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sensitivefern · 8 years ago

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[The] lemon is a cross or hybrid of the citron. That fruit, which resembles a large lemon with rough skin and has a weak lemon flavor, originated on the Arabian peninsula and was brought to Persia, where the Romans first encountered them in about 500 BC... After the citron reached China around the fourth century AD, a freak variety developed in which the fruit separated into five lobes that resemble the fingers of a hand. In China, it was considered a symbol of happiness and eventually earned the name ‘Buddha’s hand’. The Jews cultivated this unique variety intensively for their religious festivals...

[Lemons: Growing, Cooking, Crafting]

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BALTIMORE, JANUARY 9, 1946. In Baltimore, at the moment, there is not a single decent beer-house. The last was Schellhase’s in Howard street, which still survives as a restaurant but began to close at 8 PM when the war razzle-dazzle began... His place, both before and immediately after Repeal, was a very pleasant place, and I went there many an evening at 10 o'clock and sat until midnight. He served the best beer obtainable, both imported and domestic, and offered very good light lunches at moderate prices. But now he has only the Anheuser-Busch beers on tap. Budweiser I can’t drink, for it is so hoppy that it gives me heartburn, and Michelob sells at 25 cents a seidel. Whether or not he will ever have German beer again remains to be seen; probably not, for most of the German and Bohemian breweries seem to have been destroyed in the war, and the imbeciles at Washington may be trusted to lay prohibitive duties on the beer of those that survive.

[H.L. Mencken]

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Live like a bourgeois, and think like a demigod.

There are two kinds of literature: one that I would call ‘national’ (the better of the two), and the other, ‘individual’ – works produced by gifted writers. For the first to be realized, there must be a fund of opinions shared by the mass of the people, a common bond such as does not now exist; and for the full development of the second, there must be liberty.

[Flaubert]

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Bin Ladin reportedly discussed the planes operation with KSM and Atef in a series of meetings in the spring of 1999... Bin Laden considered the basic idea feasible. Bin Ladin, Atef, and KSM developed an initial list of targets... No one else was involved in the initial selection of targets.

Bin Ladin also soon selected four individuals to serve as suicide operatives...

[The 9/11 Report]

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spider plant, mother of thousands | Chlorophytum ‘My rallying cry for using houseplants as container plants outdoors can easily be made here. Here’s a genus of classic houseplants that perform superbly outdoors’... the ‘spiders’ can be seen on the elongated inflorescences – ��everyone takes delight in the baby spiders that hang from the mother’... spidie may be cut off and pinned down in a potting medium in a pot; keep it moist and exposed to bright light, but not direct sunlight... Chlorophytum amaniense ‘Fireflash’ simply ‘holds me spellbound every time I see it’ – looks like a spider with orange legs... Chlorophytum comosum is all green...

Chrysanthemum Out of all the thousands of varieties, the first choice for a container should be Chrysanthemum ‘Sheffield Pink’ (= ‘Single Apricot’, ‘Sheffield’)... ‘You might also find and like “Sheffield White” and “Sheffield Yellow” (which might arise as sports on your Sheffield; try rooting the sported shoots, but keep your fingers crossed)’... Also: ‘Cambodian Queen’, ‘Clara Curtis’, ‘Duchess of Edinburgh’, ‘Emperor of China’, ‘Mary Stoker’, and ‘Mei-Kyo’... ‘Cultural tips: one pinch early in the season can’t hurt. i feel that staking these robs them of much of their charm’...

[Encyclopedia of Container Plants]

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Aug 21 [1853]. 6 AM – To Island by boat. Aster macrophyllus. Appear not to blossom generally this year. [...] That which I had mistaken for Mentha Canadensis at Mrs. Hosmer’s brook is apparently M. piperita, or peppermint, naturalized. It may have been in bloom a fortnight... What I take to be Aster patens is a handsome light-blue aster, not abundant on the hillside by J. Hosmer’s pines. The choke-cherries, which are now, and have been for some time, as ripe as they will be, actually fur the mouth... They are a rich, fatty-looking fruit.

[Thoreau, Journal]

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western dwarf mistletoe | Arceuthobium ‘Unlike common mistletoe, which is spread only by birds, it has an “explosive” seed, which is shot out of its casing as far as 50 feet’... dwarf mistletoes have been found as far east as Connecticut...

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❚Harry Shearer What ever happened to creepy clown sightings?

Ringling Bros. circus to end 'Greatest Show on Earth' after 146 years

Fragile Internet Racists In Turmoil Over Black Lady Liberty Coin

How the World’s Oldest Computer Worked: Reconstructing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism

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aileenmcgraw · 8 years ago

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9.24.2017: PLEASURE

Ring around the rose

Obsessions are easy.

Obsessions are crippling.

They’re the thing, the beat, the craze to focus on in the most stressed, sustainable way.

Obsessions are an almost-circle. I began my almost-circle with flowers. Flowers are easy because they are objectively beautiful. If I’ve read it once in The Botany of Desire I’ve said it an annoying number of times:

“Psychiatrists consider a patient’s indifference to flowers to be a sign of clinical depression.”

I am anything but indifferent to flowers. I wear them, Instagram them, poorly doodle them, sleep on duvets adorned with them, hold onto old shower curtains printed with them, buy an on-sale, two-sizes-too-big trench coat embroidered with them, etc. I just don’t buy the actual, living them – that takes too much time, care, attention.

But then I pay some—attention, that is. There seems as much research as there are lived experiences of women being flowers. From purity to desire, from innocence to fertility in full bloom, if you take a (far too) simple idea of womanhood, you can map a flower to it all, every part of her. Me.

When I was in middle school I had a notebook full of my flower drawings. Fine, they were binders full of fashion designs, but nearly every wedding dress and pair of jeans I drew had painstaking pen-and-ink flowers (mostly peonies) on them. Now whenever I draw roses I find myself scribbling down a rabbit hole, ink turning deeper and deeper inwards until petals fold into dark circles, and finally they stop. I can’t keep drawing after the center point. I reach a singularity. A seed, or an end? When writing about flowers, I get distracted (they’re gorgeous, after all, so I get lost in my mind). And so I keep talking about them – the what – and not my why.

And so I return to a quote from that book by that dude (The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan):

“It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”

That’s exactly it. I look at flowers, I love flowers, because they give me easy access to the garden. I can stave off nature, almost. Let’s take my outfit for example. I wear that wisteria, daisy, rose, what-have-you dress and without saying a word or thinking a thought I say and think and know: I am fertile; I am blooming; I am beautiful. Only recently have I realized this acts as visual code for something else: I am sexual. I desire. I love. I fuck. I am a fucking flower, spreading my everything, everywhere. And if that means nothing, it’s because I’m still doodling that rose, focusing on the linework instead of the life itself.

A flower is easy because it does not feel pleasure. Oh, it gives it, though. It’s like basil in its sensory perfection: looks amazing, smells amazing, feels amazing, tastes amazing (and here I’m extrapolating to honey), sounds amazing (say it with me: chrysanthemum). The Guardian has an intriguing query thread about whether or not plants can “ow!” or “oooh,” and suffice it to say flowers cannot feel. They can respond – grow towards sun, close over a fly – though only to stimuli. Pain? No such luck. Pleasure? Nope. One commenter – Susan Deal from Sheffield, UK – captures the so what? in a single sentence:

“It is also hard to see what purpose pain could serve for the plant, since they can hardly run away.”

Damn, Susan. You get my conundrum. Equate pain and pleasure, and you’ll see I’m in love with, obsessed with a metaphor for me that cannot run, feel, do. It’s that classic gender studies quote that I thought was from Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project until I Googled it to no results:

“Women don’t act; they appear.”

Imagine a flower reaching full bloom, opening her bold petals in brilliant fashion, and then turning to you and saying, “I like that.” Or, “I want you.” Or, “More.” You want to ascribe human tendencies to her now, though they’re words less like gorgeous and more like selfish, extra, hungry. And suddenly Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” is stuck in your head.

And so, as Susan so aptly shows, I want it all and I want the impossible. To be delicate. To desire. To feel, and to run to and from pain and pleasure. To be an ornament and to orgasm.

Obsessions are easy.

Obsessions are crippling.

My obsession is an almost-circle. It starts with the flower, goes up and around just how close to womanhood it gets, and then resists a full embrace because I am and want and want to give more than something pretty. I am and want and want to give pleasure.

In fact, by now I’m feeling rather Georgia O’Keeffe, the famous flower painter. As she once fiercely said: “I hate flowers.”

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