Another Great Voice Quiet

This was a voice not so much to listen to for its beauty, but to read or hear for its mordant wit and exposure of hypocrisy and idiocy. Molly Ivins died yesterday, and I’m sad.

She was 62. It was breast cancer, like Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, that other great voice recently quieted. I don’t personally know too many people who’ve died of breast cancer but I do personally know way too many who have had it. I have no idea if these kinds of things actually do anything, but there is a site that claims to support free mammograms if you just click…

Of course that, or even searching for the cure, doesn’t address the real issue of why there is so much of this kind of disease among otherwise healthy people….the poisoning of our world, basically. But I digress. More on this in another post, if I remember.

I have had many an excellent laugh from Molly Ivins, though quite a lot of that laughter rueful. Her invective was not toothless. In fact, with that Texas accent even coming through in her writing, one might not even recognize it as invective. There was a certain generosity in her bitingly funny critique. A generosity that might leave wiggle room for some toadying, power-hungry, narrow-minded greedyguts to excuse their behavior on the grounds of being a complete moron.

Here’s a great paragraph from The Nation’s article about her:

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving Minnesotans and Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote about their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential exposé of the man the Supreme Court elected President. And Ivins’s columns tore away any pretense of civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

The New York Times remembrance ends with these paragraphs:

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

But she kept writing her columns and kept writing and raising money for The Texas Observer.

Indeed, rarely has a reporter so embodied the ethos of her publication. On the paper’s 50th anniversary in 2004, she wrote: “This is where you can tell the truth without the bark on it, laugh at anyone who is ridiculous, and go after the bad guys with all the energy you have.”

Tempered Delight

You’d think I would have weighed in with at least a whoo-hoo! since last Tuesday’s elections.

Of course, on the one hand I am thrilled with the results in that a lot of mindlessly conservative Republicans lost. But I’m less than thrilled that they’ve been replaced for the most part by tactically conservative Democrats. It may have been a victory for the Democratic Party, but you can’t call it a victory for any kind of progressive agenda. So call me perennially dissatisfied, but it is a little bit dismal in the harsh light of day after the initial rejoicing over the brakes being put on the no-checks-or-balances evil empire.

I guess these are the Blue Dog Democrats and their ilk. Normally I like things to do with dogs, maybe not just mixed with donkeys.

The Four Gated City, Before I Forget

So The Four-Gated City is the last in a series, or an epilog to a quartet of novels by Doris Lessing called The Children of Violence (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, and Landlocked). Wow, are they good. The first four are very reality-, almost history-based and usually viewed as autobiographical for the author. The last, The Four Gated City, was written (in 1969) more about the future—probably a time now passed.(In Lessing’s autobiography, she gets much more explicit about the “children of violence” concept, describing how her generation, born between the two world wars (she was born in 1919), were influenced irrevocably by the damage the first war had done to their parents. Which could only lead to the next war…)

I read these five books in a row, bang-bang-bang (bang-bang), which really made them powerful. Such luxury I had back in more youthful summers. I also read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet all in a row (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea—highly recommended). I was training for the national rowing team, and even then I appreciated the time I had and the situation I was in. I appreciated it so much, in fact, I kind of yearned for it even while it was happening. My so-called professional career back then would be annually interrupted by summers away at selection camp where you rowed twice a day and fretted about your position in the seat-racing ladder and what the coach might be thinking and you tried to make sure you would make weight when you had to, but not by too much, and generally had only energy enough left to nap, knit, read, write and get down to the water for the next practice. Since I didn’t nap or knit, I read and wrote. I read a lot. Besides those series I mentioned, I also consumed Doris Lessing’s “space fiction” series (Shikasta, The Sirian Experiments, The Marriages Between Planets Four, Five and Six, The Making of the Representative for Planet Eight, and The Sentimental Agents), as well as about four volumes of Sufi stories by Idries Shah and a random assortment of other things, mostly novels, that strangely fell into place like a purposeful curriculum.

Oh yeah, but this was a post about the Four Gated City, not my nostalgia for a time when I could read more than one book a month. The Four Gated City is post-apocalyptic, but the apocalypse was slow, an almost imperceptible decline into bedlam. I found the portrayal so convincing that I feel sure this is the way we are headed. Maybe not one big nuclear blast to wipe humanity away, but a series of apparently unrelated Bhopals and Chernobyls and Katrinas that amass and are never recovered from, and the government decays in its obsession with garnering power and with irrelevant ideology while people are left to fend for themselves in the damaged world left to them. Well, it’s damn cheerful, isn’t it. Enough to make anyone go out and start harvesting burdock.

Aw, jeez, I didn’t need to write the above at all. Here’s an excellent description from a Doris Lessing website:

It will provoke disquiet and questioning. Mrs. Lessing’s view of recent politics is not everyone’s. Her view of the future (inevitably brutish and painful) is that it is the present: that we are all hypnotized, awaiting cataclysms which we are in fact living through now; that we are now—as we run and read—in the process of a rapid evolution; that we are mutating fast but can’t see it, the chief characteristic of our race being its inability to see what is under its nose; that historians and scientists, in their timid traditionalism, feed our fantasy view of ourselves—suppressing truths about the human condition, about madness, about sanity, about the essential nature of the mind.

Survivalist Cuisine

For a long time now, probably since I read Doris Lessing’s Four Gated City (of which more later), I’ve had a sense, a small lurking anxiety, that I should know how to feed myself without benefit of grocery store. We’ve all been encouraged (by “Them”) since 9/11 to have several days’ or weeks’ worth of nonperishable food and stuff on hand in case of emergencies, from the relatively benign blizzards and hurricanes to the more alarming bird flus and chemical attacks, for which of course one also needs the inevitable plastic sheeting and duct tape. (We haven’t heard so much about that lately, have we? Another passing duck-and-cover campaign, serving for naught but nostalgia at our quaint responses to horror.)

In any case, the issue has occupied some space in my mind well before it really needed to. (I mean, the issue of foraging. Stocking the extra tuna fish and beans is uninteresting. The wine stash is another matter.) And, in the usual way that my out-of-the-way intentions take years to be acted upon, I finally picked some weeds from my back yard and cooked them tonight. The food was tolerable, even tasty, aided considerably by the other, less local ingredients, but it gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to have not just thrown the junk on the brush heap, but to have made dinner with it.

There’s probably an entire menu to be offered from my ¾ acre of New England, zone 6 yard and largely untended first and second growth woods. Acorns, dandelions, mystery mushrooms, purslane maybe, wild cherries, fiddleheads, and incidentally edible things I’ve planted like hyssop and borage. But I’m talking here about burdock. (Top photo from Virginia Tech’s site on weed identification.)

This impressive looking plant grows really well here. It’s actually quite handsome and has modestly pretty pink-lavender flowers, which around now turn into the most tenacious burrs. So I’d be chopping them down anyhow, or else finding the burrs throughout my laundry. A friend in Vermont had told me about two years ago that the roots of burdock were quite nutritious. He hadn’t tried them so couldn’t tell me whether they tasted like shite or not.

I’m happy to report that they’re not bad, though it was a true tug-of-war to harvest them and while preparing them they seem frighteningly woody and dirty. Apparently they’re a common ingredient in Japanese food, and the recipe I used is called Kimpira Gobo (gobo being the word for burdock). I modified it from a couple of recipes, one from a cool site of foraged food recipes called Wild Food! by Steve Brill.

1-2 c. scrubbed, sliced burdock (they say don’t peel it but I didn’t have a sturdy enough scrubber, so I peeled)
2 c. peeled and match-sticked carrots
1 T veg. oil
2 t sesame oil
2 T sesame seeds
1 T soy sauce
1 T water
Prepare the burdock and carrots (peel and slice). Throw the burdock into cold water to keep from turning brown. In a wok or large skillet, heat the two oils. When hot, sprinkle in sesame seeds and cook, stirring for about a minute. Drain burdock and add it and the carrots to the pan. Cook and stir over medium-high heat for five to seven minutes. Add soy sauce and water, cover and continue cooking until liquid is mostly gone. Total cooking time about 10 minutes.

Serve over rice.

It was good, the carrots adding sweetness and the burdock tasting nutty or almost popcorny. A bit chewy where I think they’re supposed to be tender, or crisp. But not bad. OK, I also had an incongruously Mediterranean salad with tomatoes and avocados, as well as a decent Spanish red wine. Which might have helped.

Other sources say to boil for 20 minutes. Maybe I’ll try that next time…. The stuff seems to grow back at the least provocation…

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Thanks to The Independent by way of 3 Quarks Daily.

An Article on Civil Disobedience

My friend Melanie in Strasbourg writes, “I just received Harper’s and read this article that might interest you. It is not online but I found a blog that has excerpts: The Green Knight.” The essay is by Curtis White and is called “The Spirit of Disobedience: An Invitation to Resistance,” but more on that in a sec.First off, The Green Knight is a pretty cool blog, overtly Christian and yet deeply reasonable. Sorry to say I find those things don’t often go together these days. (The author calls himself “an unreconstructed liberal, a dual Canadian-American, a High Church Anglican, and a medievalist.”) There are a lot of links to smart places in the blogroll under “US Links,” with inspiring titles like World o’ Crap, That Colored Fella’s Weblog, The Disgruntled Chemist, and Sadly, No! Thus explaining why I won’t get to bed before 1:00 a.m. Sigh.

I appreciate the pains The Green Knight has taken to get some of the subversive ideas from Harper’s into the world outside the newsstand. Go see. Here’s just a tiny snippet or two…

According to our leading wise men, the great contemporary moral and political question of the age is: Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture?…What's doubly strange is that Americans should follow with such fascination and intensity this old dispute over our national character while entirely ignoring the dominant ethos of our culture for the last two hundred years. It should go without saying that it is capitalism that most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment….

And yet for all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost….This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists…. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson imagined that the world is held together by a spirit that is not of the Church, and certainly not of Reason, but of a direct experience of the world. Emerson made this Romantic idea American, and he gave it first to Henry David Thoreau….

My word, the transcendentalists! Let us bring them back, the long-lost Transcendentalists.

I was recently reminded of Thoreau when, mired in a slough of particularly onerous adulthood, I recalled his saying “most men live lives of quiet desperation.” As a youth I had thought—“Fah, that’ll never happen to me.” Now I think, haha. And I even think, while it’s not a state to be sought, there’s even something admirable in it. (That’s how far the desperation goes, I guess!)

Get Your Bearings on the Political Compass

Darn, wish I could find or remember the name of the blog where I got directed to The Political Compass site. I love that “next blog” feature on wordpress, for the random surprises, but you can’t be too hasty about leaving the page or turning off your computer before you notice where you are. (If I find it or remember it, I’ll add it back in here.)

Back to the political compass, though. Answer six screens of questions, maybe 40 issue or position type questions to which you can agree or disagree, straight up or strongly. It shows where you come up on a two-dimensional matrix (as opposed to the customary left-right spectrum). Basically it separates views on controlled versus free market economics from views on government’s role in other aspects of life (social issues). After an explanation, plunks you on a grid with famous leaders. Are you in the quadrant with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama? Or with the lonely Milton Friedman? Or the terribly overpopulated upper right quadrant populated by Berlusconi, Bush, Hitler, Sharon, Thatcher, etc. Lots of interesting stuff here, including another very difficult quiz on who said what. Outrageous things.