Dr. Metablog

Late Blight

It seems so allegorically named, late blight, especially appropriate to your septuagenarian gardener. But it's more than symbolic -- late blight is here and it's real. It's official name is phytophthora infestans. It's a noxious fungus and it appears just when you're about to start harvesting your abundant tomatoes. Late blight blackens and putrifies leaves, stems, and the fruits themselves. It leaves nothing edible, and there's no recourse but to pull out your plants, and then either burn them or put them in black plastic and take them to the dump. We're trying to rescue a few of the tomatoes by pulling off the bad leaves, but it's a losing cause.  All that work -- starting the seeds, watching and watering, fertilizing and staking and tying up -- all wasted. What a pity.

Late blight also affects potatoes. In fact, this nasty fungus is responsible for the great Irish famine of the 1840s. So while we're mournful, we're glad that we don't depend on our tomatoes for sustenance or income. 

Why this year?  Some say that the disease comes to us from the great factory farms in the south, where tomato plants are started early and then shipped north in late spring. My neighbors put the blame on Wal-Mart. But in all honesty, I must admit that all my tomatoes were started locally, by friends and relations. The fungus can't be transmitted through the seed, so the tomato factories are off the hook. The real culprit is the weather -- the soggy cold of June and July was hideous if you're a tomato but just perfect if you're a blight.  

I think I'll take a year off from tomatoes -- let the garden go fallow, or just plant flowers. I couldn't bear to lose another crop. I'll follow the official advice -- root out every single volunteer tomato and pull every weed in the nightshade family. No tomatoes until 2011.       

Richard Poirier (1925-2009)

Richard Poirier died last week at age 83. The New York Times paid tribute with a long obituary and an appreciative essay. Poirier was a "distinguished man of letters" and also a Professor of English.

In 1960, as the juniorest and least-sophisticated graduate student in the history of the universe, I enrolled in an AmLit course taught by Poirier. Fifty years later, I can affirm that it was the single course in my graduate career in which I performed the absolute worst -- both in the instructor's judgment and in my own. I'm still embarrassed at the woeful mess of a paper I offered him. I remember little of it, except its incompetence and the recollection that I used the phrase "a writer of his ilk" -- I can't remember to which I writer I referred -- and that Poirier wrote a longish exasperated note explaining to me that I did not have the standing to treat any American author with disrespect. However, the honest-to-goodness reason why I did so badly in the course was that Poirier expected his students to think -- and thinking was not an area in which I was gifted. I had discovered early in my educational career that my memory was far superior to most of my contemporaries, that I had an ear for language, and that I had a moderately fluent prose style. But I never, ever, possessed a logical, orderly, or penetrating intelligence. (I could remember sentences and phrases and whole poems, but not arguments or chains of reasoning).  My skills were sufficient for literary study -- indeed I doubt that I could have managed an academic career in any other discipline.

In fact, I did rather well in studies with most of my graduate-school professors -- distinguished and learned gentlemen all of them -- who were so happy to encounter facility that they didn't notice the want of brain.

It is curious that some of the most profoundly learned of my professors were the least adventurous of thinkers. I remember, particularly, Douglas Bush, now a mere trivia question, but a most renowned scholar in his day, whose superficial, fey, conservative, neoChristianist, pixie observations on Spenser and Milton I duly recorded. for two endless semesters, learning absolutely nothing of worth or value.

Poirier was more serious. Only 35 (I was 21), he was thinking deeply about the qualities that made American literature distinctive (he was formulating the ideas that came together in A World Elsewhere). He was an intellectual rather than an academic. It would have been wise for me to have listened carefully to him. I might have learned something. 

It's shocking to me that the young, dashing lecturer whom I remember so clearly could be so old, so dead -- but there's no denying that half a century has slipped away since I last listened to his rumbling voice.   

The Slightness of the Lambs

As far as I can tell, the deer generally keep clear of the back field where the Morgans and the Scottish Blackfaces are pastured. Perhaps it's because the domestic animals eat down the grass, or perhaps the deer just don't like company. But a few days ago, I watched four white-tailed deer -- a doe with three fawns, I believe, though such a group makes an unlikely family -- chase twenty-two sheep out of the field and back to their fold. Sheep are notoriously skittish, but then, so are the white tails. It was a battle of cowards. It was especially painful to watch because one of the sheep was the ram, McCavish, and it's his job (aside from the annual servicing, at which he performed brilliantly) is to guard the ewes. McCavish is the "herd sire," new to the flock. He was recently imported from Wisconsin; his grandfather came from Scotland in the form of a vial of sperm packed in dry ice. What was Mr. McCavish thinking when he ran from the field?  I was embarrassed for him and for the entire flock. Query:  will the sheep stand their ground or will they allow themselves to be intimidated by the wild turkeys?

Zucchini News

In our part of Vermont, the common wisdom is, "never keep your car unlocked in August, because someone will open your door and throw in a couple of zucchinis." Like most local gardeners, I'm drowning  in the  squash. We can't eat our zucchinis fast enough. And no matter how vigilant I am in picking them, I wake up in the morning to lift one of those huge hairy leaves and there it is --- another baseball-bat long, sumptuously fat zucchini, staring its one-eyed stare at me. To make matters worse, this year I'm growing two kinds of zucchinis -- the standard green supermarket variety and a fancy striped "Romanesco."  Also another exotic squash, a buttery globe called "Ronde de Nice," most plentifully produced.  

Last week I was weeding in the garden when I had an unexpected visitor -- unusual for our dirt-road, off the beaten track neighborhood.  I can't remember having to deal with a solicitor since two barely fledged Mormons popped by, fruitlessly, in 1978. This young man, who arrived noiselessly on bicycle was from VPIRG, and he came to tell me about the hazards of the Vermont Yankee atomic power station. I told him right up front that I wasn't going to donate any money and I told him why -- it all went to Obama.  But he was cordial nevertheless, and we chatted. He's a Latin major, just graduated from UVM, off in the fall to join Americacorps. Nice kid, I thought, but an easy mark. After twenty minutes, he rode off with no donation but with  two substantial zucchinis and a Ronde de Nice in his backpack. Also a large head of broccoli and a handful of beets. 

Pond News

Last week, we had a great blue heron act in a most unheron-like way. The great blues are ordinarily skittish birds. We can't get closer than fifty yards before they're up in the air, beating their slow, graceful, pterodactyl wings. But this guy kept us company even with the grandchildren floating on the plastic boats,  squealing and keening. The kids watched as he speared a small fish and swallowed it whole. I worried:  perhaps he's hurt and can't fly.  But after a day or so, he rose into the air, wheeled about, and off he went. Was he a poorly-educated juvenile out on his own for the first time?  We'll never know.  

And then, yesterday, a new critter. The pond has become home to a muskrat, which swims slowly along the opposite bank. Should we be happy about this? Muskrats eat cattails, of which we have a more-than-adequate supply. But they also eat small frogs, and we love our frogs. They are philoprogenitive, reproducing like rabbits. We don't want vast colonies of these lemming-like creatures.  And they burrow into and undermine banks -- which is not good if they damage the artificial dike. OK, Mr. Muskrat, here's the deal -- you stay on your side of the pond, the natural side and we'll be good friends, but don't try to make a home on the artificial side. 

When I was a boy in the unenlightened 40s, women wore fur coats. One of the common furs was called "Hudson seal." Guess what?  "Muskrat fur that is dyed, plucked, and sheared to resemble seal." 

Two can play the same game. If anyone asks, that rodent over the on the far side of the pond with the long ratlike tail -- that's a Hudson seal.        

Ligawinitude

The word "ligaw" in Pilipino, a language of which I am totally ignorant, apparently means both "totally lost" and "courtship." And therefore the adjective "ligawin" refers to someone who is both "directionally disabled" or "directionally dyslexic" and also "attractive to persons of the opposite sex." What a wonderful correspondence, especially to those of us who regularly lose the car in the parking lot and to whom a walk in a strange city is a fearful and daring adventure.  My lexicography is contributed by a Manila reader whose forthright and thoughtful blog can be accessed at this address.)  "Directionally dyslexic" is an ugly phrase, filled with self-loathing; "ligawinitude" trips off the tongue. Well, almost trips;  it's certainly superior to "ligawinness" -- which sounds like the female of an extinct predator.

Here are some examples of ligawinitude (fellow sufferers will empathize) which I have borrowed from Ana in Manila:

"I am so ligawin I still lose my way around the UP campus after 30 years working there. I am so ligawin I'd enter the main door of an unfamiliar office, transact my business, and then try to let myself out through the door of a conference room right smack at a dozen people all gaping at me. I am so ligawin that when I eat out, I can get lost going back from the comfort room to my table at a big restaurant till my friends are about ready to page me....  When I am in a strange place and I wish to explore it, I walk a straight path. When I reach a fork, I turn back."

Ana claims to be "the most ligawin person in the world."  t's a hard claim to substantiate. The instances of ligawinitude that she cites -- well, I can match them with one hand tied behind my back. We won't crown a world ligawin champion until we tabulate the results of the International Ligawinitude Olympics. Nevertheless, it is curious to me that the ligawinitudinous often boast of the severity of their condition.  No one says -- "Oh, I am the most colorblind person in the world," but we (the ligawinoids) take a perverse pride in topping our lost friends. "Loster than thou" is our odd claim.  

Because the general public and even our closest friends treat us as comic, we respond by boasting of our affliction. In effect, we identify with those who laugh at us. 

The chronically lost require liberation. We're not clowns;  we're just subject to ligawinitude. 

Which means that we're a) lost and b) sexy.  

Updike-III

Two more Updike novels down the hatch. The first, Seek My Face, published in 2002, is an extended short story rooted in the author's prodigious knowledge of the contemporary art scene. It's casually written -- as if Updike didn't try very hard. Should I be insulted that Updike didn't extend himself to invent a plot?  The second novel is Rabbit at Rest, composed back in 1990 when Updike was trying harder. Harrry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "hero" of four novels, is a force in modern fiction. He's nasty, amoral, and crude, but hardly more so that the gaggle of suburbanite creatures who surround him. Updike mercilessly draws attention to everything odious in America culture -- he's the poet laureate of tacky. Rabbit is fascinating but repellent. Whatever happened to "to teach and to delight?"  

Every once in a while Rabbit, always, alas, comprehensible, becomes momentarily sympathetic. But then Updike allows him to speak -- and Rabbit's words are invariably aggressive and offensive.  I think that the gap between what Rabbit thinks and what Rabbit says is a major structural flaw in the novel -- and one that will eventually push the novels from center to periphery. But time will tell. For now, the Rabbit books are a guide to our own American kind of shallowness -- and so here I am, off to the library or to the second-hand bookstore to hunt down the earlier novels in this series. What does Dickens say about Uriah Heep -- something about "fascinating in his own repulsion."  Yes, I think that phrase will serve nicely for Updike's Rabbit.