On Gender

Gender is not a crime.

Feels a tad controversial to say so, as many nowadays consider gender roles oppressive, and condemn 'gender essentialism' in favor of some sort of neuter ideal. We humans do have a sordid record of forcing each other into restricted roles based upon gender, skin color and so on; I suppose our skittishness on the matter is understandable.

No one should be pressured to adhere to any rules of gender. We ought to all be free to express ourselves, gender-wise and otherwise, as we like. This seems an obvious platitude. And yet, we might remind ourselves how widely it applies, scolding not just icky misogynists with retro notions of femininity, but also Women's Studies majors who would denounce my tight jeans. Both, after all, implicitly impose their own gender ideas on others. My ass is mine to objectify as I please.

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Laidupedness

IN THE MONTH OF MAY the sharpshooters began to stand down. That electric nerve pain, worst kind, transmogrified to arthritic inflammation, pulsing along the nerve corridor like I was a bioluminescent sea creature. Lately I have lots of painless moments, or so they seem upon casual observation. If I inquire too solicitously my body usually reports that Pain is in fact still there, perhaps sleeping.

The controversially-called 'painless' moments are strictly conditional. I get to have them if...and you don't want to hear the ellipses contents. In brief, absurd limitation paired with ibupanacea.

I've had to cultivate some weird other kind of discipline. The kind where you don't do stuff--not even the sensible, responsible things your brain says to do. See the chickenshit on the patio, but don't hose it off. Hear the coffee beans crunch underfoot, but don't sweep up the resultant grounds. Faced with a heap of dishes, wash only one dish.

The little feline Buddhist nun understands such things. If her water bowl is empty, she says, Do not attempt to reach it! Merely open the door, that I may go and drink from the water garden. She is conducting clinical trials on the efficacy of feline saliva, applied topically, on spinal disc regeneration in humans. With a sample size of one.

I READ BOOKS about The Back and about Pain, trying to learn from them without being steamrolled by their high church pronouncements. Bed rest should not exceed 1-2 days. I agree: it should not. Not least because it FUCKING SUCKS. But what would general medical wisdom have had me do instead? Keep moving about until my screams summoned the neighbors?

I hold as my bottom line the oath I felt like a lot of doctors failed to make me: First, do no harm.

The research I do and the interactions I have about my back problem are often painful themselves, though I do learn from them. In such case I must unbandage the wound, saying, This hurts and I wish it would get better. That invites clucking opinions and facile judgments as readily as sympathy or genuine help. Princess SHao brought what I really wanted: chocozucchini bread.

AND NOW FOR a quick lesson in making a person's hardship their own choice and fault. It's a neat trick: 1. Think up something the person should be doing. 2. Suggest it to the person. 3. Sit back and relax! If the person fails to be better, it's on them! You tried.

Nothing I hate more than people's little self-solacing notions of What I Should Be Doing. The suggestey shit pricks me til I bleed with self-doubt. The philosopher JBird said what I really wanted to hear: that my ass retains its splendor.

But what would I have people do in lieu of solacing themselves? Doesn't provision of empathy require suffering along with me? How can I ask that?

AFTER THREE MONTHS of laidupedness and discouragement, I gave myself the following advice:

This will last...some amount of time. Some awful, unbearably long period of time, way beyond reason. The progress will be invisible slow; setbacks many. You won't have the support you need. Won't have options that could make it easier. Instead eight million things will conspire to make it harder. You'll often be mired in depression. Your self-confidence will wear down. Your life will get all off-track. You'll get farther and farther from being as you were. You'll lose your fitness and your beauty to some extent or other. You may not even feel like yourself; you'll feel like you are the Pain. Fully parasitized. All this will happen. Continue happening. Even so it will end. You'll get well.

That has proven useful. Eventual wellness is a damn fine promise, one beyond the reach of many who are unwell.

FINALLY, for Lolo, a word on bullshit-skimming. You see, ordinarily I care about a lot of dumb shit, like what people think about the things I do, and why I don't make more money, and whether quoting rappers makes me ridiculous. But with Pain at my back, how can I possibly care? Jay-Z said it best:

I used to give a fuck

Now I give a fuck less

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Dispatch from the Floor

TERRIBLY OFTEN when I tell people I have back problems, they’re like, Yeah me too. And then I can't say, No but mine are like super bad. I will tell you, though, dear reader: they are quite bad. Bad enough that I’ve landed on the floor, two months and counting, though I didn’t do anything much out of the ordinary.

In fact the strain upon my spine over the last decade has been far less than ordinary, since I make innumerable concessions to the tyrant Pain. I work part time and stretch at ballerina frequency. I am mindful of lifting and sitting and sneezing and carrying too much in my purse.

But nor am I Pain’s little bitch; I defy its rules when I think I can get away with it. And really, it was a pile-up of such sneaky infractions that landed me here, spine trained to the floor, with my mercifully tiny laptop atop a pillow on my stomach and my feet on the couch and an ice pack beneath me.

For the last few years Pain was the weaker contender, and I spit in its face, daring to do things I thought I might never get to do, like have a normal job, live by myself, take dance class, walk for miles. At the height of my triumph I wore some obscene heels.

I was a blithe, jubilant rat fattening myself on a windfall of spilled grain night after night, and Pain was a cat with a grin, crouching and watching. I’m being melodramatic, but nothing inspires it quite like Pain.

THERE IS A NERVE corridor originating at my sloppy L5-S1 spinal disc, the disc aptly if uncharmingly named for its location between the fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebrae. This corridor travels the length of my leg. Errant L5-S1 protrudes and the nerve gets agitated. Back in the day the S1 nerve path used to be the thing; now my main pain corridor is L5. (Both are pictured below.) The S1 path ends in the tendon and heel, which made me feel like an aching Achilles. L5 ends in the toes, which are often a-tingle.

The corridor is constantly abuzz. Be it with electric sharpshooters, splayed inflammation, dull ache. The sensations, and locations thereof, are ever changing, and sometimes I lie here and watch them, as malignant internal fireworks. The corridor may grow dark and quiet, but it always exists. Even at times when I have negligible pain, the corridor is active, alert, ready. My unaffected leg feels to have no corridor; such is the difference.

You may get frustrated, dear reader, when I tell you there is little more I can do for this than rest and let it get better. This smacks of medical slackerdom. But having done much time down the rabbithole of pills, treatments, hospitals, I can tell you with confidence that this is the truth. I had surgery ten years ago, to the day. So do me this one favor and don’t suggest anything for me to *try.* If you wish to offer something, I like food.

I just have to do the time. It is not fun, but it is a test of a sort, a strength challenge, and I dig those. It's like a marathon, only instead of training from normal human to superhuman capability, you train from jacked-up to normal. You battle the daily discouragements and the limits of your body and develop focus and stamina. And sometimes you give up and fall backwards, and watch streaming episodes of Basketball Wives. (I assume marathoners get discouraged and turn to Basketball Wives.)

Sometimes it is hard to believe that my spine is so dysfunctional. But I think of how other people have diabetes or lupus or herpes or dire allergies and it seems common for the body to have some failed function or other. It is the human body, after all, and quite remarkable. It is much more shocking to think of what it can do.

I EMPLOY a rope-a-dope pain management strategy. I lie here in apparent defeat and let Pain punch itself out until I am the stronger one.

I've had to adapt to long-term battle. Reading and writing are all I can accomplish, and sometimes I can accomplish nothing. I'm drinking pint smoothies and eating mini yogurts and frozen dinners, with a resultant abomination of plastic refuse that is hardly less objectionable than begging friends to do my dishes. Bowls are heavy to carry to bed and glasses are easily spilled down the chin when drinking lying down, so the plastics do win for now.

My personality adapts too, as you might have noticed if you know me as a pleasant person and are reading this thinking you would rather not visit such a grumpbitch after all. I don't laugh much, but I usually feel alright. It's just I have to be serious. I can't listen to music that gets me worked up or makes me want to bust even the smallest moves. No Nicki, no Weezy. I've been on Joan Baez and Iron & Wine. My earffirmative action campaign got a leg up.

And I'm in the hard situation of needing lots of Help. A friend remarked to me that it's too bad how in our society it is frowned upon to need Help. And that may be so, but I think needing Help sucks inherently, not just because of some social norms. There are as many kinds of Help as there are kinds of love or water. Help can be given loudly or quietly, generously or stingily, for free or for an implicit price; you can be made to feel it or allowed to accept it with ease. Given gracefully, it is a tremendous gift. But the position of need is a shit position, even so.

Pain is not all curses and grumbles. I grow by its trials and appreciate how it skims the bullshit off life's surface. Maybe I'll tell you about that some other time.

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SUMMER BOOK REPORT: Cleb Does Bellow

I WAS PRETTY SURE I hated Saul Bellow, vigorously and justly. Hated him for his sexism, which is to say he seemed to hate me first. My gag reflex was not Bellow-specific. I felt the same revulsion toward other macho American novelists, who struck me as oversexualizing and insulting and apelike.

However I had at some point to admit that I also found these same writers: fascinating. This attraction-repulsion required further investigation, preferably in post form. So here goes.

Bellow seemed like a fitting launchpad for said investigation, and I picked up a copy of his renowned 1964 novel Herzog. Both being Jews, I figured Bellow and I could bond over quaint Yiddishisms, having little else in common. Which worked out nicely when his character Moses Herzog reminisced on singing "Ma Tovu" with his brothers as a child. I was humming it all the next day. ("Ma Tovu" is a pleasant song to have in your head, since it means "How Good." Ma tovu ohalecha Yaakov, mish'knotecha Yisrael: How good are thy tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.)

I opened the test case macho novel with apprehension. The plan was to face the erection, hoping I'd know what to do with it. And mostly I did, noting the sense in which the hyperactive male sex drive ought to create a happy situation for us heterosexual women. I suppose the rub lies in our ambivalent role as object of those desires. Desire can beget derision, as I am wont to lecture. And too, horniness may beget creepiness. Reading Bellow was at times like being inside the head of some lecherous great-uncle; I did not want to know what was going on in there.

In the Herzog era, the Mad Men era, there seems to have been some glamorous sexual crackle, and simultaneously the sexes were warring. Usually it seems we get along better nowadays, but sometimes it seems men are stewing in their caves while women appear smugly victorious but are privately unfulfilled.

And I worry that our present era has warped and vilified some of the natural distinctions of gender, and that certain prevailing wisdoms attempt to subdivide relationships into unrealistically tidy, sterile compartments (sex, communication, housework, and so forth), neglecting the pulsating, organic whole that is the ever-tenuous but uniquely magical bond between men and women.* I kept these ruminations to myself, however, until I read a wonderful essay in the book review section of the New York Times.

*Sorry, beloved gays. This one's not about you.


IN HER ESSAY "The Naked and the Conflicted," Katie Roiphe observes that today's male novelists "have repudiated the aggressive virility of their predecessors." Predecessors like Norman Mailer, John Updike, Phillip Roth and Saul Bellow. (Among these Bellow is, incidentally, the most demure, as indicated in the below graphic, which accompanied Roiphe's essay.) She goes on:

The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex...Rather than an interest in conquest or consummation, there is an obsessive fascination with trepidation, and with a convoluted, postfeminist second-guessing.

Of that last she provides an excellent example from Jonathan Franzen in The Corrections: "He could hardly believe she hadn’t minded his attacks on her, all his pushing and pawing and poking. That she didn’t feel like a piece of meat that he’d been using."

Ladies, if we have given guys the impression that their sexual aggression is loathsome, we have failed grievously to communicate. And communication is supposed to be our specialty. Furthermore, if we have given such an impression, that we want our men de-balled, does that not betray a cowardice of our own?

It is fashionable to speak of men being *threatened by strong women,* but what of insecure women feeling threatened by strong men? Mightn't we women be quick to judge a delicious specimen of masculinity as a jerk or a dolt or a cad, similar to the way some men are quick to condemn a dauntingly attractive woman as dumb or bitchy?

Speakinawhich, check out Herzog's flagrantly displayed desire/derision vortex in this passage from the book:

He saw twenty paces away the white soft face and independent look of a woman in a shining black straw hat which held her hair in depth and eyes that even in the signal-dotted obscurity reached him with a force she could never be aware of. Those eyes might be blue, perhaps green, even gray--he would never know. But they were bitch eyes, that was certain. They expressed a sort of female arrogance which had an immediate sexual power over him; he experienced it again that very moment--a round face, the clear gaze of pale bitch eyes, a pair of proud legs. [Emboldenings mine.]

Sheesh! What threat can this stranger possibly represent? She's just like sitting on a bench in a train station and he hates her.

I found a possible answer in a description of Herzog's ex-wife, Madeleine. Recalling the beauty of the woman who left him, Herzog is flooded with venomous resentment. "Such beauty," he thinks, "makes men breeders, studs and servants." Stands to reason that Bitch Eyes, likewise, would be a threat to power. A threat to freedom. Bell Biv Devoe said it straighter: "Never trust a big butt and a smile."

Here's another Bellow desire/derision gem, describing a photograph of Madeleine as a child: "In jodhpurs, boots and bowler she had the hauteur of the female child who knows it won't be long before she is nubile and has the power to hurt." I assure you, no twelve year-old girl has ever thought any such thing.

But I appreciate knowing Herzog has these notions. What makes the insidiousness of the contemporary male novelists is their reluctance to be real for fear they'll be caught thinking wrong. This is artistic cowardice, though also understandable. By contrast, in Herzog Bellow ruthlessly exposes the twisted consciousness of an often-despicable character who seems a damn lot like Bellow himself. It reads like plain truth; artless, and thus good art.

Funny thing--Franzen tries to do this, or something akin to it, in The Corrections*: creating a mildly despicable doppelganger with whom the reader must inevitably empathize. But Franzen's Chip comes off wanting to be pitied or sheltered or something. He backhandedly begs absolution, whereas Herzog is (at least in his stream of consciousness narration) guileless. Herzog's not trying to manipulate the reader into secretly liking him; he owns to being half schmuckish and is strong enough not to whiningly finagle your forgiveness. He only asks that his faults be accepted. Who can say no to that.

*I read The Corrections several years ago and did not re-read it for this essay. That was wrong, I know. Just I was loathe to rekindle so odious a relationship. By way of apology, I offer this interesting recent Franzen article.

At any rate, this business of shipping one's self-loathing out into the world in charismatic written package is an excellent trick, one I use often. But I digress from the point, which is: I'd sooner do Saul Bellow than Jonathan Franzen. And the former is dead. (Counterobjectification. Try it.)


I LEARN things from Bellow because he tells the truth, however ugly. I have some idea now how a person of Herzog's ilk, a muddled misogynist mid-century man of ideas thinks. Communication can only be born of honesty, of course. If someone avoids saying in order not to be caught harboring incorrect (politically or otherwise) thoughts, only frustration can result.

But it wasn't only Bellow's honesty that I appreciated. Reading Herzog, I felt a less inhibited version of the attraction to mid-century macho novelists that had formerly evoked feminist shame. Indeed the very things that might make men sexist--strength, dominance, a bit of brutishness--might also make them sexy.

The loins are rarely in accord with the politically correct brain. Trust me. I've read Superhead's memoir. (Sup's writing game can't match Sup's head game.) But I do believe this conflation of sexy and sexist, what we might call the Nigel Tufnel Paradox, can be overcome. It just requires effort on both sides. A male friend once told me it is not easy to find the balance of being a guy. And I believe him. Just as, he kindly added, it is surely not easy to do same as a woman.

In saying such things there is always the fear one's fellow woman will accuse one of letting men off easy, indulging in another pathetic effort to please them. Herein paragraph constitutes my plea for sisterly mercy, so let me reassert that yeah Bellow's sexist. Classically so. Herzog's ideal woman is geishesquely servile, delighted just to please him, bathe him, remove his shoes. And he thinks some mean shit, like, "But this is a female pursuit. This hugging and heartbreak is for women. The occupation of a man is in duty, in use, in civility, in politics in the Aristotelian sense." Ouch! (Resolved to watch PBS News Hour each evening in full. No TMZ.)

And yet Moses Herzog, wandering the existential desert, is also a decent person. And indeed decent people have often been sexists, racists, slaveowners and Nazis. How many must there be today who hate gays? Prejudice is one of those peculiar quirks of humanity.



CHEST-THUMPING authors, like Mailer especially, do also use sex and misogyny the way certain rappers do: to flex a disfigured masculine pride. I distinguish such cheap knocks from genuine expressions of imperfect sentiment. And as Roiphe points out, contemporary male novelists can be sexist too; just their version is "wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out." Which is kinda worse, for its camouflage. (BTW, if you ever make your girlfriend mad, just drop five stacks on that makeup bag; it worked on my cat.)

My unsolicited advice to male authors: Writing is not macho. Novelists are not rock stars, not boxers. If writing novels threatens your manhood, perhaps prescribe yourself some other activity to restore it rather than jizzing all over the manuscript. Oh, and tell the truth. Even if someone might hate you for it.

To all the ladies worldwide, I say we have to be strong enough to let men have their strength and know we can handle it. They, in turn, have to promise not to be assholes and to treat us with respect. But the respect has to be genuine. As in literally 'look again'--not some blathering bullshit self-congratulatory fake sensitivity. Beware the man who announces his feminism. I never ever tell people who are not white that I'm nonracist.

What do women want? wonders Herzog. "What do they want? They eat green salad and drink human blood." At another point he lists what women around him seem to expect: "nightly erotic gratification, safety, money, insurance, furs, jewelry, cleaning women, drapes, dresses, hats, night clubs, country clubs, automobiles, theater!" But a woman of Herzog's day could easily have made a much longer list of what men then expected from women, including but not limited to: looking pretty, being the cleaning women themselves, rearing young, smoothing down hackles, pleasing in bed, living in suburban traps and resigning themselves to the denigrating attitudes and limited roles of their time.

I presume to speak for all contemporary women in saying we want strength without oppression, sensitivity but not 'paralyzed sweetness,' to be protected and appreciated and understood. And I cannot know but can guess that the men want care without stiflement, independence but not indifference, to be nurtured and appreciated and understood. Tall orders on both sides, but something can probably be worked out.

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The Urban Rural Life

I'm from the exurbs, so I can appreciate both urban and rural. They are both, at least, something, rather than an absence of anything. (Sorry, Riverside. You know you're always my hometown, loved unconditionally.)When I tell people I'm milking an Oakland goat they seem amused slash to be wondering why I feel the need to be so obstinately strange. There is no explaining why goat-milking is wonderful. I cannot make the case in sensible terms, like the milk is so extra delish, or it's saving me money, or I have achieved near-vegan levels of food moralism.

I don't buy milk anymore, and that is cool. But I only quite grasp the awesomeness of the thing at 7:30 on Tuesday mornings when I'm in my pajamas carrying a quart jar of warm milk up the street of my city neighborhood. (Please note that my milking sentiments are less fond at 6:30 alarm time.) It's all there as I walk home: the udder just drained, the cereal soon to be wetted, the cheese later to be made, and the peculiar sensation of knowing how it all happens.

This yield is pitiful. But you get the idea.

Knowing how it happens is not pure bliss. There's a reason we've divorced our food from its origins. The origins are often gross. The Goat Girls, aged twelve and sixteen, are wont to squirt milk from the udder right into their mouths, preferably whilst singing My milkshake brings all the neighbors to the yard/Damn right it's better than the store's--but I cannot yet do this. And in fact it took me a while before I could scramble and consume the eggs laid in my backyard without queasy revulsion. And in fact it took me a while before I could eat the lettuce grown in my backyard without a dubious mix of self-mistrust and grossness aversion.

Milking does not have a singular character. There are many kinds of milkings, as with any elemental activity. Sometimes the Indigoat Farm hens are pecking at the alfalfa hay strewn about the stanchion and Indi is bleating sweetly from the pen and sun reflects off Kiah's deerish brown flank and my hand works like it was made to do this particular finger dance, forcing great white streams into a latte froth in the collection cup. Other times rain drenches my Cal sweatshirt, its cuffs stained by and reeking of Udder Butter, and Kiah hates me, alfalfa bribes notwithstanding, and to spite me kicks her shit-caked hoof into my hard-won supply.

I was surprised (and a tad smug) when I had to convince someone--a wise and worldly reportorial sort once employed by CNN--that milk comes only from animals who have given birth. In the case of a bucolicized small farm creature he was quite willing to believe it, but surely, he objected, this was not the case for those milking machines in industrial farm bondage. Modern agriculture has us well fooled. Surely, we think, it must happen some other way.

The reason for milk. Indi, at her sleepover chez moi.

Speaking of animals' inevitable reproductive habits, Marianne has gone broody, not unlike half my human friends. She sits on the nest, doesn't lay, has to be persuaded even to roam the yard at evening recess. There are nest box skirmishes when Ximena or Betsy want to go in there and get some actual work done, and egg yields are desperately down without her dark brown, speckled contributions. The one upside is I get to bust out heretofore unused chicken terminology, moaning about how she's 'setting' and I have to 'break her up.'

My attempts to break her up have failed. (Ice cubes? Bitch please.) I began to reflect on this latest form of insubordination disguised as poultry instinct in connection with the previous form: her weeks-long campaign of daily escapes, via flight from a high branch of the fig tree that canopies the run.

I came to suspect that the problem went beyond broodiness. She's at the bottom of the pecking order, forever getting her ass beat, has last dibs on chard treats. Disgruntlement has radicalized her. I never saw this coming: my chicken is an anarchist.

Everybody seems to have ideas about how to break broodiness, but I couldn't find any tips online about how to break anarchism. And it's pretty far along. I cleaned out the nest box expecting to find some adolescent knickknacks, perhaps a few punk rock records. But no. She's got the entire fucking AK Press catalog stashed in there. Bakunin quotes scrawled on the walls. Suffice it to say that I came home sporting an "I Voted" sticker and got shat on.

I can roll my eyes and explain it away psychologically, and I'd have a strong case, considering her pecking order issues. But I should also give her choice of philosophy some respectful consideration. I do keep her caged in wire, after all.

Indeed there is much to ponder when keeping working animals. There is no 'freeing' them at this point, having finagled our needs into their very genes. At best we can work to ensure the bargain we strike with them is fair. I think
FOOD + PROTECTION ⇌ FOOD + OBEDIENCE
is pretty fair. Politeness on both sides is helpful; affection is bonus nice. (I don't eat meat, so you'll have to talk to somebody else about the off-with-their-heads bit.) But they are creatures, with creature hearts and minds. They can't be machinized, and I think that's for the best.

Leela (in the black down) and Erykah. Hands mine.

Animal husbandry is a progressive addiction, so I ended up with some ducklings, bought from a feed store in Petaluma. At maturity they're to join the lone duck at Indigoat Farm. But there was an uncute twist in which one of them died, age five days. It might not have been my fault. Then again, it might have been, which is another thing one has to think about. You gotta be on top of your game when it comes to those downy tufts of precious new life.

Shipped via Israeli post! No, not really.

Leela and Erykah have certain duck-specific charms. You can tell they like muck, and seek it (by gathering at the base of my wine barrel water garden) and seek to create it (by making a sludgy mess of their brooder box). When they splash into the Pie Pan Pond™, it is an absolute refutation of any argument that animals can't feel joy.

Meanwhile, Paulie has been in the shade by the passion vine, penning his memoirs. Six weeks in he has only the title, Big Cat Diary. When he sees the ducklings coming, he runs.

And the backyard beat goes on.

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Planting

PLANTING IS an act of faith from which I still, in this my ninth gardening season, am incapable of expecting rewards. I look out on the helpless chardlings and meager carrot sprouts and see not overflowing harvest baskets but a multitude of dire ends inspired by the Yom Kippur liturgy: Who by slugs, who by chicken attack, who by leafminers, who by flooding; who shall grow limply without apparent cause, who shall perish when I fail to water.

Nature scatters a thousand seeds that one might reach mature planthood, and gardeners are usually wise to copy Mother. It is in willful defiance of this time-tested evolutionary strategy that we break out the Accelerated Propagation System (APS) seed-starting kits with the special wicking properties and coddle seedlings like infants. But then Nature must chuckle and sigh over many of our human follies.

Among the ambitious seeds currently germinating in my APS kits are tomatoes 'San Marzano' and 'Costoluto Genovese,' and eggplant 'Rosa Bianca.' Because I trust the Italians on flavor. For beauty, I turn to the French. I get obsessed with particular French plant variety names, like 'Comtesse de Bouchard,' a pink clematis I've yet to grow, and 'Merveille des Quatre Saisons,' a red-tinged crisphead lettuce I've grown to marvelous effect, though not in all four seasons.

This spring I've welcomed another longtime French fantasy, 'Cécile Brunner.' I'm a tad embarrassed to admit that Cécile is a rose.


YOU SEE, my favorite gardens look natural, hiding the blood, sweat, tears and APS systems (preferably in a darling greenhouse). And I tend to reserve my toil for edible plants, on whom it is more readily justified. I've sneered at rose gardeners with their dainty shears and ridiculous wide-brimmed hats and elbow-length gloves undefiled by dirt. They pour on the water and chemicals in exchange for some garish splotches of yellow and hot pink that are at once snobbish and uncouth, like the ladies off one of those Real Housewives shows.

Cool gardener that I am, I just scatter a few annual seeds in fall and when I head out for my spring labor at the edibles, there to surprise me is the unassuming beauty of larkspurs, Nigella, cornflowers, Gilia tricolor, and, of course, plenty of California poppies to set off all those blues.

This is myth, however. In reality, not even the poppies can be counted upon, and while Gilia is reputed to readily reseed--it's a California native wildflower, after all--spring invariably finds me searching the ground in vain, and then scouring every nursery for those finely-cut leaves that will bear the pale blue and surprisingly complex flowers which are my favorite.

Still, it was quite a leap from $2.99 for Gilia (better get two, sake of symmetry, so $5.98) to $30 for Cécile. She'll demand investments of others kinds as well. Unlike my hippie annuals, she cares about soil type and moisture, will faint at the sight of aphids, expects timely pruning, and hopes for 5-10-10. (Keep hoping, honey.)

My investment in Cécile marks the end of a long awakening process. Roses came to my attention from a gardening perspective when I read Second Nature some years ago. Imaginary Uncle Michael has quite the hard-on for his fifteenth-century vintage 'Maiden's Blush':

Her petals are more loosely arrayed than Madame Hardy's; less done up, almost unbuttoned. Her petals are larger, too, and they flush with the palest pink toward the center, which itself is elusive, concealed in the multiplication of her labial folds.

(Yeah. He used to be so cool. Now it's all gastropolitical sermons all the time. I think to distract him we should change the French name for 'Maiden's Blush' from 'Cuisse de Nymphe' to 'Reveille Mouillé de Boomer Chauve.')

Such written rose reveries are common, and I rolled my eyes, quite sure it couldn't happen to me. I was just not that into roses. My easy stereotypes labeled them arrogant and cantankerous. Such cliched beauty--a dozen, red, in a vase. And even if you got past that, to the old-fashioned fragrant climbers, in classy cream whites and pale pinks...well...their attractiveness was so obvious as to be obnoxious.

ANY MAJOR plant acquisition is preceded by an onanistic research phase. That involves some Google image searches, sure, but--garden nerd that I am--I really get off on the fine print. I was keen to learn, for example, that although Cécile is technically a hybrid tea, she is a venerable sort, not the trashy newfangled kind. (Growing the latter invites the scorn of any garden sophisticate.) And while Céciles do grow in bush form, the plant I purchased is the descendant of a 'climbing sport'--a freak of nature who climbed instead of standing still, from whom climbing progeny were then bred.

By the by, the garden pr0n images that please me most are not flowery; they feature army rows of vegetables, diverse but segregated. Whispy carrot row, rotund cabbage row, beets distinguished by their red leaf midribs, slender onion tops in a hectic mass. A spray of sweet peas climbing behind is the sole permissible ornamental flourish.
Anyway. Pretending amnesia for all my nerdlicious study, I then show up at Berkeley Hort and fake an impulse buy. Makes me feel spontaneous.

I aspire to be more like garden guru Pat Lanza, who finds grapevines on sale one spring, buys three when she hasn't space enough for one, plants them nine inches apart (!), and in so doing remarks, "There's something to be said for my kind of blind faith. I rush in and plant while others stew over the what-ifs." From Lanza I also learned about Dreaming & Planning, which is what gardeners do in winter. (I try to instill this concept in my garden class kids, because in their corner of the world some D & P is warranted.)

Of the two, Planning seems vastly more acceptable. Dreaming overmuch is just gross. Whenever I start in picturing how lovely the fence would look draped in rose blooms, how lovely the warm spring air scented with same, I smack myself and consult the Jew Manual, which decrees that such wistfulness be swiftly undercut by gloomy ruminations and self-deprecatory quips.


I PLANTED the rose in what was a sizable wooden container and now passes as a mini cylindrical raised bed. Before its bottom rotted, it contained, for several seemingly successful years, my dwarf Braeburn apple, a plant acquired amid a similar frenzy of earnest research mixed with blind hopes (albeit at a more innocent point in my gardening career), and a plant which, despite my sincere devotions and because of my myriad mistakes, as they say 'failed to thrive.' It did bloom beautifully, and gave me some apples before its decline. But I let the little tree languish, probably for too long.
Cécile will probably perish within weeks herself, says the inner Eeyore. Barring that, she may prove to be a pain in the ass. But then again: ease of cultivation is not a recommendation in and of itself. There are as many easy to grow plants as there are thirsty dudes in the city of Oakland. Doesn't mean you want them seeding in your yard. If you want an easy plant, I've got ten thousand oxalis bulbs for you, free of charge.

While planting I was viscerally reminded that roses also, famously, have thorns. This is quite hostile. One gets resentful, always having to wear those elbow-length gloves. But thorns served their evolutionary purpose, before we humans became the natural selector protectors, and they ought to persist. A rose de-thorned would be wrong. The thorns remind us about something, likely to do with beauty and pain. Seeking the one, encountering the other.

Thus far Cécile is contemptuous, or at best inscrutable. My Italian tomatoes are but spindly sprouts. The winter peas have been chewed down by some creature, probably one whom I feed expensive kibbles. The nurseries have no Gilia. I've done a lot of renovations, and it looks bare. But spring is come and the hens are laying and we can all photosynthynthesize again. One ought to be optimistic, even if such is not justified by the facts on the ground.

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Haters Never Prosper and Obama Totally Deserves the Nobel

You see the hate
That they servin on a platter
So what we gon have
Dessert
Or disaster
--KW

I KNOW WHAT you're thinking. This post is worthlessly untimely; no one cares about a stale opinion. But the blogosphere (what an icky word) gets its parasitic bad rap from all the half-baked, loudly-shrieked opinions that are its burden to publish.

A mind as nimble as inhabits the skull of Frank Rich can dash out brilliant analysis on cue. Paulie's pundit crush, Sully, for another example, had these wise words on the subject of Obama's Nobel immediately. But we can't all be that quick smart.

Better, perhaps, for the rest of us, to think well and then say. Which is something op-ed writers get irritated at Obama for doing. (Maybe because they are deadline-stalked op-ed writers who lack the luxury.) But those radass speeches don't birth themselves overnight; insight requires time and meditation. We could probably stand, as a nation, to slow down and think a little.

The way Obama models this behavior itself qualifies him for a Nobel. I'm not even old enough to know when we became such a fidgety society, always thumbing our electronics, greedy for new inputs. We're unaccustomed and uncomfortable having to wait for anything. But Heinz teaches that the best things come to those who do.

I'll collectively insult us further (I love you all, individually, rest assured) and say we Americans tend to be lazy and only want the sure thing. Obama inspires us to instead reach for greatness. He defies, and makes us want to defy, the pull to spare ourselves the potential pain and humiliation of the whole risk-taking thing.

Haters say he hasn't *done anything*.

Yeah. Except make the whole world believe anything is possible. Slacka-ass-slacka. How much you wanna bet those same weenies saying, What were you thinking, Nobel Committee? were partying hard on election night.


HOW QUICKLY WE forget the unprecedented number of--in Wire terms--plates of shit this guy was handed. Our nation was more royally fucked than it has been in generations and we're peeved he hasn't fixed it in a year.

Sure, there is all-important Policy (see Gene for that), but there is also something intangible and arguably larger. It's called leadership. And he's got it. I have great confidence in Obama's ability to solve the world's problems, because he knows how to wield soft power. His biracial talent for straddling worlds makes him a peacemaker on a grander, subtler scale. I know Obama has made missteps, and he is a politician. But I fully believe he can achieve greatness if we just give the guy some time and a chance.

I would add to Gene's list of rookie year accomplishments the shift Obama has engendered in our national mood. Damned if black people aren't on average cheerier, even if they won't admit it. (And I can't think of an American population more deserving of cheer.) Everyone I know who worked seriously on the campaign was subsequently inspired to aim their lives more toward what Zora Neale Hurston called "far horizon." And when I say Obama makes everyone believe anything is possible--well, I might be projecting. If you doubt this mood shift theory, just try the following exercise: Close your eyes and say to yourself, Bush isn't president. Obama is president. Did your shoulders ease down a bit from that tense position around your neck? I thought they might.


FAIRY TALES ARE a gas to watch, but substantially less fun to live. Political fairy tales are especially hard on the actors, seeing as how they must play out on a huge public stage. Just ask Howard Dean and George McGovern how they feel re: this. Presidential politics is ripe for life-ruining humiliation.

In Protestant work ethic-y America, there is perhaps no greater humiliation than to be exposed as a hopeless dreamer--which is of course ironic considering the whole "American Dream" thing. We love dreams, so we hate them; desire and derision as conjoined twins. (On this see also black people's initial mass rejection of Obama. Note that he is black now.)

But he did it. He had the Nobel balls. He put his own life on the line for us. You know, like Jesus.


SOMETIMES YOU have to keep your own time. Which I think our president understands. He is wise enough to know that when you brood quietly and wait to speak, people listen when you finally do. And that when you stand your own firm ground, rather than swaying reedlike with the winds of polls and pundits, people believe in your leadership.* As well they should.

The truth behind the heaping criticism may be that we are so scarred--not only from the raw gash wounds of the Bush years, but from the thousand cuts inflicted by politicians who perennially abused our trust--that we would be suspicious of next man, good as he looks, no matter what.


*Triple mixed-metaphor word score.

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OBAMA: The 'Means to Me' Inaugural Essay

Since Obama won election, I have not been able to think about him. I had never hoped so hard and so outlandishly. To have those hopes realized was jarring, and caused some sort of processing error.

Through the year, the crazy dream became an ever greater possibility. What if it became absolute reality? All the heartwrenching suspense, a year of thrill mixed with angst, would be over. The effect, I thought, would be calming. I would walk out into the sunshine with open arms. But instead: system overload. I could not think about Obama as president. If I did, my head would explode.

The thing to do was shut down and restart. For me, as for any ardent supporter, the intensity was a sickness and it overwhelmed everything. The Obama-ascent-to-the-presidency narrative inevitably overpowered that of my own piddling life. In the election's aftermath I sought to correct the balance; I made Barack Obama a minor character. The transition seemed like a good time to leave him the hell alone, anyway. Give the guy some space to figure out the eight million problems of the world without us clinging to or picking at him. I would save the hot stone massage of thinking about him as president for later.

But the inauguration is now. And I haven't thought about it.

So what's so great about him becoming president? Attempts to sum up the answer objectively tend to fall back on "first black president." That is a huge, wonderful part, but not the whole. For most of us, he's also our first awesome president. (The meaning of "president" has been diminished lately, and I'm not just talking about Bush.)

No use trying to coldly analyze his greatness, right here in the moment. Instead, we should each write a fifth grade-style essay called "What Obama Means to Me." Mine goes a little something like this. (Hit it.)


I grew up in a lefty household and I thought of politics like cultish religion or hard core sports fandom. Something where you're really into your team and the other team is affiliated with the devil. You love to win and hate to lose, but like to moan about losing (and lefties have long been proud, moaning losers.) But belief in the team is what matters. Anyone on your team is instant kin; members of other teams are aliens. Your entire worldview is team-filtered, and capped off by belief in a messianic age when lefty politics will dictate reality. This stale perspective did not, for me, include any notion of government policy as a means to practical ends. Sure, I knew that was technically possible. But I took for granted that politics was far too arcane and antiquey for actual use.

And the teamthink I imbibed as a red diaper baby is probably not unlike that of, say, a right-wing evangelical. Obama is right to say we've been a divided nation. We all have our teams, be they political, religious, cultural, regional. It's a big country and it's easy to slip into lazy disunity. But Obama has given 83% of us something to agree on: we like him.

Our president (you can say that now) insists that we shake up the whole league. He is not a teamthink type himself, which pisses off everyone on whose team he might otherwise be. He doesn't like to win and gloat or lose and rant. He doesn't care to have enemies. His political views basically jibe with mine and I don't fret over discrepancies because I trust his when judgment is called for. When he says "pragmatic," I swoon.

Obama is very modern in the way he is reflective, a man of emotional intelligence. He made a campaign appeal based on politics, but he also made an appeal to individuals as an individual, which is fitting for our open, hyper-communicative age. In the FDR era the president was a crackling voice coming through the radio, and a leader could present himself in broad strokes. (Roosevelt even hid his paralysis from polio.) Today we get such an intimate, high def picture, and slathering on the PR won't help. We can see the pancake makeup and what's underneath.

Obama is healthy and unwrinkled. He doesn't have much to hide and he knows how to artfully maintain boundaries of privacy while giving us a peek at his soul. He lets us look at--or up to--him, but he doesn't fiend for attention like a typical narcissistic pol.

Surely it is unprecedented for Americans to know their president so well. We know him from his writing (we maniacs do, anyway), but also from his open speaking habits. In both, he takes care to express himself with precision. The fact that this person whose insides we roughly understand is also our president, our representative in the world, is both confusing and exhilarating. It can be a little mindfuck, like: Barack? Don't I know that guy? What's he doing with all these big people? Oh yeah, he's president.

To the extent I feel like I know him myself, it's also because he seems so plausibly like a part of my world. His multiculti sensibilities, his cool/nerd dichotomy, his penchant for self-improvement, the rigor of his relationship with Michelle, the kinds of jokes he makes ("My greatest strength I guess it would be my humility. Greatest weakness, it's possible that I'm a little too awesome") all make him seem like someone I might know if I was just two tads cooler myself. He's aspirational that way. I want to be awesome too.

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Brooklyn (Grow Chard)

This week, and perhaps only this week, we're having our minor Bay winter. Hoofing down Broadway in a shiver, listening to this song (hit play 6 for the recommended soundtrack to this post), I could be back in Brooklyn.




You're supposed to love New York, but I never could, even though I spent formative years 1-3 and 22-24 there. The cold concrete is enough to blast and wilt a sunny California girl, like frost does basil. With more money and brashness I might have enjoyed it, but instead I was a tad disabled--and, as a result, only marginally employable--and the towers fell as soon as I arrived.

But I didn't live in The City. I lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn I liked. It shares a lot of good qualities with Oakland: The Town vs The City, the teeming diversity, the "land" name. (Of course Oakland is softer--and in all the right places, I would argue. Less harassment, better weather, more vegetarian food.)

I had always liked the idea of Brooklyn, the "No Sleep 'Til..." and the "Tims for my hooligans in..." It was the original habitat of my white-bearded college Yiddish professor, and the place where John Travolta wolfed down two slices of pizza folded lengthwise in Saturday Night Fever.

We lived on a cool row house block in Boerum Hill, which was not yet the glamorous neighborhood it has become, although the clashes of gentrification were already thick in the air. The brownstone whose upstairs we occupied was classic East Coast historic/grimy. We shared it with a sad family and there was no door to shut between their part of the house and ours.

We joined the Park Slope Food Coop, where shopping for fine cheese at low prices was a joy, and working the cash register once a month ranged from tolerable to sort of fun. There were ATMs nearby that operated in Yiddish and I was fascinated by the young Hasid mothers with their wigs and babies on their hips, pushing overloaded shopping carts.

The late, great record store Beat Street was on Fulton. It was mecca for Crim. He entered his first dj battles there, and made pals with the staff, Scoob and Finesse and Pebbles. Somehow Beat Street was just a few blocks from our place, as were the new Smith Street restaurants that taunted our brokeness, and the miracle bodega that could produce any grocery item at any hour, and, my own mecca, the community garden.

I learned to garden in Brooklyn, which makes no sense, unless considered from the "Rose in Spanish Harlem" sort of angle, of yearning to grow something in the cracks of the concrete. It wasn't a garden to which anyone was particularly devoted, but that was fine with me, because it meant I could expand my empire of chard and Brandywines one abandoned plot at a time. I nurtured my raised beds with obsessive care; I got the soil so friable it became legend among the neighborhood cats. But the hard truth is that community gardening often sucks, at least in Brooklyn. The Brandywines all got smashed in the night. Gardening made me appreciate private property.

The downstairs teenage neighbor and his friend Jerrell were a Dean Street pair straight out of a Lethem novel: the Jewish kid from the row house, the black kid from Gowanus Projects. The dirty yellow walls of the brownstone were preferable to Gowanus; when a visitor was at the door and no one had ordered pizza, it had to be Jerrell. And he wasn't shy about buzzing that bell for a looong time if his chum didn't appear. We would see the top of his head from our window four floors up and sing our jingle:

It's Jerrell!
It's Jerrell!
Who's ringin the bell?
Well, it's Jerrell!

The song grew lots of verses and variations that I've since forgotten. For hardass Brooklyn kids, both guys were sweethearts. When I brought them to the community garden, they tasted some mint and politely considered it as a gum alternative.

At the end of our stint, Crim worked at Book Court, on Court Street, where Jonathan authors were known to show up and browse, all writerly and unshaven. Court had a great bagel place too. And the pizza. Oh, the Brooklyn pizza: giving so much and asking so little. We survived two sticky summers (one without AC) and one blizzard, which made the streets quiet and magical. I had expected a more chaotic effect from a word like that.

The thing is, you can picture a place as a whole, with a line connecting the Yiddish ATMs to Beat Street (presumably with the Beastie Boys as midpoint). But when you're actually there, the divisions are hardened. I couldn't have lived in Brooklyn for keeps. Still, on a winter's day like this one, I could go for a plain slice.

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Clinton Was Always a Bad Idea

OBAMA IS NOW extra inevitable, having snagged a majority of pledged delegates tonight. Of course, Hillary Clinton didn't mind sonning him in Kentucky for the hell of it, even if it meant palling around with some racists.

I'm not trying to get caught up in other people's narratives, all those feminist postmortems in the Sunday Times. Obama plays the charmed young prince stealing the job from a qualified older woman.

Maybe I have certain luxuries as a woman under thirty. I'm pretty confident that I'll see a woman become president. (I don't like "woman president." Sounds like some freakish hybrid--half woman! half president!--like the term itself is dubious about the concept.) I can understand that women of a certain age, like Nancy Franklin writing in the New Yorker, may fear they've missed their chance.

But ladies, think about it. This would have sucked. When I gather my granddaughter into my lap to reminisce on how a woman finally became president, do I really want to tell the sordid tale of Hillary Clinton? How'd she do it, Grandma? Well, munchkin, her husband got some brain from another lady and he gave her the presidency as make-up flowers!

NOT THAT I think Hillary Clinton is a terrible role model and should never be president because her husband is an asshole. There are plenty of better reasons why she's a terrible role model and should never be president.

Like: who is she? She's so reactive that it is impossible to locate her core. In college she was sixtiesed-out. In Arkansas and the White House she had shoulder pads with chips on them about having to play wifey. When the right wing was on her, she was a proud punching bag. When Bill cheated, she was the consummate victim. When she was contemplating a run for president, she turned hawkish for commander cred. This is not the leader women need.

Much of the talk emanating from heads these days is that she hit her stride late in the campaign when she went all woman-of-the-people. But this was just her finally figuring out what to react to, who to be in contrast with Obama.

Campaigning in Kentucky Monday, she said, "It's not, for me, the bright lights and the cameras." She does this for you, the little people!

He supposedly feeds off crowds and attention, so she's humble; he is beloved by latte liberals, so she stands with the common man; he's smooth and handsome, so she's dumpy and put-upon.

The only thing she knew how to be was a reaction. To a man. That's the least feminist thing ever.

BOOMER FEMINISTS are often skeptical of us younger women. They see traitorousness in our support for Obama and accuse us of being naively post-feminist, which they have decided means that we think sexism is over. (Never mind that they have staked out and defined feminism for forty years and we might want our own turf.) Boomers have a congenital need to sigh over the failures of the younger generation to be like they were.

No question that sexism is alive and well in America, as Hillary Clinton a little too gleefully declared in response to the "Iron my shirt" hecklers. (Are we totally sure they weren't a campaign plant?) I've gotten uncomfortable sometimes, watching the cable boys' clubs dissect her. I'd rather Chris-n-Keith avoid excessive use of sports metaphors.

But real talk: Obama won because he is the better candidate. It's not even debatable.

And I don't think we younger women are less feminist. We just have our own brand, in which you can shave your legs and eschew pantsuits. Not in which you support any candidate for woman-president. The right woman will come along.

Unrelatedly, I'm rooting for Kathleen Sebelius in the veepstakes.

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