Can't Buy Me Bulbs

Am I the only one who loves to read catalogs? Evidently not. From the Morning News, a lovely essay on the language of seed catalogs by Jessica Francis Kane, perfect for a sunny-but-still-cold (sort of) morning in April, when I am lonely for the smell of broken ground. Luckily, she brings it around to books, which I have plenty of:

For a scarlet beauty called the Prince of Austria: “It’s one of history’s most fragrant tulips (violets? orange blossoms?), and on a sunny day it will draw you across the garden.”

I like that poetic parenthetical, reaching yet failing to define the scent. Would that book publishers’ catalogs were sometimes so honest and vague. For the next wunderkind’s debut: “It’s one of the decade’s most forceful novels (sledge hammer? Norman Mailer?), and if you leave it open on your nightstand it will draw you a mongoose.”

Read the whole thing here.

On The American Agricultural Ideal

Georgia Fire Ants!

They were big and aggressive. They died soon too.

I threw away the farm a few weeks ago.

source

It's difficult to explain how I came to be reading Amazon customer reviews for Uncle Milton's Ant Farm. Sometimes these things just happen.

And sometimes, on the third page of variously cloying and bloodthirsty (and sometimes just weird) comments, the history of America appears, condensed and perfect.

"Georgia Fire Ants" recapitulates the beginning, middle, and end of the Jeffersonian dream of a farming utopia.

The first line throbs with manifest destiny, American Exceptionalism, all the tumescence of a new nation.

Line 2: loss of innocence. Inevitable conflict and shocking revelations of vulnerability: the Civil War, Sherman's burning of Atlanta, Manzanar, Vietnam.

Line 3: "I threw away the farm" -- as we have thrown away Jefferson's dream of a nation of small farmers in favor of our current nation of shoppers -- "a few weeks ago". The final, Eliot-esque touch. The dream dies and is denied even a funeral; the obituary appears too late to send flowers.