Month: November 2003

humor, nature, photography

Pretty Poultry

Posted on by littleREDelf

Photography of the seemingly mundane, or the practically unseen in nature is what I truly enjoying scouting out. I am fond of those winged things, the shiny and the tiny hiding under leaves and building nests under your eaves. Eavesdroppings indeed. Winter approaches and I hope for the hungry red cardinal landed on a birdseed laden, snowdrift railing, or the clutch of deer whisper-quiet except for their hooves crunching through the forest nearby. To catch something burrowing and to see its eyes glinting back at mine.

There’s a large farm across the street and could surely catch some creatures there when winter makes most animals scarce until Spring, but my thoughts of farm are quite the opposite direction of wild . . . I recently posted a picture of a cow, scrawled a long journal entry about the removed process of procuring food and such thoughts about animals and the environment and our respect for habitat and hunger. And no – I don’t wear Greenpeace underwear and you won’t catch me riding alongside whaling boats or swearing off meat, or chaining myself to trees, or setting fire to my angora blend winter gloves, or saving a near-dead species of bird by harvesting eggs, or developing a therapy group for tortured vegetables because you can hear them scream when they are pulled from the soil.

No – I am still talking photography here – making personal, perhaps even anthropomorphosizing animal life. For example . . .

“Humans have turned chicken and turkey into what we want them to be – which means that chickens and turkeys are a mirror of ourselves.”

Chickens are not just food. They are not just filthy bird-brained creatures that are tasty with lettuce and tomato and mayo on a bread roll, or good with stuffing – dressing, as some of you may call it. They also make for good photography. Or so I learned today while driving into work and hearing the most compelling story on the radio. Tamara Staples is a photographer who dedicated an entire book to prize chickens. The Fairest Fowl is a book which contains “dozens of fashion-runway-style portraits [that] capture the quirky personality and undeniable grace of these noble birds.” She took photos of animals who do NOT meet “The Standard of Perfection” at the American Poultry Show, which is essentially, the beauty pageant of the barnyard. The book includes an essay called “Trying to Respect a Chicken” which is also the fourth audio segment of a four part show called Poultry Slam by Ira Glass of This American Life.

Poultry Slam is an annual program about turkeys, chickens, and fowl of all types. The show airs every year after Thanksgiving and before Christmas because it is this time of year when poultry consumption is highest.

family, food, gardening, humor, music, technology, weather

Beyond the Harvest

Posted on by littleREDelf

“Now the woods will never tell
What sleeps beneath the trees
Or what’s buried ‘neath a rock
Or hiding in the leaves
‘Cause road kill has its seasons
Just like anything
It’s possums in the autumn
And it’s farm cats in the spring

Now a lady can’t do nothin’
Without folks’ tongues waggin’
Is this blood on the tree
Or is it autumn’s red blaze
When the ground’s soft for diggin’
And the rain will bring all this gloom
There’s nothing wrong with a lady
Drinking alone in her room.”

~ Murder in the Red Barn by Tom Waits

i’ve been thinking. And when i think like this – i go far out beyond fatalistic borders. It’s not a cruel darkness, just one that avoids phonecalls and voicemail and email and fax machines and blenders and microwaves – most forms of digital output and noise.

It’s the kind of thinking that makes you sit in front of sci-fi films for half the afternoon with a bottle of wine, contemplating alternate futures and ultimately deciding there’s no blindingly beautiful promise, no achieved perfection, no immortality, no homogenized version of gender, no egalitarian, peaceful rule meant to blanket the world, no disembodied intelligence – only the regression to a base understanding of what makes one truly human and sentient and in it’s crude but lovely way . . . alive. For a spell.

Never do you grapple with what a production this whole thing is until you do something as simple as say, cooking a small breakfast for yourself. Or more eating and appreciating food. You get out a pan. Not clay, not tin, but some poly-cluster creation with a gleaming handle and Teflon coating bearing a brand name recognizing a long-dead, strong sounding Norse god. A pat of butter to grease it with. No. Not butter, not taken from a cow, churned for hours in wood cut from a pine or hickory tree. Well, not even butter – margarine. And from an evenly sprayed dispenser. You turn on the fire. No. The stovetop. No, not even that – an electrified flat black surface with the pan placed over the approximate round etched size of your pan. It’s hot because water skitters off the surface so you add your egg. From a carton, from some far away chicken you never fed or robbed of its children from under the warm straw nest while it protested. It whitens, sunny side up you cover it to steam and cook faster. And while you wait . . . you get two slices of bread.  Oat Nut. Two things. Several really. Yeast you didn’t produce, oat flour you never milled, nuts you never grew or shelled or chopped. And you turn them into toast in the four-slotted drawer that pulls out of a recess in the wall. And while you wait . . . you’re out of orange juice,  a fruit which you definitely did not grow in this northern climate but you do have apple cider, in a plastic container from a towering orchard you never walked. Somewhere before all of this, you started a pot of coffee.  Not on a kettle nor pressed, but all orchestrated by one machine whose compartments allow for whole beans you never grew under a hot sun or carried by donkey pack up a steep ravine and no need for paper or filters, the mesh basket strains the ground coffee and the receptacle purifies the water of all the chemicals you added to kill the previous undesirable batch you added before which you did not take from the riverbank or pump from underground. And so onto the glass plate you never saw baked with the margarined egg and the oatnut toast and into the deep mug  with the coffee and so to add sugar you never knew as brown cane once harvested by slaves now white and bleached into angelic recognition and something to cream it with . . . some milk.  You’re out of milk.  No cow for that i’m afraid but never you worry, powdered milk to add filtered water to in a cup with measured lines and the unused rest – down the drain because it’s not palatable enough and you’ll never use it in cereal with a glossy protective varnish or cookies with chocolate which is another story altogether. And this is 10 minute preparation. Just breakfast of 2 foods and two beverages, plus condiment. Nothing farmed, all stored in various airtight and plastic refrigeration.

And what’s this to do with the season of harvest and the impending winter? Everything, had you need of preserves and jellies and canning and warm storage and feed for animals. But don’t fret –there’s a 24-hour mega-store when you run out of toilet paper and sundries. Even some carrots for the horses. Hunting season consists for some of avoiding the sprinting deer across the four-lane highway – and you never thought you’d see them here. Possums are as plentiful as pets and just as many wasted, lost and flattened. And all that processed specialty cat chow they’re missing out on.

No. i’m not really disgusted. Not entirely sarcastic. Just incredibly appreciative (and occasionally fearful) of the labor and death that comes from bounty.

And please . . .

don’t ask me about my plans for Thanksgiving.

Uncategorized

wanderlust

Posted on by littleREDelf

i don’t want to sleep anymore today
i don’t want to rest my thoughts
or save my strength
i just want to wander
and lust after nothing.

And so i did, and decided not to work
and that 6 page paper
on the disorder of my choice
is going to have to fucking wait
too.

For the world
is green but muted
and i’ve forgotten
to listen.

Cabbage butterflies
and curled yellow leaves
and the red rusted thresher
waits in the field.
While the last part of pink
and the best part of brown
go off dying together
in a dirty marriage.

The crows line the wires
and the songs are like taunting
a cow’s tail swtiches
and hits the tree bark fence
and they eye me carefully
and neither one of us
is brave enough
to charge barb wire.

But we wander
and we lust
and we trust
that all things live
and die quietly.

i plan on making some noise about it.

books, education, food, humor

More Hollow than Sleepy

Posted on by littleREDelf

“In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly
in a single file line from smallest to tallest.
What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?”

~ Washington Irving

I was a 9 year-old 4th grader in a California school. We were having a contest – a quiz game of sorts . . .

I was the only child in a tomb silent room to produce the answer to the question “Name the author who penned the character Ichabod Crane.”

I think it was the “penned” that threw them off. Having read plenty, and being comfortable with some archaic forms of proper English, i knew that at one time, writing truly meant pen and ink and so, the question meant to ask “who created him?” or “under whose pen did the character emerge?” Writing was a conjuring trick and so was remembering silly, but in this case important trivia. A prize was at stake after all.

“Washington Irving?” i half-asked or more, softly muttered.

“Who said that?” Mr. Hopkins asked.

I raised my hand and he smiled and handed me an envelope. “That’s right! Ichabod Crane from The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.”

“Awww” and “Ohhhh” the room collectively cooed in a wash of jealousy for me having won and also for having not recalled the name themselves.

I opened my envelope and sighed. McDonald’s Gift Certificates. I disliked their food for the most part and i still do. I would’ve preferred a book voucher or money for the book mobile, but instead, I treated myself and a few friends to an assortment of sundaes.

Have you ever won a disappointing or embarassing prize?

books, nature, writing

The Force That Drives the Flower

Posted on by littleREDelf

Years ago i read “Death of a Moth” by Annie Dillard and was so struck by its communal feel for nature and humanity and mortality. The essay appears in a collection called “Holy the Firm.” One interviewer described Dillard’s themes as “beauty and cruelty, intimacy and horror, extravagance and waste” and i think that puts it succinctly. There is ecstasy and suffering in her fluid, lyrical, mystic and intensely contemplative words. I think about that now as the seasons change and I find myself saddened by the images of nature dying off and bedding down for sleep. I want to tell of it, reflect on it, write it – not take its picture . . . but i may reconsider if the composition calls out.

Annie Dillard was stricken with a near fatal attack of pneumonia in 1971. Years after she recovered, Annie decided that she needed to experience life more fully and so spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, taking up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with “one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person.” For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God.

She spent her time outdoors, walking and camping, being there with nature in an area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and a myriad of animal life. When she was inside, she mostly read. After those four seasons, Annie began to write about her experiences there by the creek (challenged to write a book herself because the one she was reading at the moment was particularly bad).

She started with a journal, then transposed it all to notecards until the journal reached 20-plus volumes. She was timid about presenting what would become her book publicly and even considered publishing it under a man’s name. It took her about 8 months to turn the notecards into the Pulitzer-Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She was so absorbed that she spent 15-16 hours a day writing, cut off from society, world news, living on coffee and coke. She lost 30 pounds and all of her plants died. After her Pulitzer win, all those who had rejected her works before she was famous, now clamored for her poems.

Seeing as how much i do love my winged creatures, and how much I admire Annie Dillard and her experience with nature and writing, i thought i would share the above linked title to the short story and the excerpt below, written in 1973 and printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1977.

ENJOY!

…..

The Force That Drives the Flower
by Annie Dillard

…..

I wakened myself last night with my own shouting. It must have been that terrible yellow plant I saw pushing through the flood-damp soil near the log by Tinker Creek, the plant as fleshy and featureless as a slug, that erupted through the floor of my brain as I slept, and burgeoned into the dream of fecundity that woke me up.

I was watching two huge luna moths mate. Luna moths are those fragile ghost moths, fairy moths, whose five-inch wings are swallow-tailed, a pastel green bordered in silken lavender. From the hairy head of the male sprouted two enormous, furry antennae that trailed down past his ethereal wings. He was on top of the female, hunching repeatedly with a horrible animal vigor.

It was the perfect picture of utter spirituality and utter degradation. I was fascinated and could not turn away my eyes. By watching them I in effect permitted their mating to take place and so committed myself to accepting the consequences—all because I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted in on a secret.

And then the eggs hatched and the bed was full of fish. I was standing across the room in the doorway, staring at the bed. The eggs hatched before my eyes, on my bed, and a thousand chunky fish swarmed there in a viscid slime. The fish were firm and fat, black and white, with triangular bodies and bulging eyes. I watched in horror as they squirmed three feet deep, swimming and oozing about in the glistening, transparent slime. Fish in the bed!—and I awoke. My ears still rang with the foreign cry that had been my own voice.

Fool, I thought: child, you child, you ignorant, innocent fool. What did you expect to see—angels? For it was understood in the dream that the bed full of fish was my own fault, that if I had turned away from the mating moths the hatching of their eggs wouldn’t have happened, or at least would have happened in secret, elsewhere. I brought it on myself, this slither, this swarm.

I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. Every glistening egg is a memento mori.

…..

for the rest of this story . . . go HERE.