Author Archives: Ryan

Pollan’s “Botany of Desire” on PBS

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, Reviews

PBS has turned one of TGR’s favorite books into a good television documentary.  The Botany of Desire is a compact, lucid eco-cultural history of four plants–the tulip, the potato, the apple, and cannabis–that have been intimate partners in human civilization for the past few thousand years.  You could do the same thing with coffee or chocolate or any other plant humans take pleasure from; really, you could do it with any product that originates in nature (living or not), which is to say everything: the gas you put in your car, for example, wouldn’t exist without tiny prehistoric organisms that very, very slowly became oil.  The charm of Pollan’s approach is that he balances a wonder at nature’s wild fecundity with a careful respect for human inventiveness, which is itself contained within nature (our big-ass brains are essentially a multi-million year response to environmental conditions and stimuli).  And at the center of this is amazement–and a deep unease–at the increasing human ability to manipulate nature to our own ends:

“In the years since Darwin published The Origin of Species, the crisp conceptual line that divided artificial from natural selection has blurred.  Whereas once humankind exerted its will in the relatively small arena of artificial selection (the arena I think of, metaphorically, as a garden) and nature held sway everywhere else, today the force of our presence is felt everywhere.   It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.  . . . Partly by default, partly by design, all of nature is now in the process of being domesticated–of coming, or finding itself, under the (somewhat leaky) roof of civilization.”

(Botany of Desire, xxii-xxiii)

This has been dealt with more abstrusely by Heidegger, in “The Question Concerning Technology.” (Make sure to read the footnotes.)

Anyway, I watched the PBS version tonight, and it captures the original text quite well, mainly because the show is organized around narrative interviews with Pollan himself.  It is also shot magnificently: lots of close-ups of tulip stipplings and the droplets of resin-goo on marijuana buds.  Hurray for weed!

They will almost certainly replay the documentary soon.  Check the site for listings.  And if you want to read one of the many modern nature poets who are onto the same thing Pollan is, may I suggest the master himself?  Go near the back and dig on “The Bouquet,” then flip a few pages more and try out “The Planet on the Table.”  You will soon be fiending.  Those of you who enjoy the non-fiction side of things, get a copy of Uncommon Ground, the best available collection of recent environmental history writing.  All of the essays in there are well-written and clearly argued; delightful for the academic or the layperson, its theme is the state(s) of nature in modernity.  Plastic flowers in Disneyland, to pink flamingoes, to the fight to preserve the last American wilderness areas, y’all.

-TGR

City Journal rules

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

If anybody wants to buy me a subscripton ($23/yr) for Christmas, I say go.  I found out about it mainly through Matthew Yglesias, a great blogger with an interest in urban design and landscape architecture.

For now, two good articles from the recent issue.  The first is about E.D. Hirsch and the present fork in the proverbial road of American education.  As a college teacher who is routinely appalled by even his best students’ lack of basic cultural knowledge, I find Hirsch’s emphasis on core curriculum reassuring.  It works, and lately we haven’t been honest about that.  In fact, Hirsch is so smart that I even forgive him for teaching at The Other Place.

The other article, “A Place is Better Than a Plan,” deals with the minor moves and subtleties that are crucial to urban landscaping.

-TGR

food for poetry

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Uncategorized

If you’ve ever read John Ashbery’s “Grand Galop,” with its nasty close-ups of sloppy joes and related cafeteria goo, or, even better, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” a psychedlic jag about cartoon characters (Popeye included) chowing down on canned spinach, you might have sensed that American poets from the post-World War II generation tend to have a queasy relationship with the national cuisine.   If the nature of America (and of American nature) is adumbrated by the state of its food, then nature, for them, was often spooned out of a can and nothing to hunger after.  But in light of this essay by Jerry Weinberger, “America’s Food Revolution,” it looks like something else might be on the plate now.  Get to work, people.

-TGR

PS: Anyone else titillated by the names of 1.) vegetation, 2.) race horses, and 3.) elegant dishes?   There is so much colloquial inventiveness and cosmopolitan syncretism in all of them.  Just flip through a bulb catalog or go to the racetrack sometime.

I gripe too much about hip-hop journalism

Posted on by under Other Critics
. . . because although he deserves some of his detractors, you’ve got to concede that Sasha Frere-Jones  is a good journalist.*  He is plain-spokenly erudite: the guy isn’t a dick about how much he knows.  His writing has the style of all good teaching, because he clearly likes what he’s talking about and wants you to like it, too.  Jones is an amateur in the original sense.*  His latest piece in The New Yorker is both a mini-history of rap and a compact survey of contemporary stylistic trends and lyrical tendencies, as well as good recent albums, including the mixtapes of Freddie Gibbs (who da truth).   The thing I like most about Jones is that he pays attention to form; mainly to musical form–as a musician, that’s the perspective he works from–but with a good sense of why lyrics matter and should be interesting.  Given the entwined histories of poetry and music, Jones would make a good literary journalist, too.*

-TGR

* TGR knows almost nothing about music journalism and is the kind of person who gets his music tips from The New Yorker and smart friends.

* There will always be a need for generalist critics, i.e. specialists who can transmit their knowledge to an audience of intelligent laypeople (see Wood, James).  This is particularly important vis-a-vis music culture/criticism, which tends to fracture into little islands of pompous cognoscenti, and thus needs critics who aren’t, well, pompous when talking to people who know less about music than they.

* One can admire a critic’s general toolkit, so to speak, without admiring or accepting ALL of his/her specific ideas and positions.  For instance, S F-J is wrong about Kid Cudi being abrasive, and he likes Grizzly Bear a whole lot more than I do.  Nonetheless, I acknowledge that the way(s) he lays out his opinions is/are graceful.

three great articles

Posted on by under Other Critics

From the Internets . . .

A retrospective on the life of Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the century’s great critics, now unfairly forgotten or given as a footnote to Robert Lowell’s life.

Responsible suburbanites getting stoned & not feeling guilty about it.

Lewis Lapham’s rapier take-down of Tim Russert, “Elegy for a Rubber Stamp,” written just after he died, a la Mencken on William Jennings Bryan or Hunter Thompson on Nixon.

Harry Potter is for children.

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, guides and nudges

Maybe it’s the rainy, windy, generally raw Southern California weather, maybe I’m in a grey mood, but, regardless of the reason, I am just going to say it: if you are a grown-up who reads the Harry Potter books, you should be embarrassed.  You should be really embarrassed.  There are way too many books–good, bad, great, awful–written for adults out there; nobody over the age of 12 needs to read fantasy novels aimed at children.

Look, Harry Potter is great for kids.  I love to see whipper-snappers crack books instead of fiddling with video-game consoles.  The books in the series are well-written and beguiling and all that (yes, I’ve looked), and their existence will probably create a lot of dedicated new readers.  Bless you, J.K. Rowling.  But once a reader becomes a grown-up, s/he needs to read grown-up books, whether that means Dan Brown or Shakespeare or Keynes or whatever.  Otherwise we continue turning into a nation of children which does things like re-elect George W. Bush.  Ever notice how the HP and W eras coincide?  Coincidence?  I THINK NOT.

-TGR

your teachers were right . . .

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

. . . reading literally does make your brain more efficient.  This is why I sometimes feel like crying when I see so many twenty-somethings (or thirty-somethings or forty-somethings) who can’t sit or walk by themselves for 15 seconds without opening their iPhones or shoving in some earbuds.   Are we really entering an age of “secondary orality”?  Click and read and think: Caleb Crain, “Twilight of the Books.”

I usually give this essay to my students.  They are usually fascinated by it, but as far as I can tell, few if any of them become any more likely to read something besides Harry Potter.