White House Postpones Poetry Symposium Both MobyLives and Blog of a Bookslut have blogged this today, but what really struck me was the following statement from the White House: “While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” While I appreciate that the First Lady is at least interested in books, and in promoting literacy, one has to wonder where on earth she got the idea that the “literary” is not political. Please. Good for Sam Hamill,…
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Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as…
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Small Town Life Here’s what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He’s an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he’d made from leftover flooring samples … it’s perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from…
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Bookslut notes that The Lovely Bones story lives on, and points to this totally inane conversation on Poynter which seems to argue that David Mendelsohn’s review could only be motivated by “backlash” against the book’s commercial success, and that critics should go easy on first novels, particularly if they are heavily promoted. There are so many holes in this argument that I don’t actually know where to start, so I think I’ll just start by saying, as an author, that any review which surpasses the level of “liking/disliking” and addresses the artistic ambition and accomplishment of a work is so…
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Marion Cunningham, one of my food heros, has a great piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle about the demise of family cooking and mealtime. I don’t get it. My family life as a kid was pretty chaotic, but my mother always cooked, and taught both my brother and I to cook along with her. Most of my happy memories of my Mom’s house revolve around days we spent cooking, either experimenting with new dishes, or cooking things we all knew we liked. I’ll never forget the first curry I ever made, with instructions from a woman I remember only as…
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Snow! For the first time in forty-one days, we have snow. Piles of snow. A foot of snow. Our local ski area is, for the first time all winter reporting powder conditions! Whooo hooo … of course, I’m working today, which is why I’m here posting rather than up there skiing, but perhaps later this week I can play a little hooky.
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Bookslut pointed out this review of The Lovely Bones at the New York Review of Books. I just finished reading Alice Sebold’s first book, her memoir, Lucky. The most interesting aspect of the memoir was it’s narration of Sebold’s changing relationship to her own victimhood, and the ways that her attempts to deny and repress the emotional impact of being violently raped hobbled her emotional and artistic life for many years. I haven’t read The Lovely Bones yet myself, but I want to use Mendelsohn’s essay as a jumping-off place for a discussion (which I assume will be ongoing on…
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The Buffalo Stew went over well … it didn’t in the final analysis taste all that different from beef stew, but it was delicious. Bill and Patrick ate big plates full, and the dogs are happily scrapping over the short rib bones in the living room.
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Faith I went to Mass this morning for the first time in ages. The Cardinal Law/pedophilia scandal was the last straw for me for almost a year, and I’m still deeply ambivalent about my future as a Catholic. Somehow, the scope of the molestation, combined with the scope of the cover-up, sort of made it impossible for me, for a very long time, to ignore the clear message from the hierarchy that the Church is concerned first and foremost with it’s own power as an institution. This hit all my Big/Small buttons, and I just couldn’t go to Mass. Not…
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Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O’Brien. He’s one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn’t well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O’Brien’s long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It’s also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we’ve messed it up, and…