letter from brooklyn: morning glory
+ profiled the novelist garth greenwell for nymag + lit hub said nice things abt thot pudding
Hello, hello. As a partisan of New York summers (I said what I said), I felt absolutely attacked by the chillier weather yesterday morning. Any transition involves an ending; I am someone who resists endings, even as my life has been party to a healthy number of them. In any case, when I ran some errands (letter posting, library book return, lighter fluid acquisition, community garden plot ministry), the thermostat had returned to balmy. FOR NOW. Now I’m back at my desk, drinking smoky tea, eating a salad Shireen made and dropped off, and writing to you.
This one is a newsletter missive about, or involving, plants and gardening, and will be the last non-paywalled letter from in the series for a little bit.
Two notes before we get into it. I profiled the writer Garth Greenwell (my first profile!) for New York magazine. Word is it’s good; you can read it here.
Also, Brittany Allen at LitHub shouted out thot pudding in a list of Seven Literaryish Substacks You Should Subscribe To, Stat. I love and read almost all of the newsletters mentioned, from Jami’s to Brandon’s to Hamilton’s, so this was sweet to see. I’ll also throw in recommendations for Catherine Lacey’s, Patrick Nathan’s, Celine Nguyen’s, Meghna’s, and Alf’s, all of which I pretty consistently read-on-open. Here’s what LitHub had to say about the pudding:
I did smile at “heart-forward.” It felt like a success of a particular and private kind, because the way I used to write and think was once so relentlessly head-forward1. It deprioritized the body. It forgot that imparted emotion—of all kinds, from serrated humor to numbed-out-loneliness to taut envy—is the soil that most people’s thinking actually lives in, grows from.
Speaking of soil.
In late 2022, after volunteering for years, I got off the waitlist for a plot in a neighborhood community garden. It’s one of my favorite places. Big and tree-laden and verdant, chickens and bees tended in its tucked-away corners, its (human) members a funny mix of neighborhood transplants and old heads.
My last year’s planting went well, at least for the highkey amateur and lowkey lazy gardener that I am. But this year’s was a disaster. Being gone from Brooklyn from January to May while I taught for a semester in Iowa, it turned out, had not set me up well for the season. The plot, which is large, turned into a jungle. Its weeds were taller than I am. I spent more time fighting the jungle than planting, but eventually planted some things, late and grumpy and in between heat waves. Eggplant, cherry tomato, roma tomato, two cultivars of rose, blueberry, shishito pepper, cucumber, squash. Better than nothing. It would do.
Then I went to Toronto for a week midsummer, became embroiled in work and life event upon my return, took solace in the fact that it was raining like mad every five days, freeing me from my watering duties, and stayed away from the garden for over two weeks.
I came back to a sight. Due to my meager planting—soil wants things to grow in it, that’s the thing, it has no interest in staying empty—and general lack of maintenance, the weeds had returned, but this time things were different. The weeds of earlier had been the usual suspects: thistles and amaranth, fennel and chickweed, great masses of ground ivy and ragweed. They’d grown up towards the sky in the empty spaces of soil I’d left in my plot.
But what I saw now was a thicket of vining green, dotted all over with silky, NyQuil-purple trumpets.
This new weed had clambered up every trellis. Had created bowers over the tomato cages, then brought them crashing down. Had grasped its way, with its tendrils the approximate thickness and tensile strength of kitchen twine, up most of my plants, strangling them. Had made my garden beds new in this jarring fairytale way—it was like finding an enormous, sleeping creature in them, overgrown with heart-shaped leaves and violet flowers. I’d made my first true encounter with that cheery and ruthless bootstrapper, morning glory.
Morning glory is the common name given to the hundred-plus plants that belong in the family Convolvulaceae, most referred to as glories or bindweeds. Their flowers tend to unfurl in the early hours of the day, hence the name.
Everywhere, this summer in the city, I’ve seen morning glory. Up fence and stoop, covering tree beds, massing in people’s yards. Sometimes, as in my case, it is simply a weed that has found purchase. But on occasion, if you trace its vines to an origin point you’ll find a planter, a set of pots, a bamboo tag. People do cultivate it intentionally. It’s quite beautiful, after all.
The business of deciding if something is a weed or not is a controversial one. To classify anything as a weed involves a subjective intelligence, an intentional, which is to say, cultivating, agent, saying: this is undesired, undesirable.
With some plants, this is so straightforward, as anyone who has experienced a poison ivy weed takeover will tell you. But mugwort, also common, also weed-classified, has delicate lacy leaves and numerous healing properties, and still gardeners are driven to distraction by it. Understandably, because it chokes out what they actually wish to cultivate.
Ipomoea purpurea, or common morning glory, the specific bindweed-cousin that had taken over my plot, has a name that alludes to the Latin word for “the worm that eats wood,” because of its vigorous, erosive growth. It easily outcompetes other more timorous plants, sending down roots wide and deep—up to nine feet, if allowed—and hungrily siphoning nutrients out of the soil.
Eating morning glory causes upset stomachs and hallucinations, and so birds and small mammals give it a berth. It grows with wild speed, it’s hard to uproot and discourage, and it returns easily each year, once first established. You can see why this might become a problem.
With morning glory, part of the issue, I think, is the pleasures it offers. The aesthetic pleasure offered by the flowers. Even if they’re around so briefly, even though the rest of the accompanying plant means big big trouble and strangulation and takeover, they’re lovely. It offers the pleasures, too, of inertia, of something almost like automation. Chris, who grew it ON PURPOSE as vining cover once, put things this way to me: “The appeal of morning glory over other things is that it grows itself.”
I was not immune to this logic. Quite honestly I was tempted to leave my plot to be be fully rewilded, partly because I am both busy and lazy, but also partly because I remembered the plot before, so scraggly and brown. Even if it had murdered my poor vegetables and would likely render my soil unusable in the long run, who was to say an undulating creature covered with trippy flowers was not an improvement?
It is morning glory’s offerings—of pleasure, laborless reward, prettiness, automation—despite its greater costs, that helps secure it in our landscapes.
Making metaphor with plants, especially purported weeds, is the trickiest business, but whole days after witnessing the absolute and total swiftness of the morning glory’s takeover, the part of my brain that wishes to make meaning kept pinging.
Because in my short life thus far we’ve seen a stream of swift transformations, of massive takeovers, of the commons, of our political economy, and of our social lives. We experienced these things, most of us, as change happening to us, having happened to us.
The profit-driven digital companies that surveil and extract our attention, reprocessing it as sellable data. The financialization and McKinseyfication of our economy. The ongoing normalization and dilution and general adoption of fascistic policy by a widening range of political actors. These are some of the bindweeds of the zeitgeist.
They moved into hospitable soil and took over. Their mechanisms offered people some compensatory blooms and the complex pleasures of doing nothing—or doing less—and we, again and again, accepted the terms.
What we call artificial intelligence2 is a bindweed in the process of rooting and formation. So are our degrading norms around civil and human rights in scenarios of crisis, protest, wartime, and conquest. So is patriarchal Christian nationalism, in this country. So is the system that connects ever-increasing funding for police, prisons, immigration detention, and militarism while simultaneously divesting from public goods—libraries, public education, publicly funded childcare, healthcare governed by something besides profit.
And of course, many people’s expectations for each other — about connectedness, relating, visibility, kinship, courtesy, generosity, the basic questions of how time should be spent—have shrunken, been strangled, grown choked, as these bindweeds took over.
You can call the results of this “the loneliness epidemic” or decry “the rise in antisocial behavior,” as outlets on the right and center-left have done. But the origins of these social phenomena are caused by something that started in the soil we all live in, and was allowed to grow unchecked.
Stepping out of extended metaphor and back into the raised beds of literalness (lol cry) I did eventually deal with my plot overgrowth. It was about ten hours of work. Phil and Pam helped me a ton, as did my neighbor Diogenes. The bindweed is likely to return and keep returning, and I’ll need, as long as I work on this plot, to keep it in check.
The experience, and the morning glory, left me Ruminating, as you can see. It refocused my attention to the reality that the pleasure factors — of automation, utter convenience, self-promotion, actual relevance, perceived relevance, easy connection, straight up dopamine, other people’s attention — of these figurative bindweeds are what make them so hard to eradicate, reshape, beat into submission. (How to go about addressing that, that sort of narcotic, dangerous, compensatory pleasure, is a question for the age.)
And more than anything, my time with the morning glory left me certain that there is no substitute for the figurative mechanism of the gardener. There is no substitute for intention3. For a planning and cultivatory intelligence4. This is part of what we’ve lacked, as the bindweeds took root and flourished. This is what allowed them to flourish unchecked in the first place.
There is no substitute in a society for an ordering and cultivating mechanism — one that is beholden to something besides organized capital—that can make the pronouncement: This is undesired, undesirable. The negative externalities are too steep. The flowers, as they are, are not enough.
We need something else to grow here instead.
You could follow that thought wide and deep — at least nine feet.
xx,
STM
I was interested in people’s thinking, I realized, years ago, and so I would have to make it my business as a writer of fiction, as a writer of anything, really, how to trace and impart and understand feeling.
Genuinely a triumph of marketing, hat tip.
A line from a new Ted Chiang essay on AI and art that may resonate: “The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.” I liked the essay, with a reservation or two, but I absolutely loved its predecessor.
When I talk about intention, I mean multiple kinds. At the individual level, sure, fine, somewhat, a little. But I’m actually talking about the truly fraught—and in this country, often either captured and oligarchic, or under-resourced and bureaucratic—concept of collective intention. That has a pro-social, pro-Earth, democratic welfare in mind. I don’t mean to be glib or naive about the wild difficulties of what this looks like in practice. But, to me, it’s worth starting with seed: first comes narrative, pared down, made simple enough to take in.
Sarah! I read the Lithub article yesterday and fully agreed with the description of your Substack as "frank and genuine" and "heart-forward" (your discussion here on elite activism and political organizing in 2024 is one I think about a lot; you really captured both the emotionally dispiriting nature of being left-leaning/leftist right now, and offered such usefully tactical ways of moving forward https://smathewss.substack.com/p/the-context-and-the-coconut-tree)—
—and it was such a surprise and a pleasure to read thot pudding today and see you mention my newsletter! Thank you for reading (and I'm so happy to be reading YOUR writing too!)
I'm excited to start reading your Garth Greenwell profile as well, and I love that it opens with you and Greenwell grocery shopping, one of the greatest ordinary activities of life imo
I'm here for the heart-forward ruminating <3