Bookish Gardener

Thanks

Surely the only worthy response to this life's embarrassment of undeserved riches is to give thanks without ceasing. I'm not so good at that, but I hope to get better at it as I get older. So, on this day, and on this blog, I give thanks for the written word. In the coming weeks, in honor of the written word, I'll be making frequent trips to my favorite bookstore with a new wish list: books for the English language library for teenagers in Slovakia (with thanks upon thanks to Strengthen the Good). And today, I'll share a link to Arthur Quinn, whose written words have opened new worlds for me this year, with his thoughts on Thanksgiving.

Happy birthday, Henry Mitchell

Henry Mitchell was born on this day in 1923 and died on November 12, 1993. I knew next to nothing about garden writers or Henry Mitchell when I first picked up The Essential Earthman, but it was love at first read. I'll try to refrain from my usual gushing (although you can find plenty of that in this blog's "Henry Mitchell" category). Instead, let me offer up a sampling of his wit and wisdom, plucked almost at random from a quick flip through the pages of Henry Mitchell on Gardening:

From "Thomas Jefferson, an Optimistic Gardener":
This broadening of scope is the single most definitive quality of the true gardener: if you fail in small things and cannot perfectly manage your small garden, then expand and take on three times as much. That is gardening orthodoxy and Jefferson believed it with all his heart.

From "The Perfect Moment":
With tender new leaves and flowers all about, it is easy for the gardener to think he has done well. Payday will come in summer, when all defects shall be revealed. This is Scarlett O'Hara time in the garden. Tomorrow is another day. These are the few days the gods give us to jump up and down in. Tomorrow, when all that is wrong will be evident in the garden — tomorrow, well I say tomorrow is spinach and I say the hell with it.

From "After the Rain, a Deluge of Tasks":
As I watched Nightline on television, it suddenly struck me that the moonflower vines have not yet been planted. The seeds should have gone in the first of May. That program specializes in things to worry about and often reminds me of dreadful deficiencies in the garden.

From "The Wings of August":
In 1933 I had my picture in the paper in the town I grew up in, with the mayor standing beside me. We looked equally stupid, as I recall, but the point was that I was planting a crape myrtle that had been proclaimed the official tree of the city. It does seem so long ago, and I often wonder if those crape myrtles I planted as a kid are still in that garden.

From "Support Groups on High":
The totalitarian frame of mind is now so common in America that I know there are apartments in which you cannot have a dog, cat, or pet mouse or grow anything on the balcony railing. Such apartments also forbid corn bread in the kitchen, I suppose, and if you like tyranny you go along with it, but my advice, if you find yourself living in such a place, is to wake up, tell the landlord to go to hell, and move out.

From "The Latest Dirt on the Garden's Doings":
Some months ago I had to cancel a talk in Lawrence, Kansas, and a television crew arrived here to show, I suppose, that I was seriously off my feed and could not travel. We waddled about the garden, which was ill kempt. Months later I finally screwed up the courage to play the tape of this ill-considered venture, and as I had feared (in my initial protests at the very idea of television), it showed me as rather fat and far from youthful. Talk about distortions. But the star of the program was a mockingbird, singing in top form at top volume. Yet at the time of the filming we were unaware of so sweet a songster as we galumphed about. The moral is clear enough, that most of the beauty of a garden we were oblivious to, being preoccupied with absurd concerns about bugs on the nasturtiums or a certain rounding out of the body. And I will say this for the garden in that film, and it's about all I can say for it: it was rather funny, and the growth was as luxuriant as a jungle — it showed a place where mockingbirds sing like mad.

Two-bit binge

My favorite discount book outlet is having an outrageous sale this weekend—four books for a dollar. I stopped by yesterday and picked up an armful; stopped by again today and picked up two armsful; and since my visit today was cruelly cut short by my two restless daughters, I expect to return tomorrow, to linger leisurely and load up.

This bookstore is crammed to the gills with odds and ends, classics to trash. It takes work to comb through the shelves, title by title, snapping up finds until you're just plain worn out. (I've never been able to get through every single shelf in the store in a single visit).

So what did I get today?

• A.S. Byatt, Possession. There were several years during the nineties, roughly coinciding with the workworkwork dot-com era...and the birth of my three children...in which I read just about nothing. Nothing! I used to joke that on a good day, I could manage to find the time to get through the front cover of The New Yorker, but really, it pains me to think back on those days of drought. In an ill-fated attempt to crowbar reading back into my life back then, I borrowed Possession from the library, but could not even find the time to crack its spine before it was due back. Different century, different life: time to try again.
• Mary McCarthy, Birds of America. I read this in college but it dropped out of my library. I think it'll be an interesting reread.
• Michael Tolkin, Under Radar. I haven't decided whether Michael Tolkin is smoke and mirrors about religion, or the real deal. Let's see whether this helps to figure it out.
• Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, The Nanny Diaries. Yep, a Hostess Twinkies read—at half the price of the daily newspaper!
• Brian Hall, The Saskiad. I've been wanting to read Hall's Lewis and Clark book, but haven't got my hands on it yet. (The closest I've gotten to the subject was reading and scoring high school essays on Lewis and Clark for a state academic competition this past year...great fun!...and reading about the botanical bounty from the Lewis and Clark expedition in the various books I seem to be accumulating on Thomas Jefferson, the gardener.) In the meantime, I remembered this noteworthy recommendation of The Saskiad.
• Alison Lurie, The Truth About Lorin Jones. Absurdly, I have a wish list for my trips to this bookstore. At the top of the list is Lurie's War Between the Tates, which I have been longing to reread for some years (my copy somehow disappeared between dimensions some time ago). No sign of Tates yet, but I was happy to pick up an Alison Lurie I haven't yet read.
• Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun. This was a 1945 edition of the WWII war novel, with an advertisement for war bonds on the back cover.
• Kathi Kamen Goldmark, And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You. Another frothy read; this one looks like it'll be a real hoot.
• Dale Peck, Martin and John.  I'm not that interested in Peck's notoriety as a critic, but I am curious about what they say he tries to do here as a fiction writer.
• Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John. I'm the polar opposite of Jamaica Kincaid in temperament, but I've been deeply influenced by her garden writing. (And hurray! Her new garden book is just out.) Her fiction takes you through tough emotional terrain, which I'm not necessarily up to reading all the time, but when I do, it's well worth it.
• Jerry Oppenheimer, Martha Stewart—Just Desserts: The Unauthorized Biography. I used to be indifferent to Martha. Now I'm kinda into her; the downwardly mobile transformation tale is one of my favorite story arcs. Needless to say, Martha Inc. is also on my discount wish list.
• Susan Minot, Evening. I really liked the short story excerpt I read from this a while back in The New Yorker.
• Pierre Franey, The New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet. The 1979 Claiborne-Franey The New New York Times Cookbook has been my go-to cookbook for over two decades. I've been meaning to pick this one up for about that long.
  

There's no free lunch, but this is about as close as it gets. I'm vaguely fretful that getting to walk away with a stack of goodies like this for a mere three bucks upsets some obscure law of thermodynamics, for which there will be some future unknown and unwelcome payback. But what am I saying? I'm going back tomorrow.

Fox trot

Busy afternoon yesterday dismantling the garden for the season. A handful of nights below twenty degrees had finally freeze-blasted most of the stalwarts last week. Goodbye, nicotiana...goodbye, borage...goodbye, petunias...goodbye, sweet peas. As I was going about my chores, a crazy, angry chorus of caws interrupted the sunny afternoon. A mob of crows in high dudgeon was in angry pursuit of a red fox. It ran for its life, coming within mere feet of our back yard, and traversed half the perimeter of the neighboring athletic fields before disappearing into wooded protection. How cool! I thought at first—a red fox, in broad daylight. And then, a shiver of foreboding, remembering the fox as the favored avatar of evil spirits in Korean ghost stories from my childhood. But, then again, no less an authority than the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources reports that the red fox's "favorite dish is the cottontail rabbit". So—yo, Renard! Right this way—rabbit buffet!

Of all the things

We're finally feeling the chill of the changing season. And yes, that means that it's time to slot the Winterreise into the Beetle's CD changer. So why is this lovely standard stuck in my head?

You are

Two words, slow and deliberate...does the singer have your attention yet?

the promised kiss of springtime

Tapdancing an internal rhyme, with a sunny finish

That makes the lonely winter

With the chords changing to blue

seem long

Things are getting serious

You are

The same, but different...lower, quieter

the breathless hush of evening

Sung like it's written

That trembles on the brink of a lovely song

Just like this one

You are the angel glow

Letting it all out

that lights a star

The sound of a wish fulfilled

The dearest things I know

Coming back down to earth

are what you are

And back to where the song began

Some day

Wishful, hopeful, wistful

my happy arms will hold you

If dreaming can make it so

And some day

But reaching past the dream

I’ll know that moment divine

The singer is calm and certain

When all the things you are, are mine

And, at last, achieves unambiguous belief.

"All the Things You Are," Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.

 

Ozu's Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Halloween weekend in Madison has attracted some unwanted infamy these past few years, although the partying this year seems to have been more Bourbon Street Mardi Gras than Devil's Night. Since I find that two's a crowd in most situations, there had to have been some pretty compelling reasons for finding myself on campus both nights of Halloween weekend. On Saturday night, there would be an I've-died-and-gone-to-heaven program with the Pro Arte Quartet performing Beethoven's E-flat major String Quartet (Op. 127) and the Schubert String Quintet in C major (D. 956) (two-cello, with guest cellist Jean-Michel Fonteneau joining forces with Pro Arte cellist Parry Karp). And on Friday night, it had been time for more Ozu: a double feature of the films Late Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice.

Late Spring is the story of a widowed man whose unmarried daughter is still at home. He's an absent-minded professor who couldn't manage to keep himself in clean shirt collars, much less keep himself fed and his house clean without her care. Or is that the story?

The daughter's in her twenties, and if you'd ask anyone around her (especially her busybody aunt), they'd tell you that it's getting past time for her to marry. No question that she'd be a catch. She's beautiful, kind-hearted and selfless. And if you'd ask her, she'd tell you that she would never leave her father with no one to take care of him. Or is that the story?

Before too long, people conspire to arrange the daughter's marriage and to try to find a wife for the father. The daughter balks at all of this, at every step along the way. One day, the daughter and father attend a performance of Noh theater, and the audience includes the woman who is rumored to become her future stepmother. In an intense, wordless scene, we see the daughter's face as she looks back and forth from her father to the woman. Her expressions are those that you might see on a baby who senses the danger of being abandoned but who doesn't have words to speak and is too overwhelmed to let out a cry: confusion, then fear, then fury.

As events progress, the fledgling is gently pushed out of the nest. The daughter agrees to marry, and greets her wedding day with sadness and reluctance. Just before her wedding ceremony, her father explains to her why it's time for her to go, and she obeys. The father returns to the empty house after the wedding. Has the shot of an empty room in a film ever been more heartbreaking? As we've come to figure out through the course of the movie, it's the father that's taken care of the daughter, not the other way around, and in the final scene he pares an apple with a knife and finally, but wordlessly, reveals the full weight of the sacrifice he's made. The story of Late Spring turns out to be the story of how we come into this world, and how we leave it. It's the most deeply affecting film I've ever seen.

I would like to see The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice again. I was a bit distracted during its first half-hour or so; I kept having to take my glasses off to mop my cheeks from the lingering effects of Late Spring. This movie looks at the marriage of a housewife and her husband. Her eyes are dead with unhappiness; if you ask her, her husband is dull and "thick-headed". The movie's tidy, happy ending might have been too facile but for the character of the husband, who's a revelation. He is exactly the opposite of how he is superficially perceived by his wife and her friends, and the opposite of how we might first be led to perceive him, as a salaryman bent over figures with his slide rule and account sheets late into the night. When I see this movie again, I'll want to figure out why it is that characters break into song in several scenes, and I'll look forward to seeing again the scene in which the wife and her friends are dressed in matching spa robes, white splotched with black, like the pampered and greedy koi in the pond whose glimmering light is reflected back onto the women's faces as they toss bread crumbs to the fish.