There’s a lot of chatter this morning about David Simon winning the MacArthur Foundation Grant. While it’s true that he’s hardly a starving artist, and hence there’s griping about whether or not he needs the money, I think it’s a fascinating choice on their part. Simon, along with his many collaborators including novelists like Dennis Lehane, Richard Powers and George Pellacanos, has in some crucial way reinvented the novel as a multi-part, long form television show. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s the other way around, maybe he’s just plain old reinvented the long-form television show. All I can say…
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The sweetheart brought home his copy of The Nation yesterday, and said “Just read this, there’s a great sentence you’ll love.” Thank you Katha Pollitt: It’s often said that women’s writing is less valued because it takes up stereotypically feminine (i.e. narrower) subjects–family, children, love and becoming a woman (ho-hum, boring!)–while men’s books deal with rousing, Important Universal topics like war, politics, and whaling, and becoming a man.” It was the “and whaling” that had me chuckling all evening.
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So, last night I was feeling festive, and suggested to the Sweetie that we go out to celebrate. I put on girl clothes, and some makeup, and he cleaned up, and off we went. We live in a very small town. The options for dining out are very limited. There are two Chinese restaurants of the old-fashioned chop suey variety, a Mexican restaurant that isn’t bad, but is heavy on the shredded yellow cheese, a Bistro, an Italian restaurant owned by a very good friend (closed on Mondays), an inexplicably popular rib and chop house that I don’t like because…
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Here’s what was waiting in my inbox this morning: From Kim Carlson at Culinate: We’ve been sitting on this news for a little while, just to be sure it materialized: Your piece on croquembouchehas been selected to appear in the book Best Food Writing 2010. It’s a great piece, Charlotte, and this is much deserved. Congrats! You’ll get a free copy of the book when it’s released in mid-October (it’ll probably be sent to us, and we’ll forward it to you). Bravo! Kim I’m beyond thrilled! As I replied to Kim this morning, it wasn’t that long ago I was…
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I was halfway through my day yesterday before I realized it was Patrick’s birthday — I was putting a date on an invoice, actually, when I saw that it was the thirteenth. That felt like a real achievement, to have gotten to a place where the day was just a day, with a memory attached to it, but mostly good memories, and not a day that stabs one in the heart. I put a nice old photo of the two of us up on Facebook, since a number of my “friends” on FB are friends of his and I like…
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I’ve been watching the hooplah surrounding the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom with something of a jaundiced eye — it’s the Big Book of the fall, and Franzen’s getting similar reviews to the ones he got for The Corrections, that this is the book that explains what it’s like to live in the present moment, the book that expresses what it means to be an American, the one book that sums up everything important about our age. Those kinds of statements always get my hackles up. Really? The Great American Novel? I’d been sort of rolling my eyes at the whole thing, but…
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I’ve written before about the pleasures of buying meat by the share. This year, we bought a whole pig and a whole lamb from our local packer, Pioneer Meats in Big Timber, Montana. This is about half the pig (the other half is at the Sweetheart’s house) and all of the lamb. Plus cider from my trees in the backyard (although we made hard cider out of most of it) and some other random items. These are 4-H animals that Pioneer bought after the county fair — nice clean livestock that never lived in a CAFO. The thing is, we’re only…
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Here’s to a cleaner design, and to more regular posting. There’s probably going to be less cooking and gardening around here in the future (if only because after eight seasons in this house, I sort of feel like I’ve written just about everything one can about my garden, and about what I’m eating for dinner) and more writing about books, and politics and economics. One of the things I can’t seem to get out of my head is Shannon Hayes book, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. I wrote about it for BookSlut in last month’s column The…