"Harlem Shuffle"

Colson Whitehead's newest book (published in August) is Harlem Shuffle, the adventures of Ray Carney, a resident of Harlem. The three sections of the book take place in 1959, 1961, and 1964. As far as I can tell, Whitehead gets all the details of that era in Harlem -- and in the USA -- right. These details of Carney's picaresque life, and that of his even more criminal cousin Freddie make it a fun book to read: Movies. Food. Diners. Traffic. Danger. Robbing a hotel safe. The ever-changing streets of Harlem and New York City. Apartments good and bad. Furniture...

Wait, why furniture? Because Carney is the owner of a furniture store: a good businessman, improving his business in each of the three sections of the book. In addition, Carney's a good family man, very fond of Elizabeth, his faithful wife, who works as a travel agent specializing in creating safe itineraries for black people who want to avoid hotels and towns where they will be turned away or put in danger. Ray and Elizabeth have two beloved children named May and John, and an idealized home life (except that Ray is often out). Unfortunately, Ray Carney is also a crook, participating in a variety of thefts and cons in cooperation with Freddie and several lowlifes that he knows, some of them former associates of his late father, who was also a crook. Well, if he had just been a decent stay-at-home family man it would have been a rather boring book. 

Discrimination and various prejudices against people of color seems to be the one part of popular culture in the book that's virtually unchanged until now, maybe excepting the denial of hotel or dining accommodations. Futile actions against inequality, such as the protests and sit-ins of the 1960s, seem all too similar to what's happened recently (lots of words, not much change). The characters in the book live with the institutional biases against them, and deal with the inequality they experience, but their lives proceed anyway. This is in extreme contrast to the horrendous result of discrimination described in Whitehead's earlier book The Nickel Boys. That was a very sad book (blogged here). This one is not so sad, but still enlightening.

It's a good story, wonderfully told. Whitehead's descriptive abilities are a joy to read. I loved being immersed in both the plot and the many descriptive details. As always, I cultivate awareness of how authors use food to create atmosphere in a book. Whitehead is especially wonderful at spinning out analogies between food and other things going on. Some examples of food in the novel:

At a Chinese restaurant  "There was a fish tank with greenish water over by the kitchen door. Something moved inside it. Red-and-orange dragons writhed on the wallpaper, roiling like clouds....The cookies were stale and the fortunes discouraging." (pp 85-86)

A family memory, and a lesson, from a petty crook called Pepper:

"His grandpa Alfred had kept a steel-drum smoker out back in Newark, on Clinton Ave. He'd do ribs, brisket, make his own sausage. Grandpa Alfred's father had been a butcher and cook on an indigo plantation in South Carolina and passed down the mysteries. 'You throw chops on some coals,' Pepper's grandfather said, 'that's one way to cook a piece of meat. Few minutes later, you got that black on it, you're done. But barbecue is slow. Put it in that smoke, you got to be ready to wait. That heat and smoke is going to do its work, boy, but you got to wait.' 

"One was fast and one was slow, and it was the sane for stickups and stakeouts. Stickups were chops -- they cook fast and hot, your'e in and out. A stakeout was ribs -- fire down low, slow, taking your time." (p. 175)

Characterizing a diner: "Sometimes when Carney jumped into the Hudson when he was a kid, some of that stuff got into his mouth. The Big Apple Diner served it up and called it coffee." (p. 175)

Two criminals called Bumpy and Chink cultivated a perhaps-undeservedly favorable public opinion: "Take the publicity trick with the hams. Bumpy had started the Christmas good-will giveaway, handing out turkeys to the Harlem needy from the back of a truck. Chink followed suit, tossing out free hams the day before Easter, sometimes to people who were unaware that he'd killed their husband or son. Or were too hungry to care." (p 226)

A man who cooperates with the police against the mob, just wanting to do his civic duty, disappeared: "Washes up in New Jersey three weeks later, throat cut so bad his head is barely hanging on. Like a Pez dispenser." (p. 244)

Finally, a very long interchange about Carney's cousin Freddie's experience during the riots in 1964 that followed the police murder of a young, innocent, unarmed Harlem boy. This really shows Whitehead's writing power to use food to illustrate a point:

"'It was nine o'clock,' Freddie said. 'I get out of the subway to look for a sandwich and the streets are full of people. Raising their fists, waving signs. Chanting, "We want Malcolm X! We Want Malcolm X!" and "Killer cops must go!" ... I'm hungry. I don't want to deal with all that. I'm trying to get a sandwich....

"Freddie followed the crowd to the station house on 123rd, where a CORE field secretary with dark horn-rimmed glasses and a red bow tie listed demands: Police Commissioner Murphy must resign; set up the long-requested civilian review board...

""This old lady elbows me in the stomach, we're packed in. Hot. All these angry Negroes in one place, and they are pissed -- but all I want is a sandwich. I start heading back up to 125th and people are all buzzing, saying the police have beat up and arrested some CORE people. That was that! Boom -- it was on... Rocking cars throwing shit through windows.

"'I'm like, how am I going to get my sandwich in all this mess?

"'On 125th, everybody's closed or closing up early because of the unrest. That Cuban place with the pickle they put on the meat is closed. Jimmy's, the Coronet's got its lights out. That's when I really got hungry -- you know how you want something more when you know you ain't going to get it? Negroes are wrapping chains around those security gates and then pulling the gates off with their cars. Then they break the glass and step inside. I'm a simple man. Put something between two slices and I'm happy. But how am I supposed to get a motherfucking sandwich with all that going on? People running up and down, screaming. I'm like, damn, this riot stuff will cramp a brother's style.'

"Freddie had no recourse but to split uptown and hit Gracie's Diner. 'Got my ass a turkey sandwich, finally. And it was good too. But that was some wild shit, man.'" (pp 217-219)

When I wrote about Whitehead's earlier book (here), I said "Clearly the twenty-first-century reader is challenged to question how much progress we've made to date, in achieving the vision of a better society." While this book is much gentler than The Nickel Boys, the challenge is still here.

Review © 2021 mae sander.

Green Tea and Michiyo Tsujimura

Why is green tea bitter? What healthful substances are in it? Here's how we know:

Google Doodle, Friday, September 17, 2021: 

Celebrating Michiyo Tsujimura (1888-1969).

Did you ever hear of Michiyo Tsujimura? Lately, as you've probably observed, the google doodle has been introducing a variety of obscure but interesting and even important people. Michiyo Tsujimura, the subject on Friday, was a Japanese research chemist who studied the components of green tea, particularly discovering why green tea becomes bitter when steeped for a long time. I found this especially interesting. 

From Google's write-up about her:

"Michiyo Tsujimura was born on this day [September 17] in 1888 in Okegawa, Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She spent her early career teaching science. In 1920, she chased her dream of becoming a scientific researcher at Hokkaido Imperial University where she began to analyze the nutritional properties of Japanese silkworms.

"A few years later, Tsujimura transferred to Tokyo Imperial University and began researching the biochemistry of green tea alongside Dr. Umetaro Suzuki, famed for his discovery of vitamin B1. Their joint research revealed that green tea contained significant amounts of vitamin C—the first of many yet unknown molecular compounds in green tea that awaited under the microscope. In 1929, she isolated catechin—a bitter ingredient of tea. Then, the next year she isolated tannin, an even more bitter compound. These findings formed the foundation for her doctoral thesis, 'On the Chemical Components of Green Tea' when she graduated as Japan’s first woman doctor of agriculture in 1932.

"Outside of her research, Dr. Tsujimura also made history as an educator when she became the first Dean of the Faculty of Home Economics at Tokyo Women’s Higher Normal School in 1950. Today, a stone memorial in honor of Dr.Tsujimura’s achievements can be found in her birthplace of Okegawa City." (source)

Green tea is made from the plant, Camellia sinensis, the same as black tea and oolong tea, but green tea is not subject to the same processing as the others. Powdered green tea, or matcha, is used in the Japanese tea ceremony and also is a popular flavoring for a variety of foods. The tea ceremony in Japan originated in China, and was introduced in the ninth through thirteenth centuries, so green tea was well known long before the scientific analysis of its components!

I'm dedicating this post to the bloggers who celebrate each Tuesday (starting on Monday afternoon), honoring all beverages, especially tea. Blogger Elizabeth is the organizer of this virtual tea party: her blog is Altered Book Lover. And this post is by mae sander, © 2021.

Grow Plots at County Farm Park

 

My Sister’s Superb Apple Pie

Apple-Pie And Cheese

By Eugene Field (1850-1895)

Full many a sinful notion 

Conceived of foreign powers 

Has come across the ocean 

To harm this land of ours; 

And heresies called fashions 

Have modesty effaced, 

And baleful, morbid passions 

Corrupt our native taste. 

O tempora! O mores! 

What profanations these

That seek to dim the glories 

Of apple-pie and cheese! 

…

Though ribalds may decry 'em, 
For these twin boons we stand, 
Partaking thrice per diem 
Of their fulness out of hand; 
No enervating fashion 
Shall cheat us of our right 
To gratify our passion 
With a mouthful at a bite! 
We'll cut it square or bias, 
Or any way we please, 
And faith shall justify us 
When we carve our pie and cheese

 

De gustibus, 't is stated, 
Non disputandum est. 
Which meaneth, when translated, 
That all is for the best. 
So let the foolish choose 'em 
The vapid sweets of sin, 
I will not disabuse 'em 
Of the heresy they're in; 
But I, when I undress me 
Each night, upon my knees 
Will ask the Lord to bless me 
With apple-pie and cheese!

My sister and her husband are visiting us. This morning, she baked us a marvelous apple pie, with apples she picked herself at an orchard near her home in Indiana. She also showed us this great poem by Eugene Field — who, like us, was from St.Louis. The pie also reminded me of our late and much mourned friend Charlie, who once said “apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze.”

Here are the four of us, as seen from our drone flying above us.

Photos © 2021 mae and len sander.

An Unpolitical Man?

"There are not two Germanies, a bad one and a good one, but only one, in which the best qualities have been corrupted with diabolical cunning into evil. The evil Germany is the good one in misfortune and guilt, the good Germany perverted and overthrown." (Thomas Mann, lecture, 1945, cited in Colm Tóibín, The Magician, pp 406-407)

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is a fascinating author and public figure. He became a successful writer quite early in life with his famous book Buddenbrooks, published in 1901. He was a leading thinker as well as the author of several more novels, for which he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. During the rise of the Nazis he was cautiously in opposition to them, which increased as they took power, and by 1933 his life was in danger. He spent the Nazi years after 1933 in exile from Germany, first in Switzerland, then, during the war, in the United States, where he wrote the novel Dr. Faustus. (I read it recently: blogged here.) Mann never returned to live in Germany, and died in his final exile home, Switzerland. 

Colm Tóibín's novelized biography of Thomas Mann, published September 7, is titled The Magician. It reads more like a biography than like a novel because it lacks the type of focus that one expects in actual fiction: it begins with Mann's childhood and proceeds chronologically through his life until the end. It covers his parents and grandparents, his sisters and brother (himself a well-known author), his wife and her family, many of his friends and contacts, his children, and his writing. 

Tóibín's approach is to dramatize the events and relationships of Mann's life through imagined conversations -- or maybe conversations discovered in diaries and letters of the participants. As you read these vivid conversations, you can never lose sight of Mann's major life focus on writing novels, essays, and speeches, but there is really less about the actual content of his works than I would have expected. Despite Mann's reputation and success as a novelist, much of the novel's focus is on his family life, and often on his rivalry with his brother Heinrich Mann (1871-1950). During World War I, Thomas Mann was a German patriot and supporter, while Heinrich opposed the war. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, politics came to dominate life in Germany, especially in Munich where Mann lived at the time. Tóibín showed how the author resisted making committed statements, and how he quarreled about politics and commitment with his two oldest children, who were flamboyantly anti-Nazi. Eventually, reluctantly, he left his home -- or rather, never returned from a vacation in 1933, when his life was threatened by the Nazis.

The political tensions and the way that Mann adapted to living as a German -- a very famous German -- in prewar and wartime America -- is the part of the book I found most fascinating. Mann's encounters with prominent Americans, including Eleanor Roosevelt and many others, were depicted in detail. His life in California, along with many other German exiles, was an especially intriguing part of Tóibín's presentation. Despite the fictional nature of the novel, I think these interactions were probably portrayed with accuracy and based on good sources, but of course there's no way to know, and there's nothing in Tóibín's novel that explains his sources or methods, just a list of books he used. Maybe this is a flaw: I would like to know, but I'm not about to consult those sources or try to become an expert.

The Washington Post reviewer recently called The Magician "an incisive and witty novel that shows what good company the Nobelist and his family might have been." (source) The novel also showed how Mann's success affected the people closest to him. He was at best a challenging father and brother, and at worst highly destructive, especially to his oldest son, Klaus Mann (1906-1949) who had aspirations as a writer, and succeeded for a while, but was unable to keep going. Klaus's eventual suicide in his early 40s was a crucial event in the book. Similarly, the early success of Mann's brother Heinrich Mann ended half a century later in disillusionment and poverty, with Heinrich -- whose novels were out of print and who failed as a writer in Hollywood -- overshadowed by Thomas Mann's popularity with American readers. For Klaus and all of Mann's family, the disaster of Nazi takeover in Germany forced them to flee to new and alien environments -- mostly in the US. The loss of their native land was also a major contributing factor in their failure, in contrast to Thomas Mann's ability to adapt to the new situation.

Above all Tóibín's novel is a study of identity, including Mann's identity as a German, his consciousness of the changes in what it meant to be German, his identity as a writer, as a family man and a husband, as a very closeted gay man, as an exile, and as a political figure, though Mann never wanted to be one. He comes to see Mann as a Magician in many senses of the word. All very complex.

Review © 2021 mae sander.

Another Ruth Galloway Novel: "The Outcast Dead"

"It seems that over the last three days they have done nothing but drink tea and watch television. The mere action of filling the kettle is comforting, giving the impression that something, at least, is being achieved. Liquid is reaching boiling point, hot drinks are being made. Setting out the cups, finding sugar for Darren, waiting for the water to boil; in those minutes Cathbad allows himself not to think, except about whether he should bring in a plate of digestives. Even being in a separate room is a relief. The kitchen, with its shiny new cabinets, is pleasantly sterile in contrast to the teeming emotions in the rest of the house." -- Elly Griffiths, The Outcast Dead  (p. 326).

Yes, tea for comfort, tea for distraction from frantic worry, tea to soothe difficult relationships or cement friendly ones. Ruth Galloway, main character of The Outcast Dead, habitually pours herself cups of tea at breakfast with her daughter Kate. After a minor car accident, "she doesn’t want to get into the whole ‘are you all right, have a cup of tea, are you sure you haven’t got whiplash’ thing." (p. 79). Drinking tea with her brother, whom she hasn't seen much of, brings them together. Her feelings about going out in the evening: "Even after a day in the sun, she’s longing to be home with a cup of tea. That’s what being forty-three does to you." (pp. 180-181). In stressful times and relaxed ones, everyone is always offering to make someone a cup of tea. 

I'm sure this is very natural and normal for any British mystery series, even though Ruth is a heretic when it comes to certain other institutions -- for instance: "She goes into the kitchen to make breakfast. She’s pretty sure that Simon will expect the full English. It’s a concept which... is almost entirely alien to her."  (p. 257).

The Outcast Dead is book 6 in the series of police procedurals, featuring Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist in a small town in England. Like books 1 through 5 in the series, this one offers lots of suspense and a continuation of building the complicated lives and relationships of Ruth, her one-time lover Nelson (a policeman), other members of the police force, the egocentric head of Ruth's academic department, and the druid, born Michael, whose chosen name is Cathbad. As usual, several different crimes have occurred, and the police are investigating. Meanwhile Ruth is engaged in a professional dig that comes to the attention of a popular TV series, and she also helps the police to solve the crimes. There's a bit too much violence for this series to be classified as a pure cozy mystery, but it sure has plenty of tea.

Mystery author Elly Griffiths has written many more Ruth Galloway books, and other mysteries as well. I suspect I'll be reading more of them, as they are very lighthearted and amusing -- including the constant drinking of tea, which I'm sure will continue to occur on many occasions, as it was also drunk in books 1 through 6.

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Pandemic Mural, Melbourne

A mural by two artists, Melissa Turner and Brigitte Dawson, from Melbourne’s Murals and Interior Design, caught my eye in an article in the Guardian. In 2020, these artists did several murals illustrating a view of the pandemic and the response to it. This one is on the wall of a Cole's supermarket (source).

Caption from the Guardian:
"A woman passes under the words ‘#physicaldistancing’ in a mural based on Michelangelo's The Creation
of Adam, in Melbourne, Australia. Photograph: Michael Currie/Speed Media/Rex/Shutterstock" (source)

Another view of the mural: "The Creation of #physicaldistancing." (source)

A quote by the artists:

“In times of great uncertainty, it’s refreshing when we can turn to creativity and the power of art to help reiterate the importance of remaining safe and doing our part to flatten the COVID-19 curve." (source)

I love art parodies: though I mostly collect images of the Mona Lisa, I have quite a few images that make use of Michelangelo's famous creation image from the Sistine Chapel, and others as well. In the last year and a half, as the pandemic ravaged the world, I've seen quite a few Mona Lisa parodies and murals about masks and the pandemic -- a google search offers many of them. Here's a good one, just for fun:

"Mona Lisa Corona Covid" (source)

When I saw the "Creation" mural depicted in the Guardian, I wanted to share it with the many lovers of murals and street art who share their finds at Sami's blog each Monday (which is Sunday where I live). Maybe some of the participants who live in Melbourne have seen this mural -- if they have already shared it with the group, I'm sorry that I missed their posts!

Dr. Faustus

Thomas Mann's famous novel Dr. Faustus, published in German in 1947, is usually described as the story of Adrian Leverkühn, a German composer of great genius, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of brilliant musical production. Adrian, born in 1885, was a near-contemporary of Mann (1875-1955), and his life paralleled the dramatic events of the early twentieth century. Sometimes the novel is described as an allegory of the fall of German culture, an allegory of the Nazi project and its downfall, or as a critique of German bourgeois life, but that's oversimplifying, in my opinion.

The narrator of Dr. Faustus is Adrian's childhood friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a modest man who presents himself as a simple biographer, putting together the important facts of his famous friend's life and work. Serenus often says "this is not a novel," but of course it's a novel! And the reader has to try to understand both characters: the narrator and his subject, to see what Thomas Mann was doing. Serenus isn't exactly an unreliable narrator -- maybe he's too reliable, too detailed, too apologetic and self-effacing, too insistent on his unworthiness. But in any case, it's a novel about two men, not a biography of one man.

Narrator Serenus, who lived in Germany, began his biographical task after Adrian's death in 1940, and his writing takes place during the worst times of World War II. He is highly aware of the significance of the advancing armies that are conquering Germany as he is writing. His narrative dwells constantly on German choices, German responsibility, and German shame: his word. He's humiliated at the failure of German culture: and German culture is a major theme of his narrative. It's not evident that Adrian was particularly aware of these events, and in any case Adrian's conscious life ended in the early 1930s. As a result there's a kind of tension between the political consciousness in the two intellectual lives intertwined in the novel.

Many features of Adrian's life and work are of great interest to Serenus. In particular, the novel includes very detailed information about Adrian's musical theories and his compositions. At one point, music is described as a kind of direct link to thought and mind, a kind of pure abstraction. Obviously, the book can't include actual music that the reader can hear. Thus, the music in the novel really is mental only, though it has been identified with the 12-tone works of contemporary composers, particularly Arnold Schoenberg. Most of Adrian's music is vocal music, including settings of poems by famous German poets, operas and oratorios based on Shakespeare's work, and the like. These textual references also help to bring the non-existent music to life.

Just half-way through the novel, there's a long chapter detailing Adrian's encounter with the devil. The devil is a very vivid character who radiates penetrating cold and speaks in a very eerie way. This chapter is presented as a document written by Adrian himself. Serenus doesn't speculate as to whether Adrian's experience with the devil is real or entirely in his head, though Adrian (both at that time and later) is completely convinced of the objective existence of the devil and his bargain. The complete lack of speculation about this reality is one of the interesting characteristics of Serenus as a narrator.

Thomas Mann was indisputably a fantastic writer, especially an observer of incredible detail. I was amazed at his descriptions of faces, that made me able to image the individuals that he was describing, and even of his characterization of certain pet dogs that were present in the lives of the characters. I was bothered by some of the stereotyping of women and especially of Jewish people, which I found a bit dated and uncomfortable. However, I see that these features are meant to characterize the rather oblivious Serenus, not necessarily to reflect Mann's own thinking.

As always, I look for descriptions of food in a novel, and there were several passages where food was used to characterize a household or a person. For example, at the beginning of the book, Adrian's mother  offers visitors "the grainy dark bread with fresh butter, the golden honey in the comb, the delicious strawberries in cream, the curds in blue bowls sprinkled with black bread-crumbs and sugar." (p. 11-12) Later, the landlady with whom Adrian was to live most of his productive life "promised him light diet, milk, eggs, toast, vegetable soup, a good red beefsteak with spinach at midday, and afterwards a medium-sized omelet, with apple sauce -- in short, things that were nourishing and agreeable to a delicate stomach like his." (p. 256)

My very old copy of
Dr. Faustus.

Why did I read this novel? I chose to read it because I'm planning to read Colm Tóibín’s new novel, The Magician, which is a fictionalized biography of Thomas Mann. As the amazon review of Tóibín’s book says: "The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—the first world war, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile." I decided to read something by Mann himself before I read the novel. This is the second time I have read Dr. Faustus, both times reading the English-language edition from 1948, which originally belonged to my father. (I probably should have made the effort to get a later, and better, translation.)

Here's something puzzling: when it was first published, Dr. Faustus was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club (though my father's copy seems to have been a regular commercial edition). It's hard for me to imagine the mainstream and not very intellectual subscribers of this "Book Club" at that time dealing with this ponderous book, but maybe it was simply chosen because of Mann's reputation and fame -- he had won the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature, and was admired for his politics and for fleeing Nazi Germany. The New York Times review from October, 1948, remarked: "Members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, whose co-selection for November it is, are in for a shock when they tackle 'Doctor Faustus.'" (source)

Blog post/review © 2021 mae sander.

The Gardens Are Back!

A year ago when I visited the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, I wrote:
The gardens behind the gate are off limits this year, as are the
greenhouses, shop, and restrooms. Because of the pandemic,
only distanced outdoor walks are allowed.

We visited after more than a year of pandemic closure. The gates are open!
The gardens have been fully open since August 10.

The Bonsai Garden

Ceramic Sculpture Installation by the Ann Arbor Potters' Guild

“"A Garden of Earthy Delights,' an installation of ceramic sculptures inspired by the habitats of the Great Lakes and the plants that grow in them, is on display at Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

"The multi-piece stacked sculptures were created in collaboration with the botanical gardens and the Guild in celebration of the Guild’s 70th anniversary. Thirty-three artists collaborated on eight teams to create 10 sculpture towers." (Botanical Gardens Website)

Blog post © 2021 mae sander.

Around Me: Autumn is Coming

Near my house:

During one of my walks around my neighborhood, I saw a vulture eating a road-kill squirrel.

Although they often fly overhead,
they don't usually appear in the streets!

I've been impressed by this sunflower taller than the nearby stop sign.

At the Botanical Gardens:

After more than a year of pandemic closure, the gates are open!
Behind the gates: a beautiful collection of art works, to be documented later.

Just a touch of color for the changing season:

Late summer foods:

Duck eggs with a pearly pink shell.

White bean & carrot salad, inspired by the blog
Kitchen Riffs.

A tray of vegetables about to be roasted. Update by request: link to comprehensive vegetable roasting:
https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/how-to/article/simple-roasted-vegetables

Blog post © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

The Nature of the Future: Not Good

"'Global change:' deforestation, habitat fragmentation, introduced predators, introduced pathogens, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides. What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?" -- Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky (p. 97). 

I hated reading this wonderful and enlightening book. The consequences of human action are too terrible to contemplate.  The most well-meaning interventions that humans have tried, following the best science that they could muster, often turn out to be disasters. An introduced predator eats the wrong target prey. Efforts to protect the Great Lakes create bigger problems than the ones they were meant to address. Pumping water out of a flood zone makes the land subside and thus flood more dangerously.  One good choice doesn't lead to another, they all go wrong!

Kolbert's research for this book was interrupted by the pandemic. It's the first book I've read that mentions the pandemic and its various effects -- I'm now waiting for pandemic fiction! About this, she writes:

"I was contemplating another trip ... when COVID-19 hit. Suddenly everyone’s plans were upended, including my own. As borders closed and flights were canceled, travel to the ice sheet—or, for that matter, pretty much anywhere—became impractical. Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book." (pp. 197-198). 

There's not much amusing about a world spinning out of control, but Kolbert makes it very slightly amusing by comparing missed opportunities and botched fix-ups to great literature. I leave you with this:

"The reasoning behind 'genetic rescue' is the sort responsible for many a world-altering screwup. (See, for example, Asian carp and cane toads.) The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself: 

Do you know how he did it?
WITH MOTHER’S WHITE DRESS!
Now the tub was all clean,
But her dress was a mess! (pp. 138-142). 

All the planet’s disasters and the inevitable doomsday predictions have been on my mind anyway. Kolbert’s book touches on all of them, and by going into very specific details about little organisms made extinct by one thing or another, she shows how small events are heading us for catastrophe. 

Review © 2021 mae sander.

Here's to Summer's End

 

Banksy, "The Cocktail Rat" (source)

Here in the US, Monday is Labor Day, the traditional end of summer. At this point, most children should be back in school and most workers would be finished with summer vacations. This year the feeling of back-to-school and back-to-work is even more powerful, as there are so many tensions about full-scale, in-person returns. 

I wondered what type of image would illustrate conventional summer vibes, and found this little mural by the famous and anonymous mural painter who uses the name "Banksy." Even though I spend little time at the beach or pool sipping cocktails, I like the image as an iconic reflection of summers past and future. This reminds me of the maybe non-existent idle leisure time, in contrast to whatever is coming up after Labor Day. And of the coming end of weather when one could sit outdoors with a drink.

Ruth Ozeki

Coming later this month!

Before reading Ruth Ozeki's new book The Book of Form and Emptiness, I decided to read an old one, from 2003 titled All Over Creation. I don't know why I didn't read it earlier, as I read and liked My Year of Meats, her first novel, and read and liked A Tale for the Time Being, her third novel as well.

All Over Creation is an ambitious but flawed book. Like My Year of Meats, it tells the story of farm families who are caught in the trap of choosing to grow genetically modified and other chemically altered crops or choosing less artificial ways to farm. The book is set on an Idaho potato farm in the late 1990s. At that time, many of these issues were really on people's minds, as they still are now.

As Ozeki's farmer-characters succeed and acquire more land, they are more and more pressured to purchase altered seeds and cuttings to fill their vast fields. In this book, the dilemma is: do they plant potatoes that have built-in insecticide? Or do they spray large amounts of commercial insecticides? Or can they find a better way entirely?

The characters tend to resemble the types of a morality play, with everyone designed to embody a message, even when they are individualized. A dying man, once a large-scale farmer, has been converted to the rightness of natural farming, and makes meaningful and poignant speeches about his belief. His wife, who came to Idaho as a Japanese war bride, grows and sells heirloom seeds, and talks to her plants with stereotyped Japanese insights. Their daughter, who ran away at age 14, has just returned to see them one more time, and is discovering her true identity. A group of protestors living in a trailer create theatrical events to call attention to the problems of pesticide and other evils in the food supply. Several articulate children play a role: I found the portrayal of these children especially annoying because they seemed to be too perfect in expressing the author’s message. Aging Flower Children, who had been idealist hippies during the sixties but have sold out their ideals, play a role in the many complications and dramas in the book.

I found it readable but contrived. Unfortunately, the issues raised in the book are worse than ever. I hope I like the new book better!

Blog post © 2021.

 

Argus Farm Stop

New mural at the farmers’ consignment store, Argus Farm Stop.
There’s one Argus near my house, and this one on the West Side of Ann Arbor.

 

The mural painted on the window has been there for a while.
Photos © 2021 mae sander for mae food dot blogspot dot com.