Word: vetch
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...bittersweet nightshade, heal-all, true forget-me-not, blue vervain, spring larkspur, spiderwort, monkeyflower, dog violet, common butterwort, spurred butterfly, crown vetch, henbit, spotted Joe-Pye weed, gray beardtongue, spreading dogbane, live forever, steeplebush, crazyweed, woolly locoweed, hairy vetch, lady's thumb, common speedwell, field milkwort, Lyon's turtlehead, ragged robin, calypso, common burdock, spotted knapweed, hairy willow herb, purple saxifrage, red baneberry, slender glasswort, toadshade, climbing bittersweet, birdsfoot trefoil, moth mullein, smooth false foxglove, showy rattlebox, prince's plume, agrimony, squawroot, mouse-ear hawkweed, rattlesnake weed, coltsfoot, tickseed sunflower, Jerusalem artichoke, sneezeweed, swollen bladderwort, clammy ground cherry, purslane, muskflower...
...Consider the weeds. The field's gone rank and knee-deep with bedstraw and Queen Anne's lace and vetch and God knows what other dense rural jungle life, patrolled by over flights of stinging deer flies and creased by deer paths. How do the hawks spot field mice and voles through such dense camouflage...
...James Leer, who as a fledgling writer excites his protective instincts. Grady and James share what Grady calls the "midnight disease" of the writer, a sense of their own strangeness that isolates them from the world. This dark side of writing is introduced in the person of Albert Vetch, a hack horror writer whose suicide Grady witnessed as a child. Vetch floats over the book as a symbol of the true artist, the estate to which Grade aspires: "He was the first real writer I knew, because he was the first to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking...
While the midnight disease is one of the novel's main preoccupations--it begins with the memory of Vetch, as if everything that follows is an elegy on the dark fate of the write--it is probably the least successful element of what is essentially a comic story. Chabon's strength is his witty, graceful, delicately absurd style, and his attempt to turn his comic creations into bearers of a secret curse does not come off. Grady remains a Rabelaisian "minotaur," too devoted to sex, marijuana and adventure ever to seem suicidal; even James is more quirky than disturbed...
...glance is enough to induce fidgeting in the average five-year old. Favorite Wildflowers Coloring Book, for instance, would be a pretty rotten gift if you were expecting a Barbie. On the first page, a table of contents tells colorists on what page they will find the Cow Vetch. Bonus: an Index of Scientific Names teaches the novice that the Cow Vetch is also called "Vicia cracca." Of course, every cool five-year-old already knows this...