On Facebook yesterday, Aric Olnes, with a floral message brought to us by the letter M (he does a daily alphabetic floral message):
(1) Aric: Matchlessly magniloquent Michaelmas modifies miserable moping motivating meliorative mindfulness
Tim Evanson then messed around with it in a minor way:
Miss Marple is always admiring the Michaelmas daisies just before a murder, it seems
From Matthew Melmon on Facebook yesterday:
— MM: The humidity today is unreasonable. SADNESS. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
In response:
— AZ > MM: Yes, something we’re not used to. But then, predictably, it has brought the boletus mushrooms back to my patio garden. (They will wait underground, for decades if necessary, until there’s warm humid weather, when they will suddenly send their fruiting bodies aboveground, to spread their spores everywhere on passing breezes.)
Recent appearances of the boletes in my garden were noted in postings on this blog, in 11/23, 9/24, and 5/25. The current outbreak is the first one I’ve noticed in August.
First, apologies for losing a day. I fell victim to some sudden and overwhelming intestinal affliction that I would prefer not to describe here — it’s profoundly disgusting — a disaster that took me an entire day to do basic cleanup on, and then took most of my helper’s day yesterday to do a proper cleansing. Resilient AZ then kicked in, so by 4 yesterday afternoon I was back into the business of dispossession, mostly on office supplies (the house I am in has three fully working desks, each overstuffed with its own contents, oh Jesus), but now some tackling of framed artworks. Which brought me to works that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away.
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects. Someone Jacques and I discovered many years ago, in a long-gone science and art store in Stanford Shopping Center. Where we bought, and then had framed, two elegant one-color linocuts of herbs, “Sage” (1984) and “Worm Wood” (1985).
In my 7/14 posting “Making a mango crazy in bed”, a surprising mishearing on my part. The speaker said:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a man go crazy?
But what I heard was:
What’s a bedroom move that makes a mango crazy?
The (sex-infused) mangos just dropped in from the sky, bafflingly, with no justification I could see. (Intended [mæn.go] and perceived [mæŋgo] are very close acoustically, but mango makes no sense in the context. )
Then on the 17th it was kapok. Maybe it’s a plant thing.
Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):
“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.
So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).
Yesterday, a brief and multiply allusive birthday poem for my friend Sharon (“A rose for Sharon”, on this blog here), along with the birthday gift to her of a big spathiphyllum plant, which should soon send up some of its sexy flowers. Various associations floated in my mind along with the plants and their symbolic eroticism.
Molly Bloom and her soliloquy of yes, but directed to a woman. And, overwhelmingly, the singer of the Song of Solomon 2:1, a woman who declares that she is (figuratively) the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys and goes on into (heterosexual) erotic verse from the woman’s point of view (which can of course be repurposed as directed to a woman), ending with a surprising celebration of spring (in places where winter is the rainy season), suggesting a springtime of her body as well as the season:
My beloved spake, and said unto me,
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone.
And from that I’m taken to shapenote music and to factual questions about the plant the rose of Sharon and about Sharon the place from which this plant (and the Sharons of this world) got its name.
An occasional poem (in free verse) for my friend Sharon on her recent birthday, wrapped up in the calendar, the female body, and plants and their sexual symbolisms, with photos. The poem first, then remarks on its form, then a bit of background information.
Among Tuesday’s crowd of events (it’s now Friday, and life has been stressful and unpleasant, but I’m trying to produce at least one pleasant thing): a visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, taken there by Sharon Gray of Bay Area Geriatric Care Managers. Too much in bloom or getting ready to bloom (or harvest, in the case of food plants) for me to post on more than a little bit. I’ve picked out two plants I admired but didn’t know. One is still a mystery (there was a label, but it clearly applied to a plant that had already bloomed and gone dormant, not to this ornamental grass with pretty bell-shaped purple-blue flowers), but the other had a label that applied to it (and not to some other plant in its neighborhood), so I can tell you that it’s an especially vigorous Sisyrinchium striatum — the creamy-white blue-eyed grass of my title.
There will be photos, including one of me sitting in the garden; this one will require a fashion digression, on the tank top I’m wearing in the photo, a recent acquisition for summer wear.
That’s the land of maze and Shiraz and similar AZ things, those whose names have the letter-sequence AZ in them; Aslan is something entirely different (see below). I was taken to AZ-land yesterday on Facebook by Aric Olnes (who is, among other things, a floral artist), in one of a series of alphabetic flower photos from Casa Thomas / Olnes in Pioneer (Amador County) CA — where Aric and his husband Mike Thomas live these days — which come with lengthy alliterative captions, in this case for the letter A:
(#1) The photo, of a Pioneer Azalea; the caption:Astonishingly attractive Azaleas arrest acrimonious assumptions ascending aloft angelic amiability
(Look, Aric wasn’t aiming for elegance or poetic facility, just alliteration playfully carried to ridiculous lengths; otherwise, all it has to do is make some sense)
And my response, also on Facebook, taking things in a direction Aric probably didn’t anticipate:
— azaleas are from AZ-land, like azure, azimuths, and azithromycin, in a region that embraces Azerbaijan, the Azores, and Azusa [but not Anaheim or Cucamonga] — and is next to the Plaza Hotel, the Amazon River, and Jason Mraz‘s recording studio (among many many other things)
