potatoes, marmosets + (some) useless updates
Okay, bots,
Happy Lunar New Year! As Spring approaches, Southern Idaho is now covered in 4 inches of snow. In times like these, I am reminded of a passage in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.
The water was so calm that the sunken half of the fallen tree was replaced by the mirrored image of the half trunk and limbs that remained above the water. All day two cats prowled in the branches, pawing at little eddies and currents. The water was beginning to slide away. We could hear the lake groan under the weight of it, for the lake had not yet thawed...The afternoon was loud with the giant miseries of the lake, and the sun shone on, and the flood was the always flawless mirror of a cloudless sky, fat with brimming and very calm.
Perhaps it is the relatable calm of a winter blue, one which always accompanies the precise kind of cold that permeates this book. It may also be the sinking limbs, like fence posts on a highway-side farm in the snow, leaving not but their soggy brown tops to the sun. So much exists beneath, among, around frozen water, whether a lake or the four-inch snowpack. To this end, Housekeeping is an ever-present thought.
If I were to re-design this blog, which would not be hard because there is so little to redesign, I would make it an ode to books. Recently, a friend of mine notified me that Goodreads is owned by Amazon. But don't fear, there is an alternative: The StoryGraph. AND, you can read about The StoryGraph's founder and CEO Nadia Odunayo in your spare time...should you find yourself in need of less boredom. In the all-too-frequent event that you find yourself in need of more boredom, I can only state that in such moments I myself listen to grass. Absurd as it sounds, the task is rather soothing. And to regain once more the brilliance of Robinson's winter scene: that which lies beneath the lake (in my case, snow) holds an ominous tone.
Some other news:
- Some conservative and liberal conspiracists agree on one theory: the election of President Biden was/is a hoax orchestrated to make Vice President Kamala Harris the first female and woman of color President of the U.S. In order for this to happen, Joe Biden must die. I am unclear on how this works out, but you're welcome to read about it (click on "read" and "about" for double interesting content).
- The first episode of season three of All American came out and, in this show, characters actually model what it looks like to communicate with one another.
- My sister inventoried the fridge in an effort to be more zero waste. We are also: not buying fruits and veggies that come in plastic unless it is absolutely unavoidable (goodbye berries and boxed salad greens), purchasing pasta, spices, cereal, chocolate chips, and other items in the bulk section using our own bags, and only buying loose leaf tea or tea that does not come in its own bag from here on out. If you live in Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California, or Oregon, I highly recommend WinCo because it's affordable and they generally have all the items you'll need. But, here is a list of organic bulk food stores by state if you're not so lucky.
The books on my side table expand or contact in both number and size according to my ambitions which, at the moment, are quite substantial. I, a very slow reader, am attempting to read at least 35 books this year--this goal comes with a great deal of responsibility. And to lighten the load, I've chosen some short books. Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez, for example, is both light in subject and page count. The National Book Award-winning author challenges the politics of biography in a fictional tale about Virginia Woolfe's pet marmoset, Mitz. And if you, like me, do not know what a marmoset is, I implore you to check out this Google page.
Another shorter read: My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kincaid is a favorite author of mine. And while 65% of this book is the sometimes sensible sometimes absurd details of one impassioned gardener's seed catalogs, My Garden offers itself openly, without reservation, as so much of Kincaid's work does.
A garden will die with its owner, a garden will die with the death of the person who made it.
And should you read this book and find yourself deeply troubled by the relationship between colonialism and plants, should you find yourself thirsty for supplemental text, I suggest reading Jill H. Casid's "The Hybrid Production of Empire." You can, however, get much the same information out of this book without reading Casid's chapter. So, the choice is yours.
It is true to me that great books from great writers often require the help of other great works from other great writers to fully grasp. I have a theory about this and the accumulation of information, the politics of information, or rather the hierarchies of information--this theory angers me immensely. And because I do not have the words to define such a theory I will simply say that to read a book is to read another book. One can read a book without reading another book. But if you have read multiple books you will find more than the book you're reading in your book. It's very meta. Very unnecessary. Quite infuriating actually. If I were not so curious, so in love with those who write words and the words they write (sometimes simply because they wrote them), I think I would hate reading.
All of this brings up a few questions to which I have no blog-worthy answer and, instead, recommend you seek such answers among the much smarter, much more articulate people of the world.
1. Is literature accessible?
2. Is asking if literature is accessible elitist?
3. What can you do with an English major? (I do actually have an answer to this one: you can do everything with an English major. You can also do absolutely nothing. It seems to me at this point in my life that, if we momentarily disregard the importance of college educations in job success and financial prosperity, everything you can do with an English major you can also do without an English major.)
And none of these questions are of any serious importance (because they are epistemological at best and it would be much more effective to simply live your life by acknowledging affectionately the help of others) except that I find a kind of solace in the meta-data, so I'll call it, of books. That to write a book is to write at least one other book, and such is the same with reading them.
Ronniger's [catalog] is printed on newsprint, and it has photographs that might have been taken with a not very good camera, or by someone who is not a particularly good photographer, or possibly a combination of the two, but they are adorable, the photographs. They are of people doing something with potatoes, or of machinery used in the cultivation of potatoes, or of potatoes just by themselves...There is a particularly appealing picture of a young boy gathering potatoes; he has a look of blissful concentration on his face, as if the world outside the cultivation of the potato were completely closed to him. But this is only conjecture on my part...it could be very well that this boy is not only deeply familiar with the cultivation of the potato but with its history, with the crucial role it played in my ancestors' diet and, therefore, their development as people.
Among the many things going on in this passage, I think it's worth noting that these potatoes, as Anne Ewbank might say, "transcend their homely image." And, because it is not entirely beside the point Kincaid makes, I highly recommend you check out the "Potasia: Potatoism in the East" exhibit curated by Jinyoung Jin (a Big Shot museum director) and Jeffrey Allen Price (a dedicated potato artist). Unfortunately, the exhibit has not been made virtual (probably because it happened pre-pandemic in 2018), but you can see some of the work here and here.
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| “Multifaceted Potato” by Seongmin Ahn |
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