reviews

Boordy Vineyards Wine & Herb Festival

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Last Saturday we drove up to Boordy Vineyards, north of Baltimore, for their annual wine and herb festival. I was imagining something ‘a little more California,’ as my friend’s mother would say: linen trousers, platters of complimentary artisanal cheeses with crusty bread, and music wafting on the breeze. It was not like that. What it was like was paying an entrance fee for the opportunity to spend more money, a construct that I’ve never really found appealing.

Although it’s not something I would have attended had I known what I was getting, the festival as structured was fine. There was a live band, a dance floor, and a varied selection of local products available for sale. However, besides bringing in the additional vendors and the music, Boordy didn’t provide anything that couldn’t be had by visiting the vineyard during regular hours. There were no special rates and no complimentary drinks or food beyond the usual 1/2 ounce tastes of their regular products. This was the largest digression from what I’d imagined we were attending; for the $12 dollar entrance fee, I expected more than I could have gotten at any of the free Taste of [fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-city] events I’ve attended over the years.

The major disappointment of our visit, however, was the discovery that most of their wines were just plain bad. I’ve had their Riesling several times and enjoyed it; my mistake was assuming that a Riesling would be on the lower end of what they had to offer. Quite the opposite: the Riesling is by far their nicest (i.e. most authentic) selection. Granted, this was the first time I’d gone to a tasting of Maryland wines, and it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that the flavor and body were so consistently what I can only describe as young. I imagine this is an artifact of growing grapes in this climate, but I was still taken aback by how unappealing I found them. They were no competition for New York or New Jersey wines, let alone even moderate choices from California or Oregon vineyards. I suppose that people who enjoy California wines and don’t have expectations based on the French originals might find these local cabernets and pinots palatable; I certainly did not.

Another element that I wasn’t prepared for was the prevalence of flavored fruit wines. When did coolers in a wine bottle become something consumed by anybody over the age of 20? I truly did not consider myself a wine snob before this weekend, but either the norms have changed dramatically in the past decade or my tastes have matured much more than I realized, because I was kind of appalled to see what people were drinking by the case and pronouncing excellent. I’m no stranger to fruit wines: Michigan produces lovely cherry wines, I’ve had delicious blueberry wines in Ontario and New Jersey, and my aunt bottles a refreshing peach flavored wine at her local DIY shop that’s perfect for a summer evening. I guess that’s the problem: I didn’t expect to find flavored wines worse than what my family can make on their own being touted at the local vineyard.

The upshot is that the wines were really not worth the trip, and it’s good to know what to avoid in the future. We did come home with several herbs for our garden — rosemary, ‘Italian oregano,’ and mint julep — courtesy of Putnam Hill Nursery, and two new honey selections — cranberry and blueberry — from the folks at Bees on the Bay. So, the trip wasn’t a total wash, and now we know.

Boordy Vineyards Wine & Herb Festival

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

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This is another book I’ve had for years and just now got around to reading. Prodigal Summer is a lovely novel, one of my favorites by Barbara Kingsolver. Before this book, the only novel of hers I really loved was The Poisonwood Bible; for me, that novel was in a different league than her earlier works, in terms of characters, plot and resonance with a time and place. Others may disagree, and it’s possible I was simply at a different point in my life when I read it. Nonetheless, I’d put Prodigal Summer in the same category, as a cut above her earlier writing.

There are many things that spoke to me in this novel. The challenge of re-creating a different way of being on a contemporary farm. The way in which the place of your youth calls you back to it, whether you particularly liked it there or not. The beauty of being awake to the natural world, and the way something—human, plant or animal—will cling to life even as it scrabbles on the brink of extinction. My own commitment to supporting both organic farming and the conservation of wild places made those aspects of the book most enjoyable. The myth of the coyote—scrappy, wily, and allegedly the only native species to profit from European invasion—is one that is becoming central to how we think of ourselves socially and culturally in this country, and the varied ways in which characters respond to the appearance of these animals provides depth that prevents them from becoming caricatures of themselves. Similarly, the opposite approaches that two elderly farmers take to the same challenge—preserving some part of the natural world that is precious to them—helps illuminate the truth that there is commonality between everyone who cares for their local terrain, despite what appears at first glance to be incompatible difference.

Kingsolver’s close connection with the natural world is evident in the care and tenor of her writing in Prodigal Summer, and the book serves as a sort of fictional prequel to the non-fiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that followed some years later. That book deserves a review all its own, but the things that I loved in Prodigal Summer clearly arise from the way in which she looks closely at the natural world around her and holds dear her place in it.

Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

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This was an interesting book, one of those that I couldn’t tell you whether I liked or enjoyed. Even having finished it, I’m still on the fence. The attraction of the book for me was the portrait of the artist as Sally Mann, and the speculation about her daughters’ lives. I don’t know how this book would read to someone not familiar with Sally Mann’s work, and the attendant controversies; since this is the element that fascinated me, I found it hard to evaluate the prose on its own terms.

I was introduced to Sally Mann’s work in college, in a feminist art history course. We studied major 20th century women artists who were challenging norms of gender, sexuality, and femininity, as well as the lines around art itself. Sally Mann, Cindy Sherman, Judy Chicago, and Barbara Kruger are the ones I remember. Nikki Lee hadn’t begun showing her self-portraits at the time I took the course, but they would have been at home in this group of artists. Of all of them, Sally Mann’s work was the most intriguing, perhaps because the reactions to it were so polarized. On the one hand, she was seen as an avant garde visionary who was challenging all kinds of dearly held social beliefs: nudity as sexual, children as asexual, rural life as pastoral and naive (to name a few). On the other hand, she was attacked as an abusive and manipulative mother, exploiting her children for the creation of pornographic images. Probably there were some middle positions, but they weren’t getting much air time back then.

One thing is certain. Sally Mann–like her fictional alter ego in Dani Shapiro‘s Black and White–took staged photos of her naked children. How the children came to be naked, and why Mann was called to photograph them that way, remains a mystery of sorts. Does it matter what she was thinking? Does it matter what her children’s experiences of being photographed were? Does the art stand alone? Can photos of naked children, or even topless children, ever be art in our contemporary U.S. culture?

To my knowledge, these remain open questions about her work, and speak to the degree to which context informs interpretation and reception. Images are never just images, and Mann follows in the footsteps of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Whatever her original intentions, the concerns of social culture layer the life of the photographs. The most basic set of questions, perhaps because it is one we can never really have answers for, centers around the impact on her children. These questions are at the heart of Shapiro’s book. In the end, the author creates an artist who is not Mann in significant ways, and the resolution of the narrative depends on those differences. By relocating the family from rural Virginia to New York City, and continuing the naked–sorry, nude–photo shoots through her daughter’s teen years, Shapiro creates a level of tension that requires action and resolution. It’s not clear that Mann’s own children related to her art in the same way, but it’s one possibility, and a possibility that seems easy to imagine.

This resonance makes Shapiro’s book compelling, but again: I couldn’t say whether that would be the case for someone who wasn’t familiar with Mann’s work and hadn’t already asked the questions to which Shapiro’s version offers an answer.

Black and White, by Dani Shapiro

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

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I was somewhat disappointed in Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis. This was another book that had the reputation of being clever that didn’t resonate with me. It was entertaining at times, in a light period kind of way, but I didn’t find myself saying, ‘oh, the wit, the wit!’ as I read. I certainly enjoyed the detailed description of the various styles and fads of the era, in clothing, entertainment, and especially home decoration, as well as the attempts of the child narrator to make sense of the somewhat ludicrous setting in which he found himself. Beyond these elements, though, the attacks on middle class mundanity didn’t really do much for me.

Reading books like this makes me realize that what critics, reviewers and fans call clever, witty, or cutting, I frequently find boring and mean-spirited. Anyone can insult someone else, and judgments of taste are only funny when we share them. Insults dressed up as ‘biting social commentary’ are still just name-calling and trash-talking. This kind of thing can be a breath of fresh air when everyone’s pretending to agree, however it’s not quite as entertaining when it’s coming from those with greater social power. Cleverness has historically been a way to rise in a social hierarchy, through education or wit, and as such is a much vaunted personal characteristic. The exercise of cruel wit, though, seems most frequently to be a tool for enforcing those hierarchies, and as such, it’s not a habit I respect.

Auntie Mame, by Patrick Dennis

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

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I loved The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and found the balance of humor and pathos just right. Maybe it takes the voice of a young narrator to really convey the hilarity and heartache of childhood, or maybe it’s the more direct relationship to Alexie’s personal biography, but it moved me in a way that neither Smoke Signals nor The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven quite did. Don’t get me wrong, I also loved Smoke Signals, but mood is different, partly because the characters there are older when they make it off the rez. I also found it difficult to get into The Lone Ranger and Tonto…; I’ll go back to it again and make a better effort.

What more can I say about the book? I would say that Sherman Alexie is the most well-known contemporary Native American author around, and Part-Time Indian offers a direct view into his beginnings. While many of the experiences Alexie relates are particular to growing up on a reservation in the Pacific Northwest, the special weightiness and attendant costliness of adolescent choices is something that resonates across class and cultural lines.

At a key point in the story, the narrator says, I used to think the world was broken into many tribes. By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not. I think it’s also fair to say that there are people who had the kind of childhood related in Part-Time Indian, and there are people who did not. For those who did, the book is also a beautifully written tribute to the determination of those younger selves who brought us to adulthood.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie