SuperWeed

Just now, slouched half-turned toward the window with one leg angled on the sill, listening to Thao Nguyen(*) while working on a project concerning linkages between queer and animal liberation, I started to stare off into space out the window and instead found myself looking right into the eyes of the very young preying mantis perched on my knee looking intently at me.

That felt like good luck to me, especially considering the suddenness of her appearance and the way she looked right in my eyes, as if she had come to tell me something. But of course, she was probably just mystified, having inadvertently hitched a ride on me from the mailbox, which stands among bushes that mantises like. No, not a good luck charm at all, just a scared young animal — like the juvenile turtle I helped cross the road yesterday — grappling with unexpected complexities caused by human constructions. Of course, I hopped gently out the door, keeping my knee as level as possible, and brought her back to the bushes. But it wasn’t until after I had left her in one patch of bushes known to be inhabited by mantises that I realized she must have come from the bushes by the mailbox. I hope she’ll be okay.

I remember one summer day when I was quite young, brooding by myself on the blacktop playground of the neighborhood elementary school when some boys came along and started throwing rocks at a huge preying mantis trapped on the iron grill over one of the windows. I was really scared — of them and for her — but I somehow managed to convince them that preying mantises were an endangered species and the cops would come to get them if they killed her.

These stories aren’t parables. They’re just what happened.

(*) Thao Nguyen is an extraordinary singer-songwriter with a unique vocal style, interestingly shifting rhythms, and breathtakingly poetic (and often startling) lyrics. Her first album, Like the Linen, was released under her own name. Then she dropped the “Nguyen” (I guess because everybody kept mispronouncing it) so you can find her latest album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, under “Thao.” The lyric that startled me into to staring off into space in the first place was from her song Violet on the new album: “it must be hard on your bodyguards when you charge at icicles eye-level to your heart.”

I’m still busy writing other things (one of which you will see soon) and [grrr] grading, so let me send you elsewhere again.

The Black Looks blog is a collective effort of several African and one African American blogger. According to the blog’s founder, “I wanted to primarily focus on anything to do with African Women - a very broad term for a whole continent - and the African Diaspora that is socially, politically, racially, culturally, ethnically and sexually diverse. I also wanted to look at human rights, to challenge stereotypes and discuss issues such as gender, sexuality and racism and how these are constructed and manipulated by culture.” Recent posts have covered topics such as deceptive anti-poverty projects, police repression of LGBT activists in Uganda, and the ongoing 16 days of activism against gender violence.

I don’t know the orientation of the bloggers but this blog turns out to be one of the best sources of news about LGBTQ issues in Africa and within the Diaspora. But what I like best about Black Looks is that the diversity of issues covered really does reflect the stated mission. Often, activists and bloggers here in the USA say that they work within an understanding of the intersection of oppressions but then go on to act and write within an implicitly single-issue focus.

So, for example, anti-racist bloggers and activists have been all over the issue of the Jena 6 — six African American males who were disproportionately prosecuted for an assault perpetrated in the context of white hate crimes against them and their peers –while remaining comparatively silent on the issue of the four African American lesbians who received prison sentences ranging from three-and-a-half to 11 years for fighting back against a homophobic attack while the memory of the homophobic murder of their friend Sakia Gunn was still fresh in their minds. (Similarly, African American Sakia Gunn’s murder received much less attention from LGBTQ organizations than did the homophobic murder of white male Matthew Shepherd.)

Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Patreese Johnson, and and Renata Hill were convicted by an all-white jury for fighting back against a man who choked, spat on, and threatened to rape them because they were lesbians. Why aren’t anti-racist activists marching for them with at least the same fervor that they defend six young men who jumped a white young man who had previously participated in acts of hate against them but was not at the time threatening them? Because they’re women? Because they’re lesbians? Because they’re lesbians who don’t conform to gender norms? Because the man who attacked them, like the man who killed their friend Sakia, was African American? Because it’s all just too complicated?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying we shouldn’t defend the young black men collectively known as the Jena 6 from unjust prosecution. I just want to know why these young black lesbians don’t deserve the same protection from anti-racist activists who claim to oppose all forms of discrimination. And excuse me if I get emotional on this one but, while these four weren’t among them, some of Sakia Gunn’s grieving friends were my students a couple of years ago. It could easily have been them sitting in prison while their community and its alliies rally, yet again, to defend men. When are we going to see that it really is all connected, that an injury to one really is an injury to all, that none of us ever will be free so long as some of us are sitting in prison for defending ourselves, other animals, or the earth?

But I’m ranting again and all that I wanted to do was send you over to Black Looks for the antidote to the kind of thing that provoked this rant.

Also of interest today is this Center for Strategic Anarchy post on swarm intelligence. That’s the collective process that allows ants, bees, and other swarming animals to perform complicated cognitive and mechanical tasks without anybody being in charge. Besides providing links to several very interesting articles on the topic, this post explains its relevance to those of us interested in anarchist practice. It’s not such a stretch as it may seem! Way back in 1902, Peter Kropotkin wrote the book Mutual Aid, arguing that natural selection tends to favor cooperation over cut-throat competition. The more we learn about other social animals, the less “natural” warfare and other relatively late developments in the history of our species seem.

Isa at Post Punk Kitchen sent me a lot of traffic last week so the least I can do is share some punk music that has something to do with food. So, here’s Communist Radio by — str-e-e-e-e-e-etching for the connection — The Eat.

I love this song for so many reasons. The Eat was… I wish I could say “brief flash in the Florida panhandle,” but they actually were a local band in South Florida. Their sound captures the punk scene I remember from the time, although I was in a different place. They brought out “Communist Radio” on 7″ vinyl in 1979. I remember hearing it, somehow, at the time and I was thrilled when the mp3 blog Something I Learned Today shared an mp3 ripped from a scratchy record. I was even more excited whenl Alternative Tentacles came out with this compilation, from which I am sharing today’s tunes.

Besides the nostalgia provoked by the song, I just love to shout along with it, whether or not it’s actually playing. The refrain is especially fun for me because I once had a communist radio show. Or, at least, a quasi-communist radio show.

Of course, I’m not a communist per se. As an eco-feminist, I know that communists are just as likely as capitalists to see the earth and other animals as mere “resources” to be exploited by people. As an anarchist, I don’t like the statist and often totalitarian ways that Marx’s economic ideas have been implemented by so-called communist governments.

But, as long as red baiting continues, I’ll probably continue to feel the need to periodically proclaim myself a proud pinko. And, I must admit to having a rude affection and grudging respect for activists belonging to the various communist parties, even though their party-mandated machinations sometimes drive me to distraction. I like to call them “party people” since, in their seriousness and relentless goal-directedness, they tend to be opposite of what we mean by that phrase. This song goes out to them.

My version of communist radio was called Tenant Talk. It was a call-in show on 88.3 WCBN-FM Ann Arbor, all the way to the left of your radio dial, as we liked to say. It was a public service program sponsored by the Ann Arbor Tenants Union, which I coordinated for a few years. The idea was that tenants could call in with problems like how to get their security deposits back or how to make the landlord turn up the heat and everybody would get the benefit of the answers. Of course, most renters with such problems just called our counseling line so we didn’t get all that many on-air calls, leaving lots of time for local social justice news, interviews with in-studio guests, information about housing and economics, subversive songs, and anything else I felt like playing or talking about. I always used to think nobody was listening but then I’d staff a booth at a local street fair or other event and find out that I actually had fans!

My favorite show was one where I had invited the mayor and city council to come on the show to debate a local controversy concerning SRO housing. All of the Republicans, and only the Republicans, showed up. I guess they were trying to make some kind of point but it backfired because I used the opportunity to ask the mayor about something she had done behind closed doors and didn’t know that I knew she had done. It was one of those little behind-the-scenes local government decisions that really affect people’s lives but nobody notices. She had, to put it briefly, broken an agreement brokered by the Tenants Union many years before that ensured that equal numbers of tenants and landlords would be on a review board that granted or refused variances to the city housing code. When the term of one of the tenants on the board expired, she appointed a landlord to the seat, thereby quietly assuring that the board would rubber-stamp departures from the code by landlords. When confronted about it live on the air, what else could she do but pretend to have made a mistake and vow to restore the balance?

The other thing I liked to do was help listeners to understand how the boring economic news most people ignore affects all of our lives. In her recent article on GWB’s “Tony Soprano economics,” Carolyn Baker writes:

“Several years ago I had an epiphany that shattered my then-left-liberal/progressive world. I awakened from decades of delusion that I could adequately grasp world and national events without understanding the essential nature of how money works in the capitalist economy in which I live. I realized that until I acquired that understanding, all of the other subjects I preferred to talk about-war, social justice, race, gender, environment, energy depletion, civil liberties, globalization, and many more were inextricably connected with the financial machinations of the imperial beast within whose belly I reside.”

How can you start to understand things like why and how the Federal Reserve uses interest rates to keep the unemployment rate up? My favorite resource is Dollars and Sense, the “magazine of economic justice.” D&S articles are always informative and readable. Check out the archive for selected articles from back issues. Even better, subscribe!

And now here’s a bonus for those of you who’ve read this far. It’s another song by The Eat: M80 Ant Death. The liner notes describe this as a song about animal abuse, which makes me happy, since so few people recognize insects as animals. I can’t understand all of the lyrics but I really empathize with the repeated tag line: “M80 ant death brings it all together.” Yeah, I feel that way sometimes, like assassinated ants on a Florida kitchen floor symbolize everything.

I’m still waiting for my brain to stop seething before I get to talking about the issues raised by the comments on my posts on Pornography and Global Warming and the Pornography of Violence. Meantime, check out “Just a prude? Feminism, pornography, and men’s responsibility”, which is a talk delivered by University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen at the Sexual Assault Network of Delaware annual conference in 2005. Jensen is the co-author of Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality, which is a book that I need to read and maybe you do too.

Warning: Jensen’s talk includes a description of a mainstream but still quite violent pornographic film, which you might find upsetting.

Jensen goes on to say, “I am afraid of the sex I just described to you” and to express empathy for both the women who appear in such films and the women they portray. Taking into account the well-documented escalation in the amount and extent of degradation portrayed in mainstream for-profit pornography, Jensen concludes that the feminist “critique of pornography is truer today than it was when the founding mothers of the movement first articulated it in the late 1970s.” Perhaps most importantly, he talks about what men who don’t want to live in the world described and inscribed by such pornography need to do.

That said, let me come back briefly to the problem of the disappearing bees, as I promised to do some time ago. I’m not ready to venture my own conclusions just yet but, in the interim, let me direct you to an article that asks, “Are the bees dying off because they’re too busy?” Read it if you’re curious about Colony Collapse Disorder. Even if you’re not yet worried about that, read it if you don’t know about modern beekeeping practices, which are, in essence, factory farming of insects.

What do pornography and disappearing bees have to do with each other? I’ve got some thoughts about that but why don’t you tell me?

Since my own desktop is often decorated with downloaded photographs, it only seems fair to share and share alike. Here are some extreme closeups from my garden. Click the thumbnails to see them in their full-screen glory. (I used the screen resolution used by most blog visitors. Just let me know if you’d like another size.)

Even if you don’t want wallpaper, have a look at the pictures to see the beginnings of your delicious vegan dinners.

This is a squash blossom. They’re edible!

This is the back of the same flower, the swelling at the base of which is what will be a winter squash. They all start out the same way, as a swelling at the base of a fertilized flower.

It’s the same with watermelons! The flowers are much smaller (even though the fruits are often much larger) but the principle is the same.

Ditto for cucumbers! Here you can see the fruit of one flower hiding behind two other flowers.

Finally, we don’t see nearly enough of these anymore. Here’s a bee fertilizing a sunflower, which is actually a bazillion little flowers, each of which will become a bird-friendly seed if fertilized. The petals are edible!

…It’s too too hot to think clearly about the kinds of things I’ve been posting about lately. So, let’s escape to the garden, shall we?

Here’s a psychedelic song to listen to while perusing these pics of my garden. It’s Caetano Veloso singing Lost in the Paradise [mp3 expired], which is featured on the Soul Jazz Records Tropicália compilation. If you like the song, support the artist.

This song exemplifies the often disorienting blending of styles that characterized the music that came to be called Tropicália (after Veloso’s song of that title). It’s one of the few Tropicália tunes in English, so you’ll be able to understand it. See if you agree with me that it captures the tensions that led to the use of the phrase “brutality garden” to describe Brazil under military dictatoriship.

And now, to my gardens…

Before we get there, we are arrested by the monster squash that has taken over the compost heap.

Yes, that’s just one volunteer plant, a butternut squash I believe, supported by the red metal mop handle and series of tree branches that I’ve had to swivel into the ground around her as she has grown.

I’m sure that the make-shift trellis will keep growing as the dozens of young fruits like this develop.

Also already outgrowing their hand-made supports are these pickling cucumbers…

… sharing the front yard garden with tomatoes, sweet peppers, marigolds, basil and summer squash. The rooster in the background, son of the hen called “Sparrow” who was rescued by Amy Trakinski and Len Egert back in 2002, is one of the reasons that the pepper plants are protected by cages and another cage sits over the spot where I just planted some haricots verts. I’ve had a hard time getting beans and other warm weather crops to sprout in the ground this year, because our heavy clay soil remains slow to warm despite all of the organic matter that I and the chickens have added to it over the years. I just dug some sand into the top couple of inches to help it along and resowed all of my beans, zukes, and extra cukes yesterday. With luck, I’ll have some cute pictures of bean sprouts to share soon. You can’t see them, but behind the tomatoes are some sunflowers that will be looking pretty for the people this summer and feeding the finches this fall. Also out of site are are a watermelon vine and the parsley patch that is still recovering from wreackage by feral chicks.

Meanwhile, in the side yard garden plot…

Not to be outdone by the cucurbits, this heirloom tomato plant and volunteer sunflower seem to be having a growing contest. They’re already over four feet high. Every time one of them gains an inch, the other goes one better. In the mornings, sometimes, it seems like they are talking to one another.

Also in that plot are more tomatoes, slicing cucumbers, lots of hot peppers, basil, and marigolds. With luck, the handmade bamboo trellis in the background will be heavy with pole beans and cucumber vines by the next time I get out with a camera.

There’s also a garden plot carved out of the foraging yard for the “broiler hens” here at the sanctuary. The watermelon, eggplant, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and hot pepper seedlings there soon will be joined by okra, pink banana squash, and two kinds of beans that will dry on the vines for wintertime use. That plot isn’t quite ready for a closeup yet.

Instead, here’s a bonus shot from the nursery yard. I told you that I can’t get a good picture of those frenetic chicks!

I took all of these pictures at noon yesterday. The sunflower, tomato, and monster squash are all already bigger. And — happy day! — I saw a baby preying mantis on one of the pepper plants and a bee (they’ve been scarce this year) buzzing around the yellow cucumber flowers.

I’ve noticed that quite a few people are finding this blog while looking for tips on veganic gardening, so I guess I’d better follow up my post on cruelty-free gardening with a few more helpful hints. In that post, I focused on soil amendments, giving suggestions for alternatives to animal-based fertilizers. Now, I’ll cover the other big difference between organic and veganic gardening: the control of so-called “pests.”

While organic gardeners and farmers do not use the kinds of synthetic chemicals we’ve been talking about in our discussions about Silent Spring, they do sometimes use natural substances and other means to kill insects and other inconvenient beings. Veganic gardeners rely instead on the time-proven tactics of confusion and deterence.

Here are some tips that I have found helpful:

1. Learn to live with some loss

That’s something we all need to do anyway, innit? When gardening, plant a bit more than you need, so that you won’t feel so bad when other creatures eat some of the fruits of your labor. You might even want to plant an extra row of lettuce for the bunnies — outside of your fenced garden. For sure, they’ll eat the greens they can get to more easily. Plant some corn and sunflowers for the birds and maybe something tasty for the deer too.

2. Protect your young plants

Lightweight row covers keep all sorts of munching insects out while letting the sunshine and rain in. Empty toilet paper rolls make nice sleeves to deter cutworms. Big pop bottles with the bottoms cut off act like mini greenhouses while keeping tender seedlings from being munched or trampled by birds. Punch holes in those cut-off bottoms and use them to both mark the spot and protect the emerging seedlings of melon or squash that you’ve sown directly into the ground. Be creative! Whatever or whoever is pestering your plants, you can probably think of a barrier that will serve as a deterrent.

3. Mix it up

Don’t plant all of your cole crops together unless you want the flea beetles to move in to stay. Have several small plots rather than one big garden (I’ve got three this year) and distribute your tomatoes among them so that they all won’t be wiped out in the unlucky event that one of them becomes infested or diseased. Learn the basics of companion planting, so that you can reap the benefits of advantageous interactions among plants. Grow different things in different places from year to year, so that any overwintering insects or soil-based diseases that affect one kind of plant won’t find that same plant the next spring. (This is a good practice for the soil too, since different plants draw different nutrients from the soil.)

4. Sow confusion

Plant flowers and aromatic herbs among your vegetables, so that their scents will confuse the insects. Tuck marigolds anywhere you can fit them — their scent will add to the confusion while their roots will deter nematodes. If you’ve been troubled by a particular insect, grow the plants known to repel them.

5. Attract your friends

Grow plants that attract ladybugs and other beneficial insects. These include the herbs fennel, dill, cilantro, and caraway as well as the flowers cosmos, coreopsis, scented geraniums, and — yes! — dandelions.

6. Choose your varieties wisely

Some heirloom plants are naturally disease-resistant and/or less tasty to particular insects. I’ve also noticed that plant structure can make a difference. For example, I like to grow the Italian varieties of broccoli that have many side sprouts rather than one large central head. Besides providing a longer harvest, the lack of a tight central head makes it less likely for cabbage worms to hide themselves inside the plant.

7. Let the rest of the yard go wild

I’ve noticed that the more diverse and lush the wild plants growing on the rest of the land are, the less interest everybody seems to have in the little bits of land devoted to the vegetables. There are so many good things to eat elsewhere!