Bookish Gardener

Like looking in a mirror

My Simpsons avatar, courtesy of my 10-year old, from this site. It's a shocking revelation of both my inner Milhous and the fact that I really should become reacquainted with the gym sometime soon.

Drive, she said

Corinna: It says here that Sweetwater hosts the annual sorghum festival. What the h*** is sorghum?
Alex: Third most popular cereal grain in the country.
Corinna: How do you know that?
Alex: I'm a gardener. I know crops. What's the address again?
Corinna: Four fifty-five.
Alex: No, no way.
Corinna: No what? You don't even know what this says.
Alex: It says that we have to rob the bank.
Corinna: How do you know that?
Alex: I wasn't always a gardener.

Alex Tully, we hardly knew ye. Drive got cancelled after just four episodes over three nights. Those of us who got hooked too quickly are waiting for the final two episodes to show up somewhere, anywhere, after they were scheduled to air July 4th, then yanked and rescheduled for July 13th, then apparently scrubbed altogether. (Hey, Fox...ya might want to check into that Long Tail thing.) 

I'm back from a 2,700-mile drive myself. We took the quintessential summer family car drive vacation, looping through the Great Plains, with Mount Rushmore as the epicenter. My favorite serendipitous soundtrack moment of the drive: switching on the radio after heading onto the interstate out of Miles City in "Big Sky" Montana; a station comes in, clear as a bell. It's playing The Who's "I Can See For Miles and Miles."

When I drive, music is essential company (although sometimes to distraction). The CD's in my commute car/mom taxi have to wear well over weeks, and sometimes months, of repeated listening, and now it's time to change out the CD changer for these summer tunes:

Pale Young Gentlemen, Pale Young Gentlemen
David Daniels, Serenade
Sly and the Family Stone, Greatest Hits
Haydn, Auenbrugger Sonatas (Ronald Brautigam, fortepiano)
Bangles, Greatest Hits
Elvis Costello, Armed Forces.

Soundtrack

From Jontillman.com, via Asymmetrical Information:

"If your life had a soundtrack, what would the music be?

Here’s how it works:
1. open your library (iTunes, winamp, media player, iPod)
2. put it on shuffle
3. press play
4. for every question, type the song that’s playing
5. new question – press the next button
6. don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool"

Most of my audio library lives outside my media player, so the selections below aren't all that representative of what I listen to from day to day, although the overweighting of a certain artist (overlooking the gruesome fact, which has me in an irrational adolescent rage, that he has recently begun hawking a line of luxury cars and, if that wasn't bad enough, had to bring Beethoven—Beethoven!—into it...because, what, the second movement of the Ninth is the most luxury car-like of all the symphonic movements? Or maybe I'm just annoyed that I won't be able to smirk "sellout" to my husband anymore when Robert Plant caterwauls for Caddys) is.

Opening Credits:
"Everything to Me" - Rockapella - Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Waking Up:
"Trail of Broken Hearts" - k. d. lang and the re-clines - Absolute Torch and Twang

First Day At School:
"Big Sister's Clothes" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Trust

Falling in Love:
"Do You Love What You Feel" - Rufus & Chaka Khan - The Very Best of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan

Breaking Up:
"Fantasy" - Earth, Wind & Fire - Greatest Hits

Prom:
"Shallow Grave" - Elvis Costello - All This Useless Beauty

Life’s Okay:
"After the Love Has Gone" - Earth, Wind & Fire - Greatest Hits

Mental Breakdown:
"People Make the World Go 'Round" - Marc Dorsey - "Crooklyn" Soundtrack (Vol. 1)

Driving:
"Fish 'N Chip Paper" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Trust

Flashback:
"Let the Good Times Roll" - Harry Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson

Getting Back Together:
"Seasons Change" - Exposé - Exposure

Wedding:
"(I Don't Want to Go To) Chelsea" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - This Year's Model

Birth of a Child:
"I'll Take You There" - The Staple Singers - "Crooklyn" Soundtrack (Vol. 2)

Final Battle:
"Sunday's Best" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Armed Forces

Death Scene:
"Pretty Words" - Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Trust

Funeral Song:
"It's Time" - Elvis Costello - All This Useless Beauty

End Credits:
"Moods for Moderns" - Elvis Costello & The Attractions - Armed Forces

"Congratulations, Universe. You win."

It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected.

Laurie Colwin, "A Mythological Subject," The Lone Pilgrim.

So! Within 48 hours after I last rang off with such high hopes, we had a bit of unwelcome excitement at my daughter's school, and I've been in hyperinvolved- activist-public-school-parent mode for the past several weeks.

Yes, we've got to get ourselves back to the...

More soon. Really.

Report:

Still here! With a suitcase full of sorries for the sabbatical. I've been navigating some rocky shoals from left field (metaphor mixmaster operational, sir!) this past year. (But please don't worry, if you were to be so inclined: husband and children are fine, livelihood is fine, I'm fine, all blessings too numerous to be counted.) I'll blame the reluctance to show up here on a self-editor that's been exceptionally unforgiving, and on the fear of sounding too much like HG2G's Marvin upon each occasion of opening my mouth. But enough of all that. It's been long enough. Let's proclaim December YahMoBlogMo, er, Month. See you?

O pioneers!

I love looking into other people's gardens. Each garden seems to say something about its gardener in a way that's as intriguing and mysterious as the unique slant, velocity and pressure on the page of an individual's cursive hand. Some of what a garden tells about the gardener seems obvious: compact plants predominate in the garden of a garden friend who's shorter in stature, while six-plus foot heliopses, towering hanging baskets and statuesque potted tropical shrubs populate the garden of another garden friend whom I look up to in more ways than one. (The garden of this average-height gardener follows the "eye-level" theme as well, with tall plants as the backdrop and short plants as border accents to a vast army of mid-sized plants.) And maybe genteel pastels mirror a gentle soul, while exuberant primary colors are the natural expression of an extrovert's outsized enthusiasm. But these generalizations are anecdotal at best, likely inaccurate, and mostly not even the point. When I'm in someone's garden, I get a sense of the gardener in a way that can't quite be expressed in words. (Which, by the way, is not at all affected by the garden's state of housekeeping. Weeds are irrelevant! Which I ought to remember every time I'm tempted to panic at the prospect of someone approaching my garden.)

I love looking into other people's gardens, but I am mostly too reserved to invite myself in, even with (or, I should say, especially with) gardeners that I know well. And so I observe and appreciate (or spy on and lurk about) other gardens by reading garden writing on blogs, including most of those in Kathy Purdy's terrific series of interviews with garden blog pioneers (nine parts in all; the link will take you to part one, with each part containing a further link to the next part of the series). Garden writing worth reading, whether in print or in pixels, isn't merely, or really, about the whats and hows of the same old things (not gonna use the phrase "perennial topics" here)—whether daylilies, blackspot, foraging four-legged creatures, or the caprice of weather. When I read about your garden, I want to know what floats your boat or (to steal my seven-year-old's latest favorite phrase) grinds your gears. The essence of the pleasure of reading a dozen, or a hundred, good garden writers—long may they proliferate—is getting to experience each writer's unique mix of humours. (Yours truly? The melancholic, diluted with the phlegmatic, with occasional bubbles of the sanguine, and tinges of bile, mostly during Japanese beetle season.) The best garden writing, as with the best writing, answers the question that I always pose in my mind to a writer that I want to find worth reading: How are you finding this life?

Of course, garden blogging isn't immune from the tension between doing for love and doing for money. (Which is where I get to say, "Thank goodness I'm an amateur.") If life were fair, gardening magazines would be filled with the bylines of the garden bloggers that I most enjoy, and I'd be rushing to open their covers instead of setting them on the shelf for future, mostly indifferent perusal. To those whose value should be, but isn't, recognized or remunerated, I say: Even deserved fame is fleeting (Lou Grant to Mary Richards: "Look at Winston Churchill. Great man. Probably the greatest man of the century. When was the last time you heard anyone mention Winston Churchill?"). And an out-of-print copy of Thomas Mann's Joseph The Provider from the used-book counter, with the price of thirty-eight cents, speaks volumes about the half-life of commercial and critical success. "Traction" is not the slope of a stats chart but the staying power of your writing. There are blog posts that I've read from years past, and even from blogs that have gone to 404 heaven, which still resonate as much as a well-remembered conversation with an old friend. Those are the blogs that I want to read (and, I hope, to write once in a while). So plants grow, bloom, set seed, and die in mindless cyclicity, and who cares? Except that we're still reading Virgil's Georgics, and Karel Čapek, and Henry Mitchell, and with any luck will be reading even more from those who happily travel along the same dusty road. I'm grateful for and grateful to the garden blog pioneers for widening the path. Go pioneers!

25 characters in search of a vast wasteland

Time for a silly blog list, yes? Here are my 25 favorite TV characters ever (originated by James Gunn, via Whedonesque, including a list from Joss!). I've broken some of Gunn's rules (whaddya mean no cartoons?), and arranged these somewhat chronologically:

1. Morticia Addams (Carolyn Jones), The Addams Family. Wife, mother, gardener...who says you can't have it all?
2. Chet Kincaid (Bill Cosby), The Bill Cosby Show. Noteworthy ep: "A Christmas Ballad." First season just released on DVD(!).
3. Dr. Bombay (Bernard Fox), Bewitched. The cranky quack was the only thing that saved this show from the switch from B&W to color and from York to Sargent.
4. Arnold Ziffel ("Arnold the piggy"), Green Acres. Some pig!
5. "Nanny" Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), Nanny and the Professor. Noteworthy ep: "A Letter for Nanny"...the one where Nanny cries. 
6. Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk), Columbo. Noteworthy ep: "Try and Catch Me" with Ruth Gordon.
7. Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), The Night Stalker. Goofy, scary, perfect.
8. Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At her best before she got skinny. Noteworthy ep: "Love Blooms at Hemple's."
9. Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx), Sanford and Son. Favorite mixed drink: Cranberry juice and Ripple: 'Cripple'.
10. Sergeant Foley (Bruce Solomon), Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The inexplicably irresistible almost-love interest of the pigtailed Louise Lasser.
11. Assistant Crown Attorney Heather Redfern (Janet-Laine Greene), Seeing Things. The buttoned-up lawyer whose teenage crush was not Paul McCartney, but Glenn Gould.
12. Detective Ron Harris (Ron Glass), Barney Miller. Dapper and literary...I'd always hoped to be set up on a blind date with someone just like him.
13. Bradley Raines (James Rebhorn), Guiding Light. The indelible soap opera role. (District Attorney Norwalk in Carlito's Way? That's evil stepfather Bradley! Dr. Bowman the psychiatrist in Far From Heaven? That's evil stepfather Bradley!)
14. 'Coach' Ernie Pantusso (Nick Colasanto), Cheers. To whom thanks are owed for teaching us that Albania's chief export is chrome, and for (as director Nick Colasanto) the two best episodes of Columbo ever, "Etude in Black" and "Swan Song".
15. David Addison (Bruce Willis), Moonlighting. If you ignore the smirking, the "singing" and the bogus final chase scenes, there's actually something to see here. Noteworthy ep: "Knowing Her," with Dana Delany and the Isley Brothers' "This Old Heart of Mine.".
16. Dana Scully (Gilllian Anderson), The X-Files. Held her own even after this show jumped the shark and skidded down to the bowels of hell. Noteworthy ep: "Beyond the Sea."
17. Sheriff Lucas Buck (Gary Cole), American Gothic. The perfect role for the always awesome Jeffrey MacDonald-Mike Brady-Bill Lundbergh-Cotton McKnight Gary Cole.
18. Executive Assistant DA Benjamin Stone (Michael Moriarty), Law and Order. The first and the best.
19. "Sideshow Bob" Terwilliger (Kelsey Grammer), The Simpsons. Noteworthy ep: "Cape Feare".
20. The Chief (Lynne Thigpen), Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Authoritative and soothing, she was the first talking head that got a smile out of my colicky first born.
21. Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Noteworthy ep: "Once More, With Feeling."
22. Hal (Bryan Cranston), Malcolm in the Middle. Noteworthy ep: "Rollerskates". Please tell me that was not a stunt man skating to "Funky Town".
23. Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), 24. Let me get this straight: Tony is dead, and Audrey is alive? 24 writers got some 'splaining to do...
24. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), Firefly. Coming back to TV in reruns next month, in high-definition (!), if you get Universal HD on cable.
25. The Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who. My other car is The TARDIS.

Slouching toward Parnassus

Commemorating one full, wonderful year of piano lessons.

Piece: Debussy's "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum"; instrument: Yamaha P22 upright acoustic piano; recording device: Samsung YP-MT6 (aka the cheapskate's iPod surrogate). (Kindly forgive the bobbles; more takes would have done nothing to improve my performance anxiety. Trust me...all that background hiss is a good thing.)

Download DGP.WAV

And you?

I am a Violet What Flower Are You?

No time to blog? No time to breathe? Still time to take this fun, lovely and legal quiz created by Hanna at This Garden is Illegal.

I am...tagged

I am [see above].  Thanks, OGIC!
I want spring to be like this year's, always.
I wish there were 48 hours to each day.
I hate having to shoot the look of the death ray at people who talk during performances.
I love these 50 things.
I miss holding a sleeping infant snuggled against the crook of my neck.
I fear heights and speed, especially when combined.
I hear the hard drive of this laptop revving up for no apparent reason. Uh-oh.
I wonder when, oh when, Audrey will meet her overdue end on 24.
I regret letting the lisianthus seedlings dry out (Mistah Eustoma, he dead).
I am not voluble.
I dance whenever asked, and sometimes even when not.
I sing in the pews at church, and otherwise only in my head (why, you're most welcome).
I cry so seldom that my children ask me, "Mom, have you ever cried?" Until they saw me turn into a soggy mess watching the Doctor Who episode "Father's Day". Cried at the show, cried at the rerun, cried at the recap.
I am not always as punctual as I mean to be.
I make with my hands (or, made with my hands) fingerless shiny red gloves for my first-grader to wear while she dances to "Supergirl" .
I write slowly and with undue anxiety.
I confuse David Anthony Higgins on Malcolm in the Middle with Michael Badalucco on The Practice.
I need black coffee, dark chocolate, chili peppers and garlic.
I should fold the laundry.
I start Beethoven's Op. 27 No. 1 (piano sonata no. 13) this week.
I finish dessert, always.
I tag anyone who wants to play...