Becoming a Dirt Diva with Annie Spiegelman

I probably should have timed my comeback a little more strategically. I have done one yoga session since my last post. Yep, one. I’ve been quite busy writing some grant proposals, and have neglected most other activities non-work related. I also simultaneously started reading Ulysses. Yep, Ulysses.

I do plan to remedy this next week.

I have, however, been thinking about my garden. I’ve been reading through Talking Dirt by Annie Spiegelman. This was a stocking stuffer from the dear husband, and I’ve really enjoyed it. For you gardeners, or want-to-be gardeners, I highly recommend it. It’s concise, practical, and full of suggestions for easy-to-grow plants. And it’s all about organic ways to garden. Earns an A for its wonderful gardening advice. Earns an A+ because it’s also quite funny.

Image from Amazon

Fake Plastic Trees? Howard Says, "Yes."

Over the past week or two, I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I’ve been fascinated over and over again.  Fascinated that choices I’ve made in the past were the right ones, but not necessarily for the right reasons.  Fascinated at the damage the corn industry not only does to humans but to the environment (perhaps a much costlier damage in the long run).  Fascinated at how quickly a ruined ecosystem can be rebuilt, when animals and plants are reintroduced and managed appropriately, meaning in accordance with their evolution.  Fascinated at the multi-millenia-long relationship humans have had with eating meat. And fascinated at how equally difficult and easy it is to find and support local farmers.

I could write for days about this book, and very well might, but today I’ll focus on one of my favorite finds: Sir Albert Howard, “an English agronomist knighted after his thirty years of research in India, [who] provided the philosophical foundations for organic agriculture.”  Pollan mentions him several times throughout the second section of his book, a section devoted to “big organic” (i.e., Whole Foods, Cascadia Farms, etc.), regulated by USDA who openly appalled the industry until quite recently, and real organic, which is to say, local and sustainable food, not always regulated by USDA.

Reading this section has convinced me that I need to read Howard, especially An Agricultural Testament, which seems to be just as much a philosophical book as it is an agricultural one.  In Pollan’s short overview, he recounts Howard’s account of how German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig cracked the code, so to speak, of what plants need in order to survive.  Anyone who has taken anything above second-grade science knows that plants need sunlight, water, and nutrients to survive, but anyone who gardens or farms knows that “nutrients” is really the powerful three: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus.  “Of course,” I thought to myself, “yellow leaves and stunted growth usually means your plants need nitrogen.”  Well, true, Howard says, but he also notes this: “The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters.  When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine” (paraphrased by Pollan).

Learning from Non-fiction

I’ve been on blog hiatus.  When regular work keeps me until 6 and 7PM, something’s gotta give, and, unfortunately, it was the blog.  I think I’m back in business, though, and I’ve been learning quite a bit while I’ve been gone.  Most notably, how to read non-fiction.

Side note:  Isn’t it sad that we have to define a genre with the negative form of another genre?  Couldn’t there be another term instead of non-fiction (i.e., anti-fiction)?  Certainly works in this genre can stand on their own merit and don’t need to be defined by the opposite of fiction, right?

I found a discussion about non-fiction vs. nonfiction in which I learned that the hyphen is often preferred by Brits but not Americans.  I love, love, love hyphens, so I am using it. (I also appreciate that Brits often use commas and semicolons and don’t think they “take away” from something’s creative power.)  Others also claim that the hyphen should be eliminated because non-fiction should be able to stand on its own and not be the equivalent of “anti-fiction,” and still others say that the hyphen is disappearing from American usage because of coporate marketing (non-fat vs. nonfat, is the example used) in which the absence of a hyphen makes the word more appealing.  Whatever, I say.  The use of the prefix “non” in front of anything, basically, means “anti”or “without” whether there is a hyphen or not.  The removal of the hyphen doesn’t make nonfiction its own entity, nor does it, to me, make the word more appealing.

Too philosophical, I think.  Okay, Back to life. Back to reality.

I’ve read several non-fiction books lately: Reading Lolita in Tehran, Under the Banner of Heaven, and, currenty, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  All have been fascinating reads and have convinced me to line up more non-fiction on the reading list.

As an English major in undergrad and then an English grad student, I didn’t have time for non-fiction and was rarely even encouraged to read it.  I do recall my English Composition II teacher having us read Drinking: A Love Story and Into the Wild and my advanced composition teacher having us read much of The Best American Essays of the Century and An Unfortunate Woman, all of which I much appreciate many years later.  By and large, though, my days were filled with fiction, and, occasionally, poetry.  When I started teaching, I found myself reading selections of non-fiction and essays and realizing that I liked it, precisely because I was learning from it.

Disclaimer:  I also believe people learn from reading fiction.

Since embracing non-fiction, I have learned much about the methods by which people learn to read and write, what life may be like for many Puerto Ricans who have moved to the US, some history of Mormonism, and, currently, industrial organic, a term that is quite perplexing.  I have also learned about seed saving and its necessity to our preservation of indigenous (or ancient cultivations of indigenous) varities.  I’ve learned that corn is a grass and that it needs human interaction in order to pollinate itself, for those kernels can’t escape the husk otherwise.  In short, I’ve learned a lot from non-fiction.  In the coming weeks, I plan to do a focus on a book, or portion of a book, once or twice a week to highlight what I’m learning there, and why you should buy/borrow (from your local library, not me) the book to learn the same.

As one of my favorite friends, Emily, commands by wearing this awesome t-shirt:

I love this t-shirt. It makes me think of Emily.

Final note: I did read The Help, but that was some time ago.  I’m having difficulty updating the books on the blog, but that should be remedied soon.  Until then, just imagine me curled up with Michael Pollan (books not person) because I’ve got three lined up in the queue.  I’ll be with him for a while.