The Whitney Bees in the News

In case you were in Madagascar studying carnivorous fossa a few weeks ago and missed reading the Talk of the Town in the New Yorker - the one with the cover featuring yet another iconic American tale of vacationing with our dogs, in the vein of Travels with Charley, The Incredible Journey and Old Yeller, but, as Gail Collins wisely reminds us, different – and in case you want to know what really happened on the roof of the Whitney that winter day, just click here and find out.
Yes, the estimable Calvin Tompkins and the charming Dodie Kazanjian were there with CSB and yours truly, winterizing the bees and extracting bee barbs from exposed body parts. That is all true, and you know it is true because the Fact Checker made sure it was true.
The Fact Checker was marvelous. Before he even called us he had spoken with an entomologist at the Agricultural Extension at UC-Davis to check all my bee facts. (I think it was UC Davis. But please be aware that SQD has not been fact-checked.) Also, he wanted to ascertain that CSB is as tall as he is, and me, as short. I could have spoken all day with the Fact Checker.
While it is true – and this too was fact-checked – that CSB did not wear a bee jacket, it went unmentioned that I have recently acquired for him a very stylish bee jacket from Sheriff’s of England, hoping that he will occasionally wear it and get stung by fewer bees. It is probably a vain hope. And bee stings are good for your arthritis anyway.
Likewise unmentioned, but true, is that we burn sage in our bee smoker. We grow the sage in our garden and then dry it in the fall, suspending picturesque nosegays from a beam in the basement. The thing about sage is that it smells like pot when it burns, or at least it smells like pot as I recall it, and sometimes – as we are tending the bees - I find myself looking around to see who has a joint. It’s just an odd moment, a flash, of living multiple lives.
Other unchecked facts: Calvin wore a leather jacket. Dodie had enviable fur-lined clogs whose provenance I might have inquired about had I known her better, or at least not just met her for the first time. Bees don’t like leather or fur, but we didn’t mention that.
But really, the question you are all wondering about, the really pressing question, is: What do the bees on the roof think about this year’s Biennial? The question should be: Do bees even think about Biennials? But since that answer would be something of a dead end, we will go with the first question. Bees prefer flowers to collages and video, but performance art involving nectar is appreciated in a post-modernist way.

Herbals

All harvesting, all the time. Tuesday it was honey. Yesterday basil. Today sage, lavender, mint and chives. Should chives be dried or frozen?
But my mind keeps wandering to Luis Fernando Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutan. Verissimo is a Brazilian writer I found totally by chance in the library last week. (I was there to pick up the new Paul Auster but the librarian – not one of the regulars of whom I am mostly very fond – curtly informed me that I had waited too long to pick up the reserved book and it had gone back to whatever larger library it had come from.) His book The Club of Angels was on the New Book shelf, oddly since it was published two years ago. But I immediately recognized the distinctive size and shape and elegant/smart design of a New Directions book and I am always drawn to ND books, and not just because they took a leap into the unknown and published my first novel oh so many years ago, but because I just tend to like their authors, especially the foreigners, especially the Latin Americans. The Club of Angels is the story of a group of men who get together and eat fabulous meals. Then their leader, Ramos, dies of AIDS and is mysteriously replaced by a cook talented beneath their wildest dreams. Except that following each meeting a member of the club dies. And even knowing that one of them will die, they continue to meet, continue to dine sumptuously, in full expectation of the end. Which makes it sound like a fairly normal book, which it is not.
But that is not the book I am distracted by as I dry herbs and make carrot soup and bake eggplants, but another Verissimo book, Borges and The Eternal Orangutan, which I read late into the night last night. It seems to be about a solitary man who adores Borges and meets him in BA at some esoteric conference at which a much-hated German academic is murdered inside a locked room. À la Poe. And Borges refers siempre to Poe, and it is all referential. And because I harvested all the sage – and there was a lot of sage - today and am hanging it to dry in the hearth room downstairs to be used to fuel in the bee smoker, it seems to me that Poe knew more about herbs than I ever will. According to Culpepper’s Herbal (originally published 1649) sage is a very useful plant and a decoction of it “provokes the urine, brings down women’s courses and expels the dead child”, which almost made me nervous until I read of some other herbs, also recently harvested chez nous. Mint will “Stay women’s courses and the whites”. (I have no idea what is meant by the whites.) And lavender will “provoke women’s courses and expel the dead child and afterbirth.” While basil will “expelleth both birth and afterbirth and as it helps the deficiency of Venus in one kind, so it spoils all he actions in another. I dare write no more of it.” So said Culpepper.