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.”

How Sports Can Be Sublime

There’s a lot to be grumpy about out there, the general theme of this blog, but the subtheme, the stuff to rhapsodize over… man, it beats all. It’s when I have things to share like this little You Tube clip from a bicycle race in France that I wish I had a proper lively blog with a big viral audience. This is so inadvertently uplifting! Ah well. Pass this along if you find it as delightful as I did. You don’t need to love or even know cycling, and it’s probably even better if you don’t understand French. Even with the crappy video quality, it’s an etude on the wonderful surpringness of the world. Or if not an etude, some other musical term. Capriccio or something.

C’est beau!

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.

Confessions of a Lazy Blogger

I realize it is not done to manipulate one’s posts. I know it is fogeyish to overconstruct one’s supposedly casual rants and raves. I dig that it’s all about the immediate.

But still. Sometimes I compose a post in another application, you know, like Word or a textpad or even an e-mail. And then, sometimes, when I’ve been sitting there too long and my fingers have grown icy…. it’s just too much to actually take whatever heartfelt thingamajig I’ve composed and copy it over into the clicks and boxes of WordPress. It’s not that this interface is particularly onerous either. I’m just particularly lazy. And then, that poor post, not feeling so urgent once it’s written, gets filed for the next (next, next) day.

So my confession to you, imaginary reader, is that I’m gonna backdate some posts to the time I actually wrote them. If the machinery allows me such deception. I haven’t actually tried it yet. Such a revelation of disorganization or inertia or fiddling with dates may prevent me from running for public office one day, but I hope you won’t hold it against me. Thanks.

Forgotten Cultural Icon

Remember Euell Gibbons? You’ve got to be of a certain age to recall him hawking Grape Nuts on TV. The author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) hearkens back to the days when public television called itself “The 21-inch Classroom.” Euell may just have had a show, I don’t know. One of the first “health food nuts” of our times, his Stalking the Wild Asparagus is just the book I need when I think of the uneventful apocalypse ahead, where we have to find our own edible tree bark and make soap from beetles’ wings because the distribution of goods shall have decayed so. He’s got a whole chapter on burdock!

The title has been much riffed on, but I’d completely forgotten it until now, poking through the shelves of my friend’s house in central New Hampshire, where I’m blissfully spending the afternoon doing nothing but drinking tea and reading (and now writing). Toasty on this brisk October day with the sun slanting in the windows, and even the four dogs quiet after our three-hour hike this morning. (Child and husband went on their own camping trip, no dogs allowed.)

While on the topic of reading, I just finished Pere Goriot, the 1834 novel by Honore de Balzac. I do seem to be on the old book kick this year. I read it because a) it has been sitting in my house for 60 years (it came with the house when I moved in) and b) just previously I read an endearing little novel called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. It was a sweet book on a serious topic and I enjoyed it. But it made me realize I had never read any Balzac. I had always admired him though for his reputation, productivity, intriguing name, robust deshabile statue by Rodin, and not least, the fact/story/myth that I’d heard that he drank 60 cups of coffee a day. That is prodigious.

Before the Little Chinese Seamstress, to go yet further back in the conversation monologue, I had read another oldie: Melville Goodwin USA, a 1952 novel by John P. Marquand. I love J.P., and this was the fourth or fifth novel of his I’ve read. Least favorite too, but it wasn’t bad. I’d recommend B.F.’s Daughter over it, or Wickford Point, or his most famous The Late George Appley. (Melville Goodwin, I just discovered, was made into a movie in 1957 called Top Secret Affair.) Before Melville, I finished the previously mentioned Ten Circles Upon the Pond.

Have I wandered enough? Back to my fading afternoon of reading I go. I am loving the come and go of the furnace’s rumble, and the gentle snores of the sacked-out dogs.

Grateful for the Well-Spoken and Annoyed

Toothless I remain (not literally, thanks to Dr. Polansky), but where has all the invective gone?

My god, things have come to such a pass that I am reduced to spluttering. Which is why I don’t post much here, in the place I thought I would do my political ranting. Take Bush in his press conference today, going on about the dire, most serious, portentious, and did I say dire, situation in regards to Korea (a.k.a. part of the Careen Peninshla). Trying to look like a responsible leader. Here’s a snippet:

[THE PRESIDENT:] Kevin.

Q Thank you, Mr. President –

THE PRESIDENT: If I might say, that is a beautiful suit. Q Thank you, sir. My tailor appreciates that.

THE PRESIDENT: And I can’t see anybody else that even comes close. (Laughter.)

Q Thank you very much. I’ll be happy to pass along my tailor’s number if you’d like that, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: I’ll take that back. I will recognize that — please.

Q On May 23, 2003, sir, you said — you effectively drew a line in the sand. You said, “We will not tolerate a nuclear North Korea.” And yet now it appears that they have crossed that line. And I’m wondering what now, sir, do you say to both the American people and the international community vis-à-vis what has happened over the last 48 hours?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I appreciate that, and I think it’s very important for the American people and North Korea to understand that that statement still stands, and that one way to make sure that we’re able to achieve our objective is to have other people join us in making it clear to North Korea that they share that objective. And that’s what’s changed. That’s what’s changed over a relatively quick period of time. It used to be that the United States would say that, and that would be kind of a stand-alone statement. Now, when that statement is said, there are other nations in the neighborhood saying it.

And so we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work. It is very important for us to solve these problems diplomatically. And I thank the leaders of — listen, when I call them on the phone, we’re strategizing. This isn’t, oh, please stand up and say something; this is, how can we continue to work together to solve this problem. And that is a substantial change, Kevin, from the previous times.

Suzanne. First best dressed person here. Sorry.

Q Kevin and I coordinated.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. He actually looks –

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Back on Iraq. A group of American and Iraqi health officials today released a report saying that 655,000 Iraqis have died since the Iraq war. That figure is 20 times the figure that you cited in December, at 30,000. Do you care to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?

Et cetera.

See, where do you begin? Well, in truth, I begin by appreciating those with the stamina to give voice to their outrage. Even if it feels it has no effect, it does no good to stop, right? I think I’ve mentioned The Disgruntled Chemist in here before. Did I mention Arse Poetica? Just a likeable soul who appreciates good things (say, food and praying mantises, though not together), suffers with others, and excoriates public idiocy (say, questionably elected leaders).

You can always find something good, if more intellectual than visceral, on 3 Quarks Daily. For example, you can’t beat a headline like this:
The Return of Henry Kissinger: Will We Never Be Free of the Malign Effect of This Little Gargoyle?, which links to a column in that vein by Christopher Hitchens in Slate.com.

One Good Move is a good compendium of outrageous observations, remarked upon with a blandness that accentuates the beyond-rage quality of outrageousness.

I’ll try to keep sharing the voices that in some way or other say what I would have said if I were half so clever. Or profane. Or not beaten down by the disbelieving dread of it all.

Fearful Invective

I know this is a really trite and prissy thing to get irate about, but certain brands of so-called reality TV do seem to succinctly represent a rotten society.

I’m late jumping on this bandwagon, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t deride these “competitive” reality shows, even the people who say they like watching them. The reason I’m late to this is that I’ve avoided the whole gamy field by simply not paying any attention at all. So, my vitriol is uninformed. I won’t argue that. That doesn’t make it wrong.

I had remained safely in my “reality”-free world until they upgraded the workout room in my workplace. I was very grateful for the new erg and the replacement for the antebellum weight machine and so forth, but sad that dual TVs had been deemed critical to the improvements. These days, as it happens, I tend to frequent the room at the same time as some very nice seeming person who treads away on a conveyor belt and watches Fear Factor.

Here, people, is the end of western civilization. (See my previous mention of The Four Gated City.) This is the irrevocable crumbling decay that is happening under our own stuffed-up noses.

The first few bits of the show that I caught while whipping through my weight workout didn’t seem so bad. People climbing a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter to grab a flag, swimming underwater to unlock something—whatever, these seemed like physical challenges no more bizarre than football or platform diving. But soon the whole gross-out aspect became evident. Transferring leeches between two containers using only your mouth, lying in a bed of millipedes, that kind of thing. Retarded. But the thing that put me over the edge, made me have to leave the room and think the world was going down the toilet, was when they introduced some buxom contestant and did the sun-dappled profile of her. Ahh, here she is with her sister riding horses in the countryside and the sister’s voiceover saying how sweet Ashlee is, though tough, and how much she really, really loves horses. So naturally her challenge is to play horseshoes with someone and whoever loses has to take the number of points they lost by and eat that many inches of horse rectum. Yes, that’s right friends, horse rectum (apparently dried). The screen shows the pretty girls, the host holding up a yard long thing that looks like your dog’s rawhide chew toy, and of course, of course, a couple of horses (ass view) in the background.

Really. I don’t expect people to want to always watch something edifying or be Dr. Bloody Bronowski or anything, but is this stuff really worth the firing of a single neuron? The crass manipulation of emotion and the encouragement of nastily selfish behavior is what seems most offensive, though on the other hand, aren’t they supposed to not harm animals in the production of entertainment? Did the producers just pop down to Safeway to buy a whole horse rectum, byproduct of some otherwise legitimate horse slaughter? Admittedly, I’d probably find the eating of horse rectum objectionable under most circumstances, even say, the more benign Iron Chef, but there was something especially repellent about the setup on Fear Factor. I know, duh, that’s the whole idea, get it—fear and repugnance. Primal, maybe irresistible things. But is there no better way to scratch that particular itch? And not to get unbearably righteous (like I haven’t already), isn’t there something despicable about eating as punishment when there are people starving in the world?

You may be wondering what happened to that horseshoe contestant, but literally, I left. And ever since when I’ve had to be in that room while the treader watches her show I blast music into my ears at dangerous levels and studiously don’t look at the screen.

A security professional I sometimes work with posits that the replacement of quasi-civilized TV (e.g., Spencer for Hire or The Beverly Hillbillies) with the truly abominable crap known as reality TV is what has caused the world to hate the United States (as the source of most of it), and want to strike out at us and all we stand for. I think he has a point.

Foursooth!

I was away from my blog reading (i.e., Bloglines) for a little while. Back and discover I’ve been tagged for a thingy. Is this a meme? Seems like a meme can mean just something that everyone is talking about, or one of these survey type things. I’ll see what I can do. (It started, as far as I know, at Ma Vie Bucolique.)

 

Anyway, my instructions were to make a list of fours (most categories supplied) and create a title with a play on the word four. I don’t know if these are supposed to be four things one likes, doesn’t like, feels represent one, have a significant role in one’s life, are the first things one thinks of (I can’t even think of four chairs without great effort). I was puzzling over the point of this… does it interest you, dear reader, to know that I seem to like silly movies and serious books? Ahh, but it does allow one to plop a lot of links in one post! Just don’t anybody say I’m a party pooper.

 

4 flowers (I wish I could grow)

Cosmos

Delphinium

Peony

Stock

 

4 plants (I can grow)

Burdock (see previous post)

Foxglove

Lily of the valley

White pine

 

4 family members

Susan

Stephen

Sara

Scott

 

4 chairs

Let’s give 3 chairs and 1 chair more for the hardy captain of the Pinafore.

 

4 jobs (I have had)

Census worker

Editor

Rowing coach

Swamper (oil field laborer)

 

4 bosses I would like to be like

Janice on
Cape Ann (is there any other answer possible?)

Joan Tobin

Julie Benyo

Tom Sawyer

 

4 movies watched multiple times

Down By Law

The King of Hearts

The Princess Bride

Strictly Ballroom

 

4 favorite authors (among many)

Doris Lessing

Naguib Mafouz

J.P. Marquand

Barry Unsworth

 

4 websites visited (nearly) daily

3quarksdaily.blogs.com

CIO.com

Google.com

Metrodad.typepad.com

 

4 favorite foods

Baked goods

Cheeses

Fruits

Wine

 

4 states I’ve lived in

Massachusetts

Michigan

New York

Delusion

 

The “gruesome tag part,” as Janice on
Cape Ann so aptly put it. Thanks you guys. I’m going to cheat, and re-tag some who have not yet posted this silliness on their sites. Mostly cuz I’m a lame blogger and don’t have relationships with bloggers I don’t know in the flesh and blood world. Well maybe someday.

1. Kerstein 

2. Murray

3. Borgy

4. Churbuck

 

 

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…