Farmer Sven's Backyard Eugenics Journal 3

It felt good to spend some serious time in the garden on Sunday, except when it didn't. After listening to an awesome lay sermon by a seminary student who is doing her internship as a chaplain at Grant Hospital, I was ready to weed and water. I'm glad there are qualified people to do that kind of work in those surroundings, and Chris is made of the right stuff. I prefer to dig weeds, thank you.

The choices I make when I play weekend farmer aren't as hard as Chris's are on a busy weekend, and my little corner of Methodistville is not a downtown trauma ward, although they are matters of life and death. Of plants, mostly wild, wanton, unruly ones. With growth exploding around me, I did some aggressive selecting to keep the population under control. It's a garden, not a wilderness. Starting with the perennial beds that are most visible, I attacked the dandelions first.

I have nothing against dandelions personally, but they are so prolific and invasive that I singled them out for elimination. I know it's not fair. Other wild ones will get the same treatment during different phases of the growing season, when wave upon wave of wild flora do their thing for the betterment of the species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom. My work is just beginning. And yes, I do have control issues. The thistles will be next to feel my wrath.

There's another wild herbal thang growing like crazy in a raised bed right by the patio, threatening to crowd out some new groundcovers we just stuck in the ground late last summer. The neophytes are coming up nicely, but this opportunistic weed saw an opening and is about to take over, and I can't let it. The competition would make it difficult for the new guys to get established, so I will have to be vigilant in giving them some lebensraum.

Despite the necessary-evil side of weeding, I admit that it's satisfying work. You get to see the results immediately, and waking up the next morning to a neat landscape is easy on the eyes. It gets a little tiring in the lower back after a while, so I try to break up the day by doing something else. Psychically as well as orthopedically, planting provides just the right balance. So every hour or so I took breaks to spade and rake smooth a couple of beds for vegetables.

That flat of seedlings I bought last week probably thought I'd forgotten all about them. By the end of the day, in the triangular bed nearest the house there were 32 little plants (8 cabbage, 8 cauliflower, 8 spinach, 8 mesclun) watered-in and looking perky. In the trapezoidal bed next to them, there are 300 onion sets in three rows around the perimeter, leaving a triangle in the middle for something else, I'm not sure what yet. Maybe snow peas? Do we still have time to plant snow peas before it gets too warm?

Things you can tell just by looking at her

It's the title of a movie Gven and I watched the other night until way past my bedtime, which I guess means it held my attention. Four or five short films rolled into one, not a single continuous narrative but a series of stories about a circle of characters going about their own business in their own private trajectories, which are linked in unexpected ways. If you've seen "La Ronde," a French film from way back, you're familiar with the genre: stories intersecting stories with n degrees of separation.

Glenn Close, for example, in her usual uptight rich professional role, is going through a difficult time caring for an aging relative and consults Calista Flockhart, in her usual flaky young waif role, for a tarot reading. Oddball Calista sees things straight-arrow Glenn is missing. Holly Hunter, a bank manager with her own complicated relationships, is confronted in a parking lot by a street person who, in exchange for cigarettes, tells her all about herself. Close is called in to help Hunter in a medical matter; Hunter's male co-worker goes out on a date with Cameron Diaz, the blind sister of cop Amy Brenneman, who is investigating the apparent suicide of Calista's neighbor. It all connects.

And in the strangest ways, a lot like real life. People generally treat each other decently if not with perfect compassion, and it comes across as a useful skill they've acquired: good manners can help in the most everyday matters of survival. You never know. As illustrated "ham-fistedly" in that other, more popular recent movie about what a small world L.A. is, "Crash."

I'm in your movie because you are reading this, just as you are in your best friend's movie and your nemesis at work's movie, and they might be in my spouse's mentor's sister's movie, which could make this the most unlikely non-French surrealist movie of all.

A couple of days later I went to the yoga factory to teach the class that no one shows up for, but my co-worker's partner was there to work out with the personal trainer, the same partner who used to work at the bakery where I had previously worked, and who goes to the church where I used to be a member, meaning we have dozens of mutual friends (and an interest in basketball) while barely knowing each other.

That same night at my men's group meeting - a bunch of guys I have no connection with other than this meeting we go to once a week - it occurred to me that all seven men sitting in a circle, telling each other a selected slice of their life for the week, each represents a narrative that intersects with other mundane, ordinary narratives that sometimes intersect with each other! Not so remarkable really, and nobody will pay to see that movie, but it's still kind of cool. Almost as cool as my street gang of imaginary friends when I was a disturbed boy of 7, but that's another story.

Languagepolitics

David Foster Wallace says that "Politics and the English Language" is redundant. It still makes a nice subtitle for "Authority and American Usage," the title that by itself comes across as a little dry. That would be unfair, given the excitement Wallace finds - and I share - in his subject, the new Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner.

Oh, joy, a new bible for geeks, you might say as you flee. I admit that only a few of us will care - including my friend J. Thunder, who sent me the article; my mentor J. Bussert, who had already clued me in to Garner's groundbreaking work; and my geek-daughter Helga, who humors me with questions about words when she's not correcting my syntax. On the outside chance that these socio-linguistic battles will engage anyone else, I'll make the attempt to point out some highlights. Just as a jumping-off place:

...it's now pretty much universally accepted that (a) meaning is inseparable from some act of interpretation and (b) an act of interpretation is always somewhat biased, i.e., informed by the interpreter's particular ideology....decisions about what to put in The Dictionary and what to exclude are going to be based on a lexicographer's ideology. And every lexicographer's got one. To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism. (p. 86)

Dontcha love it? No!? Still hanging onto the notion that something called 'objectivity' enables the elect and the elite to transcend the muddled and fuzzy realm of mere opinion? It's a lot like George Lakoff's chapter on myths in his book on metaphors, where he describes the indignation expressed in the Myth of Objectivism, which imagines itself outside all points of view, when in fact it's one of them. Richard Rorty says similar things about philosophy, which he sees as "a kind of writing" rather than a superior, all-encompassing body of knowledge - as both Platonists and Positivists fantacize - that includes all other bodies of knowledge (please!). In short, if you want to be 'right' in any of those final, noncontextual ways, get over it.

Clearly, as linguistic communities evolve over time, they discover that some ways of using language are better than others - not better a priori, but better with respect to the community's purposes. (p. 90)

Or, as someone in a nearby cubicle said just today, it's not about being right or wrong but about how to say appropriately what needs to be said in a particular time and place. This business of appropriateness for the purpose helps get around the recurring snag of whether to be descriptive (this is what people actually say) or prescriptive (this is what they should say). How many style guide arguments in the last year have come down to a confrontation over whether to follow the precedent set by current mainstream publications, or whether to try to set a different standard. I guess I'm a prescriptivist, because I think sometimes we know better. Wallace pays Garner a high compliment when he says:

The book's spirit marries rigor and humility in such a way as to let Garner be extremely prescirptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist put-down. (p. 78)

One of the pitfalls for us prescriptivists if the ever-present danger of using word choice as an opportunity to get up on our favorite soap-box to advocate one set of politics and tear down another. Or the corollary tendency to try to impress one set of readers and patronize another (which I'm probably doing at this moment) by using the vocabulary and grammar of one region, culture, or class rather than another. Wallace also sheds light on the sticky, tricky labyrinth of metacommunication (although he doesn't call it that):

As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English "makes a statement" or "sends a message" - even though these statements/messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you're trying to communicate. (p. 94)

Which is half the fun when you get down to it. And I'm only scratching the surface here. If by some miracle you're still reading this, and you want the real stuff, stylishly delivered, read David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays.

Garden Journal 2

On my way home on Easter Sunday, I went to Cross Creek, the little retail nursery overlooking Hoover Reservoir on Sunbury Road. The weather was so nice I couldn't resist the urge to put something in the ground. I was surprised to see that their prices were not too bad, so I decided then and there to plant a few cool-season vegetables: cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, and mesclun. It's been a long time since I've attempted any of those; we'll see how they do.

I got right to it, but I was detoured immediately. Planting means soil preparation, and I hadn't done any. I was dissatisfied with the bark paths between last year's tomato and pepper beds, and a quick touch-up wasn't making it any better, so I decided to remake the borders. I scrounged a couple of solid railroad ties from the side of a brick walkway and laid them in where there had been bark. That made the edges of the mounded beds more solid and leaves more room for plants. I'll have to go back and edge the brick walkway with some smaller boards.

All of this takes a lot more time than it seems like it would, repeatedly raking things smooth, a little shovel work here and there to level things out, a lot of stepping back to look it over, and occasionally doing it over when it isn't quite right. Move a couple of columbine in the adjacent bed that weren't really in the right place to begin with, in order to make room for the next railroad tie. Pull a few weeds. There's always more that could be done, but by now it's time to go to Julie's house for the Easter potluck, and we're already running late, and I still haven't planted any vegetables.

Dinner at Julie's was great, and I enjoyed seeing people who live right here in Methodistville but I hadn't seen in a month of Sundays. We sat outside on the deck until it started to rain, then went inside for cheesecake and coffee. I managed to talk briefly to Emma, Ethan, Elizabeth, Tedy, and Delta - our friends' kids in various stages of high school and college - and catch up on some of their adventures, which included lots of travel, theater, writing courses, and prom dresses. It's interesting how much better they get at humoring their elders. Julie and Michio passed around some fine pictures of their trip to Japan.

Around midnight, when I was doing my last little workout of the day back on the patio at home, I started thinking about where the actual plants would go, assuming they ever get planted, so I revisited the vegetable garden. Working in from the corners of a roughly 8 x 8 x 12 triangle, I poked holes in the ground with a stick to mark the approximate spacing of 32 seedlings, and it looks like it will work out.

The Ghost of Easter Past

My sister JeanieBeanie GollyGee (middle child in center with white cap, white shoes, and mischievous smile) sent me this antique photo about a year ago. She said it's about 1958, but it looks more like 1956 to me (lower right with finger in eye). That's eldest sister AnnaBanana GollyGosh behind me, arms folded and already a kindergarten teacher at 12. Third sister JoJo GollyBadly, who later became my main ally in the culture wars, is next to Jean in white gloves, poised to kick someone.

Standing guard behind their little flock are Ellen and Chas Golly themselves, better know as Mom and Dad, or nowadays Grandma and Grandpa. Only rarely did Mom wear a hat, and she must have had heels on because she looks taller than her actual 5'8". We're all dressed up for church on Easter Sunday, facing straight south into the glare, probably thinking about chocolate bunnies and painted eggs. The girls look quite spiffy in their new dresses; Mom probably had the sewing machine humming for weeks. No doubt I felt quite grown-up in my jacket and clip-on bow tie. This was like six years before Rock Golly (gleam in Chas's eye obscured by shadow) was born, so I was still the baby of the family.

Our house on Market Street in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, had a nice screened back porch where we would sometimes eat supper in the summer. The back steps behind us served as home plate in an endless series of imaginary baseball games where I played 18 positions plus doing the play-by-play, fielding whatever bounced back when I pitched to the porch. Usually it was the Milwaukee Braves against either the Dodgers (regular season) or the Yankees (world series): "Here's the three-two pitch, Aaron swings, it's a long drive deep to center, it's going, going, no! Mantle makes an amazing leaping catch at the fence to send it into extra innings!"

This was the first back yard I can remember, having moved there when I was three, and the scene of countless games of cops and robbers, re-enactments of World War II (with voice-over by Walter Cronkite), Indian battles, and pastoral cowboy dreams. The wilderness where my friend Mike and I would build forts. The field on which I threw my first spiral, caught my first grounder, and hit my first homer.

Coloring eggs was a big event, and my sisters were really good at it. JeanieBeanie especially would do elaborate watercolor designs on the hard-boiled eggs. That was the Saturday night project, then we would eat the eggs on Sunday morning, dye seeping through to stain the white, with a carefully controlled ration of chocolate.

Garden Journal

Everything in the yard is waking up at once and quaking with biochemical activity! Birds are building a nest in the metal bird-feeder (not the metal-bird feeder) hanging from the tree outside the kitchen window. I even watched a pair attempting to make some little birds today.

Like talking about music, dancing about architecture, or explaining the punch line, listing what's happening in the garden doesn't really work. You really have to be there. An inventory just doesn't convey the vibrant energy of even my humble garden. But here it is anyway:

Ajuga has a distinct purple shine and is starting to spread; vinca is sprouting runners; other (unnamed) groundcover is going crazy, too, so I need to decide which perennials are weeds and which aren't. Dandelions are already everywhere, so I started digging them up, and they make good compost.

Daylilies, tulips, and the big, saber-like iris are going strong, the smaller Japanese iris are just poking out of the ground; daffodils are blooming here and there; peonies are sticking their bizarre-looking heads out of the ground. I need to plant more bulbs.

Columbine are getting full, round, and leafy; astilbe (?) is beginning to grow; yarrow is just barely sending up feathery little shoots; black-eyed susans are getting their first leaves; lemon balm are getting their first sprouts where they were transplanted, so they might make it; creeping phlox have that shine they get when they're growing, but I need to add a lot more on the side and maybe the front.

Pear trees are starting to bloom; apple trees need to be pruned; dogwood has buds, but it's crowded between pine trees, so it will be a while; dawn redwood planted last fall has buds, so yea, it survived its first winter; redbuds don't look so hot, I wonder what's ailing them; maples are getting big, fat buds, so I have to trim them NOW before they leaf out (it's time to hire a professional for those big limbs way up high).

Spirea are getting their first leaves, forsythia are in full bloom, and I think I'll move the one in back out front with the others when they're done.

Strawberries somehow stayed green all winter and look like they're growing; wild strawbs are taking over a low spot near the patio, and they can have it.

Why is it so important to name them all? Biology (life-naming) is not horticulture (garden-growing). Knowing the name (botanical or common) has nothing to do with getting plants to grow, except when you need a reference to look something up. Linnaeus was a fanatic with his taxonomy of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

Right in the midst of getting all excited on Sunday, a major disappointment. The "equine science facility" (horse barn) up on Old C3 has stopped giving away composted manure. They decided to "control" the area in the back pasture by hiring their hay supplier to haul it away rather than letting it sit in the field and age. My unlimited supply is gone. Bummer. Searching for another source.

I also need to decide where to plant which vegetables (thinking spinach, onions, eggplant, and squash, in addition to tomatoes, beans, and peppers), but there's time to do that. Should I start from seeds or buy seedlings at the nursery? And I might expand the planted area another few feet toward the back fence, where firewood is stacked, which means I need to split and stack more wood to clear the space. It's always something.

The marryin' kind

Remember the 1950s Western-genre movies - the kind that were all put in a blender in the 1980s and came out as "Silverado" - where the good guy in the white hat roams and rambles for a spell before settling down on his own spread with a few head of beeves, a white picket fence, and a good woman? Not the dance-hall floozy he took a shine to in his footloose days, but a nice girl who likes to plant flowers, bake pies, and slop hogs. You know, the marryin' kind.

Which proves to the impressionable audience that our hero (John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart) is also the marryin' kind. Unlike his ne'er-do-well friend in the black hat (Montgomery Clift, Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson), with whom he has shared many a rough ride, but who always moves on to the next town, the next cattle drive, the next saloon, the next card game, and the next floozy. He just ain't the marryin' kind.

I've known since I was like five years old that I was the marryin' kind. Don't ask me how, probably some very early and very effective socialization/indoctrination by my very responsible Methodist parents, Chas and Ellen Golly. In my case, that sense of stability and commitment came with an equal dose of judgmental possessiveness, egocentric machismo, and all kinds of other baggage. Being the marryin' kind is not an unmixed blessing, but I am what I am, and a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

What brings up the subject at all is the recent spate of divorces in my small, insular world. There are three in the last few months, just among my co-workers, in some stage of working their way through the excruciating process of dismantling a marriage. These life-changing events for the people involved affect me only tangentially, but since the parties in question are my friends and colleagues, their trials and tribulations make me shudder, even from a certain distance. Each person and situation is, of course, different from all others, a unique story with it's own peculiar causes and circumstances, so each twist and turn has its own particular hurting and healing possibility.

My good buddy Esterhazy and his wife recently split up, and I guess this one is a little closer to home. I got to know him in graduate school, and we were both members of an exclusive secret society called the Physical Club (named after a circle of friends in Boston that included William James, C.S. Peirce, Chauncy Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, called the Metaphysical Club, but that's another story). In our small circle, three of us were already married, two of had kids, and one had a step-child in his second marriage.

We went running together, we went drinking together. We did seminars together, we went to conferences together. Our wives knew each other, our kids knew each other. The Physical Club babysat Jessi and Helga as toddlers.

California Esterhazy met his wife, Wilderness Woman, in the Ph.D. program at Swingstate Megaversity, and everyone saw it as the perfect match. They both graduated on schedule, worked hard and found tenure-track jobs, had two beautiful little girls and everything to be happy about. So it was a shock find out this year that they had gone their separate ways after 17 years. Of our Physical clubmates, Chicago Ransom is now on his third marriage, and London John is still hitched, as far as I know. Two out of four ain't too bad, I guess.

Looking further back to undergrad days, there were four of us in my freshman dorm who became fast friends. Fremont Frank got married first, had two great kids, and moved back to his hometown with his high school sweetheart. Elyria Jack has left a trail of girlfriends in his wake, but last I heard he'd never married, and therefore never divorced. Cleveland Jon went to New York and sadly died in his forties. Again two out of four. About the national average.

Not sure where I'm going with this difficult tale. If I looked up my high school friends, I think I would get similar results. But I'm pretty sure where I'm NOT going - I'm not going to see a lawyer. It's not that I'm too wholesome for all that, and it's not that I'm totally ecstatic with everything about my marriage, and it's not a desire to stay together "for the kids." I reckon I'm just not the divorcin' kind.

Anaerobic

It's been at least a month since my last confession, and of course I have sinned. But where do I start?

The first confession is my obsessive-compulsive, production-editorial approach to exercise. In the back of my DayRunner pocket planner - I guess that's the first confession, that I carry and use a DayRunner pocket planner, a tabbed weekly calendar with quarterly section - is a small, three-month calendar where I subdivide each day to record my workouts. Each part of the grid shows how many minutes I practiced this or that - taiji, qigong, upper-body, whatever - each day. At the end of the month, I can add up how many days I practiced each thing. I know, I'm a freak.

The second confession, based on the data from the first confession, is that I have done an aerobic activity an average of once a week during the last three months. Walking the dog doesn't count. Anybody knows that once a week doesn't do much for cardiovascular fitness. Phys ed majors of the world, forgive me, for I have sinned. My aerobic condition is woeful, and some things in this life are unforgiving, oxygen debt being one of them. My heart and lungs would be laughing at me, but they're out of breath after climbing the stairs. I will pay for this.

It's a daily practice, this practice of writing down how much of each practice I practice and leaving an ugly tell-tale X on my calendar when I don't. And it's a monthly practice to total the days, read it and weep, or pat myself on the back. And it's a quarterly practice, because my planner is organized that way, my classes register that way, and the seasons change. So we're starting a shiny new quarter, turning over a new leaf and all that, an opportunity to do myself a favor and get on the bike a little more often.

My new Monday night class at the new rec center - which, by the way, was designed by our favorite tech gurl Magrit's father - is off to a good start. The six students are very different from each other, which makes it challenging to communicate effectively with all of them but helps them to learn from each other, I hope. The ongoing Thursday night classes at the old rec center in the old neighborhood are taking shape too. A couple of new students have joined, and the mix of athleticism, yogicism, and inquisicism* looks like it will balance out, I hope. The fledgling Wednesday and Friday classes at the Factory have had a lot of no-shows lately, so I just work out on my own, which isn't bad either.

[*made-up word]

Wittgenstein's Mistress

Yet another in a series of nonreviews of books of a certain genre posing as books of another genre. This one is the deceptively titled and widely acclaimed work of uncategorizable fiction (or criticism or history) by David Markson, which by the way has almost nothing to do with Wittgenstein or his mistress, in the unlikely event that he had one. Like his later novel, This Is Not a Novel, this book can be entertaining if you have no preconceptions about what constitutes a coherent narrative, a work of fiction, or a paragraph. It also helps if you're interested in art, or at least in people who make art.

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm.
Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm.
One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered. (p. 12)

If you're not careful, Markson's prose style will infect your own. You could start walking around composing sentences drawn directly from what is directly observable through the senses, then drawing conclusions based on what may or may not be the case with regard to something else which may or may not be connected with those observations. Then construct subsequent sentences calling into question the accuracy of the observation, the truth of the sentence, or the conclusion drawn from it. If you follow my drift. Or even if you don't.

Surely one cannot type a sentence saying that one is not thinking about something without thinking about the very thing that one says one is not thinking about.
I believe I have only now noted this. Or something very much like this.
Possibly I should drop the subject. (p. 63)

As you can see, Markson isn't just interested in art, or in artists, but in sentences and the way the mind works with them, sometimes in the most surprising ways. And being a writer, he has a particular sensitivity to both the logical sense of a sentence and the sound of it to the ear. I guess that's what kept me going in the slow trudge through this book, the way both hemispheres of my brain were working in tandem, usually going back and forth and only rarely hitting on both at once.

Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano.
What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again. (p. 214)

Clearly there seems to be a gap between what's actually happening and anyone's best efforts to explain it, but they keep trying, don't they. Which is the nut of the problem Ludwig Wittgenstein kept running into, as I understand it, and a lot of other very talented people, Magritte and Heisenburg and Isadora Duncan come to mind. So you might enjoy this book, if you're interested in that kind of thing. If not, there are other, more entertaining things to do, like flying a kite.