Nom de Plume

Ben, Steve’s nephew came out to visit for a week. Steve took him camping. This is really cheating, because I didn’t go on the trip. Instead, I stayed home and worked. They were gone six days. Not many pictures for six days, but what Steve took is pretty cool. Pam, I’ve burned all the images onto CD for Ben to give to you. But he may lose it, the way he lost his shoes. We still haven’t figured that one out. Steve gave him his Tevas to wear; Ben was not happy. Apparently, Tevas are not cool with the about-to-be sixteen crowd. Who knew?

I eat meat; therefore, I think it’s important to be honest about where meat comes from and slaughter a chicken if it’s called for.

Called for it was: I had three extra roosters. My plan for today was to kill and roast them up. But I just couldn’t do it. I had raised the Houdini twins and Madame Bovary (who ended up being Monsieur) from wee baby chickiepoos. They would come running over whenever they saw me, and peck at my hair, thinking it was something toothsome. I would have no problem killing the Welsummers (who, by the way, have now entered a fevered molt now that they are deloused) because I’m not attached. So I sold the three on Craig’s List instead.

And bought a barred rock.

I won’t bore you with the details of the stakeout, but it’s pretty exciting: I found two mother lodes–one from the buttercup (seven eggs) and one from Stubbs (only two eggs, so I think she has another stash).

They can free range again.

Or rather, Kiyoshi Saito meets crazy chicken lady meets crazy chicken lady’s unemployed boyfriend meets the alley-facing back of our garage.

But that wouldn’t fit in the title area. And it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Not that the name Kiyoshi Saito necessarily makes a lot of sense either, unless you’re a fan of sosaku hanga.

Anyway, I have a Kiyoshi Saito woodblock print of two roosters called Competition for a Charm. I love it. There are other prints of his that I covet fiercely and can’t afford, but I remember this one from my childhood, when it hung in my parents room. It went with me to college and it has been with me in every place since.

And of course, now I have become a crazy chicken lady with a boyfriend that has too much time on his hands. Not, you understand, that I’m complaining. “We need some chicken art on the back of the garage,” he said the other day. “I know what I’ll do!”**

**Steve credits his inspiration to Joy Wants Eternity. If anyone should feel so inclined, he would love free tickets.

The welsummers haven’t laid a single egg. Now this could be normal because from everything I’ve read, it can take several weeks for them to get over the trauma of being moved. But again, you don’t know why they’ve been sold at auction. Perhaps they’re just old. “Check their vents,” one Web site urged. “If they are moist, they’re of egg bearing age. If dried and puckered, the hens have probably outlived their usefulness.”

(If the above grosses you out, read no further.)

So I checked their vents. This, for the unititated, basically means running around after chickens who don’t want to be caught, rounding them up and herding them into the coop, and lunging at their feet–at which point you dangle them upside down. The hens don’t like this, but at some point, they give up–and just kind of go stiff, like they’re dead. Which made life much easier.

And which made it much easier to see that they were crawling–CRAWLING–with lice. There were eggs crusted around their vents, creepy crawlies scurrying over their skin. It was gross, and those poor hens must have been miserable.

Now I had dusted them before they went into the coop in the first place, but obviously it didn’t work. So I dusted them again with diatomaceous earth (which, by the way, totally kills any chicken poo smell in the coop and I’ve started adding to their feed as a dewormer), and went down to Del’s to get a permethrin spray. I would like to be all natural and everything, but sometimes you just need to use chemicals. Came back, cleaned out the coop, sprayed it down. Caught ALL the chickens, sprayed them down too (though no one else seemed to have lice). This was Sunday; yesterday, they were clean and clear.

So what I think is that they just had a bad infestation and stopped producing–and that’s why they went at auction. Could be wrong, but it’s a working theory that allows me to the luxury of thinking that one day they will produce.

Oh, and I battened down the hatches of the run yesterday. The buttercup and Stubbs both gave me an egg. So there’s a clutch of eggs somewhere out there in the yard ….

• Captchas need to be more legible. #
• Anyone want a rooster? #
• Indian education system: Class V–what does that equate to in US? #

Chicken experts weigh in! At 9 weeks, I’m thinking all these guys are roosters; Carrie thinks there’s still a good possibility they might be hens.

“Get me a book, will you?” I asked Steve about a week ago, as he prepared for a jaunt to the library. “I’m running out of things to read.”

So he came home with Tomato Girl. “It looked like something you’d read,” he said by way of explanation. Actually, it didn’t really, but that’s fine. No complaints on my end. Sometimes one gets in a reading rut; sometimes one needs something a little more unsettling.

Which is what Publisher’s Weekly says about it on the back cover, saying that it’s an accomplished debut. And the author bio says she’s published in literary journals and has written a book of poetry.

The reason that I’m telling you all this is because I want you to know that I was absolutely fair. I was prepared to like this novel. I opened its covers with a completely open mind. And sadly, nothing prepared me for its sheer, unutterable terribleness. It was beyond bad. And the really sad thing was that it wasn’t like trashy novel bad, which is just bad writing plain and simple and you harrumph about the crap that gets published these days, but it was a mass market paperback so who really cares? No, it was more like college fiction workshop bad, where everyone thinks they are saying profound new things in beautiful new ways, but it would be more enojoyable to hear a tortured cat scream for three hours straight. (If you’re wondering where that piece of randomness came from, chalk it up to the feral cats on the prowl last night.)

Enough said.

*Update: I feel a little guilty for posting that review, so I feel the need to mention that she has samples of her poetry on her site; they are MUCH better than this novel.

Padma Viswanathan tells a ripping good yarn. The year is 1896; Sivakami is 10 and her family is looking for a husband. They visit the healer in her mother’s home town to have her star chart done; he begs the family to let him marry her. Though his own chart says that he might die in the ninth year of his marriage, the birth of a son might stop his death from coming to pass. When the son is finally born, he does the calculations and realizes that he will die. And because they are Brahmins, and because Sivakami will enter a world of virtual seclusion upon his death, he does everything he can to prepare her, including hiring a local man, Michumi (who also happens to be gay and therefore trustworthy) to oversee the properties.

And then the story wafts over the next three generations, with Savakami holding the family together with the help of Michumi. Ripping good yarn. One of the things that was fascinating to watch was the arc of superstition and magic. Sivakami believes in the superstitions of her tradition–tradition, of course, being one of the few things allowed her. But her son Vairun (who by the way has vitiligo, which is a great thing to see represented in fiction) wholeheartedly rejects the idea of Brahmins’ inherent superiority and of all superstition, including star charts–despite the fact that his and his sister’s both come true. And it’s interesting to see how the story starts in one place–a mythologized place of legend–and ends grounded in the modern world, with problems blamed on people, not on gods.

To be absolutely, completely honest, I lost interest in The Toss of a Lemon toward the end, and it felt like a bit of work to finish it. And I didn’t really like the ending–don’t worry, no actual spoilers–because the end of an era, which has taken the novel almost 600 pages covering sixty-odd years, feels too explicitly stated. Still, if you read one book this summer, make it this. In addition to being a gripping read, Viswanathan’s prose is gorgeous.