The Download: 8 Things in October
Weeds & Dürer, Women in Windows, Saudade & Almeida Júnior, Cha-cha-cha-changes, Bodies & a few books.
Welcome! I’m Lex Orgera——poet, gardener, herbalist, editor—-and this is The Download, a list of 10 things I’ve been up to / reading / thinking about each month. Please share this newsletter with anyone interested in nature + culture!
Hi everyone,
Where the hell did this month go? No, seriously. I’m a day late and a dollar (or two, as the case may be) short with this installment of The Download, but you’ll see in numbers 6 & 7 that I’ve been extra busy this month...interviewing for a new job while doing an old job, letting it sink in that I have a new book coming out, and making my normal attempts at polymathism. Enjoy!
1. Weeds
Not the tv show, alas. A book called Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants by British nature writer Richard Mabey. At the start of chapter four, Mabey discusses this 1503 painting, Large Piece of Turf, by Albrecht Dürer:
Mabey writes, “To gaze at Albrecht Dürer’s extraordinary painting...is to glimpse an imagination piercing through the artistic conventions and cultural assumptions of its time and projecting itself forward three centuries. This is painting’s discovery of ecology.”
No one painted like this in the 1500s, with such grounded realism, and according to Mabey, no one would again until the early nineteenth century.
You can probably guess which “weed” led me to this lovely discovery: those three rosettes of plantain amidst dandelions, meadow grass, saxifrage. My plantain, from the German wegerich, from Old High German, wegarîh, which mean path-king. From the Old English wegbrāde, or waybread or waybroad. Bread that follows the path of wayfarers and pilgrims, of carts and horses. In Chinese, cart before horse. Indigenous people of North America: white man’s foot or Englishman’s foot because they popped up along all the paths of those wayward colonizers.
And Mabey calls it “a weed that has so closely dogged human trackways across the globe that is was also known as Waybread and Traveller’s Foot.”
Always underfoot, my plantain. Like an annoying cat or toddler.
2. Women in Windows
I ran across the most arresting painting perusing images for my @_womeninwindows_ Instagram project yesterday. Saudade (Longing) could have been painted yesterday. It actually took my breath away when I saw it. The way the subject leans into the windowsill while reading the note, the way she fiddles with the shawl over her mouth. I imagine her chewing on it. The tears on her nose. So intimate, so quietly immediate.
The crazy thing is that it was actually painted in 1899, the same year its painter, José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, was stabbed to death by his cousin at age 49. Apparently, he’d been having a longstanding affair with his cousin’s wife, and when the cousin found out, he flew into a rage and killed him.
It’s said that Almeida Júnior used his lover’s features in many of his paintings, so perhaps this mystery woman resembles her.
The word saudade, turns out, is one of those words that has no direct word-to-word translation in English. It’s a cultural phenomenon with its own holiday in Brazil (Jan. 30), from the Latin for solitude. Saudade is more than longing; it’s deeply melancholic, nostalgic longing, a sense of incompleteness and loneliness. A missing piece that will likely never be found.
Almeida Júnior is one of Brazil’s most famous painters. The painting lives in the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. I want to have an encounter with it. The way I’ve encountered Sargent’s El Jaleo at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Degas’ Woman at the Window at the Cortauld. Or Michelangelo’s Pietà in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Encounters that just stick to your bones.
3. Dear Watson Poem
Since I was last yammering on about my poems in the voice of Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes (see my last newsletter)...I’ve written a bunch. I sorta can’t stop. Thought I’d share one with you, as this has been a big part of my month:
Dear Watson, I’m not being a reductionist when I say that we die continually. Little deaths everywhere. Little deaths on the roof where I keep the bees. Little deaths at the boundary waters of the Hudson. Little deaths in little puddles after rain. Little deaths in this rumpled bed. You know my methods, Watson, so you know I’m not talking about certainty but change & chance & all the ways we walk into new lives. Look at us, two variables collided into something greater than our originals. The war machine stops here, Watson, with us. You were a surgeon once & I your dying patient. I was an opium junkie once & you my sober companion. All memory is an injury. This origin & that collapse.
Suffice it to say, I’m still watching Elementary. Like, literally. It’s on right now. I’m on Season 5, Episode 11. Sherlock employs his amazing lip-reading skills in this one.
4. Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon)
Well, I promised I’d tell you a little something I learned about Bermuda grass after spending days wrestling with it during the process of building new beds.
I don’t have time to do any real research, though I did just waste an hour looking for this book, selling for $100 on Amazon. Most of the following comes from Wikipedia, which really does work in a pinch and at least directs you to primary sources.
What I know: It’s also called Bahama grass, couch grass, devil grass, dog's tooth grass, quick grass, and star grass; the reason it’s such a pain in the ass is that its root system is deep, and it’s great in a drought situation. So great, in fact, that it’s been used for grazing cattle where nothing else would grow. This makes it highly invasive, particularly in non-drought conditions, crowding out other plants.
It’s great for golf courses and sports fields. And has been used to stop erosion.
Oh, and it’s not from Bermuda at all.
But here’s where it gets interesting. In Hinduism, it is traditionally important as a sacred plant to the worship of Lord Ganesha. In fact, there is a festival called Durga Ashtami dedicated to this grass. It’s also used in other rituals and offerings.
In Nepal, a garland of Bermuda grass is worn by the bride and groom at weddings as a symbol of long life.
It’s also used in Yoruba religious practice.
It’s used in Ayurvedic medicine. The rhizomes are diuretic and the grass juice astringent.
I guess what I’m getting here is that this grass that some folks only want to kill or play football on has actual sacred, life-affirming value to other cultures. It’s a good lesson in empathy derived from widening of perspective and one that has actually made pulling up the stray grass——yes, I still want it gone from my beds——a bit less violent.
5. Currently reading
I’m not a huge fan of short stories (I don’t know why, really, because when forced to read them in the past, I LOVE them), but I AM a fan of Jeanette Winterson, so I picked this one up to read for Halloween. Of course I only got one story read before Halloween. It was good. Sort of tech scary / dead spouse haunting with a couple of good twists.
6 & 7 Cha-cha-changes on the horizon
I want to devote some time and space in separate, upcoming newsletters to these two big developments in my life, but I’ll mention them here because, well, they are exciting!
I have a new book of poems coming out with Jackleg Press in 2025! It’s called Agatha, and anchoring the book are poems in the voice of Saint Agatha of Sicily (231-251 AD), who refused the advances of a Roman prefect and was tortured (specifically, her breasts were removed) as a result. There are hundreds of paintings of Agatha. The depictions we mostly find are of Agatha being restrained by a bunch of men with giant forceps or pliers, which they will use to remove her breasts. Another very popular image is of Agatha carrying a platter of her own breasts like this Piero della Francesca painting from the 1400s:
Not to be too gross, but I’ve read that there are breast-shaped pastries during her festival in Sicily.
Anyway, there are also poems in the voice of someone in a hospital bed after a concussion, and others. The trick with persona poems is that you’re writing as another person but also as yourself. Or I am, at least.
I’m so glad to be a part of Jackleg Press and to get this book into the world! More soon.
I also got a new job! Starting in December, I’ll be the new executive director of a local literary arts organization. It’s not been publicly announced yet, so I’ll wait to say any more, but I’m really excited to be at the helm of a super nonprofit doing good work in the community and beyond. I’ll be taking a break from editing except for special projects like the delightful middle grade novel I’m currently working on. My neck and back will thank me.
8. Bodies
Anyone watching Bodies on Netflix? It’s cop-show-meets-sci-fi, where four detectives in four different time periods find themselves investigating the same murder.
Great premise, right?
I won’t go into detail because...spoilers, but listen, time travel really messes with my head. Particularly when there’s a loop. Like once you time travel you have to keep time traveling? You have to go back in time because otherwise you won’t be born. But why? If it’s already happened, why????? Someone explain this to me. Am I being to linear about time or what? I tried to ask Twitter(umm, X) and it was a fiasco.
Alright all, I need to run errands and take a road trip. See you on the flip side!
Lex
I like Durer a lot. How'd you get Substack to give you an umlaut?