Dr. Metablog

Clean Deer

That most malicious of all living creatures, the white-tailed deer, has been destroying the phlox. Also the roses, the blueberries, the plums, the hollyhocks (tender new leaves only), the day lilies, and most particularly, the precious new apple trees. They've weakened the Wealthy, noshed the Norland and bonsaied the Baldwin. My friends and neighbors suggest various remedies. Eight-foot high fences is the consensus -- although occasionally, allowed a running start, the deer are able to leap even these. But do I want an unsightly eight-foot fence around my garden and orchard? Let's consider some other wisdome of the ffolke.

Should I buy human hair from the local barber and hang bags of it around the orchard? I don't think so -- far too voodooish for a post-Enlightenment gardener such as myself. I could douse the grounds in coyote urine, though I'm not sure that I want to milk a coyote -- or, a fortiori, a mountain lion. I know one kind of urine that doesn't repel deer  -- at least when anecdotally applied. Some folk, more determined than I could ever be, soak rags in human urine and ring the garden with them, but I suspect that I would not savor either the administration or the aesthetic repercussions of this method. A strong solution of garlic might work, but it's deer I want to repel, not vampires. A spray of peppermint seems like a more pleasant choice, but apparently it must be renewed after every rainfall, which is highly impractical in our moisture-abundant climate. A recipe of a slightly beaten egg mixed with a gallon of water is claimed to be effective, but must be applied nightly -- too much cookery for me. Some people claim that moth balls repel deer, but the same people claimed that moth balls would repel raccoons. My raccoons took the moth balls for marbles and made a game of them and of me. Decaying fish heads would no doubt repel deer, but they'd also repel bees, birds, friends, and family. Even if I could procure them ("I'll have a couple of pounds of decaying fish heads, please"), do I really want to sit, contemplative, in a garden of such stinkiness?

Besides, I don't believe in these superstitions. I want data. I want double-blind experiments. I want science. 

My sister, who lives in prime white-tail country, hangs bars of Ivory soap in her apple trees. It works, she says. Not credible, not scientific, say I. But last week we visited her, and there they were, a half-dozen or so thriving young apple trees. Not a nibble on a one of them. New growth allowed to be new growth.

Hers are New Hampshire deer. I bet that our Vermont deer will sniff the soap, chortle, and proceed to bathe face and hoofs. We'll soon have the cleanest deer in all creation.

In desperation, I've joined the ranks of the credulous. I've threaded Ivory soap with baling twin and hung a cake on each of the young apples. White rectangular scarecrows. But for the first time all summer, I'm seeing new growth. This could work. 

One of my neighbors says, "No, no, don't use Ivory soap -- use Irish Spring."

A Exceedingly Weird Dream

Aficionados of this blague know that I'm directionally disabled. I don't think that I've admitted that I suffer from frequent nightmares in which I'm totally lost in a strange city or building. 

Last night I experienced another such dysgeographical dream. I was trying to walk north in some unidentifiable but mysterious city. A large building, which seemed to me to be a junior high school, blocked my path. I decided to cut through the building and continue on my way. I traversed various confusing corridors and staircases until I was satisfied that I was about to exit the correct door (one of many). But I couldn't get out because there were wires (which looked like electric fencing for animals) strung across the doorway. I attempted door after door and each one was wired -- chicken wire, barbed wire, all sorts of stuff. I started to panic, as I often do in such dreams. 

At last I decided to force my way through one of the doors. I tangled myself in various wires which had somehow metamorphosed into thick chains. The chains rattled loudly and I said to myself that someone would hear them  --  it was as though I was back in school and had gotten myself into deep trouble with the principal. And sure enough, along came a guy who seemed to be either a janitor or a detective. He was speaking rapid Spanish and I couldn't understand him. Although I begged him, he would not untangle me. I cried out, "I'm  tired of this basura (basura is the word for garbage in Spanish, which happens to be a language I've never studied and don't know). I shouted, "With basura, with basura."  And then I thought, wow, the phrase "with basura" could be used as the basis of a parody of Ezra Pound's Canto XLV, "With Usura:" ("With usura hath no man a house of good stone/ each block cut smooth and well fitting/ that delight might cover their face" etc. etc.)   A person could substitute the word "basura" for the similar sounding "usura" and make good fun of Uncle Ez's economic theories -- theories which are in fact nothing more than a great big load of reactionary pseudo-medieval poppy-and-lily trash. Inspired, I decided to wake up and get to work on the poem, but I wasn't alert more than a few seconds before I came to the realization that the great world is probably not exactly aching for a parody of Pound's Canto XLV.  Even an exceedinglyl clever parody.

The Absence of the Elms

When we arrived here, in the summer of 1968, there were so many huge old dying elms that we jokingly referred to the place as "Dead Elm Farm." One by one every single elm succumbed to the virus. Bare and leafless, they dropped their branches and then stood as barkless pillars until rot or a windstorm toppled them. For many years there were young elms around, but as soon as they grew to twenty or so feet, the disease would take hold. There are still a few adolescent elm skeletons, but they're harder and harder to find. 

We have some slippery elms and an occasional water elm, but the good old American elm, a prominent feature of our landscape for several hundred million years down to this present moment, is virtually extinct. 

Am I a member of the last generation on earth to marvel at the majesty of these great trees?  Sure the landscape is still rich -- maples, oaks, birches both white and yellow, beeches, spruce, pine, fir, hemlock, the big-toothed aspen, a cottonwood or two, cedars and our most plentiful wetlands inhabitant, the deciduous conifer variously called the hackmatack or tamarack or larch (in taxonomists' parlance, the larchy larch, larix laricina).  But I grieve for the elms. Their absence makes a space in my mental landscape. 

I don't, of course, long for the American chestnut, which was gone for fifty years when I came on the stage. Just as my descendants won't notice the absence of the elms.

Not far from the house an old elm has coppiced in an awkward place, and it needs to be removed. It's ugly -- twenty or so stems ten or twelve feet high racing for the sun. It should go. But I imagine that I'll leave the best of the shoots and hope that it will thrive. It would be almost criminal to saw down the last lonely elm. There's always the one-in-a-million chance that this unhandsome specimen will prove to be virus-immune. Wouldn't that be something?   

Bring Me the Head of Alberto Gonzales

It's public knowledge that Bush recently underwent a colonoscopy, but the doctors' reports have not been widely disseminated. It appears that, in addition to the polyps, way up high, lodged against the pyloric sphincter, was found the entire head of Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales. Until this discovery, it was not generally known that Gonzales' head was missing; according to received Washington wisdom, it was only his brains. A second smaller mass, puzzling at first, has now been definitively identified as the nose of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn).

(August 16)  Spike Schapiro adds: "Not the whole story. Bush's head was also found in there. It had been missing since late in his last term as Texas Governor." 

Christopher Marlowe's Shoes

At age seventeen, awash in hormones, I took a serious shine to the sensuous words with which, in Marlowe's play, Faustus addresses Helen of Troy. 

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azured arms.

Just a bit more polished and glorious than what I myself could devise in the way of compliment, the outer limit of which was "you're looking kinda nice."

No wonder I was impressed. Marlowe was, and still is, a young person's poet. Ageless because he was murdered at age 29, he was flamboyant, unsubtle, and hyperbolic beyond any ordinary hyperbole. And above all, musical. "Wanton Arethusa's azured arms?" "Azured" only because the unusual adjective jauntily reinforces the timbre of  "Arethusa."  In actual fact, even the most alluring of female arms aren't blue --unless they are bruised, which Marlowe surely did not mean to imply). "Wanton?"  In the story, Arethusa was chaste and preserved herself from the approach not of the monarch of the skies, but of the minor river-god Alpheus. Marlowe could trample on visual accuracy and learned tradition. But who could grudge him when the outcome was sonic delight. Nor did it seem to matter that Helen was compared not to a female goddess (many were available) but to Jove himself. And so I toted Tucker Brooke's old-spelling edition of Marlowe's works to my 1950s summer job, hoping and pretending that the poet's escapist rhythms could put a little shine into the grim warehouse where I earned my pittance.

I've just read a new biography of Christopher Marlowe. It's Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy (Oxford, 2005). It's a good but not great book. It's a revelation how much new information has come to light in the last fifty years  -- not so much about Marlowe himself as about his co-workers in the espionage business. Honan attends to Marlowe's plays, but he's clearly more interested in spying and in the Elizabethan political milieu. He repeatedly employs such formulas as "Marlowe could not help think... or "Marlowe must have felt..." in order to lace public events to the poet's putative consciousness. It's a doubtful procedure, but I suppose justified by the paucity of direct biographical evidence. Honan is diligent in accumulating information but his writing is careless and his interpretation of the plays hardly more than slapdash. 

It's no secret that Christopher Marlowe, son of a mere shoemaker, wrote obsessively about men of lowly origin who achieve greatness. Faustus was (in Marlowe's version only) "base of stock," Gaveston a commoner who attends a king, and most notably Tamburlaine a simple shepherd who sets his foot on a large slice of the Asian steppe. Honan thinks that Marlowe was ashamed of his father's trade, and adduces as evidence the fact that the playwright "never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, or sole but distances himself from his father's concerns. At the various times when he refers to leather, or boots, the allusions are oddly repulsive: 'Covetousness: begotten of an old churl in a leather bag,' 'a worm eaten leathern targets,' 'As if he had meant to clean my boots with his lips,' 'our boots which lie foul upon our hands.'"  Such lines, according to Honan, "suggest hatred" of the cobbler's work.

Perhaps, but not the whole story. In Tamburlaine, when the Scythian shepherd woos Zenocrate, his seduction technique is to pile gifts at her feet. "A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee/ Mounted on steeds, swifter than Pegasus./  Thy garments shall be made of Medean silk,/ Enchast with precious jewels of mine own./ With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled,/ Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,/ And scale the icy mountains lofty tops." And on, and on -- Marlowe, bless his enthusiastic heart, was never embarrassed by excess. No shoes in the royal dowry?  But wait. There's also Marlowe's best known poem, the "passionate shepherd to his love." The Arcadian shepherd, following at the heels of the Scythian, also offers a long list of gifts to his beloved.

I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull,

Fair linèd slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold.

"Fair-lined slippers for the cold,/ With buckles of the purest gold!!"   Not your ordinary, trudging-around-Canterbury-in-the-mud shoes, but footwear nevertheless. When he wrote these lines, "Marlowe could not help think" -- to use the formula of biographers -- that he had celebrated and ennobled his father's profession. 

Or so I like to think. Although John Marlowe probably did very little business in the gold-buckle line.