You can expect me to look at the successes and failures of media in terms of portraying women. You can expect me to occasionally mention videogames. You can expect me to touch on the history of women in the genre, riffing off the SF Mistressworks project. You can expect me to highlight discussions about women and genre in the blogosphere — if your not-so-humble correspondent fails to miss them. You can expect me to look at recurring tropes that turn up in genre, often to our detriment. And you can expect me to pop up, yelling, “Feminism WOO YAY!” once or twice a month. (Like a bad penny.)

The first post has loads of links to online feminist geek/SF/genre goodness to keep me busy for days. And, Bourke promises to write about lots of feminist genre writers and their books, so TBR piles beware!

One of the most amazing things about this post, however, is the comments. Usually one can expect some real trolls to turn up with stuff like this. And while there were some challenging males that did make an appearance the general tone did not degrade to name calling and mud slinging.

Sadly, it looks like it is only going to be a twice a month column but I am still pleased. Go check it out and add it to your feed reader.

And while I am on the topic of feminism, have you heard the sad news that Susan Gubar, co-author of Madwoman in the Attic and author and co-author of many other books and articles, is dying of ovarian cancer? She has managed to write a memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, that was just published April 30th. I’m number 33 in line for it at the library so will probably find myself reading it in the middle of summer. Of course I will post about it.

There are a couple of things that caught my attention, both have to do with judgment.

Spacks wonders how it is she could find Herzog so much better on rereading it and other books she thought so powerful on first reading were disappointing on rereading. She wonders:

if the facts of a book’s nature can shift in such ways, value judgments, too, must be less stable than they appear. I can say, facilely, that taste differs from judgment and that value involves concerns quite different from those entailed in merely liking a book, but that observation only opens new questions. Pleasure and instruction constitute literature’s essential contributions: so classical critics held, and I agree. Then if the pleasure a reader takes in a book bears no relation to the standards she holds, something must be wrong with the standards.

A few pages later Spacks is wondering about her students. As a teacher she considers it her job to teach students how to read:

They will, I like to believe, perceive their reading as valuable even if they don’t approve of a specific book, and they will come to appropriate conclusions, learning to judge as well as enjoy. What, in light of these assumptions, am I to make of my own recent experience, with its recognition of conflicting feelings and judgments? I must be a ‘bad reader’ in the present or have been one in the past – a disturbing hypothesis for a professional teacher and critic. I prefer, obviously, to think that the ‘badness’ belongs to the past, that my current understanding constitutes an advance over previous versions.

Is Spacks ever hard on herself as a reader! It is as though she thinks that one is either a good reader or a bad reader always, a finished product. I think anyone who reads and has been doing it for a long time, eventually figures out that reading and becoming a better reader is a continuous and lifelong process. So of course judgments we make about books we read when we were 16 will be different from those we make when we read the same book at 40 or 60 or 100. I don’t think that means we need to feel badly about what our 16 year-old selves thought about the book, instead I think we should celebrate our growth as readers and people in the between times. What good does it do a person to be embarrassed or feel bad about what and how she read as a teenager or even in her 20s?

And as for standards, do readers in general have them? I mean, sure, there are kinds of books I know I will like better than others and I tend to read the ones I am more likely to enjoy, we all do that. But that doesn’t mean that if I read and enjoy a book that falls into “ones I usually don’t like” I’m going to toss all my “standards” out the window or call them wrong. The way I see it, it works like this:

See how there is overlap? I can read a book that perfectly meets my standards and not like it just as I can read and like a book that doesn’t meet my standards. But most of all, why worry about it? I think Spacks’ concern about standards and judgment come from her training as an academic and critic. Her book is meant for the general reader, who, I’m guessing, isn’t really bothered by these things.

Of course, I could be reading her wrong and missing her point. That is one of the things that makes reading such a risky undertaking, misinterpretation. But it is all part of the experience and making mistakes in reading and learning from them is just one part of the process of becoming a better reader and not something to feel bad about.

I am not going to go through and list all the things Spacks concludes about rereading, you can read the book for that. I will mention some of the things she did with her project and maybe a couple of especially interesting points.

For her project Spacks undertook to reread a variety of books from books she read and loved as a child to books she read when they first were published and were popular to books she didn’t like the first time around. She discovered that some of the books she read as a child stood up to the test of time and others were too simple and no longer interesting, she had outgrown them.

When it came to reading books that had been the thing to read when they first came out, Catcher in the Rye and Martin Amis’s Lucky Jim, she found she no longer liked them. They seemed simplistic and overwritten, indulgent and not really that interesting. She also reread Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, a book she didn’t much like when it was first out. While she didn’t exactly fall in love with it on the reread, she did notice there was more going on than she had at first realized and was able to at least appreciate it. She thought it stood up much better than Salinger’s and Amis’s books. One book she reread and didn’t like the first time but loved on the reread was Herzog by Saul Bellow. She had originally found it tedious and claustrophobic and on the reread she liked it so much she found herself wondering what had been wrong with her when she’d first read it.

Spacks also has a chapter on rereading guilty pleasures and this chapter was one of the weakest in the book. Guilty pleasures are books she feels embarrassed to admit she read or liked, a category into which she puts P.G. Wodehouse. Huh? I was thinking guilty pleasures equaled blockbuster fiction like Jaws or Valley of the Dolls or maybe even lurid romance novels. But P.G. Wodehouse? It is here that her background as an academic gets most in the way of her reading and what she considers embarrassing. Not a few times in this chapter did I feel like I’d be afraid to tell her what I read at all for fear of her judging it as being subpar and something she wouldn’t be caught dead with.

Still, overall I liked the book quite a lot. It is academic-ish but reads at a good pace. Spacks sometimes goes a bit overboard on the textual analysis of her reading material and it would feel like she was wandering into literary critic land and away from an examination of rereading. But this generally wouldn’t go on for too long and the few times it did I didn’t feel guilty about skimming a bit.

If you are looking for a book on reading and rereading that has substance to it I recommend this one. If you want a book that gushes about the joys of reading or tells funny stories then this book is not for you.

Here is the vegetable garden all planted up:

We’ve got paste tomatoes and a slicing tomato, a bell pepper, beets, lettuce, bush beans, peas, radishes, pumpkin and cantaloupe melon. We don’t have the string up for the peas to climb yet. We’ll get to it in the next day or so. In a few weeks there should be lots of green sprouts in the there.

Now, for what took most of our work today, the side yard. We dug up all the weeds and other unwanted overgrown plants and spread out some compost. Then we put up the reed fencing. We need to get a little more but it has already made a huge difference. We are going to put in a new gate too eventually. After the new fencing was up, we planted some stuff:

Beautification project in progress

dwarf hemlock

lady fern, wild ginger, and froggy

I usually go overboard and buy too many plants for new beds, not taking into account full grown size and that they might spread. So this year I went light on the plant selection partly because I didn’t want to overdo it and partly because I am not sure what sort of plants might do well over here. Except for the dwarf hemlock they are all native plants chosen mostly for their leaf shapes and textures rather than flowers. There are some flowers in there though, hepatica (white flowers) and wood poppy (yellow flowers). There is lots of space in between the plants and a good three or four feet with no plants at all. We’ll be adding wood chip mulch in the bed to help keep it moist and to keep the weeds down.

To go along with the gardening, a book I bought last week arrived in the mail. The Smell of Summer Grass by Adam Nicolson. Nicolson is the son of Nigel Nicolson and grandson of Vita Sackville-West. He has a book on Sissinghurst that I own and am looking forward to reading when the mood strikes. The book I bought is about Perch Hill Farm in Sussex, a small farm he and his wife bought and turned into a little piece of paradise. I am looking forward to reading it though probably not until fall or winter when my gardening season is over. It’s always nice to curl up indoors when it is cold and gray outside and dream of green. Sometimes if I read gardening books during the summer it only makes my own little piece of land seem tiny and inadequate and my gardening abilities not quite up to snuff.

And now, my sore muscles and I are going to go stretch out and see if we can’t manage to read a few pages before falling into an exhausted stupor.

So we got our wristbands and then went to have some breakfast at our favorite breakfast cafe. We got back to the sale about 9:15, just in time to breeze right in.

I brought the camera with me planning on taking photos of the sale but in making sure we had our cart and plant list and everything, I managed to forget the camera in the car. Oh well. Maybe next year I’ll remember. Because I am such an advanced planner, it only took us about 45 minutes start to finish. Plus Bookman and I make an awesome team.

Now we have to plant everything. Today being a mostly sunny and warm day, we got started. The new bed we planted last year in the front yard next to the street had several plants that didn’t make it through the winter so we planted two new plants, leadplant (amorpha canescens), a small shrub in the pea family and native to Minnesota and other parts of North America, and purple prairie clover (dale purpurea). The clover variety is called “Stephanie” so you know I had to have it even though it is spelled wrong. It is a cultivar of a Minnesota native variety, butterflies like it, and it grows well in association with leadplant. Hopefully they both live and thrive. Here they are in their new home:

While I was at it, I had to take a photo of one of the flowers we planted in the bed last year, echium russicum. It is native to Russia and very cold hardy and has awesome curvy flower spikes that then bloom a reddish-purple. Here is mine just starting to bloom next to the yellow perennial alyssum in the background:

Last year we bought a honeycrisp apple tree at the plant sale and it is doing really well. We needed another tree to pollinate it so we got a crab apple from the Arbor Day Foundation. The crab did not thrive despite our best efforts and succumbed to the winter. So we invested in a bigger crabapple this year at the sale and brought home a variety called “chestnut” that gets one inch sized crabapples on it and will be good for making jelly. Yum! We planted it in the same place as the crab that died so I hope there is no lingering death curse or something. Since it is a much bigger tree because it didn’t come bare root in the mail but in a five gallon pot, we had to enlarge its living quarters:

And here is the tree planted up.

Welcome home Walter!

Bookman has named it Walter after the actor Walter Matthau because he was the curmudgeonly half of the Odd Couple and crab apple -> crabby -> grouchy -> Walter Matthau = tree named Walter. See how Bookman’s mind works? It is kind of frightening sometimes. We have a tart green apple tree in our front yard that is only good for cooking and Bookman named that one Bossy a number of years ago, as in Bossy the milk cow that gives lots and lots of milk except our Bossy is a tree that gives lots and lots of apples. For some reason the honeycrisp did not get a name. Bookman’s falling down on his tree naming duties.

Since I am done with library school and supposedly have more time for gardening now, we decided to take a half share from the csa farm we belong to and re-dig our own veggie garden. It has been about four years since we had a veggie garden and the grass has filled it in so we have to re-dig it. But the weather leading up to today has not been cooperative, raining on weekends and dry and sunny during the week. This weekend will be dry and nice and even if it weren’t we’d dig in the mud if we had to.

Instead of making the traditional rectangular garden, we are doing a horseshoe instead. This way we don’t have to walk between plants and compact the soil (bad for plant roots), and we can get at the plants from each side as well as weed without kneeling in the dirt. As Bookman was cutting the edge of the bed he struck something in the ground so here he is digging for treasure:

Ar matey, there must be gold or something

And here is the treasure:

it couldn’t be a gold handle?

The plastic handle of some tool that was not ours. We’ve found all kinds of interesting things in the yard as we have dug up different areas of it for garden beds. A plastic tool handle is nothing compared to the 4 x 6 foot slab of concrete we located at the back of the yard that was about four inches below the topsoil. That was ten years ago and not a happy gardening day.

Stay tuned, there will be more gardening to come this weekend as we finish the veggie bed and put plants and seeds in and as we dig up the horrible overgrown side yard and turn it into an Asian-inspired mostly native garden:

beautification project area