The house thing again. Houses as characters in both fiction and nonfiction. Objects to make bright and shiny. And an opportunity to align ourselves as characters alongside the lovely abodes of our dreams. Just as we are what we eat, we are often where we live as our inner workings are expressed in our outer surroundings. And an opportunity to radically re-imagine ourselves from time to time is appealing. To me.
So when I began seeing bloggers posting about The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentleman Farmers by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I knew immediately that I would pick it up as an in-between book. The front cover of this book says "An Unconventional Memoir," but there is little here to really indicate that - except the tone, the irreverence, the self-deprecation, and the awareness that this is an exercise in artifice in some way, a keenly self-aware, self-conscious marketing ploy. As exemplified by this opening disclaimer:
The author reminds you that there are plenty of other memoirs out there written by courageous souls who have broken with their past, poetically leaving behind such things as:
1. Drugs and/or Drinking
2. Career Ennui
3. Bad Relationships…and have successfully achieved goals such as:
1. Creative Fulfillment
2. The Simple Life
3. Jesus’s Approval
The author notes that those memoirs are generally full of more shit than a barn at the end of a long winter.
And yet it's charms are undeniable. And I laughed out on more than several occasions as I read this story of two successful Manhattanites, one in advertising and one a MD/MBA working for Martha Stewart. Affluent, respected, enjoying a successful relationship but still seeking a better life. An agrarian one as it turns out. So they end up sinking a large sum of money in a home - no, a mansion - four hours from the city. They have goats. And a crypt. And a heirloom variety vegetable garden of a very large size. And eccentric neighbors. And seemingly, at first, a dream fulfilled.
But then there is the desire on the part of the author, the drag queen turned marketing expert, to abandon the pressures, the falseness of his city existence, and live and work on their farm full time. And here the beginning of the bucolic plague where we see their personal relationship and their finances unravel as they seek simplicity through all the complex machinations and ill-conceived priorities defined through their materialistic urban cogitations. Where their mansion, The Beekman, becomes the focal point of a marketing campaign devised in the same vein as Martha's empire.
This book could have been dreadful. But it was extremely entertaining because of its humor and its awareness of its own failings - both bookish and personal. Few could pull off the Martha Stewart adulation and ridiculous comparisons of Martha and Oprah as representations of the two urban farmers here, but Kilmer-Purcell does. Most enjoyably so. Finished this one in a day. Because I loved the unfailing romantic attachments to possibilities here.
For more info, check out their project website at www.Beekman1802.com.
Now back to Nabokov's lectures and Madame Bovary. Ironic that my reading break from all things Bovary should be an indulgence in bourgeois materialism.
What are you reading in the Sunday Salon today?
