In which she remembers she has a blog

"I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven."

The summer between ninth and tenth grade I found a little brown hardcover copy of Leaves of Grass, what I now realize was a facsimile of the slender 1855 first edition, in the greeting cards section of Yerington's now-defunct Sprouse Reitz store among those little hardcover gift books of sentiments and hopeful glurge that you might bring to an invalid you didn't know very well but were forced to visit. It had the frontispiece of young Walt, "one of the roughs," an old fashioned clear font, and was priced well within my baby-sitting income, which I usually squandered on fancy, useless pens and colored nail polish. I think I sort of knew who Whitman was by reputation, certainly had had to read "O Captain! My Captain!" in middle school, and may have been vaguely hoping for something a tad racy, a bit like the wedding chapter from The Godfather, which had been making the rounds at school, or Fear of Flying, which the couple I babysat for had tucked away behind the TV and which I was reading on Friday nights after their kids were in bed. So I bought it. And read it in the back seat of the Newport when the Schaechterles made our biennial drive to see the relatives in Colorado and Kansas. It was nothing like I had imagined--which was probably what Whitman's contemporaries thought, come to think of it--and more than I expected, although I could not have understood it all then. In Kansas I talked about it briefly with my older sister, who had studied English at university. On the way back to Nevada I read it again. Bits of "Song of Myself" burble up into consciousness unbidden, and I always teach it when I can (the delights of being an Americanist). That particular volume, though, is long gone, victim of too many moves and too many purges of literary overstock. But I want to take a moment today to thank that corporate buyer, who must have picked up a gross of facsimile editions for some unaccountable reason and distributed them to the greeting cards sections of Sprouse Reitz stores across the west--a gift for social and emotional invalids you didn't know very well, like me.

In which she remembers to post about what she's reading

I've just begun reading Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb, recommended (and lent) to my by a friend. It was written, but not published in the late 30s, only because Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath had just been published to wild acclaim and her publisher (Random House--Bennett Cerf was her editor) didn’t think the market could sustain two dust bowl novels. Babb’s novel is much more focused on the day-to-day travails of sustaining family life than Steinbeck’s (who, the forward says, may have actually had access to Babb’s notes from her work coordinating migrant camps in California) and I doubt there are going to be any epic Tom Joad speeches or universalizing archetypes (wasn’t that always the complaint against women writers?) but there are pages and pages of lovely writing and characterization, which no one would ever accuse Steinbeck of. This looks to be more in the line of another beautiful piece of proletarian writing (despite its author's later meretricious career as an anti-communist stooge) To Make My Bread, by Grace Lumpkin, republished a decade or so ago in Alan Wald's series The Radical Novel Reconsidered.

In which she simply posts a link

Katrina Kittle interviewed by Ron Rollins.

Winter Dreams

Woke up thinking idly of the opening golf course scene in Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams," and that got me thinking about how it really became sort of a tiresome schtick, Fitzgerald always punishing a female character (with loss of looks and life potential) for the emptiness of his protagonists' aspirations in those proto-Gatsby stories. But then I started thinking about the dreamy summer of 1973 I spent in Beattie, Kansas, with my sister Linda when I was fourteen or fifteen and first read "Winter Dreams" and the rest of a collection of Fitzgerald stories edited by Malcolm Cowley that I pulled from her bookcase, along with Podkayne of Mars, Catch-22, and Conan the Barbarian (that last pulled from my brother-in-law's stash). There were other books picked up and discarded that summer: an abridged Clarissa, for instance, and other books discussed. Linda was having difficulty sleeping that summer and told me she found that Pilgrim's Progress, taken in a small dose at bedtime was often effective in putting her under, in the absence of The Faerie Queen, also handy in that regard. 

I was transitioning from fourteen to fifteen that summer, a late-blooming, serious and self-critical adolescent, and Linda would have been twenty-eight. Pregnant with her first child, she had completed all but her master's thesis and never would. She confided in me once, maybe not that summer but some other time, that she was glad enough to let it lie. Writing that thesis was not what she found she needed to do. But she was the pattern for me in many ways of the reader I was growing into and the English major and academic I would shortly become: an omnivorous, but discriminating reader, with a large, unawed acquaintance with the classics and an interest in "junk" reading as well: drug store science fiction, westerns and the occasional bodice-ripper. All she and I ask from drug store books is that the prose style not make us roll up our eyes and gag. Both of us are pretty much willing to grant authors their premises, so long as they run with them sure-footedly. 

My mother had sent me to northeast Kansas for the summer because my brother-in-law had been posted to another part of the state by Farmers Cooperative and would only be home for a few weekends that summer. My job was to  keep Linda company, help out when I could--in the getting ready for a baby department--and probably be out of the way back home, as mine was an uncomfortable age for  my mother. I do not believe I was much actual help, though I sewed a few bibs and other Useful Baby Objects; but I know I was company of the best kind: fascinated by a sister who-- thirteen years older than me, had left for college when I was five, then been left behind in California by my family during one of our frequent moves, then married and moved herself out to the Midwest--was a comparative stranger, grown up, self-assured and possessed of her own life. She seemed to have read everything and had strong and humorous opinions on most of it. I absorbed her every word and read, or did not read, according to her one- or two-sentence reviews. So strong an influence did she have that I have not yet, to this day, forty years later, opened Pilgrim's Progress or The Faerie Queen, contriving to avoid those college courses where they might be taught and fashioning myself as an Americanist so I never would have to. (I did finally in grad school read Clarissa, whose reticences I found just as amusing as I am sure she surely had.)
Country and western music was always on the radio that summer, and Watergate was always on the TV. We watched it endlessly and declared it the best soap opera ever. Along with the rest of the hearings audience we breathlessly hung on the revelations of the wonky, weirdly attractive former White House counsel John Dean. Liddy, Haldeman, Mitchell, Erlichman, Magruder: we knew them all--the villains--who surely would have twirled their mustachios  if they'd had them to twirl (as Liddy in fact did though it was not of the twirlable kind). And off stage, in the crack between the chapters, somehow both pulling the strings and and being pulled by them, Tricky Dick, the embodiment of the evil of banality, as Thomas Pynchon showed so well with one word in the epigraph to the last part of Gravity's Rainbow, published earlier that year. 

When we weren't watching, we drove all over northeast Kansas in Linda's VW Super Beetle to do summer things: paint ceramics, see summer theater (The Fantasticks and A Comedy of Errors in Waterville), have a chocolate ice cream soda at a drugstore counter in Marysville. Once we faced down a bull on the roadway, and once during a thunderstorm we drove over a flooded patch of the road, crossing our fingers that it wasn't deeper than it seemed. I learned to recognize milo in a field, particularly a tall variety known as Atlas. When I got back to Yerington later that summer I began to read in earnest, having picked up from my sister that past the mere consumption of books was the thinking and talking about books. I wouldn't get to Gravity's Rainbow until some fifteen years later; there was just so much out there to read. The summer of '73 was probably the summer that made me who I am.

So my winter dreams this day are backward, not forward, backward to summer dreams of a future of reading. If there were a perplexing demanding object of desire in those days would it have been a desire to be possessed of my future self, perhaps also just as empty an object of desire as the one at the center of "Winter Dreams"  and probably as unpossessable because not actually real. But there's no sense in taking it out on the poor imaginary thing, really, is there, Scott?

In Which She Finally Gets Around to Reviewing a Book, with a Side-Trip or Two

Louis Bromfield would be a mostly forgotten Ohio-born novelist of the expatriate generation of American writers in Paris were it not for his early-middle-aged return home in 1938 to purchase the acreage now known as Malabar Farm, near Lucas, Ohio. We have the second world war to thank for his return, and his keen observation of French peasant farming practice to thank for his decision to make Malabar a model farm, leading the way in practicing soil and water conservation and sustainable farming technique by mingling the best practices of old world agriculture and the best science available from U.S. agricultural schools with a pesticide-free approach that would make Malabar one of the first consciously organic farms.

Bromfield's memoir/manifesto Pleasant Valley (1945) should be read by every Ohioan wishing to build a sense of our long and broad, if neglected, literary heritage, and by all readers who have an interest in ecology and sustainability, or simply in where our food comes from. Later books by Bromfield furthered his argument and helped pay the expense of running his farm which, according to popular account, never could sustain itself financially. Still, even a town and suburb gal like myself cannot read Pleasant Valley and ever look at fields neatly plowed in fall so as to be ready for spring without thinking of how many ways that topsoil can be lost before planting, or see messy hedgerows along the roadside or clumps of trees here and there without remembering how essential those non-farm plantings are to saving soil, purifying and trapping water, and providing homes for birds and animals who can help control pests or offer shade for a tired worker in the field and a place to keep that worker's jug of water cool.

The term "eco-biography" did not exist when Pleasant Valley was written, though it is certainly not the first in the genre. Mary Austin's Land of Little Rain (1903) beats it by some forty years, Walden by ninety, others, no doubt, by more--I am no scholar of the genre. But the term itself is a late twentieth- or early twenty-first century coinage, born of the need to describe a kind of writing increasingly becoming mainstream and increasingly being written. Pleasant Valley, like Walden puts farming at the center of its ruminations of life lived upon the land and, more so than Walden, uses farming as a way to think also about community, about the nourishment we get from being with and working with other people. Thoreau is a bit sour on his neighbors, like the Irish family at Baker farm, and famously considered three chairs sufficient for "society"; Bromfield was eminently sociable, hosting friends from his far-flung travels at Malabar--novelists, musicians, wealthy philanthropists, most famously Bogie and Bacall on their wedding day. Ohioans are, by and large, Midwestern friendly.

All of this brings me to a newly published farm-and-community centered eco-biography from Torrey House Press, A Bushel's Worth, by Kayann Short, a Colorado feminist, social activist, teacher, and organic farmer who, with her husband John Martin, owns and operates Stonebridge Farm, a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) organic farm just outside of Lyons, Colorado. She is also an old and close friend from my Ph.D. days in Boulder. Hers, together with our fellow Ph.D. Sian Mile's, was the last face we glimpsed in our rear-view mirror when we loaded up the rental van and drove off to Dayton, Ohio. She is the only person to whom I regularly write letters on paper in ink and from whom I eagerly await a handwritten reply. In grad school she amassed one of the largest private collections in the region, if not the nation, of books published by feminist presses, since donated to her undergraduate alma mater. (The Friedman Feminist Press Collection at Colorado State University, named in honor of Short's friend June Friedman. Here are the dedicatory remarks.) Every space in her apartment that was not occupied by a stack of books by women held a plant or a piece of vintage stuff she had gathered, from ancestors, family, or yard sales and valued more for its human imprint, its air of having been valued and treasured, than for its intrinsic worth. When she finished her doctorate, got a job teaching writing and women's studies, and bought a Boulder condo, she transformed the pocket back yard into a lush herb garden, and when she married John--another Colorado Ph.D, a mathematician with a farmer's heart and a recently purchased 10 acre organic farm--she became a full hardworking partner in Stonebridge Farm.

I have had the luxury of staying as a guest in the chicken house (which I would gladly rent for a season if I had a book to finish and needed a comfortable setting with beautiful views of the Front Range, conducive to peace and reflection), of watching my young son press apples for cider and help John drive the tractor and weave on John's loom. And I have gobbled the vegetables and asked for more. So I may be a bit partial as a reader, but only a bit. It was partiality to the writer that made me pick up the book in the first place, as eco-biography is not my first choice of reading material. But it was the grace of the prose, the interweaving of generational history, recipes, reports on current and past farm practices, and musings on family, friendship, and community that kept me reading, those and Short's humble and generous consciousness of her debts and her contributions to multiple writerly traditions in which she grounds herself: feminist, farm, ecological, western, literary, that kept me reading.

A Bushel's Worth began its life as a blog three years ago, when the author, turning 50 began taking stock of her life--as I am doing with my blog. There's something about reaching, or perhaps passing, what can only be the halfway mark to impel one to pause, reflect, and wish to record those reflections, even if nobody ever will read them. But it's clear from the reading that the book actually began its life earlier, with young Kayann's summer trips to her grandparents' North Dakota farms, with her saving and studying of old photographs and objects, with her grandmother's mint plant under the spigot, with a grade school activity marking April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day--a small green hopeful moment in a year otherwise marked by the Kent State massacre (less than two weeks later on May 4), the My Lai Massacre in March, the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields. Its chapters retain some of the best features of blog writing--relative brevity, focus, recursiveness, a willingness to mix modes and to incorporate other artifacts--but achieve the polish and depth one expects of carefully written memoir. Various chapters take up Short's farming roots, or what seem to be the three S's of sustainability--seeds, storage, and salvage. The chapters on seed saving (The Seed Box), the fall of the farm's ancient cottonwood (What Goes Down) and finding oneself (Mountains to the West)  besides being fine pieces of writing--exemplary essays--are, in the vein of the best naturalist writing, about more than they pretend to be.

But what has struck me most about A Bushel's Worth is the centrality of community--of communities, actually--to all of the farm's practices and to Short's philosophy of sustainability. Stonebridge's communities include the subscribers, the barterers (people who pay for their shares through farm labor), area musicians, writers, and artists who find temporary refuge and work space in the farm's community room and who may also be subscribers or barterers, Short's and Martin's children and grandchildren, holders of neighboring fields, far-flung fellow CSA farmers, students who come to the farm to learn farming or life-writing, water-rights holders up and down the three ditches that bound or bisect Stonebridge, Coloradans touched by the great St. Vrain flood of 1969, long dead canners of vegetables and builders of barns, and women literary forebears from Vita Sackville-West to Alice Walker. It is the magnitude of Short's vision of community, of the complex web of interrelations generated by every human action, and her willingness to construe those connected in this web as family that mark A Bushel's Worth as a feminist eco-biography with roots in the second wave as well as in the sustainability movement.

The reason I do not eagerly reach for naturalist writing is its generally dour or mournful undercurrent. Thoreau was already warning us that we were fouling our nests over a century and a half ago. A decade or so before him, Cooper had Natty Bumppo decrying Americans' "wasty ways" in The Pioneers. Austin points to the litter of trash the heralds the proximity of every western town along the road. Leopold, Berry and Abbey continue to remind us. After all this time and so much writing we are still fouling the nest. How hard it must be for the later generations of nature- and eco-writers to have to remind us again and again; how dreary to be reminded and to see proof of the need to be reminded along every roadside and with the advent of another strip mall or housing development or big box store with attendant parking acreage! There is a bit of that mournful sense of loss in A Bushel's Worth to be sure. It would not be an honest entry in the genre without it, and the farmers at Stonebridge Farm must know that theirs may be a losing battle. Short remarks several times that the fate of the farm when they are too old to farm it is uncertain, that they are working out options. But overriding that in this book is still Short and Martin's joy in community and connection.

Short's capability in finding joy in these reminds us that community, connection, and family--the web of relations--are the very reason for cleaning our nests and preserving our natural spaces. Short's friends are mostly ordinary people like us; being with and working with them nourishes her, and she them--even beyond the gallons of Stonebridge pancake batter she dishes up annually. Her capability and vision--her awareness of the nourishment to be had in communities spread across space and time--are, I think, Short's real contribution to the eco-biography genre and, beyond the pleasure to be had in reading good prose, make this book worth the reading.

I'm reminded of the fate of Malabar Farm, and hope the Stonebridge farmers can take hope from it. Upon Bromfield's death in 1958, his friend the philanthropist Doris Duke provided much of the funding to allow Friends of the Land, a conservationist group, to buy and operate the farm and keep it safe from development. In the 1970s the land was deeded to the State of Ohio, which operates it as a state park and educational center. It still operates as a model farm and offers the community an opportunity to connect over the preservation of the land and a way of life. Perhaps something similar can happen for Stonebridge Farm. In the meantime, I am hoping for more writing from the farm by Kayann Short.

In which she simply posts a link

One Book In . . . This, in the NYT Sunday Book Review captures the way a great childhood book can hold you.

In Which She Simply Posts a Link

If you care about books as artifacts, as I do, and about their place in history, Books for Victory is a must read blog.