A song I cannot resist

Today's post at Turn Outward is a tiny bit sad, so here's a remedy--"Gimme a Pigfoot," a Bessie Smith tune that never fails to make me smile. No video here, just music, but it's more than enough.

Book rec

Seems like ages since I've posted here about a book I didn't review for money, but this one deserves all the readers it can get. Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are is the best kind of popular science writing. It's witty, Marlene Zuk's prose is graceful, and it's perfectly accessible without seeming a bit dumbed down.

Zuk's basic message is "Stop worrying and learn to love pathogens." Or at least accept that they are an inescapable fact of our existence. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, sometimes they're both--kinda like every lover you ever had, right? In fact, you could read this book as a sort of human-microbe relationship manual. Chapter headings include "When Sex Makes You Sick" and "Parasites and Picking the Perfect Partner." There's a danger here of excess drollery, but the science is substantial enough to keep the jokes from getting tiresome. When Zuk lets herself get a little poetic, the book really soars. Here's a great passage from the introduction:

Life is naturally tattered, infested, bitten off, bitten into. The stem with a broken leaf, like an animal with lesions on its internal organs or less-than-glossy feathers, is more normal than its unscarred counterpart. An unblemished animal--or person--is idealized and fictional, like the advertisements showing a solitary traveler at the Eiffel Tower. It doesn't really exist except in our imaginations. Disease is part and parcel of how we are supposed to look, of how we are supposed to live.

Beautiful stuff. The whole book is like that, only funnier, and occasionally creepier--especially when she writes about how pathogens may actually guide our behavior. The book came out last year, but it was just released in paperback this spring. It's well worth the $14 investment. Plus, it may save you a fortune in hand sanitizer.

Riddled with Life at Amazon.com

One Sentence Perfume Review: Rive Gauche pour Homme, Yves Saint Laurent

A perfume for those days when you're feeling brave, virtuous, and ambiguously gendered.


Notes per Basenotes: Bergamot, Star Anise, Rosemary, Lavender, Geranium Leaves, Cloves, Vetiver, Gaiac Wood, Patchouli.

Joan of Arc on Horseback, manuscript illus. 1505. Image from Wikimedia Commons

"Then would she hold me and never let me go?"

Under yonder beech-tree single on the green-sward,
Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
Then would she hold me and never let me go?

From "Love in the Valley" by George Meredith (1828-1909). Complete poem at Poetry Foundation.


Image from Historia del Arte Erotico.

"Crawlin' King Snake"

Muddy Waters in fine form, doing one of my favorite songs. Today's post at Turn Outward is a variation on the theme--sort of.

Today's post is at Turn Outward

You have to go there to find out what the tick knows.

A few lines by William Stafford...

in recognition of Obama's promise to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Now is glass and an egg and gossamer in the wind.
Tomorrow is darkness and a bomb ticking.
But peace and yesterday are a still pool.
Peace and yesterday are a shadow quiet on the wall.

And from the sound of peace I heard a voice,
A man who raised before the wind of steel
A wispy tapestry of wondering:

"Why follow half-way saviors, men who kill
Or lie or compromise for distant ends?
Marauders come; but no man dares cry 'Wolf!'
The wolves look too much like our guardians ..."


From "From the Sound of Peace" by William Stafford, 1941. Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford 1937-1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008) 12-13.

Another Sunday without a sexy picture

Things are getting much too sedate around here. Since I like to put up a lively music post for Monday morning, let's kill 2 birds with one stone. Here's a salacious tune from Sonny Terry, "These Women is Killin' Me." (If you want to start the week with something more meditative, you can read my Sunday post at Turn Outward.

After the Bath, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1894

The bathers whitely come and stand.
Water diffuses them, their hair
Like seaweed slurs the shoulders, and
Their voices in the moonstrung air

Go plucked of words. ...

From "Five Women Bathing in Moonlight" by Richard Wilbur, 1948. Read the complete poem at Poetry Foundation.



Image from Wikimedia Commons

Lammas

As if we needed a reason to eat, it's time to celebrate the feast of the first harvest. It's too damn hot to cook here, so I'm just going to enjoy some tomatoes from the garden and think grateful thoughts. Given the rising cost of food, I think I'll donate to Second Harvest, too.


Summer, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1338-40. Image from Wikipedia.