Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire:

Once a upon a time, there were no flowers—two hundred million years ago, to be only slightly more precise. … The world before flowers was sleepier than ours becuase, lacking fruit and large seeds, it couldn’t support many warm-blooded creatures. Reptiles ruled….

Flowers changed everything. The angiosperms, as botanists call the flowers that form flowers and then encases seeds, appeared during the Cretaceous period, and they spread over the earth with stunning rapidity. “An abominable mystery” is how Charles Darwin described this sudden and entirely evitable event. Now, instead of relying on wind or water to move genes around, a plant could enlist the help of an animal by striking a grand co-evolutionary compact: nutrition in exchange for transportation. With the advent of the flower, whole new levels of complexity come into the world: more interdependence, more information, more communication, more experimentation.

Since bestowing one’s pollen on an insect that might deliver it to the wrong address (such as the blossoms of an unrelated species) was wasteful, it became an advantage to look and smell as distinctive as possible, the better to command the undivided attention of a single, dedicated pollinator. Animal desire was thus parsed and subvdivided….

So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time, human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the ehes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes…

Roses on the corporate piano, anyone?

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

and, in my newest post, offer to blog my perfect recipe if someone posts a request in a reply…

Take a breather, PUMAs!!

Boardwalk Breather…My Favorites from the Jersey Shore to NM (Yes, There are Boardwalks in NM!!!)
http://preview.tinyurl.com/66hpcx

Wind up the holiday weekend on a positive note to start the next week in fighting form!!

Add some value with your comments, Sunny. Just don’t blogwhore a links. I’ve mentioned this before, more politely. Thanks.

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

is not my field, so therefore it’s interesting casual reading.

Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (2008)

“The fact that Oprah Winfrey’s road to fame has paralleled the political-economic revolution of neoliberalism is no coincidence, as this book seeks to demonstrate. Taking seriously Newsweek’s claim that we inhabit ’The Age of Oprah,’ the book explores the relationship bewteen Winfrey’s ascent to a position of singular cultural authority and the larger sociohistorical and political-economic processes that have made her popular canonization possible. Rather than seeing her enterprise either as “cause” or “effect” of those processes, and hence external to them, I treat their relationship as mutually constituative,” 8.

Her chapters titles are “The Theraputic Enterprise and the Quest for Women’s Hearts and Minds,” “Backlash Politics, the Dysfunctional Self, and the Recovery Cure,” “Recovery and Reaganism: The Psychologization of the Political and the Politics of Pathology,” “Mind Cure, the Enchanted Self, and the New Liberal Covenant,” “’Transcending Race’: The Racial Politics of Oprah Winfrey and the New Liberalism,” “The Oprah Brand and the Enterprising Self,” and “The Anxieties of the Enterprising Self and the Limits of Mind Cure in the Age of Oprah.” You can see that she makes the connections between theraputic language and the shift from politicizing social problems to seeing them as problems within the individual that are the responsibility of the individual rather than society or the state.

Did you ever read 1001 Nights? This is what this book is like. Written by a Lebanese ex pat, living in SF. Great stories one building from the other. Past and present.

Hakawaiti, means the story teller, sort of a story troubador.

Sit in the garden and enjoy.

Lambert, I read Pollans book.

I would love to show you my new raised bed, the lettuce is awesome.

After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC

it gives me perspective - sort of like “how i learned to stop worrying and love global warming”. as a species, we’ve adapted to changes bigger than those coming in the next few years. however, back then, it was simply a matter of packing a few kilos of belongings and heading out. i’m more and more convinced that my decision to live on the road fulltime when i retire next year is the right one. you property owners better get snorkels.

I’ve been reading a large collection of Dashiell Hammett’s crime stories. I recently blogged a long take on one of the stories in that volume called “This King Business” and hope it is not considered a blogwhore to not rehash it here.

I love, love, love Hammett and reread his writings constantly. In fact, unlike most writers, when you reread his work, you realize it was MORE meaningful than you thought, not less. Hammet is infinitely more, next to Fitzgerald as one of the greatest American authors.

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Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites

With so much wordplay in the book, the reviewer is tempted to pun too—calling this book “shear” fun for example. It’s a very pastoral book—much of it occurs out in the meadow—and it has that slow rhythm…interspersed, of course, with sheep conversation.

“Finally (the sheep) agreed that a good shepherd was one who never docked the lambs’ tails; didn’t keep a sheepdog; provided good fodder and plenty of it, particularly bread and sugar but healthy things too like green stuff, concentrated feed, and mangel-wurzels (for they were all very sensible sheep), and who clothed himself entirely in the products of his own flock, for instance an all-in-one suit made of spun sheep’s wool, which would look really good, almost as if he were a sheep himself.”

There’s lots more of that in the book.
Sadly, the good shepherd of this flock has been killed. The sheep find him dead one morning. They decide to solve the murder, because

“we owe old George that. If a fierce dog took one of our lambs, he always tried to find the culprit.”

The extremely sharp and mystery-solving head sheep is Miss Maple, obviously Swann’s Miss Marple, who sorts through all the suggestions by the other sheep as to clues and what they witnessed. The progression of putting the story together follows the standard mystery format, with more clues appearing, human conversations being listened to while grazing nearby, and the elimination of suspects by sudden changes in understanding.

There is a lot of sheep wondering in the meadow here, about life, death, leaves caught in hooves, and what the heck those humans are doing. The grand finale, moreover, is unique. A relaxing meadow read…but I would watch what you’re doing in front of the sheep.

“We must watch what (the humans) do. And we’d better not all stand around in a crowd; it looks suspicious. We ought to act naturally.”

… because the other book I’m reading, or re-reading for the 100th or 1000th time, is Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery, with Miss Marple, who is nothing, nothing at all, like Angela Lansbury. OK, that and Richard Martin’s Woken Furies….

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

If you really need to read about gardening and plants right now, try Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katharine White. I usually save her for the winter because she brings the plants to life, but she’s a knowledgeable plant lover and great company. A writer and editor for the New Yorker for years, she had a garden in Maine and connects us to the history of people gardening in the past too, amongst just everyday gardening observations, problems and loving descriptions of flowers.

Can’t find my copy right now but I love the bit in that book (is it CM or the “sequel”?) where Christie describes Marple in a fluffy pink scarf, not looking anything like the Nemesis she is…

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes. He had style, but his audience didn’t know it, because it was in a language not supposed to be capable of such refinements. They thought they were getting a good meaty melodrama written in the kind of lingo they imagined they spoke themselves. It was, in a sense, but it was much more. All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech. Hammett’s style at its worst was almost as formalized as a page of Marius the Epicurean; at its best it could say almost anything. I believe this style, which does not belong to Hammett or to anybody, but is the American language (and not even exclusively that any more), can say things he did not know how to say or feel the need of saying. In his hands it had no overtones, left no echo, evoked no image beyond a distant hill. He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hardboiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitpriv…

What say you?

Mr. Rafiel (who I prefer to think of as a Soros-type billionaire, rather than a Coors one) says that:

He leaned back suddenly and and roared with laugheter. “It’s a damned good joke,” he said. “If you knew what you looked like that night with that fluffy pink wook all round your head, standing there and saying you were Nemesis! I’ll never forget it!”

We need more knitting posts!

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

In Mexico, some mobile home owners from America just travel around and live at various campsites. Do you know if there are any books about this? Well, other than say, Travels with Charley? Love Steinbeck’s countrywide sampling of apple pie with ice cream.

Or there are the Floating Islands of Peru.

…a block from the boardwalk and the West End beach. Moved here in 2002 after living in the middle of Manhattan for more than half a century. I can see a nice slice of the ocean out my living-room window. Bliss! (Long Branch has spiffed itself up a bit recently; it’s probably much improved from when you were here last.)

I like to take a stroll on the boardwalk in the early morning, before it gets too hot and too crowded. The fewer people there are, the more of them are likely to exchange a “Good morning” nod with you.

But this whole July 4 weekend has been very dreary. I work out of my home on my own schedule, so I can go to the beach whenever I want; but most folks aren’t so lucky, and I really feel bad for them when the prime three-day weekend of the summer turns out to be unbeachable. Same for the local businesses that depend on the tourist trade.

Is crochet okay if I promise to yell “Knitting Post!” as a request next week?

Like this: Making Mathematics with Needlework: Ten Papers and Ten Projects.
“The “knitting revolution” began a few years ago when Daina Taimina, a mathematics professor at Cornell, crocheted one of the first physical models of a hyperbolic shape—which, given that hyperbolic space expands exponentially, was no minor feat.”

Pix here.
more:
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_…
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/mar/kni…

“You can see that she makes the connections between theraputic language and the shift from politicizing social problems to seeing them as problems within the individual that are the responsibility of the individual rather than society or the state.”

Interesting…does Peck relate this to the framework of political thought—like conservative or liberal framing?

Cookbook reviews, yeah!

Book on the Boardwalk review, yeah!

which is part of their appeal for me.

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

roses on the piano, yeah!

Pollan (pronounced pollen right? you gotta wonder—Swann writes a book on sheep…

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/weekin…

(probably my favorite picture of Rollie Fingers too))

So fascinating to think about flowers being so central…many of us certainly have an emotional reaction to them. I’ve read the book—doesn’t he talk about flowers being the source of most of our food too?

Thanks very much for the Christie quote!! I’m very impressed you found it! You must really know your Christie!

for a blogger like me.

current reading: (i always have three or more going, one for the potty, one for the bathtub, one for the bedside, one to brag on, etc)

“kushiel’s avatar.” dangerous. not for men, or at least, not all men.

“rousseau and revolution” by the durants; conservative’s take on revolutionary history.

“the unabridged works of mark twain.” la plus ca change…

“well behaved women seldom make history” a gift from my father.

i’m not reading it, but i gave it to a friend on the way to a long journey, and it’s a fav of mine, indeed, a “bible’ for atheists like me:

gene wolfe’s “shadow of the torturer.” seriously, i can’t recommend it highly enough. i promise you, if you like language, history, fantasy, you won’t be sorry. read all five. i weep every time i do, they are so beautiful.

gardening books i’ve mentioned here before: “the self sufficient gardener” by john seymour, and pretty much everything that Mother Earth News prints/posts. ah, and looking upon what’s next: a reread of “out of the house of life.” sigh, such compassion, such beauty, such horror. perhaps only those of us who deal with the ancient world, its study, it’s glory, can understand. but so has been my life. madeline, if only you were real, we would be fast lovers forever.

by Michael Chabon. Noir detective novel with an alternative-history setting, in which Jews fleeing the Holocaust have settled in Alaska rather than Israel.

Pure aesthetic enjoyment: the writing is infinitely delectable, very ethnic, spiced with Yiddish, alternately hilarious and heart-wrenching and deeply beautiful.

Hard to extract anything, but one quick sample, the detective on a winter Sabbath eve in Sitka:

“Landsman notices how quiet it is on Verbov Island, in the snow, inside a stone barn, with dark coming on, as the profane week and the world that profaned it prepare to be plunged into the flame of two matched candles.”

The plot is serviceable, with a slightly disappointing denouement, but it’s hardly the main feature; it’s just a frame around which to weave the extraordinary writing and characters. It’s so good I found it actually painful to come to the end.

Chabon’s hit or miss tho, i find.

I’m reading the Algebraist by Iain Banks now—-kinda eh, but still interesting enough to finish and chock full of interesting stuff—esp about how things that seem inconsequential often aren’t.

waiting to be read—
Saramago’s Seeing (sequel to Blindness, which was just extraordinary), and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (his Cloud Atlas was just amazing and one of the best books i’ve ever read, but i’ve started this newer one 2x and was bored—it gets one more shot before i give it away or sell it), and Theft, by Peter Carey.

— Baltazar & Blimunda by Saramago, and Cloud Atlas, and Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Carey are all in my top10 all time great books. Well worth reading if you ever come across them. : >

Lambert writes:

Richard Martin’s Woken Furies

You mean Richard K. Morgan.

More Quellcrist Falconers, fewer Mitzi Harlans, please.

Am reading The Monster of Florence.

… and totally savoring it, again.

(i’m probably going to skip the third book - The Amber Spyglass - this time though, cuz i found it somewhat anticlimactic when i first read the trilogy - which came just short of being GREAT, imo - last year.)

I always mix that up. Mentally, I file by sound…

An, um, indeed…

[x] Very tepidly voting for Obama [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

“Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and his earlier one, the Pulitzer Prize winner, “Kavalier and Clay,” which I didn’t enjoy nearly as much. Held my interest, but just barely in some spots. LONG.

(Chabon had a post awhile back on HuffyPo whose premise was that the only reason some of us progressives were supporting Hillary was because we were afraid Obama couldn’t win. I emailed him, er, proposing otherwise. He responded cordially, disagreeing but completely missing the point I had made. Ah, well; so Chabon isn’t God. Another one bites the dust.)

Reading an unabridged, annotated version of Huck Finn is a true revelation. So, too is Tom Sawyer, especially when you realize that he is one of the most unsympathetic of child heros (anti-heros?), certainly among the first, and is an incredibly astute stand-in for the oblivious everyman blessed with his class, his luck and guile but not necessarily any inherent morality. His morality is almost entirely based on Huck Finn’s insistence and Tom’s own juvenile excitement at tweaking his superiors.

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Around these parts we call cucumber slices circle bites

I am surrounded by books, too, too, many books; the bane of my life.

It’s all my parents’ fault. In addition to both of them working at full time jobs, when I was a wee, wee lass, they owned a Book Shop/Lending Library, and when nursery school was over, the person they hired to run their little enterprise, picked me up and looked after me in the book shop, which turned out to be a magical place, probably as much because of my age, from toddler to pre-kindergarten. In fact, the the LA school system insisted on my skipping the first grade because I could already read

In addition, every Saturday, religiously one could say, my father would make a trip to the LA Downtown Library, which was a huge, wonderful art deco building, with a superb collection. The grounds of the library was home to quite a few homeless men, in those days, a different from our homeless today; these guys could go find some kind of shelter in SRO buildings, or various downtown missions; they were more like thirties style vagrants, many with booze problems, or hobos, who used LA as a home base when they weren’t roaming.

My father being one of those people who always treated every human being as he would wish to be treated, got to know some of the regulars, and eventually started taking out and returning books for them, using his own library card. Not one book was ever not returned, not one was ever lost. Eventually, quite a few of his “library friends” as he called them, with his help, got library cards of their own.

My mother also had a book club with a group of her women friends that met once a month, the role of hostess played by each member in turn. This went on for something like thirty years or so. Even after the club disbanded, the daughters started giving luncheons for our mothers, so they could meet and keep up with one another, and exchanges of books became part of the routine.

Like CD, I tend to read more than one book at a time.

Right now, I’m reading “The Race Beat, The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, And The Awakening of a Nation,” which is essentially a history of the press coverage of the civil rights movement, Here’s a paragraph from the dust jacket:

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles and interviews, veteran journalists, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen- first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media-revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings andpropelled its citizens to act.

Given what we’ve lived through the last eight years, I think you can see why I might find this interesting, inspiring even. The free press worked during this period, at least on the reportorial level; less so in the editorial pages. It’s a book worth having - like Taylor Branch’s trilogy about the Civil Rights movement itself. It’s in paperback.

I’ve also been re-reading Terry Tempest William’s little triology of esssays, “The Open Space Of Democracy.” You can buy a used copy of it on Amazon. Or, you can go to the website for Orion magazine, where you can find the three essays, which I’ve left links to before, but here goes again: “Commencement” is here;“Ground Truthing” is here; “Engagement” is here.

Lastly, also for inspiration, I’ve been reading a collection of poem that was part of a protest against the invasionn of Iraq; “The Poetry of Peace,” edited by David Krieger, with a foreward by Terry Tempest Williams.

I just did a knitting post.
I’m working on knitting a Boy’s Surface

And through my knitting site I am part of a Jane Austen book club and am currently reading Sense and Sensibility.

I don’t like that Willoughby guy.

Go Hillary or Go Green!

to post pictures of the Boy’s Surface when you can actually discern more then a lump of knitting.

Why didn’t I just go with a Klein Bottle? There’s a pattern for that! ARGH!

Go Hillary or Go Green!

Isn’t writing on blogs like living in a book that’s being written? Ya think cd?

Okay, or not?

Don’t you have that problem with fiction though—the whole I’m in the book or the book’s in my life and influences my perceptions and decisions, eh?

In any case, reading and writing, we’re all wordsmiths, eh?

Thanks for your reviews, everyone!

(I’m sorry, Pat and Inna, I’m staying away from the dark side…although, ’monster’? and is Pullman really so anti-Christian?)

Swift Loris, sounds very interesting, nice descriptions, and your review was the inspiration for this (coming) week’s review of…a book with a similar idea (check it out.)

Amberglow, how was the end of the Algebraist? And did you really like Blindness? I found it very interesting but harsh (and can we wonder how it will transfer to film?) Would you review Blindness for us if you feel like it?

Herb the Verb: is Twain a racist (resisting Lambert snark here) or does he use Huck Finn to enlighten? Is Jim the best character in the book?

Thank YOU, Leah, Correntewire is super, and your post gives us a rich glimpse of your past…totally nice, and very cool.

Thanks, yeah that Willoughby…

to put a review together for Blindness for 2 sundays from now— have to re-read it — it’s been a while…

i think the movie will be good—it’s really such a visually intense book (which fits perfectly, since she’s the only one who can see— we see the world and the horrors all thru her eyes)