FERTILE BATTLEGROUNDS

—a June Round Up 🐸—

In this missive:

Pondering: Why my garden is not a metaphor
Reading: Uprooting by Marchell Farrell & reviews of revolting perfumes
Watching: Jacques Demy's Donkeyskin from 1970.
Celebrating: a win for all living things in Scotland, or the recent defeat of the obscenity that is Flamingo Land in Loch Lomond.
Planning: Let's celebrate the Solstice together! Deets for our next online hangout below.

Pondering: Something I never thought I would see in my lifetime has happened: a military parade through DC in a show of force against the American people. Days before the Stalinist display, the Republican Administration of the U.S. ordered the Marines & National Guard to oversee immigration raids in my old home city of Los Angeles.

BBC coverage of the Republican Administration's hostile military presence in LA is distorted (no surprise). What many people (at the Beeb and elsewhere) don't understand is that L.A. and all of SoCal is really part of Mexico--like all of the US, it's stolen land. Many  of the so called 'immigrants' being rounded up are citizens, or have a legal right to be in the US. L.A., Aztlán--mi corazón--Sepa que el mundo está mirando--know the world is watching. Migración es vida/Migration is Life. 

I am flaring--as in enraged, triggered, grief-stricken, and yet the mass uprisings on June 14th give me hope. If the body is keeping score, this is a hefty tally. A dance teacher of mine used to encourage us as we drilled endlessly, working past muscle memory to some other way of moving. She would say welcome to the labyrinth of your body. Now I work within the flare, wondering what is next.

NPR has a series of photos of protests from Jun 14th across the whole of the USA here.

When I can do nothing else--when I am too exhausted and strung out on the state of things--I take to my little back garden which is transforming from a sterile patch of grass and cement to something new—a refuge of sorts. A mouse tunnels beneath my inchoate flower bed. A black bird hunts for grubs at dusk, and a frog shelters under a slate in my proto-rock garden, beside the ‘water feature’: a rain-filled saucer.
In the mornings I go outside—sometimes in my robe, other times in a dress and lipstick. A cabbage butterfly lays clusters of eggs, like yellow dollhouse caviar, on my black kale. I check the underside of every brassica leaf. The eggs must be squashed into a safety-yellow slime. I'm armed with a fondue fork, the last of a long lost set. Slug patrol is methodical; I lift one stone at a time. Every morning there are at least ten gastropods. Sometimes a pair of snails are attached, going at it. They enter and receive each other simultaneously, only after a prolonged courtship of following slime trails. They circle and then shoot chitinous 'love darts' into each other. I hold them up, glued together by the rigid, viscous bridge of their hemaphroditic union before tossing them, bound in ecstasy, into the poppies.

I put the other fertile beasts in a takeaway box. I ponder my sins, all the things I’ve gotten wrong in trying to do right. Slugs, and likewise the grey Lovecraftian grubs with their lamprey-like orifices, are at the heart of this dilemma. (The Eldritch larvae might actually be good for the garden…the internet is not in consensus here.) I had this idea that I could share my bounty, but the critters have devoured my good will along with the ultraviolet greens, marigolds--esas maravillas calendulas--as well as my first planting of black kale, mange tout, and basically every damn seedling planted out in March.   
I tried feeding the slime-bandits to Frog but they weren’t interested. Likewise the birds weren’t having them.  So, dear reader, I drowned and composted them.  I would like this to be some sort of metaphor, but it isn’t.

Reading: Uprooting by Marchell Farrell.

Uprooting begins as a book about an idyllic cottage garden, but quickly deepens into a complex narrative of healing the ancestral trauma of slavery and ongoing institutional racism while surviving a pandemic. Farrell wrote her book at the same time I was writing Ashes & Stones, and it’s interesting to see parallels in how we used the isolation of the lock-downs to confront personal and societal trauma. I particularly appreciated Farrell’s discoveries regarding the ‘invasive’ plants--considered 'illegal immigrants' of the vegetable kingdom--an attitude common to English gardening. (Penelope Lively in her Life in the Garden goes so far as to call weeding 'a bit of ethnic cleansing.') Farrell discovers many common English garden plants are actually colonial imports, like the 'English' rose. These 'English' garden plants where taken along with human beings during the slave trade, and domesticated in Britain.

This is a book for anyone who is breaking ground—in a country garden—or on a patio, or in suburban sod as I am now doing. An important work of anti-colonial literature and sublime nature writing.

I am also reading the Grow North Gardening Manual, produced by a group of community gardeners on the Black Isle. Anyone growing in difficult, unpredictable weather of the Northerly variety will find something here. I am learning so much.

“Whether you’re here to commiserate, looking for warnings, or just enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, prepare for an olfactory odyssey of the damned.”

& This Short Read: An omnibus blog post of revolting perfumes is the best thing I’ve read in a good long while.  S. Elizabeth’s blog is my favourite web-log out there, and she has outdone herself with this round-up of some of the worst perfumes she has reviewed. It's is like walking through an infernal duty free labyrinth with its miasma of colognes, but, like, it’s fun. Cathartic even.

Watching: Donkeyskin from 1970

A surreal visual feast of lavish costumes and technicolour saturation, Jacques Demy’s camp version of the classic Perault fairy tale revels in dream-like cause and effect. The storytelling machine of these folk tales allows the inevitable and familiar to surprise us with subtle shifts in the telling. This disturbing tale of incest, abuse, and escape is told with an OTT, winking Freudian irony. The fairy godmother employs future technology, literature and glimpses of liberation.  Perrault wrote Donkeyskin for his own children, but it was widely read during the reign of Sun King, Louis XIV. He was no doubt influenced by Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, who invented the fairy tale genre as we know it today—a literary version of much older folk tales.  

A year before Demy's dreamscape I would be born into this technicolour world. Nine years later, Angela Carter would publish her masterpiece of fairy tale retellings, The Bloody Chamber. I have spent decades considering this text. As I watched the film, I felt she was sitting beside me, a black cat between us. She might have said, ‘I've seen this one already--properly—in the cinema.’

Below is Anne Biller, director of Love Witch,  talking about Jacques Demy and the film’s influence on her own work.  

Celebrating: A small win for all living things in Scotland.

Flamingo Land’s plan to build a Butlin's style resort on the banks of Loch Lomond was set to go ahead after a mysterious 'governement reporter' ok'ed the plans in a weird secretive move. This embattled proposal has been resisted by the Scottish people for over ten years, and we are winning. The proposal will now go to Scottish Parliament. This is a sordid tale of corporate greed and shady government dealings threatening the beautiful biodiversity of a large area of wild Scotland. The tycoon owner of Flamingo Land is an arch conservative backer of the racist, right wing Reform Party.

I'm not going to celebrate until I see the stake in proposal's heart. Clearly for Flamingo Land this is a battle of attrition with the people of Scotland, National Parks, National Trust and many other government bodies who hate the idea.

Read more about this here.

Planning: Come to the Solstice Outlier Hour! 

Become a paid subscriber if you are not one already & join in this wee meeting of the minds.  Come as you are--no need to have your video on if you're not up for it--just show up with a something to write/draw with, some paper and a libation of your choice. Wear something frivolous/beautiful if you are in the mood (or not)! We'll greet the solstice together, a bit early.

🗓️ We'll meet on Saturday, the 21st of June at 7pm-8pm GMT.
🔗 The Zoom Link--email me at contact.allysonshaw@gmail.com to RSVP & I’ll send you the Zoom link.
🕰️ Find out what 7pm GMT is in your time zone here. 

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