balcony garden

My mint plant is now happily pest free, thanks to a lot of patience, radical pruning, and judicious use of a dish soap and cayenne pepper solution.  The now pest-free plant has moved quarters too, into spacious digs in a cheery red pot, along with a dwarf lupin. 

I also bought a few more pots, some good dirt, and some more plants.  I now have a hot banana pepper plant, a busy sweat pea that doesn't need staking (or, so said the accompanying tag), and a thyme plant that I bought at our local farmer's market today.  I would have bought more herbs, but I had a hard enough time getting one plant home alive in this horrid heat (on a bike, no less!).  I now have a veritable little garden going on in my little balcony. With luck, everything will grow well, and I'll have my own peas, hot peppers, and herbs to enjoy over the summer and fall.  The only thing I wish I had was a cayenne pepper plant, but alas, the only seeds I have left are back in my parents' house.  I contemplated buying habanero peppers, but I decided against it. Now, I'm having not-buyers remorse; I may go back to Lowe's to get one.  And another bucket to use as a pot. 

Review of Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie

Now that my papers are done, I can contain grad school related reading to the eminently manageable 9-5, and leave my evenings and weekends free for books without footnotes.  The last one I read was Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie, which I received as an early review copy from LibraryThing. I had received it a while back, but only managed to finish reading it tonight. And, I might add, I haven't had a cup of coffee all day.  But that's more because I forgot to bring my coffee from home to the library, so I wasn't able to brew my usual clandestine brew.  Although, a whole day without coffee, and I haven't bit off anyone's head yet.  This is good.


But, back to the topic at hand: here's is the review I wrote for the LT site:
Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie takes the reader on an adventure that takes the reader from the banks of the Thames, feet in the mud, and maggots wriggling between your toes; to whaling lanes of the Atlantic, covered in the blood and blubber of a whale killed to meet the then dwindling need for whale oil; to the islands in the South Pacific, peering over the edge of a cliff, and watching giant lizards, “a mess of the like eels slipping wormily over one another in a must tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag tailing festoons, the grinning head of which half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own” (134).  This horrific scene, a presage of things to come, is representative of Birch’s grand ability to weave words and create a rich tapestry of exquisite detai 

Our protagonist, the young Jaffy Brown, is only 8 when he is born for the second time, in the jaws of a tiger belonging to the London animal seller, Mr. Jamrach.  Jaffy becomes a yard boy in Jamrach’s menagerie, mucking out the stalls of every exotic animal that passes through nineteenth century London, and along the way, forming a complex friendship with another of Jamrach’s employees, Tim Linver. When Tim signs up on an expedition to capture a dragon in the South Pacific for Jamrach, Jaffy signs up as well, and the two boys join a whaling expedition, the last in a dying industry.  The whaling ship takes them  to ports of call all over the world, but finally to an island “neither big nor small, rocky green, high mountains of harsh brush jutting the sky above jungle and weeping bays” (123).  This is the island when they finally meet their dragon, even after catching their prey, the story is far from over.

Jamrach’s Menagerie is, at its core, a Bildungsroman, telling the tale of Jaffy’s harrowing voyage back to London.  Jaffy’s quest for survival leads him to understand the lengths to which people must go in order to survive, and leads him to understand why, despite its horrors, the sea holds such a sway over sailors who go, again and again, to sea. 

gardening

In the last apartment in which I lived, I had a rather expansive balcony, and I was able to grow green beans, sugar peas, cayenne peppers, chives, thyme, and oregano.  It certainly never snowed, and while it had to be watered assiduously in the summer, for the most part, the garden took care of itself, and I had herbs and cayenne peppers all year. 

After I moved, I tried very hard to keep some plants alive indoors-- I bought a small thyme plant, and planted a few cayenne pepper seeds in pots by the window.  I don't know if I just don't get enough light, or if my apartment was just too cold and inhospitable, but none of my plants ever did well indoors. As soon as it was warm enough to keep plants outside without the frost getting to them, I bought some more plants to keep outside.  Some were lost as a result of some late in the year frosty nights, others died after being rained on for a week straight.  And finally, the mint plant I had (and it's mint too!  it's not like mint is particularly fussy) was infested with some disgusting pest that gave it ugly looking spots on all the leaves, and that seems to be stressing the entire plant.  Even the leaves that don't have whatever pest (they're some brown furry things that attach themselves on the bottom of the leaves, and creates purple spots that fade into yellow on the top sides of the leaves) are clearly stressed, and have become elongated and thinner.  

Why are all of my plants dying?  All I'm trying to do is be a little bit greener by growing at least some of the food I eat and the herbs I use. But, it's of no use if everything I try to grow dies.

Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater

My papers are done, for good or for ill, and with any luck.  Looks like, for now, at least, I'm still on track to not get kicked out of the program with one of those consolation prize Master's degree...  Woot!  While it sometimes seems that I spent the entirety of the last month locked in my carrel in the library, reading, writing, and drinking enough coffee to float an ocean liner, that's not entirely correct. I did slip into NYC for the Paul Simon concert (now) almost two weeks ago.

It was incredible.  The only less than ideal part was that I went alone, since I don't know anyone else who is as convinced of the epicness of Paul Simon to get a ticket, especially not when we're all working on final papers.  So, whatever; I went alone.  Me, and two-thousand or so middle-aged couples.**

I struggled to write this post; I began with a rough sketch for a simple concert review.  He began with Crazy Love Vol. II.  Images of MLK came on the screen when he sang “So Beautiful or So What.”  He made a crack about having to stop playing, otherwise he’d miss the train home.  As if he had to take a train back home, as if he were one of us.  He played quite a few songs from the new CD, and two songs from the old S&G stuff... But, then I realized that sort of review didn't capture why I was so happy to have seen him perform live.  Even though I was alone.  Even though I was stressed about all of the work I wasn't doing. 

The concert was, to me, more than a list of songs that were played, more than a retelling of the few words directed at the audience.  I know that this sounds corny, but Paul Simon’s music has defined my life, from as early as I can remember.  My parents used to play me Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes before I had to go to sleep, and I would dance along to the music for six minute duration, and then that was the last of my fun.  It was time to go to bed.  Sometimes, I would dream of that mysterious couple, the lady with diamond-studded shoes, and the poor boy who would follow her everywhere.  I had no idea what a bodega was, and, as a born and bred Angelino, I had no idea where Broadway was.  Still, these shadowy figures would dance in my dreams, all the while accompanied by raucous trumpets and guitars.  Time went on, and my parents no longer played me songs before I went to sleep.  Times were rough, and they were busy. But, that song remained in the back of my memory, and the rich girl with diamonds on the soles of her shoes was a fuzzy recollection in the back of my mind, but a recollection nonetheless. 

Fast forward a couple of years, and I’m in junior high school.  It’s the age when musical tastes start to form, but I remember distinctly not liking the songs that people of my age and gender listened too.  The Spice Girls?  N’Sync? The Backstreet Boys?  It was never something that really spoke to me or hooked into my soul the way good music does.  I didn’t have a radio that I could discover music on, so I did the next best thing—I raided the cupboard where my parents kept all of their music—back then, it was full of CDs and the few tapes that were still hanging about the house.  I ditched all of things I knew I wouldn’t like—the tangos, milongas, and the folklórico, and everything from the ‘old country.’  Everything else, I threw in the big, bulky music console that had been in the living room before my mother got tired of always having cables and mess there, and banished it to my brother’s room.  It was an old machine, it even had a turntable on the top, not that we had any records; by the time my parents moved here, those were out, and even tapes were rapidly becoming obsolete.  At any rate, I took all the CDs I could find that sounded interesting, and took them for a spin. It was then that I stumbled upon the Old Friends compilation album, and my 11-year old self was immediately hooked. 

I remember many an evening laying on the floor of my brother’s room and listening to all of those Simon and Garfunkel songs.  I knew all of the lyrics by heart, and I would try and pick apart the two voices, and determine which person sang which song.  From the introductions on the live versions of “Red Rubber Ball” and “A Poem on the Underground Wall” I knew which voice belonged to which name, and I would parse the harmonies to see who was singing when.  I also wondered which one was Paul, and which one was Art.  From the picture on the cover of the box set, I decided that the one with the curly hair and seemingly his head in the clouds was the one with the sweeter, higher voice. He just looked like the kind of guy who would have a voice like that.   And the other voice, (perhaps not quite as light and sweet as the first, but nonetheless arresting), I decided, belonged to the shorter man with a troubled countenance.  I even made the mistake of having some of my friends listen to some of the songs.  "You've got to listen to this stuff, it's amazing!" I said in my naivité.  My friends just laughed at me-- a song with the word 'groovy' in it?  Laaaaaame!  That was the subject of much good-natured ribbing for the next few years.


Even in college, when my CD collection was full of Bad Religion, the Descendents, X, All, the Distillers, and all sorts of punk bands of varying degrees of musical ability; even when I cut my hair short, and gelled it into spikes, and generally went through my teenage years, I still listened to my old Simon and Garfunkel CDs (mostly when no one could see me though***).

High school turned into college.  I packed up all of my stuff, Graceland in the box, along with my laptop; Bridge Over Troubled Water in the box with my molecular model set.  I’ll always remember the day that I came home from college—it must have been about 2006--- and my dad called me into the kitchen to see something.  He had just discovered YouTube, and had found the music video for “You Can Call Me Al.”  I was 18, and like most other teenagers, I bet I rolled my eyes a bit—it’s not like YouTube was new to me like it was to my dad.  But, the rolling eyes was more affectation than not.  I watched as Paul Simon stood next to Chevy Chase, and pretended to play a saxophone that was far too large for him.  And it *was* funny.  And it brought back memories for the whole family, of long car trips to fun places, Paul Simon spinning from the car's speakers.

Even when I moved across the country for grad school, with mp3s for pretty much every song Paul Simon ever wrote were all safely on my hard drive and space at a premium, I only packed a few of my favorite CDs in the boxes that brought a hundred or so books safely to Grad School City.  That smattering of CDs included quite a few of Simon's works.


And, earlier this month, I even got to have another go at dancing to “Diamonds on the Souls of Her Shoes.”  In that, I suppose I was lucky to have gone alone-- no one I knew present to see me dance like an idiot.

I had the most incredible time.  Everyone I knew was in the library, and I was having the time of my life. 

_____
** this isn't totally accurate, I wasn't the only person there under 30, as I had feared I might be, but there weren't too many people there that seemed to be in their early 20s....


*** Ah, the insecurity of youth!  I've gotten more than a bit of grief for my taste in music, characterized as lame by more than one person.  But, now, I realize that I'm getting a Ph.D. in something esoteric and boring.  I am lame.  And I'm OK with that.

42 pages later

I'm all done!  Now, I really need to do my laundry.  And clean my apartment.  And return my library books.  I think I'll do that last one first.

go go go! part II

with ~16 hours left to go, I'm at 8185 words.  Going faster.  This is good.

go go go!

7206 words, with 17 hours left to go!

down to the wire

word count so far, for my last paper of the semester: 5287. I need to nearly double that before tomorrow afternoon.

Gah!  The work needs to be done in less than a day!  Why did this stupid paper take so long!

on writing

You want to be a writer
But you don’t know how or when
Find a quiet place
Use a humble pen
- "Hurricane Eye," Paul Simon

The semester is over, and it's that time again; the time to churn out final papers, and crank out however many thousands of words over the course of two weeks.  Only, I've already spend the first couple of days of our writing time just reading, and I have hardly made a dent in the pile of books that I wanted to read before I began my first research paper.  I told myself that I would have my introductory section written before I went to class yesterday evening, but instead, I read a whole lot, and didn't get a whole lot of real (non-reading note) writing done.

It's always so difficult to begin to write though. I have a rough outline, and even an idea on how to begin, but I'm having trouble starting that initial story to lead into the meat of the paper.  I really should take the words from the Paul Simon** lyrics I quoted above to heart, sit myself down in my quiet place (done) and pick up my humble word processing device (done) and start to write!  I have 16 days to write my first year research paper, as well as another final seminar paper.  There is just not enough time!***

** I have tickets to go see him when he's playing nearby (and by nearby, I mean not terribly nearby, but I suppose distance is always relative...), and that's exciting!  Even though I don't want to take so much time away from actually working.  

*** of course there is enough time. I just wast too much of it.  But, I at least got the writing portion for one of my seminars done already. So, one down, two to go!!!

Paraphrasis in nonum librum Rhazae

Andreas Vesalius' first published work was what seems to be his medical thesis, the 1537 Paraphrasis in nonum librum Rhazae.  This work was, as the title suggests, a paraphrase of the work of Razes, or Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, a Persian polymath who wrote works on medicine, among other things.  

In his dedicatory letter to Nicolas Florenas, Vesalius writes that he was only paraphrasing Razes rather than translating his work word for word because he felt that a paraphrase would serve his readers more.  He neglected to mention, however, that his language skills weren't up to the task of such an undertaking.  He comes out of that epistle looking like quite the linguist, when in reality, he was not.  It does take some guts to write something like that, to not only mask your own ignorance, but to cloak it in an insinuation that you could do it if you wanted to, but that would be such a waste of time.  And, if it was a thesis, Florenas was one of his old teachers-- surely he knew what languages Vesalius could and could not translate.  

On an unrelated note, the first section of the work deals with pains in the head.  All of this Latin* is giving me a pain in my head!  

*in the interest of full disclosure, especially since I just poked fun at Vesalius' cockiness, I am incapable of providing a full translation of this work.  But, at least I admit it!