Bookish Gardener

Mmmm...rabbit...

...although I suppose this would not be a suitable use for the remains of the mangy, long-eared, puff-butt rodent who gnawed down my monkshood last night, and who I can only hope will be making a wolfsbane-induced "final exit" from my green garden.

Everybody's got a little light under the sun

Today's the twenty-fifth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night (credit to A Small Victory for noting the anniversary, via Llama Butchers). I wasn't there, but a colleague at my campus job had been at Comiskey that night. (Her take: "It was like 'Lord of the Flies'.") Funny that it's now remembered as a sort of cultural milestone, when to my mind it was nothing more than attention-seeking behavior by someone who just could not get over the fact that he wasn't, never was, and never would be Larry Lujack. Back then, I had only one question for those who jumped on the "Disco Sucks!" bandwagon: after you've blown up all those records, what on earth do you dance to? So, with nostalgia and affection for the days when we would repair to the basement of Woodward Court to dance* after heatedly debating messianic symbolism in Melville late into the night, I am pleased to present the Bookish Gardener mix of '70s dance tunes. Disco est mort; vive disco!

"Dazz" by Brick: "Everybody go on and dance if you want to..."

"Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor: "If it wasn't for the girl sittin' next to me, I'd jump right up and outta my seat you see..."

"Disco Inferno" by The Trammps: "I heard somebody say...burn baby burn..."

"Don't Leave Me This Way" by Thelma Houston: "Awwwww...baby!"

"Boogie Oogie Oogie" by A Taste of Honey: "If you're thinkin' you're too cool to boogie..."

"Knock on Wood" by Amii Stewart: "Think you'd better knock knock knock on wood..."

"Please Pardon Me (You Remind Me of a Friend)" by Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan: "Every time I see your face, you remind me of that someone..."

"I Wanna Get Next to You" by Rose Royce: "Boy, I'm spending my dimes, wasting my time, talking 'till I'm black and blue..."

"Flashlight" by Parliament. Because..."Everybody's got a little light under the sun...under the sun...under the sun..."

Next up: Your Disco Cultural Concurrence Index ("Protégées: The Emotions, or Samantha Sang?"). Kidding!

*Disclaimer: not typical of the undergraduate experience at the U. of C. in the '70s.

'Rédouté', sans doute

The David Austin English rose 'Rédouté' began blooming a few days ago. It's lovely. It has a gentle rose fragrance, a blush pink color to lighten up the goth corner (which it borders), and a friendly fat face of a bloom. It promises to be quite floriferous: a half-dozen blooms are open already, with another half-dozen budded and ready to follow. (The Japanese beetles, which just showed up in my garden yesterday, will have quite a feast. For now, 'Roseraie de l'Haÿ' seems to be their trap crop.) I really don't think of myself as a rosarian, since there are so many other flowers that I've lost my head over, but I am very fond of the roses that I do have. Just to think that this was a bare-root stick two months ago, newly planted by a ten-thumbed gardener—to see it now is just wondrous.

Daikon Harvest

All my ratatouille ingredients have been sulking on their vines, given that we haven't yet had a single solid week with night temperatures consistently above 50°F, but the daikon radishes are ready! These are a smaller and more slender variety than the typical daikon (or, in Korean, mu). They grew solidly to the bottom of the one-foot raised bed, then started pushing themselves up above the surface (like a turkey pop-up timer button) once they hit clay. We'll sample their flavor in a couple of ways: as a Japanese su no mono-type vegetable and fruit side dish (good with white meat and "the other white meat") called kōhaku namasu, mixing the daikon with a sprinkle of carrots, apricots and lemon peel (everything julienned; better get the knives sharpened), in a sweetened rice vinegar amazu sauce; and as Korean mu na mul (as a side dish, this must be eaten with rice, and stands up to beef), where the julienned mu is combined with the four basic Korean spice groups: red pepper, garlic, sesame seed oil, and green onion, then marinated in a sweetened vinegar.

Oughten Austen Often

Reports of the demise of the good reader (and writer) are greatly exaggerated: witness the celebration (masquerading as a "cage match") of Jane Austen (more specifically, her heroines Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennet) by Robert the Llamabutcher (for Emma) and Kathleen the Cake Eater (for Lizzie). (These names! Chan the Bookish Gardener is getting a mighty thirst for a hornful of mead right about now.) Check out all three "rounds" (Round 1; Round 2; Round 3). They'll make you want to enjoy Emma and Pride and Prejudice all over again.

Taste test (Updated by request)

Here are the results of my whirl through the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. My preferences are bolded and italicized; some were strong preferences, some were hard choices, and some were the lesser of two dislikes. For those of you who are saying "Uh, Chan, planning on posting anything gardening-related any time soon?", have no fear...I've come up with my very own taste test for gardeners (but only 25 questions, not 100), also after the jump.

I ♥ Books! or, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Book Festival Crowds

Since I'm, uh, bookish and all, I've been mulling over Cristina Nehring's ill-tempered essay, "Books Make You a Boring Person," from last week's New York Times Book Review (registration required; at the time of posting, this link hadn't yet turned into a pay-to-read pumpkin). She's bound and determined to pick a fight with anyone who would call himself a lover of books: "There's a new piety in the air: the self-congratulation of book lovers"; "[B]ookworms have developed a semi-mystical complacency about the moral and mental benefits of reading." These and other words and phrases freighted with religious connotations recur throughout the essay ("Perhaps the best lesson of books is not to venerate them"; "We do better to wrestle with our writers as Jacob with the angel than to worship them as saviors"), all the more jarring given the unholy contempt the writer displays for the objects of her withering judgment: the omnivorous, undiscriminating reader ("We all know people who use a text the way others use Muzak: to stave off the silence of their minds."); the filmmaker Mark Moskowitz and his "diminutive documentary, 'Stone Reader'", who in Nehring's view has only an overindulgent and misguided (book-loving) public to thank for his film having "provoked the hosannas it has, much less [having] made it into the aisles of Blockbuster"; and a young man at a book festival, with a chirpy greeting and a button in a primary color bearing a slogan punctuated with an exclamation point and a question mark:

"I'm a reader!'' announced the yellow button. ''How about you?'' I looked at its bearer, a strapping young guy stalking my town's Festival of Books. ''I'll bet you're a reader!'' he volunteered, as though we were two geniuses well met.

Goth garden

Well, this has turned into a moody little bed. I'm thrilled at how the hollyhocks ('Nigra') look against the chlorinated Colonial blue siding of the house, and I'm relieved that the opium poppies shown here ('Lauren's Grape' to the left; and, bulging out of its membrane in preparation for bloom, a peony-flowered blackish purple poppy to the right) didn't get snarfed by the rabbits (some of their brethren were not so lucky). I don't know the cultivar name for the asiatic lily blooming among the hollyhocks; it was the generous gift of a gardening neighbor, and its color is a much more profound orange than other asiatics. It too escaped the rabbit ravages by hiding underneath the skirts of the hollyhocks as they put out their first big, green, lily-pad leaves way back in April. Somehow holding it all together is the mauve malva, Sidalcea ("they say you're nothing but a...") 'Party Girl'. Despite its name, it's not a bit frivolous...it came back like a trouper this year, four feet tall!, after being reduced to four-inch stems by the rabbits all last season. Now, there were other colors planned for this bed, to modulate things just a bit, but I probably don't need to tell you what happened to: the blue larkspur; the yellow coreopsis; and the tall snapdragons in mixed pastels. Perhaps I'll try something more rabbit-resistant next year for this bed, like these daylilies à la Mixolydian Mode (who, by the way, has my fervid gratitude for pointing out the new Flannery O'Connor blog).