Gunnera

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A friend recently posted a picture on Facebook of her Washington-state yard. Like most Washington-state yards at this time of year, it was mostly under two inches of water. Off to one side, however, was the most spectacularly huge-leaved plant:

I mistook it for a Philodendron selloum, which was unlikely, even in warm wet Washington, but my friend quickly corrected me. It is, in fact, a Gunnera manicata.

 

  

Gunnera's glory is its foliage. The leaves, as you can see, are comically gigantic. It's sometimes called "wild rhubarb," as the leaves very much resemble those of rhubarb, and some gardeners call it "dinosaur plant," for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture a brontosaurus peacefully chomping on it?

The more I studied the picture, the more I knew I'd seen it before. I went through some old photos and found it in Adare, a picturesque Irish village Partner and I visited in 2007; it was growing at the boggy end of a public park, and its leaves were so spectacular that I had to take a picture of it. I discovered online that it's a moderately common garden plant in Ireland; locals sometimes pick the leaves and use them as umbrellas.

 
Gardens should always be a mix of old and new, common and unexpected, big and small. We love to see a hundred daffodils in bloom, but we need the darkness of tall ominous pine trees behind them to make them shine. We cherish our one-blossom-at-a-time borders, but we need something big and splashy to give them drama.

Gunnera, with its rich green tablecloth-sized leaves, will give your garden all the drama it needs.

 

Just don't blame me if you start attracting dinosaurs.

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Attention whore

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Way back in the 1990s, my mother had her own adventure with cancer. Along the way, she managed to get herself dehydrated, and ended up in the hospital. To my surprise and that of my siblings, she seemed to love the experience. "I call the nurses 'the girls,'"she told me over the phone. "They are so sweet to me. They know I'm not supposed to have coffee, but oh, I wanted it so much, and one of them brought me a little cup of coffee, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good! And I asked her for one more little cup, and she brought it for me, and - oh, Loren! - it was so good!"

I listened to this story with a thin-lipped expression. Later I repeated it to my sister Susan, who grimaced. "I know," she said. "The nurses fell for it. Mom can be so damned cute when she wants to be. But you just wait: once the nurses catch on, it won't be so much fun for Mom any longer."

Which, in fact, happened a day or two later. "I don't know what happened all of a sudden," my mother groused on the phone. "The nurses don't seem to pay attention anymore. Sometimes I press the call switch and it's a couple of minutes before anyone shows up. It's like a whole new staff. I can't wait to go home."

This whole thing seemed very strange to me. Mom was normally the soul of staunch individualism; she lived all by herself at the end of a dead-end road, and most days she didn't see a living soul. Why should it be so much fun for her to be the center of attention all of a sudden -

  

Aha.

She finally had center stage with a whole retinue dancing around her, and she was loving it.

She had become an attention whore.

Flash forward to the other day. I'm in recovery, which means I spend days at home alone watching TCM and waiting for the mail. So then I have a doctor's appointment, and the doctor says, "You could use some fluids. We can give them to you today, in the chemo ward - "

I nearly knocked her down, I was so eager to get to that chemo ward.

"Chemo ward" doesn't sound appealing, but it’s nicer and more comfortable than you think. The chairs are all recliners. There's a TV in every little nook. There are chairs for visitors. The nurses are funny and make light conversation as they poke and prod you and stick needles into you. Snacks and beverages and warm blankets are available upon demand. In short, the staff waits on you hand and foot.

Does this sound familiar?

Ah, but I learned from my mother's experience. Her mistake was that she overdid it.

I will not overdo it.

I have another fluids day soon, back in the chemo ward with those nice kind attentive nurses. I hope I can maintain my composure.

I don't want the girls to know what an attention whore I am.

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Guitar

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I was pillaging through my stacks of books at home when I found a neat little collection of folk songs edited by Tom Glazer. It's got all the classics - "Crawdad" (which I know as "Froggy Went a-Courting" and also because of a 1940s MGM cartoon, as "Crambone"), as well as "Barbara Allen," and "Shenandoah" - as well as some I'd never heard of, like "The Dodger" (with lyrics like "The lover is a dodger / he'll hug you and he'll kiss you / but look out girls, he's a-telling you a lie").

These are great tunes, simple and straightforward. Some are no doubt European (as "I Know Where I'm Going," which I only knew before as the Scottish-flavored theme song of a movie of the same name starring Deborah Kerr and Roger Livesey); others are more Americanish (is that a word? If not, it is now), as in "The Midnight Special." And there are some others, weirdly cheerful, that might have come from anywhere, like "The Sow's Got The Measles (And She Died Last Spring)."

But, best of all, this book has an appendix called "The Beginner Folk-Guitarist."

If you are as old as me, you will remember that there was a time in the late 1950s / early 1960s during which folk songs and folk singing were Hot Stuff. Groups like the Kingston Trio were all over the radio, singing sweet harmony to the accompaniment of acoustic guitars. Everyone played and sang in those days. A lot of early rock-and-roll singers and guitarists came out of that era. (Donovan, anyone?)

But I never learned to play the guitar.

Tom Glazer, in fifteen short pages, makes it look easy. He gives you the fingering for sixteen chords, and describes three ways to strum. And that's it.

Me for that!

I just saw a commercial for the Guitar Center in which they show a $29 ukulele, and similarly low-priced acoustic guitars. Can you imagine how very irritating I might become if I could strum a few silly chords?

Let's go for it.

All together now:

Oh, Froggy went a-courtin', and he did ride, crambone . . . .

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For Sunday: Wonder Woman spins, and spins, and spins

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I think I speak for everyone who loved Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman when I say that we never got tired of watching her spin. She could turn even the most pedestrian outfit into something special.

Here are several dozen spins. Watch the outfits. It’s a whole education in late 1970s / early 1980s fashion.

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Helene Hanff and "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street"

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I had a big stack of books all set to read once I reached this point of my treatment / recovery: textbooks, novels, history, Latin, et bleeding cetera.

Yes, let's have a good big laugh at my planning.

I am not much in the mood for new books. The idea of cracking "De bello gallico," or Thomas Pynchon's new novel, or the pre-calc book my student assistant very thoughtfully provided for me, makes me utterly apathetic. I managed to read a science-fiction novel, and the first half of "Little Dorrit," and I am afraid that's about it.

But rereading  - !

I was fumbling around the shelves the other week and my hand fell upon Helene Hanff's "84, Charing Cross Road." I devoured it, for the thirty-fifth time. It's a charming little epistolary (!) novel in which Helene enters into correspondence with a little London bookstore back in the early 1950s. Her style is chatty and wise-guyish, and the bookseller's letters are starchy and informational. They get to know one another. She gets to know everyone in the bookstore. She sends gifts of food (rationing was a grim fact of life in England in those days), and talks about Isaak Walton and John Donne as if she knows them personally, and the bookstore staff send her snapshots and tablecloths and - upon occasion - the books she orders.

If you haven't read it - well, it's a gem.

In the sequel, "The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street,"  Helene finally goes to London (in 1971) and stays for about six weeks, and keeps a detailed travel diary. This book was never so much a favorite of mine as “84 Charing Cross”; it seemed perfunctory, tacked-on.

Now I have read it twice more, and I have changed my mind.

This book is a minor masterpiece of travel literature. It works under one simple premise: if you dream of visiting a place for long enough, the place you dream of will be there waiting for you when you finally get there. There will be all kinds of U-turns and surprises, but at the end of the day, you will have discovered your dream.

Helene's descriptions of London are peachy. Her observations are wry. She is unexpectedly wise. (She notes, for example, that you could take any block of a London suburb and plop it down into Queens or Brooklyn, and no one would be the wiser. You could never, however, get away with substituting a block of downtown London with a block of downtown New York.) Her descriptions of her traveling companions are poifect. She is irascible and sometimes unhappy and disappointed. It’s one of the truest travel books I’ve ever read.

Put this on your reading list, kids.

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Westerns

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I was born into a shit-kickin' family. My father's parents were Eastern Washington farmers, and my sister Susan married into a local dairy family, and - well, what more do you need?

Evidently it’s in our DNA. My brother Leonard worked in grocery stores his whole life, and yet he talks like Walter Brennan. He was, for a fact, born on my parents' farm, during a brief period in their early married life during which they were farming, but still!

Anyway, everyone in my family loves Westerns, and the whole Old West folklore thing. (When Leonard found out I was doing our family history, he drawled: "Are we descended from any horse thieves?" Evidently that would have been perfectly delicious. The reality - some Polish peasants, some Italian peasants, some English hooligans and riffraff - just isn't colorful enough, in a six-guns-and-Randolph-Scott way.)

Every once in a while I try to reassociate myself with my Boot Hill roots and watch a few Westerns on TMC. Sometimes they're harmless enough that they sort of wash over me. But - you know? - a lot of them - most of them - just aren't very good.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that there are some classics, like "Cimarron" and "Stagecoach" and "Red River." I have seen at least ten minutes of each of these - more of "Cimarron," because it has Irene Dunne in it – and they are all lovely. I stick by my original point, however. Read on:)

·        Westerns are all depressingly similar. I will spare you a recitation of plot points, cliches, situations, etc. I will only say that I recently fell asleep during a Jimmy Stewart western, woke up about ninety minutes later during another Jimmy Stewart Western, and was uncertain for a few minutes if it was the same movie.

·        They certainly save money on costumes and sets. I'm sure there was a kind of Studio Western Kit, containing things like 1) one chuck wagon 2) three dance hall girl dresses 3) two fancy saddles 4) one fancy lamp with a fringed shade, for indoor / city-slicker  / bawdy house scenes.

·        Scenery. Magnificent, right? HDTV has killed that illusion. In Movie #2 the other day, J. Stewart and company were riding along a dangerous mountain ridge with all kinds of mountains and forests and valleys in the distance, except that, um, no they weren't. The foreground was perfectly clear and in focus; the scenic background looked like Jackson Pollock's hick cousin Vernton Pollock had blooped and blopped together some green and blue and white paint to produce Western Background #14.

And so forth.

I am sure, as we say, that for people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like. I like all kinds of silly / stupid / sub-par things, especially in the movie category. (Next time you hear me warbling on about how wonderful "Shack Out On 101" is, give me a real hard whack on the back of my head.) But, bafflingly, I was born without the mental toolkit required to make sense of these verkakte Westerns, even though genetically I should be right in there with my relatives.

Sigh.

Okay. Now: anybody want to see "Shack Out On 101" one more time?

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Alphonse Allais

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I was avid to visit the town of Honfleur, up on the damp coast of Normandy, when Partner and I visited France in 2012, because one of my favorite composers - Erik Satie - was born there. (I should note that, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin, Satie left Honfleur as soon as he realized where he was.)

Honfleur is a dour little fishing port with boggy streets and old sad-looking houses. Satie's childhood home has been converted into a very neato little museum, good enough to be featured by Rick Steves on his excellent European travel TV show, but once you've seen the museum - as Partner and I quickly realized - you've seen the shank of the town, and the best thing you can do is bid Honfleur a modest au revoir.

Except that one little detail caught my attention: a life-sized plastic cow in the visitor center, with a bande dessinee painted on the side. (Two Rick Steves-type comments: Normandy is a farm region, so the cow motif is everywhere, and Partner begs me to remind everyone that the restroom in the Honfleur visitor center was the most toxically horrible he ever came across in Europe.) Anyway, the comic strip on the side of the cow depicted Erik Satie and Honfleur's other favorite son, humorist Alphonse Allais, grabbing one another's chin and singing a little children's song. Then one slaps the other on the cheek, very hard (I have no idea if this is part of the children's song or not) and runs away, leaving the other in tears. I was so baffled by this that I don't even remember which one does the slapping and which one runs away.

This led me to Alphonse Allais, whose "oeuvres anthumes" I purchased on an appropriately soggy day in Paris about a week later. (“Anthumes” is meant to be a cute parallel to “posthumes,” meaning “posthumous” – see, I bought the stuff he published while he was still alive, get it?) It turns out that Allais was an essayist / journalist / humorist in a way that no longer really much exists. (If you can imagine the New York Times's Gail Collins without the politics, or "CBS Sunday Morning"'s Bill Geist without the peripatetic folksiness, you've almost got it.) Allais created characters and situations and wrote about them for a page or two. Generally there's a punch line. If the characters or the situations amused Allais, he revisited them.

He was, in a word, a feuilletonist.

Do they exist in American literature? Did they ever? Most assuredly. It was a late 19th / early 20th-century thing to be and do. Mencken was a feuilletonist, as were Don Marquis and H. Allen Smith and Harry Golden. See? You haven't been reading those guys recently, have you? But it's not because they're not entertaining or that they don't write well; it's only that the style has fallen out of fashion.

Allais had the famous dry Norman sense of humor, the "pince-sans-rire" ("pinch without laughing" - basically, "tell a joke all the way to the punch line, but tell it so seriously and drily that no one is sure if you're joking or not." Isn't French neat to be able to put all of that in three words?) Satie used pince-sans-rire all the time in his music, writing pieces of fantaisiste music with titles like "Dried Embryos," and ending them with long strings of Beethovian tonic-dominant-tonic chords.

Allais needs to be translated for a modern American readership.

Now who could do something like that?

Hmm.

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Resolutions 2014

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If you want to know how I feel about New Year’s resolutions in general, please see the above illustration. “Foo” says it all.

But I love the idea of resolutions. What could be nicer than making a fresh start? Suddenly “next year” becomes “this year,” and we have an entire nice expanse of time before us, like a yardful of untrodden snow.

So let’s make us some resolutions!

1)    Stop complaining. Foo. No chance.

2)    Be healthy. Easier said than done, but there’s no way 2014 could be worse than 2013 from a health point of view. If I can manage to keep my organs from actually dropping out of my body this year, I will be doing okay

3)    Appreciate the good things more. This might actually be doable. Today’s bitterly cold in Providence, for example, but the sky is a lovely blue. Why not appreciate the lovely blue sky, even while cursing the weather?

4)    Maximize the love in the world. As a deeply flawed person, it amazes me that people actually like me, and I try whenever I can to return the favor. I already tell Partner several times a day how much I love him. I am also lucky enough to have friends – Patricia and Apollonia – whom I truly love, and who express their love for me in various oddball ways. I have always appreciated this, and after my illness I appreciate it even more.

5)    Work on the family history. This has been going on for over twenty years; I leave it and come back to it, mostly assembling records and keeping track of marriages and deaths. It’s fun and instructional, which brings me back to it, and incredibly tedious, which drives me away again.

6)    Practice my ukulele chords. Every day. I promise.

And finally:

7)    Be a better person.

Foo.

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Movie review: "The More the Merrier" (1943)

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“The More the Merrier” is one of those movies that seems very ordinary until it sneaks up on you and bites you on the butt.

It sounds unremarkable in synopsis: Washington DC working woman Jean Arthur decides (for patriotic reasons) to rent out half her apartment, because there’s a housing shortage. She (reluctantly) ends up with grandfatherly wiseguy Charles Coburn as a roommate. He almost instantly rents half of his half-apartment to handsome young Joel McCrea, who’s doing some kind of mysterious government work.

And, as they say, hijinks ensue.

Unpromising, right? But it’s full of delights.

First of all: Jean Arthur. She’s almost forgotten now, but she was a great comedienne with a voice that was husky and squeaky at the same time, and she had terrific comic timing and a very expressive face.

Second: Charles Coburn. He’s sly and sympathetic, and is obviously plotting to get Joel and Jean together from the very outset. (He won an Academy Award for this performance, by the way.)

Third (and not least): Joel McCrea. You know how I feel about him. He’s not traditionally handsome – his nose is a little pointy – but he’s intensely masculine without being threatening or boorish, and he has the best smile.

Some of my favorite scenes:

-         McCrea and Coburn charge around the apartment making choo-choo-train noises, pretending to keep up with Jean Arthur’s ridiculously precise morning schedule.

-         McCrea and Coburn lie on the roof, on their stomachs, reading the Dick Tracy comic strip from the paper, while Jean Arthur watches them with bemusement. (Coburn reads Tracy; McCrea does the voice of the Leopard Lady.)

-         Jean Arthur, in her room, turns on some Latin dance music, and dances to it, all by herself. (She even turns her head to check out her own butt). In the next room over, Joel McCrea (in bathrobe) slowly begins to do the same step, also all by himself. And in the next room over from that, Charles Coburn does a few steps too.

-         Joel McCrea jumps into the shower, removes his bathrobe (after getting it soaking wet!), and proceeds to slap himself all over and bark like a seal, while Jean Arthur listens in astonishment from her bedroom.

-         An astonishing scene in which Jean Arthur describes her engagement to her “fiancé Mr. Pendergast,” while Joel McCrea makes love to her and kisses her. This scene is hotter than Hades, kids! And this is something Joel McCrea does very well; he did a similar scene in “The Palm Beach Story.” The message he communicates is: “I know you think you love someone else. But I love you, and I know you love me too.” It’s a very powerful message, and he communicates it better than any actor I’ve ever seen.

This is a classic movie. It’s small, but perfect in its way. It reminds me of Jane Austen’s remark about carving her “two inches of ivory.”

“The More the Merrier” is two inches of perfectly carved ivory. And (as Jane reminds us) two inches of perfectly-carved ivory can be very lovely.

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DIY religion

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Back during chemotherapy, while I was lounging in my recliner imbibing toxins through a tube in my arm and Partner was watching "Let's Make A Deal" on the retractable TV, a young hospital chaplain named Meredith came around to check on our spiritual needs. We politely let her know that we were all set, thanks very much, but she (like chaplains through the ages) was stubborn enough to chat with us for a while. She complimented us on being such a close couple, and quoted something I'd heard once before about "for better and for worse." She left before she became too obnoxious, so I liked her. "Did you notice," I said to Partner after she left, "that she never quite mentioned any one religion? Very non-committal and non-denominational."

"I like that," Partner said. "I could get behind a religion like that."

"I think," I said," that there is a religion like that."

So, a few weeks later, we both got ourselves ordained as ministers in the Universal Life Church.

Ordination is free; you need only provide name and email address. For a couple of bucks, they will send you gewgaws like a wallet card and an ordination certificate and a press pass (evidently for when I'm interviewing the Metropolitan of Constantinople). After that, you need only follow the church's one dictum, which is "do only that which is right." (They further define that you must peacefully determine what's right in every case; no gunplay and no rassling allowed.)

Partner and I are both obnoxiously pleased about this. We are both in the process of determining the dogmas of our new church. Mine is going to involve wearing a lot of pink and purple. (I determined peacefully that I like both, and why not? Pink and purple are perfectly nice devotional colors; just look at the candles in any Advent wreath.) I will use a lot of multidenominational texts involving silence. (Examples: "Let all the earth keep silence before the Lord," from Habakkuk in the Jewish Bible; "Sky says nothing," from the Analects of Confucius; "The way that can be spoken of is not the true way," from the Tao Te Ching; and maybe also "That which we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence," the last line of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.) My services will begin with maybe a piece of music, the reading of a text like one of the above, and then a kind of community silent meditation, the way the Society of Friends does it.

Also, did I mention the pink and purple?

Religion should be fun. It should be participatory, and it should be meaningful to the people who participate. If they crave mystery, well, life is crammed full of mysteries; meditate on a few of those. And if they crave certainty, there are lots of those too. Just think about them quietly, would you?

Partner has thought about his church too. He wants it to welcome all comers, and he would allow them to worship any god they please, and he intends to forbid proselytizing.

(I hope it also involves hats. Partner and I both look good in hats, and I hope he and I can lead some ecumenical programs down the road, once we've established ourselves as pillars of our respective faiths.)

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