Amanda Davidson

Shelf help

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WISH LIST My family of origin is so nuclear that on smoggy days a mushroom cloud can be seen above the suburb where my parents still reside. During the holidays we gather there to rehearse and stage the roles we will alternately perform and resist in the ensuing year. While Dad tracks holiday cards sent and received on an Excel spreadsheet, Mom dons a pair of felt antlers and holes up in the kitchen. As for me, I revert to fatigued, endless reading, as if by some cruel law of repetition I have returned to that sullen moment in junior high when my only friend suddenly became popular, leaving me with nobody but books as my companions. Without intervention, I might remain in this half-hypnotized state, rereading Flowers for Algernon until the world outside grows dim, like a dream I can barely remember. This year, however, I’m readying myself with an eclectic batch of new books, books that make me want to participate instead of turning into a listless blotch of angst. These titles provide critical frameworks for dissent, suggest avenues for engagement, and probe cultural blind spots — generating new aesthetic possibilities along the way.

I, for one, like to kick off the holiday season with a powerful dose of well-researched feminist analysis, supplied this year by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books, 368 pages, $26). It’s akin to taking vitamins to ward off the winter cold that’s going around the office. I read some Faludi, I ask my brother to help out in the kitchen. Faludi argues that a highly gendered mythology reasserted its virulent hold over the national psyche (as writ large by the national media) in the wake of Sept. 11. Drawing from an abundance of sources, she parses out the myth: strong male heroes rescue helpless girls, feminism is dismissed as a frivolous and dangerous mistake, and cowboys and manly men rise again to keep the home soil safe. In debunking this overblown narrative, Faludi demonstrates that it doesn’t actually help those it valorizes, nor does its rehearsal expedite an increase in national security or political accountability.

Investigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence (Leon Works Press, 167 pages, $15.95 paper) takes up "black presences in European literature, visual art, and film." Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.

Renovating symbolic systems can be hard work, and nothing restores a fatigued body and mind like making changes to the physical infrastructure — such as sawing through your drainpipes to divert "barely used" household water from sewers to gray-water systems for gardening and washing clothes. Sexily linking the macro to the micro, the locally grown junta known as the Greywater Guerrillas has expanded its how-to know-how into Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground (Soft Skull Press, 416 pages, $19.95 paper), a collection of essays that examine the global plight of water misuse and attendant broad-scale ecological impacts. I don’t think it undermines the gravitas of the issue to mention that portions of the book are a sheer pleasure to read, especially when editors Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, July Oskar Cole, and Laura Allen (illustrations were supplied by Annie Danger) detail their efforts to "disengage from the water grid" by taking plumbing into their own hands.

What James Kochalka takes into his hands in American Elf Book Two: The Collected Sketch Book Diaries of James Kochalka (Top Shelf Comics, 192 pages, $19.95) is his life, tidbits of which he transforms into daily diary comics. Visually and verbally, Kochalka risks a silly, reckless sweetness — a sampling of titles includes "Romance of Life" and "Everything was fine until the old wakey wake." The strips are also a little bit perverted and weirdly honest, as Kochalka’s elf-eared stand-in catalogs a receding hairline, farty dairy hangovers, and arguments with his beloved and salty-mouthed wife. As the pages and days pile up, the effect is infectious, such that, while under the diaries’ spell, I began to sense secret fissures of creative potential and magic in the mundane flow of everyday life.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and the army of flavor lovers they run with have changed the landscape of vegan cooking. In Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook (Marlowe and Co., 336 pages, $27.50), Moskowitz and Romero draw inspiration from a variety of international cuisines, without making any claims to authenticity. The resulting recipes (mole, saag, and lasagna, to name a few) are adventures in surprising flavor combinations. A helpful foreword details how to stock a vegan pantry, and tips offered alongside the easy-to-follow recipes instruct on where to find specialty items or how to organize your cooking tasks — advice that, as an unskilled, distractible cook, I found particularly useful. An appendix of menus ranges from rich party foods to low-fat and easy-to-prepare options.

Printed in large type, so it’s easy to read when splayed open next to a bicycle, the repair-manual portion of the illustrated Chainbreaker Bike Book: A Rough Guide to Bicycle Maintenance, by Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark (Microcosm Publishing, 256 pages, $12), builds from the ground up. Starting with the ethics and rewards of skill sharing, it moves on to detail parts, tools, and instructions for system-by-system checkups and repairs. The book’s second half comprises reprinted issues of the Chainbreaker zine, originals of which were lost when zinester Jackson’s New Orleans home flooded after Katrina. The zines complement the how-to portions with a wider view of the bicycle’s cultural impact — e.g., the role of bikes in the women’s clothing revolution, the democratizing potential of this low-cost form of transportation. Note: the book hits shelves in February, but aspiring bike enthusiasts can order it now at www.microcosmpublishing.com.

And to come full circle … Sherman Alexie’s first young adult (and graphic) novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown Young Readers, 240 pages, $16.99), reminds me that a return to YA reading can be the opposite of mind-numbing — when undertaken with a book that’s emotionally spring-loaded, linguistically gymnastic, and devastatingly funny in turns. Drawing from his experiences growing up, Alexie tells the story of Junior (a.k.a. Arnold True-Spirit Jr.), a comic-drawing Indian kid who leaves his reservation to attend an all-white high school. Between racism at school and conflict with friends on the reservation, Alexie nails the ups and downs of a young artist learning to navigate by his own radar, amid competing claims from family and a sometimes encouraging but often deviously indifferent world. Ellen Forney’s inspired illustrations channel Junior’s manic, tell-it-like-it-is sensibility and provide a visual anchor for Alexie’s loquacious narrator.

Boundary issues

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Get your herb on

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“There are few things in the world as pleasurable as taking a nap on a chamomile patch,” says herbalist Joshua Muscat. “It’s an herb that doesn’t get a lot of respect. It smells good. It looks good. The flower is cute.”
It’s a hot Sunday morning in west Berkeley, and Muscat is leading a workshop called Local Medicinal Herbs and Your Health. This session is one of the classes offered by the EcoHouse, a unique residence designed to demonstrate sustainable building and gardening techniques. Wearing a white T-shirt, maroon pantaloons, and Crocs, Muscat has a down-to-earth demeanor and a boundless gusto for herbs. He’s been a student and practitioner of Western herbal medicine for the past 11 years, and his five-hour class covers everything from harvesting herbs to practicing holistic health care to preparing medicinal tinctures.
Twelve students gather on stumps, benches, and stones in the EcoHouse’s invitingly rambunctious garden. We’re here for a variety of reasons. Several people express dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine, while others want to enhance their home gardens by adding beneficent native herbs. One man is preparing for a stint at a Buddhist monastery by planting an organic garden. Another says he’s here simply because “the EcoHouse is always inspiring to me. I just like to come here and get a little bit of that.”
Babeck Tondre, a permaculture activist and resident of the EcoHouse since its inception, acquaints us with some of the special features of the site. Native plants and edible species grow in garden beds and containers in the ample yard. Bamboo shoots and ginger plants stretch into the air, towering leafily over the flowering parsnip and varietal poppies. A bathtub fountain burbles peacefully beside a straw bale toolshed designed by a local landscape architect.
There’s a rustle in the yard and a wiry man with glasses and an outdoorsy look rushes up to Muscat, trailing a freshly plucked specimen of the herb of the hour. As we pass the chamomile around, Paul Johnsen dives back into the foliage to search for another plant. Johnsen knows the garden well. A horticulturist, he became a part of the three-person EcoHouse-hold last year and works with Tondre to continually upgrade the site. Almost everything in the garden has a teaching function, including hand-built structures and animal life, which are part of the garden’s ecosystem. The toolshed roof will be renovated during an upcoming workshop on planting a living roof garden. Even the ducks will have their day.
Frances and Nate are brother drakes who waddle about the yard quacking amicably at passers-by on the long stretch of sidewalk that borders the garden’s west-side fence. Parents and children greet the two birds by name. In addition to winning the Mr. and Mr. congeniality award, the ducks keep the slug and snail population to a minimum. This month Frances and Nate will star in a workshop about raising ducks and chickens in your yard. Omelet aficionados have doubtless already sniffed out another potential benefit of raising female fowl: harvesting eggs. The EcoHouse did, at one point, foster a female duck, who purportedly laid large and delicious eggs throughout the yard. She died, though, so there won’t be eggs in the garden until the mail-order chicks arrive.
But other organic edibles abound, and during the lunch break Tondre encourages us to “forage in the yard.” There are low-water apple trees that yield a tart, green fruit and quince trees and raspberry bushes. Someone passes a basket of freshly picked gooseberries around the class. Their papery sheathes enclose a berry the size of a cherry tomato, and the intensity of the sharp, sweet flavor is akin to having a pellet of freshly cut grass applied directly to the taste buds.
Refreshed by garden goodies, we’re ready for more learning. Muscat talks about the importance of harvesting herbs responsibly. As medicinal plants such as echinacea and goldenseal gain widespread recognition and use, wild sources can suffer from overharvesting. Muscat recommends patronizing small businesses such as Lhasa Kharnak in Berkeley (www.herb-inc.com) or Scarlet Sage in San Francisco (www.scarletsageherb.com), which utilize sustainably grown or harvested plants. A group called United Plant Savers (www.unitedplantsavers.org), dedicated to preserving native medicinal herbs in North America, provides a list of endangered herbs, as well as one of responsible plant purveyors.
The best way to ensure a good source is to grow herbs in your own garden. Since space is a limiting factor for many of us, Muscat encourages urban gardeners to think collectively when deciding what to plant. As in, I’ll grow yarrow in my container garden if you grow lemon balm in your window box.
Devising tactics and sharing resources like this is a primary goal of the EcoHouse, according to Tondre. “Karl would want me to say how this project fits into the larger community,” Tondre says. The Karl he’s referring to is the late Karl Linn, a community activist and landscape architect who spearheaded the EcoHouse project in 1999. Though Linn passed away last year, his vision and presence remain vividly felt here.
Classes at EcoHouse are $15 and no one’s turned away for lack of funds. Expanding its community reach and resources, the EcoHouse recently joined forces with the Ecology Center, a well-known Berkeley nonprofit that offers a wealth of green resources to compliment the action-packed EcoHouse workshops. The center acts as an umbrella organization that hooks green-minded volunteers up to relevant activist organizations and also operates an information desk that answers such practical questions as “Where can I get worms for my worm bin?” The center also houses the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL), which offers seeds for free; the price tag is a promise to bring seeds back to the library the following year. Beck Cowles, program director at the Ecology Center, speaks enthusiastically about the partnership with EcoHouse. “One of the neat things is that because it’s a demonstration site, people are able to come and get hands-on experience in learning to live more sustainably in the city.”
Back to the herbal-medicinal course at hand: just spending time in the garden will help fix what ails you, Muscat says. He opposes the quick-fix, pill-happy culture of mainstream medicine. Muscat advocates for Western herbal medicine as an alternative or compliment to mainstream medical practices. “It just doesn’t work within a capitalist framework,” he says. While herbal applications can remedy certain short-term problems (lemon balm: great for soothing herpes sores!), Muscat says that his holistic approach is more effective in treating long-term ailments, such as chronic fatigue and sinus allergies. Putting his mugwort where his mouth is, Muscat runs the San Francisco Botanical Medicine Clinic (www.sfbmc.org), an organization that provides low-cost treatment using herbal remedies and a holistic approach to health care.
After several sun-beaten hours among the plants, our fog-accustomed bodies are responding with proto–heat stroke. So Muscat pitches a canopy and retires to the dappled shade of a prune tree to gleefully demonstrate the mad-scientist-meets-celebrity-chef aspect of herbal medicine: preparing tinctures. His working surface is made up of a warped wooden table, upon which rest a heavy-duty blender, two quart-size bottles of Everclear, and an “I [Heart] My Guru” mug.
As Muscat blends, sifts, measures, and shakes, I inadvertently engage in the ancient practice of urtication, otherwise known as flogging with nettles, as I brush against a prolific member of the genus Urtica growing next to my stump seat. For a moment I ponder seizing the bull by the horns or, um, the nettle by the hair?, and continuing the flagellation. Relieving rheumatism, after all, is one possible application of the plant’s medicinal properties, according to herbalists.
And those who find pleasure in pain (including certain members of the kink community and perhaps of Opus Dei) are well acquainted with the nettle’s saucy sting. It’s just one more example of symbiosis between people and plants. It turns out that plants too can thrive on a bit of rough play. As Shakespeare penned in Henry VI, “The Camomile; the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows.” SFBG
ECOHOUSE
1305 Hopkins, Berkeley
(510) 594-4308
ecologycenter.org/ecohouse
ECOLOGY CENTER
2530 San Pablo, Berkeley
(510) 548-2220
ecologycenter.org