make men sexist--strength, dominance, a bit of brutishness--might also make them sexy.
The loins are rarely in accord with the politically correct brain. Trust me. I've read Superhead's memoir. (Sup's writing game < Sup's head game.) I sense that many of my male peers feel pressure to be sensitively soft and then get stymied because really of course we ladies tend to like hardness. What Roiphe calls 'paralyzed sweetness' is highly unattractive. And yet we often begrudge men the very hardness we like. When I speak of the conjoined twindom of desire and derision, I do not exempt my own kind, nor myself.
I do believe this conflation of sexy and sexist, what we might call the Nigel Tufnel Paradox, can be overcome. It just requires effort on all sides. A male friend once told me it is not easy to find the balance of being a guy. And I believe him. Just as, he kindly added, it is surely not easy to do same as a woman. In saying such things there is always the fear one's fellow woman will accuse one of letting men off easy, indulging in another pathetic effort to please them. Herein paragraph constitutes my plea for sisterly mercy, so let me reassert that yeah Bellow's sexist. Classically so. Herzog's ideal woman is geishesquely servile, delighted just to please him, bathe him, remove his shoes. And he thinks some mean shit, like, "But this is a female pursuit. This hugging and heartbreak is for women. The occupation of a man is in duty, in use, in civility, in politics in the Aristotelian sense." Ouch! (Resolved to watch PBS News Hour each evening in full. No TMZ.)
And yet Moses Herzog, wandering the existential desert, is also a decent person. And indeed decent people have often been sexists, racists, slaveowners and Nazis. How many must there be today who hate gays? Prejudice is one of those peculiar quirks of humanity.
CHEST-THUMPING authors, like Mailer especially, do also use sex and misogyny the way certain rappers do: to flex a disfigured masculine pride. I distinguish such cheap knocks from genuine expressions of imperfect sentiment. And as Roiphe points out, contemporary male novelists can be sexist too; just their version is "wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out." Which is kinda worse, for its camouflage. (BTW, if you ever make your girlfriend mad, just drop five stacks on that makeup bag; it worked on my cat.)
My unsolicited advice to male authors: Writing is not macho. Novelists are not rock stars, not boxers. If writing novels threatens your manhood, perhaps prescribe yourself some other activity to restore it rather than jizzing all over the manuscript. Oh, and tell the truth. Even if someone might hate you for it.
To all the ladies worldwide, I say we have to be strong enough to let men have their strength and know we can handle it. They, in turn, have to promise not to be assholes and to treat us with respect. But the respect has to be genuine. As in literally 'look again'--not some blathering bullshit self-congratulatory fake sensitivity. Beware the man who announces his feminism. I never ever tell people who are not white that I'm nonracist.
What do women want? wonders Herzog. "What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." At another point he lists what women around him seem to expect: "nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater!" But a woman of Herzog's day could easily have made a much longer list of what men then expected from women, including but not limited to: looking pretty, being the cleaning women themselves, rearing young, smoothing down hackles, pleasing in bed, living in suburban traps and resigning themselves to the denigrating attitudes and limited roles of their time.
I presume to speak for all contemporary women in saying we want strength without oppression, sensitivity but not 'paralyzed sweetness,' to be protected and appreciated and understood. And I cannot know but can guess that the men want care without stiflement, independence but not indifference, to be nurtured and appreciated and understood. Tall orders on both sides, but something can probably be worked out.
I'm from the exurbs, so I can appreciate both urban and rural. They are both, at least, something, rather than an absence of anything. (Sorry, Riverside. You know you're always my hometown, loved unconditionally.)
When I tell people I'm milking an Oakland goat they seem amused slash to be wondering why I feel the need to be so obstinately strange. There is no explaining why goat-milking is wonderful. I cannot make the case in sensible terms, like the milk is so extra delish, or it's saving me money, or I have achieved near-vegan levels of food moralism.
I don't buy milk anymore, and that is cool. But I only quite grasp the awesomeness of the thing at 7:30 on Tuesday mornings when I'm in my pajamas carrying a quart jar of warm milk up the street of my city neighborhood. (Please note that my milking sentiments are less fond at 6:30 alarm time.) It's all there as I walk home: the udder just drained, the cereal soon to be wetted, the cheese later to be made, and the peculiar sensation of knowing how it all happens.
This yield is pitiful. But you get the idea.
Knowing how it happens is not pure bliss. There's a reason we've divorced our food from its origins. The origins are often gross. The Goat Girls, aged twelve and sixteen, are wont to squirt milk from the udder right into their mouths, preferably whilst singing My milkshake brings all the neighbors to the yard/Damn right it's better than the store's--but I cannot yet do this. And in fact it took me a while before I could scramble and consume the eggs laid in my backyard without queasy revulsion. And in fact it took me a while before I could eat the lettuce grown in my backyard without a dubious mix of self-mistrust and grossness aversion.
Milking does not have a singular character. There are many kinds of milkings, as with any elemental activity. Sometimes the Indigoat Farm hens are pecking at the alfalfa hay strewn about the stanchion and Indi is bleating sweetly from the pen and sun reflects off Kiah's deerish brown flank and my hand works like it was made to do this particular finger dance, forcing great white streams into a latte froth in the collection cup. Other times rain drenches my Cal sweatshirt, its cuffs stained by and reeking of Udder Butter, and Kiah hates me, alfalfa bribes notwithstanding, and to spite me kicks her shit-caked hoof into my hard-won supply.
I was surprised (and a tad smug) when I had to convince someone--a wise and worldly reportorial sort once employed by CNN--that milk comes only from animals who have given birth. In the case of a bucolicized small farm creature he was quite willing to believe it, but surely, he objected, this was not the case for those milking machines in industrial farm bondage. Modern agriculture has us well fooled. Surely, we think, it must happen some other way.
The reason for milk. Indi, at her sleepover chez moi.
Speaking of animals' inevitable reproductive habits, Marianne has gone broody, not unlike half my human friends. She sits on the nest, doesn't lay, has to be persuaded even to roam the yard at evening recess. There are nest box skirmishes when Ximena or Betsy want to go in there and get some actual work done, and egg yields are desperately down without her dark brown, speckled contributions. The one upside is I get to bust out heretofore unused chicken terminology, moaning about how she's 'setting' and I have to 'break her up.'
My attempts to break her up have failed. (Ice cubes? Bitch please.) I began to reflect on this latest form of insubordination disguised as poultry instinct in connection with the previous form: her weeks-long campaign of daily escapes, via flight from a high branch of the fig tree that canopies the run.
I came to suspect that the problem went beyond broodiness. She's at the bottom of the pecking order, forever getting her ass beat, last dibs on chard treats. Disgruntlement has radicalized her. I never saw this coming: my chicken is an anarchist.
Everybody seems to have ideas about how to break broodiness, but I couldn't find any tips online about how to break anarchism. And it's pretty far along. I cleaned out the nest box expecting to find some adolescent knickknacks, perhaps a few punk rock records. But no. She's got the entire fucking AK Press catalog stashed in there. Bakunin quotes scrawled on the walls. Suffice it to say that I came home sporting an "I Voted" sticker and got shat on.
I can roll my eyes and explain it away psychologically, and I'd have a strong case, considering her pecking order issues. But I should also give her choice of philosophy some respectful consideration. I do keep her caged in wire, after all.
Indeed there is much to ponder when keeping working animals. There is no 'freeing' them at this point, having finagled our needs into their very genes. At best we can work to ensure the bargain we strike with them is fair. I think FOOD + PROTECTION⇌ FOOD + OBEDIENCE is pretty fair. Politeness on both sides is helpful; affection is bonus nice. (I don't eat meat, so you'll have to talk to somebody else about the off-with-their-heads bit.) But they are creatures, with creature hearts and minds. They can't be machinized, and I think that's for the best.
Leela (in the black down) and Erykah. Hands mine.
Animal husbandry is a progressive addiction, so I ended up with some ducklings, bought from a feed store in Petaluma. At maturity they're to join the lone duck at Indigoat Farm. But there was an uncute twist in which one of them died, age five days. It might not have been my fault. Then again, it might have been, which is another thing one has to think about. You gotta be on top of your game when it comes to those downy tufts of precious new life.
Shipped via Israeli post! No, not really.
Leela and Erykah have certain duck-specific charms. You can tell they like muck, and seek it (by gathering at the base of my wine barrel water garden) and seek to create it (by making a sludgy mess of their brooder box). When they splash into the Pie Pan Pond™, it is an absolute refutation of any argument that animals can't feel joy. Meanwhile, Paulie has been in the shade by the passion vine, writing his memoirs. Six weeks in he has only the title, Big Cat Diary. He somehow duped Carmela into doing all the research pro bono, so she's on the phone making polite entreaties to Hopalong and Thornhill Pet Hospital, gathering data on his kittenhood. When he sees the ducklings coming, he runs. And the backyard beat goes on.
It may be mating season, but the hens are instead ensconced in their book club. (Currently, Mansfield Park.) Following are their retorts to unworthy rooster suitors.
Ximena: A living of ten thousand a year and the finest carriages to your estate could not overcome a manner so uncivil. Besides which these attentions cannot have merit, your having so recently made my acquaintace as to be utterly ill-equipped to discern my character.
Betsy: Without wishing to insult you, I am nonetheless obliged to bring forth the unsuitability of the connexion, as I should never entertain the entreaties of a man of inferior birth.
Marianne: While in grateful receipt of the knowledge that your examination of my hindquarterly regions has yielded so favourable a result, I speak not from modest delicacy but rather with stern purpose in saying these attentions shall in no manner further the cause to which I can only but attribute your initial addresses toward myself.
IT WOULD have been nice if Erykah Badu made just the album I wanted. It would have had all the philosophical depth of New AmErykah Part One and all the yarn-spinning and sensuality of Mama's Gun and even better grooves than Worldwide Underground and would have taught me everything I need to know.
But it doesn't work that way. Badu made the album she needed to make, and it's on me to love it or leave it. Being a proper fan is probably good training for all kinds of other relationships.
I know I've no right to write music reviews. I'm not qualified. I don't understand music, even though I consume it in gobs. So people say New AmErykah Part Two is more acoustically au naturel whereas Part One was more pre-fabby, and I believe them, because* it sounds that way, now that they mention it. But I'd never have thought that up. I share my day job with a pro violist and find her world of wooden objects foreign and fascinating. I'm flattered to use the same mouse as such magic hands. Writing is not cool like that. *This phraseology is meant to be Colbertish. What I can tell you, experientially, is that Part Two is emotional journey while Part One was bombastic blaxpoitation soundtrack. But it makes leisurely tracks across sophisticated emotional terrain, far from the rawness of my perennial favorite Badu song, "I Want You." For those in need of review, the archetypically Baduizt prescriptions therein contained for the affliction of being sprung on some dude:
1. pray til early May 2. fast for thirty days 3. get a good book and get all in it 4. try a little yoga for a minute 5. turn the sauna up to hotter and, 6. drink a whole jar of holy water (an entire jar!)
Badu appears to be done drinking holy water. On Part Two, she sounds cozy and requited. Which must be nice. This album doesn't have a natural single, a "Honey" or a "Danger." So "Window Seat" is the one getting tossed out for broad consumption, which is kinda random. It's not the awesomest song ever, but I object to criticism that it's a throwback to the Baduizm days. Nothing on that ankhdafied proto-Badu album was as cool as:
So, out my mind I'm tusslin Back and forth tween here and hustlin I don't wanna time travel no more I want to be here I'm thinkin On this porch I'm rockin Back and forth like Lightnin' Hopkins If anybody speak to Scotty tell him beam me up
When New AmErykahPart Three comes out (oh yeah: there's a Part Three; you know it), I might as well just turn immediately to whatever track exceeds the ten-minute mark, because those weird, ambivalent, endless jams always become my favorites.
On Part Two, the weird, ambivalent, endless jam niche is filled by "Out My Mind, Just In Time." Throughout the whole ten minutes she never decides whether she is crazy or not, which--I don't know about you, but that's how I go through each day. It does that signature Badu trick of seeming like one track ends and another begins--the mood, the music, the gist of the lyrics may all change; silence may even occur--but no! Still the same song. And when you really listen to one of these smushies it's not just a cute ploy; the parts are rightfully of the same song. It's like with semi-colons; surely these are two necessarily-tethered independent clauses, not separate sentences in need of punctuational chastening.
Another good smush, should you need one, comes on Part One's "Master Teacher." That song also abets my theory that there is a Badu song suited for any mindstate. "Master Teacher" is for insomnia: I have longed to stay awake/Beautiful world I'm tryna find.
The best part of "Out My Mind" comes at one of its about-face seams. She shifts from delicately-sprouting optimism to:
MaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAn Fuck this shit Fuck this shit
That bit totally played in my head when I had to sit full days at the reception desk. (The pro violist skipped town for a spell.) On the opposite end of two spectra--length, seriousness--comes the album's comic miniature track, "You Loving Me," which, in typical Erykah expectation-thwartation fashion, is not a lovey song at all. In its entirety, it goes:
[Badu sounds] You lovin me, and I'm drivin your Benz You lovin me, and I'm spendin your ends You lovin me, and I'm drinkin your gin You lovin me, and I'm fuckin your friends [repeat] You lovin me [mutters That's terrible isn't it, and chuckles]
Erykah would never do those mean things! Why did she think that up? It's so needless and silly and catchy.
And yes, there's a collab with Lil Wayne because Badu does hear my prayers. It's a romp. He kinda sounds like he's freestyling. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I know he doesn't write shit cause he ain got time.
DON'T WORRY. I am going to talk about the nekkid video. Of course I'm gonna talk about the nekkid video. Badu has generously offered for us all to make of it what we will. So to me it's about unlayering. Which, in turn, is about performance.
Speakinawhich, I saw her perform at Oakland's renewed Fox Theater back in February. Seeing Badu live was not the easy adulative experience I'd anticipated. Goapele, who opened for her, is slick and unconscionably beautiful, and while she is a fairy godmother in her own right,* she seemed like a feeble pop star compared to Badu. Goapele gave us what we wanted. Erykah was making some obscure demand and promising to make it worth our while, like the mean teacher who actually has high hopes for you. *I hate this phrase. Its use pertaining to the wife of an impressive man should be banned.
She started out inaccessibly weird and excessively clothed and inversed both ways as the night wore on, so when I watched the nekkid video, the theme was already familiar. The show's chailight came when she was down to just glitter pants and purple t-shirt. She led a sing-along to "Ain't No Fun," that classic West Coast posse cut which posits that if the homies cannot partake of the lady you are enjoying that enjoyment is curtailed, and I've never felt so elated singing Cause you gave me all your puss-ay/And you even licked my balls.
Who knew misogyny could be so efficiently undercut by mockery? But then co-optation of the oppressor is a fine tradition. It's why gay people took 'queer' and black people took the 'n' word. (Also why I took 'Cleb,' but long story.) Winking co-optation succeeds where rants fail. During the part that goes, And if you can't fuck that day baby/Just lay back, and open ya mouth, Badu tipped her head back and opened her mouth and aimed her mic there. It was hilario.
Onstage and in the "Window Seat" video, Badu's protective opener armor is peacoat, hoodie up, lots of articles. (It's like Game says: My mind fucked up, so I cover it with a Raider hood.) She sheds that protection in layers, with determination and care. Art demands self-exposure, but overexposure might kill you. The video evokes the work and risk of trodding one's individual path. She walks with unmistakable purpose. When I listen to "Window Seat" while walking home along Lake Merritt, I may or may not walk thusly myself. And may or may not loose my hair from its tyrannical clip in dramatic fashion at some pivotal moment.
Badu specializes in what they call 'brave vulnerability,' a thankless specialty. If it weren't bad enough to have your soul all naked, you also get demeaned as a pussified emotionalist. This strikes me as the opposite of, say, intellectualism, war and sports--pursuits that garner such ready respect.
NOT THAT that's why she did the Dallas stripdown. She did it because she heard that her #1 stan said this:
My only problem with [the song "Me"] is the part when she says "my ass and legs have gotten thick." If you have seen any recent pictures of stick figure Badu, you'll understand why this is offensive to those of us in the thick community.
Erykah: I am so sorry. Point taken. Your boomboom might mine own exceed in size. The thick community welcomes you. xoxo, Cleb
IT WAS ALL a dream. I used to read Mother Earth magazine. Now Paulie Walnuts and Miss Cleb are milkin cream. He hates when the little goat sleeps over, though. He can't stand immature forms of any species; he calls them 'larval rats' or LRs for short.
When the Bird Lady and her Tall Jew came for dinner, they noticed he had put on some weight. After they left I found him in the closet, weeping softly, and I was like, Come on. I thought we were done with that closet shit a long time ago. He won't come out. He's unfit to be seen, &tc. I yank him out by a hind leg and squeeze him into his rubber punishment suit in the hopes we can celebrate his paunch. Instead he takes one look in the mirror and puts a paw gun to his temple.
We talk. He says he really wants to pursue a healthy lifestyle and I try to encourage him. He spends the next forty-eight hours on nothing but legumes and cucumber water proving he means it. Then he crashes, gorges, collapses in a pile of self-loathing.
I prescribe us a night at Easy. We tuck our jeans into our heel boots and he brushes his teeth with a bottle of Jack and we go. He can't but be happy when it's midnight and his fur is drenched in sweat and "Five On It" is playing. I know he won't actually dial any of the numbers he gets. He just craves some talismanic reassurance of his fuckability. For such a handsome cat, he can be most insecure.
The next day he's like, Fuck the club. He'd rather count a million bucks. I explain to him yet again why we couldn't score that inheritance. He says integrity is fine, but a Gucci collar is infinitely better. Also he's through with dieting. Has decided to be a Jabba the Hutt-style rap Dionysus. I ask him how that worked out for Biggie and Pun. He says he's still not a player but I'm still a hater.
I'm sterilizing milk jars and he asks how's Mr. Snuffleupagus. (He means the TS.) I tell him to fuck off because my imaginary friends could kick his virtual friends asses. He swishes off to IM his remote homie Seymour, and soon is cracking up over what they've dubbed 'humanure': shit that only humans think is funny. (Seymour's humom taught him portmanteaus and this is the thanks she gets.)
He's got this diva persona, but he's actually sensitive. He knows when my Pain is bad. He thinks it was imprudent of me to strike out on my own when I can't, like, carry shit. But he doesn't say it out loud. If he said it out loud I could point out his rhetorical error, the implication I should have stayed with Crim so the latter could carry shit. I assure him that the bonus-bling hooptie is on the way and, as soon as it starts and I remember how to drive stick, I'm up for ease of groceries and he's up for a puke-erific ride culminating in a rabies shot. He can't wait.
And actually, he does understand. He's like, Freedom isn't free. We get to reminiscing on his Log Cabin Republican days.
In literal terms, we are making cheese. (Chevre cleanse, twenty days, key to health.) Also practicing our thug love duets. He sucks at memorizing lyrics, so he always gets to be Ashanti. If we're feeling weak we do pushups to "Drop the World." Naturally he gets to be Wayne and I have to be Em. After that he's fired up and wants to stay out all night 'hunting,' which in his case should rightfully be called 'hunching in a vigilant pose by the coop.' It's seemingly meek Carmela who actually earns her barn cat keep.
He says he's finally figured out why I like rap so much. Because it's pretty words and it's about struggle. He says even when it's about money-cars-clothes-hoes it's really about struggle. I tell him that's pretty insightful. For a cat. He gives me the middle claw.
He likes seeing me at my writing desk, but he can't quite be supportive. He feels obliged to step on the keyboard and point out that writing is not going to provide the bottle-popping lifestyle he's looking for. I tell him I know that but I have to do it anyway. He understands. Write it or die trying. I ask if he'd care for some goat's milk squirted straight from the udder.
PLANTING IS an act of faith from which I still, in this my ninth gardening season, am incapable of expecting rewards. I look out on the helpless chardlings and meager carrot sprouts and see not overflowing harvest baskets but a multitude of dire ends inspired by the Yom Kippur liturgy: Who by slugs, who by chicken attack, who by leafminers, who by flooding; who shall grow limply without apparent cause, who shall perish when I fail to water.
Nature scatters a thousand seeds that one might reach mature planthood, and gardeners are usually wise to copy Mother. It is in willful defiance of this time-tested evolutionary strategy that we break out the Accelerated Propagation System (APS) seed-starting kits with the special wicking properties and coddle seedlings like infants. But then Nature must chuckle and sigh over many of our human follies. Among the ambitious seeds currently germinating in my APS kits are tomatoes 'San Marzano' and 'Costoluto Genovese,' and eggplant 'Rosa Bianca.' Because I trust the Italians on flavor. For beauty, I turn to the French. I get obsessed with particular French plant variety names, like 'Comtesse de Bouchard,' a pink clematis I've yet to grow, and 'Merveille des Quatre Saisons,' a red-tinged crisphead lettuce I've grown to marvelous effect, though not in all four seasons.
This spring I've welcomed another longtime French fantasy, 'Cécile Brunner.' I'm a tad embarrassed to admit that Cécile is a rose.
YOU SEE, my favorite gardens look natural, hiding the blood, sweat, tears and APS systems (preferably in a darling greenhouse). And I tend to reserve my toil for edible plants, on whom it is more readily justified. I've sneered at rose gardeners with their dainty shears and ridiculous wide-brimmed hats and elbow-length gloves undefiled by dirt. They pour on the water and chemicals in exchange for some garish splotches of yellow and hot pink that are at once snobbish and uncouth, like the ladies off one of those Real Housewives of ________ shows.
Cool gardener that I am, I just scatter a few annual seeds in fall and when I head out for my spring labor at the edibles, there to surprise me is the unassuming beauty of larkspurs, Nigella, cornflowers, Gilia tricolor, and, of course, plenty of California poppies to set off all those blues.
This is myth, however. In reality, not even the poppies can be counted upon, and while Gilia is reputed to readily reseed--it's a California native wildflower, after all--spring invariably finds me searching the ground in vain, and then scouring every nursery for those finely-cut leaves that will bear the pale blue and surprisingly complex flowers which are my favorite.
Still, it was quite a leap from $2.99 for Gilia (better get two, sake of symmetry, so $5.98) to $30 for Cécile. She'll demand investments of others kinds as well. Unlike my hippie annuals, she cares about soil type and moisture, will faint at the sight of aphids, expects timely pruning, and hopes for 5-10-10. (Keep hoping, honey.) My investment in Cécile marks the end of a long awakening process. Roses came to my attention from a gardening perspective when I read Second Nature some years ago. Imaginary Uncle Michael has quite the hard-on for his fifteenth-century vintage 'Maiden's Blush':
Her petals are more loosely arrayed than Madame Hardy's; less done up, almost unbuttoned. Her petals are larger, too, and they flush with the palest pink toward the center, which itself is elusive, concealed in the multiplication of her labial folds.
(Yeah. He used to be so cool. Now it's all gastropolitical sermons all the time. I think to distract him we should change the French name for 'Maiden's Blush' from 'Cuisse de Nymphe' to 'Reveille Mouillé de Boomer Chauve.')
Such written rose reveries are common, and I rolled my eyes, quite sure it couldn't happen to me. I was just not that into roses. My easy stereotypes labeled them arrogant and cantankerous. Such cliched beauty--a dozen, red, in a vase. And even if you got past that, to the old-fashioned fragrant climbers, in classy cream whites and pale pinks...well...their attractiveness was so obvious as to be obnoxious.
ANY MAJOR plant acquisition is preceded by an onanistic research phase. That involves some Google image searches, sure, but--garden nerd that I am--I really get off on the fine print. I was keen to learn, for example, that although Cécile is technically a hybrid tea, she is a venerable sort, not the trashy newfangled kind. (Growing the latter invites the scorn of any garden sophisticate.) And while Céciles do grow in bush form, the plant I purchased is the descendant of a 'climbing sport'--a freak of nature who climbed instead of standing still, from whom climbing progeny were then bred.
By the by, the garden pr0n images that please me most are not flowery; they feature army rows of vegetables, diverse but segregated. Whispy carrot row, rotund cabbage row, beets distinguished by their red leaf midribs, slender onion tops in a hectic mass. A spray of sweet peas climbing behind is the sole permissible ornamental flourish. Anyway. Pretending amnesia for all my nerdlicious study, I then show up at Berkeley Hort and fake an impulse buy. Makes me feel spontaneous.
I aspire to be more like garden guru Pat Lanza, who finds grapevines on sale one spring, buys three when she hasn't space enough for one, plants them nine inches apart (!), and in so doing remarks, "There's something to be said for my kind of blind faith. I rush in and plant while others stew over the what-ifs." From Lanza I also learned about Dreaming & Planning, which is what gardeners do in winter. (I try to instill this concept in my garden class kids, because in their corner of the world some D & P is warranted.)
Of the two, Planning seems vastly more acceptable. Dreaming overmuch is just gross. Whenever I start in picturing how lovely the fence would look draped in rose blooms, how lovely the warm spring air scented with same, I smack myself and consult the Jew Manual, which decrees that such wistfulness be swiftly undercut by gloomy ruminations and self-deprecatory quips. I PLANTED the rose in what was a sizable wooden container and now passes as a mini cylindrical raised bed. Before its bottom rotted, it contained, for several seemingly successful years, my dwarf Braeburn apple, a plant acquired amid a similar frenzy of earnest research mixed with blind hopes (albeit at a more innocent point in my gardening career), and a plant which, despite my sincere devotions and because of my myriad mistakes, as they say 'failed to thrive.' It did bloom beautifully, and gave me some apples before its decline. But I let the little tree languish, probably for too long.
Cécile will probably perish within weeks herself, says the inner Eeyore. Barring that, she may prove to be a pain in the ass. But then again: ease of cultivation is not a recommendation in and of itself. There are as many easy to grow plants as there are thirsty dudes in the city of Oakland. Doesn't mean you want them seeding in your yard. If you want an easy plant, I've got ten thousand oxalis bulbs for you, free of charge. While planting I was viscerally reminded that roses also, famously, have thorns. This is quite hostile. One gets resentful, always having to wear those elbow-length gloves. But thorns served their evolutionary purpose, before we humans became the natural selector protectors, and they ought to persist. A rose de-thorned would be wrong. The thorns remind us about something, likely to do with beauty and pain. Seeking the one, encountering the other.
Thus far Cécile is contemptuous, or at best inscrutable. My Italian tomatoes are but spindly sprouts. The winter peas have been chewed down by some creature, probably one whom I feed expensive kibbles. The nurseries have no Gilia. I've done a lot of renovations, and it looks bare. But spring is come and the hens are laying and we can all photosynthesize again. One ought to be optimistic, even if such is not justified by the facts on the ground.
Bellow seemed like a fitting launchpad for said investigation, and I picked up a copy of his renowned 1964 novel Herzog. Both being Jews, I figured Bellow and I could bond over quaint Yiddishisms, having little else in common. Which worked out nicely when his character Moses Herzog reminisced on singing "Ma Tovu" with his brothers as a child. I was humming it all the next day. ("Ma Tovu" is a pleasant song to have in your head, since it means "How Good." Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mish'knotecha Yisrael: How good are thy tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.)
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