| the greenhouse thing started with the big five: myrtle, pomegranates, oleanders, citrus, and jasmine ~ then Caesar demanded fresh cucumbers ~ John Rose presented a pineapple to Charles II ~ citrus was magic, was what you wanted ~ they talked about "to fructify in winter" ~ goal: citrus of kings ~ John Rose at the grocery today would look at the produce and wonder what king? we've crowned the sun, John Rose ~ the coronation of control ~ but then he'd taste the undelicious apples, the mealy citrus, the tomato crunch turned red not by sun ~ chemical ~ and he'd worry what king this was for ~ George MacKenzie said that the roof of a greenhouse should be parallel to the "vaulted surface of the heavens" ~ so ecclesiastical ~ Loudon understood plants, but he couldn't resist saying the greenhouse was Eden ~ he said "may not therefore greenhouse roofs be rendered expressive of ideas of a higher and more appropriate kind? ~ these men and their god their glass their grapevines ~ Loudon wanted to grow people in his greenhouses ~ servants pulled coal carts down the greenhouse aisles to distribute the heat ~ victorian greenhouses were better heated than victorian houses ~ if you were a victorian, and you had a houseplant, and it tilted toward the window like all houseplants do, then you were shunned ~ you were no king ~ but if you owned a bizarre fern from the humid slit of Borneo, and you kept it alive and built your intellectual identity around it, you were admired ~ you might have kept the fern in a Wardian Case ~ basically, if you heaved a big fuck you to the seasons, you could become a prominent Victorian ~ making oranges ripen in London in January was called forcing ~ no one seemed bothered by the implications of this term ~ trick spring into summer and summer to forever, all in the months of winter ~ only one Victorian believed in seasons ~ Rusking called the forcing houses "vile and gluttonous" ~ i'll believe in him because he believed in seasons ~ but I do like my pineapple fragrant, and I'm not even a king ~ Leopold built a greenhouse church ~ god is a chive ~ you used to build a greenhouse to have a place to withdraw ~ we love private gardens ~ but then others built greenhouses for public display ~ so John Hix calls the greenhouse a "shuttlecock in the game of style" ~ that's funny ~ I have a small glass building I'd like to play badminton with ~ when industry had the revolution, the foundries that produced iron for sewers could also produce iron for greenhouses ~ a curve is a curve ~ we're all atoms, wet seeds ~ Queen Victoria had virginity, greenhouses, and servants ~ her servants wrapped greenhouse pears in muslin, to keep bugs away ~ (this is what we have done for the flesh of fruit) ~ like Caesar, QV craved cucumbers ~ unlike Caesar, she didn't like the thick curve ~ she ordered her cucumbers to be grown in tubes ~ they came to her plate straight, tender as veal, safe as G-ratings ~ pious ~ Walter Benjamin saw greenhouses for what they were, "residues of a dream world ... the collector dreamed he was in a world that was not only far off in distance but also in time." ~ residual ~ I have my own shards of glass ~ Victoria may have eaten curved cucumbers in private ~ right around this time, in an American greenhouse, a lemon ripened ~ believed to be restorative, it was ferried by horse to a sick person ~ back in the day in the century ~ and i've never seen a mature citrus tree ~ the greenhouse thing started with the big five: myrtle, pomegranates, oleanders, citrus, and jasmine ~ then Caesar demanded fresh cucumbers ~ John Rose presented a pineapple to Charles II ~ citrus was magic, was what you wanted ~ they talked about "to fructify in winter" ~ goal: citrus of kings ~ John Rose at the grocery today would look at the produce and wonder what king? we've crowned the sun, John Rose ~ the coronation of control ~ but then he'd taste the undelicious apples, the mealy citrus, the tomato crunch turned red not by sun ~ chemical ~ and he'd worry what king this was for ~ George MacKenzie said that the roof of a greenhouse should be parallel to the "vaulted surface of the heavens" ~ so ecclesiastical ~ Loudon understood plants, but he couldn't resist saying the greenhouse was Eden ~ he said "may not therefore greenhouse roofs be rendered expressive of ideas of a higher and more appropriate kind? ~ these men and their god their glass their grapevines ~ Loudon wanted to grow people in his greenhouses ~ servants pulled coal carts down the greenhouse aisles to distribute the heat ~ victorian greenhouses were better heated than victorian houses ~ if you were a victorian, and you had a houseplant, and it tilted toward the window like all houseplants do, then you were shunned ~ you were no king ~ but if you owned a bizarre fern from the humid slit of Borneo, and you kept it alive and built your intellectual identity around it, you were admired ~ you might have kept the fern in a Wardian Case ~ basically, if you heaved a big fuck you to the seasons, you could become a prominent Victorian ~ making oranges ripen in London in January was called forcing ~ no one seemed bothered by the implications of this term ~ trick spring into summer and summer to forever, all in the months of winter ~ only one Victorian believed in seasons ~ Rusking called the forcing houses "vile and gluttonous" ~ i'll believe in him because he believed in seasons ~ but I do like my pineapple fragrant, and I'm not even a king ~ Leopold built a greenhouse church ~ god is a chive ~ you used to build a greenhouse to have a place to withdraw ~ we love private gardens ~ but then others built greenhouses for public display ~ so John Hix calls the greenhouse a "shuttlecock in the game of style" ~ that's funny ~ I have a small glass building I'd like to play badminton with ~ when industry had the revolution, the foundries that produced iron for sewers could also produce iron for greenhouses ~ a curve is a curve ~ we're all atoms, wet seeds ~ Queen Victoria had virginity, greenhouses, and servants ~ her servants wrapped greenhouse pears in muslin, to keep bugs away ~ (this is what we have done for the flesh of fruit) ~ like Caesar, QV craved cucumbers ~ unlike Caesar, she didn't like the thick curve ~ she ordered her cucumbers to be grown in tubes ~ they came to her plate straight, tender as veal, safe as G-ratings ~ pious ~ Walter Benjamin saw greenhouses for what they were, "residues of a dream world ... the collector dreamed he was in a world that was not only far off in distance but also in time." ~ residual ~ I have my own shards of glass ~ Victoria may have eaten curved cucumbers in private ~ right around this time, in an American greenhouse, a lemon ripened ~ believed to be restorative, it was ferried by horse to a sick person ~ back in the day in the century ~ and i've never seen a mature citrus tree. |
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| The homepage of Jen Hirt |
| Updated May 1, 2009 |
| jenniferUNDERSCOREhirtAThotmailDOTcom |
| Arrived to Find |
| [[[need less]]] |
| CREATIVE WRITING "Laying Dynamite with the 9th Duke of Devonshire" in Redivider "Idaho Fell" in Sunday Salon "Herculean in Nantucket White" in Rougarou "Girlfriend" in the Hiram Poetry Review An interview with Scott Russell Sanders in Fugue Bernheim Arboretum fellowship Ohioana Library grant |
| OTHER WRITING Two articles for ABC-CLIO's What Made History in 2007? project: Growth of the Antiwar Movement Growth of Open Source Software and a book I've edited about psychic mediums |
| My faculty info page at Penn State Harrisburg |