LivingSmall

People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a […]

So, four days into my Arizona sojourn, I’ve come down with a massive chest cold. It might be the flu. It’s not hot here, but it’s not really cold enough to have built a fire  during the day or to be wearing a big old fleece jacket I found lying around the house. I’m freezing. […]

I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk in […]

It’s happened again — the world has come around and has begun to tilt back toward the sun again — and our northern world is turning light again. When I moved up here my California friends were horrified by the prospect of cold, but having survived childhood and college in Wisconsin, the coldest place on […]

Ten thousand years ago, when I was in my 20s, I spent a couple of months in Taiwan. My college roommate had married a Chinese guy and was clearly going to stay there, and I was in between jobs, and I wanted to see what her life was going to be like, so off […]

So Meg at megnut is throwing up her hands and isn’t going to worry anymore about what she eats while at Salon, Barry Glassner talks to Tracie McMillan about the religious and sociological roots of America’s strange and inconsistent anxiety about food.
Meanwhile, at the LA Times, Alain Passard comes to America to cook with his […]

This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris […]

On the eve of being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Patti Smith, as always, asks all the really interesting questions:
Should an artist working within the revolutionary landscape of rock accept laurels from an institution? Should laurels be offered? Am I a worthy recipient? I have wrestled with these questions and […]

Winter is on the wane — it was in the mid-fifties today, blue skies, sunshine, birds singing and I dug the quackgrass out of an entire bed at the front of the house.
Three years of serious spring composting and my dirt is lovely — even after being trampled hard last summer during construction. Stick a […]

The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory.
For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because […]