My new essay for Culinate was posted this morning. The Croquembouche that saved Christmas (faithful readers might remember): My inner Child — A Christmas to remember : Culinate.
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I have a personal theory about Jane Austen, which is that they should immediately stop teaching her to high school students, and perhaps even college students. Jane Austen can only properly be appreciated when you’re old enough to have really messed something up, when you know that sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach feeling that comes from a truly missed opportunity, when you understand that you can, indeed, really mess up your own life. Then Jane Austen’s books open up, and become magnificent. That she’s considered a rom-com writer makes me apoplectic. I’ve never been that obsessed with biographical detail, but I thought this article…
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Craig and I survived the PhD program at the University of Utah together — it was a terrible time for me, a program that wasn’t a good fit, and in general, an experience that taught me that academia wasn’t a good habitat for me. But Craig, Craig was maddening, a provacateur by nature, but he was also one of the truly kind people I met at Utah. His loss, which is chronicled here at the Salt Lake Tribune, is immense. He was an enormous talent, a poet just hitting his stride. There’s a lovely rememberence here by his friend Michael…
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FaceBook is a funny thing — I have deeply mixed feelings about it although I do like being in a sort of everyday casual contact with lots of old friends. On Saturday, when I was in between garden chores, I checked in to see what was happening and my old friend Sean O’Grady had posted Jim Houston’s obituary in the New York Times. I had no idea he’d been ill, and was just shocked that he’s gone. Jim was a tall, gentle man who you could count on to give you a true reading of your work. The very first…
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My dear friend Nina, she of the miracle-twins who restored our collective belief that things might work out in this world, has had her fifth baby this afternoon. The first boy! He’s a big beautiful healthy boy, and she’s just fine, and now I’m slightly crazed to be here in Montana while they’re all in LA. Yargh. And I have to say, as much as I love her four girls, my “fake children” as I like to call them — it’s a very girly house over there. I’m sort of psyched to have a boy to play with — I’m…
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We are flying the flag today for Barack Obama, for the restoration of the Constitution of the United States of America, for the revival of the American Dream. I hate crowds, but there’s part of me that now wishes I’d somehow managed to go to DC. What a day. What a miraculous day. I have a staff meeting that starts just when he’s supposed to take the oath and I think that I’m just going to have to call in late. I can watch the speech on TiVo, but I need to see, in real time, that this actually happens.…
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Part of my decision to get rid of most of my cable service grew out of my resolution these past few months to turn the TV off in the evening. I spend my working days plugged into two different computer screens, where I’m working, emailing, IMing and generally being bombarded by electronic communications. It’s insane. Last summer was the beginning of my escape from the TV — I spent most evenings outside, in the backyard, with a fire in the firepit reading a book by the light of the Coleman lantern hanging from the apple tree. It was bliss. Now…
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My lovely friends Chris and Debi Lorenc have gone off on an adventure worth reading about. Chris and I met in a workshop during the very first year of the Art of the Wild workshop at Squaw Valley. I was workshopping the very first chapter of Place Last Seen, and Chris was working on a luminous manuscript about the Santa Cruz mountains as an ancient spiritual site. He’s a beautiful writer, and he and his wife Debi are spiritual people in the deepest, sweetest sense — true seekers. I love them dearly and their dispatches make me kvell on a…
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Last week at work was just insane — hence the dearth of blogging — and I spent most of the weekend in recovery-mode. I was so knackered that I totally bailed on Halloween — went to bed at 8:30 that night. But I did manage to pull together a Day of the Dead altar this year. I was in Chicago for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, and it’s been one of those years. My friend Jim lost his beloved Mari (and Isabella lost her mother), David Foster Wallace’s suicide hit me hard, there were two deaths on my dog walking…
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It’s been a weird week — starting with the outpouring of false sentiment over the 9/11 anniversary. I’ve come to dread it, that upwelling of sentiment, the appropriation of tragedy by those only tangenitally affected, the politicians and blowhards pontificating about how we are all changed forever. I’m not talking about the real grief of those who lost loved ones, I’m talking about the obscene way that the day has been spun and abused and turned into a sentimental touchstone. I hate it. Luckily I don’t watch much television, so I missed most of the worst of it. September 13…