The Botany of Desire
OK, that’s two books bought on odd persistent impulse, and both good. The first was Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, the second Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Clearly my book muse knows where to find the good stuff.
(Y’know what’s wrong with the world? Search on Amazon.com for pynchon mason dixon and you get three hits for books about Mason & Dixon before the actual book comes up. It’s like loading your LJ Friends page and getting 75% posts about reading an LJ Friends page.)
I’m just three-quarters of the way through Botany. It’s about the history of agriculture, taking the thesis that plants and humans have shaped each other rather than just us shaping them. Pollan focuses on domesticated plants - apple, tulip, marijuana, potato - and associates a human desire with each one - sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control - and devoted on chapter to the history of each. For apples he focuses mostly on John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed), for tulips on the Dutch tulipomania, and for marijuana on modern illegal growers (including his personal history along those lines). I assume the potato chapter will focus on Ireland, the famine, and the ugly social politics around that. Along the way he’s developing a theme about Apollonian vs Dionysian mental states, and the conflict between paganism and monotheism. cthulhia, I think you’d dig this book. (And I’ve no idea whether the author pronounces his last name like “pollen”.)
I finished up the third chapter while in Ground this evening, and just did a little sketching:
(Y’know what’s wrong with the world? Search on Amazon.com for pynchon mason dixon and you get three hits for books about Mason & Dixon before the actual book comes up. It’s like loading your LJ Friends page and getting 75% posts about reading an LJ Friends page.)
I’m just three-quarters of the way through Botany. It’s about the history of agriculture, taking the thesis that plants and humans have shaped each other rather than just us shaping them. Pollan focuses on domesticated plants - apple, tulip, marijuana, potato - and associates a human desire with each one - sweetness, beauty, intoxication, control - and devoted on chapter to the history of each. For apples he focuses mostly on John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed), for tulips on the Dutch tulipomania, and for marijuana on modern illegal growers (including his personal history along those lines). I assume the potato chapter will focus on Ireland, the famine, and the ugly social politics around that. Along the way he’s developing a theme about Apollonian vs Dionysian mental states, and the conflict between paganism and monotheism. cthulhia, I think you’d dig this book. (And I’ve no idea whether the author pronounces his last name like “pollen”.)
I finished up the third chapter while in Ground this evening, and just did a little sketching: