With apologies to Anne Lamott, here’s what I’ve taken to doing with novel drafts. My local feed store ran out of wood shavings, so I’ve been using shredded office paper inside the coop. I don’t know why I didn’t do this before? Maybe because in Livingston’s famous winds this can sometimes get messy, but the girls really really like the shredded paper. They’ve been making little nests with it. And this is one way to keep oneself from getting too precious about “the work.”
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My new CookBookSlut column is up over at Bookslut — I take on cooking and urban homesteading as one approach to the continuing implosion of the economy and the unabating high unemployment rate. I mean, if we’re not going to have jobs anymore, we’d better learn to grow our own and cook our own and take care of our own. (Rant alert, btw.) Here’s a list of the terrific books I discuss this month: A Householder’s Guide to the Universe: A Calendar of Basics for the Home and Beyond Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables This Organic…
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A long weekend, a big snowstorm, my sweetheart’s delightful cabin (available as a vacation rental!) with a woodstove and snow outside and two deer in the yard in the morning, which meant I had a lovely, unplugged stretch of time to catch up on some reading. If you’re looking for romantic books to read on the weekend, you may look into these passion novels. Somehow I’d missed Nicole Krauss these past couple of years, probably because I had been dismissive of the Brooklyn writers. They seemed like emo music to me, one of those things I’m too old to find charming,…
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Run, do not walk (well, in internet terms) to the London Review of Books and read Hilary Mantel’s Diary of being ill. It’s by turns hilarious and hallucinogenic and scary (and probably not for the squeamish) and brilliant. Especially her take on Virgina Woolf’s On Being Ill. (Although I feel a little bad for enjoying her ad feminiem attack on Woolf, since it wasn’t until I became chronically ill in grad school that Woolf’s work started to open up for me.) Nonetheless, I loved this essay.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the subject of fictional characters and “likeability.” Probably because I’m writing again, but also because it’s a topic dear to my heart, since so many readers found Anne, in Place Last Seen deeply unlikeable (go take a look at the Amazon reviews if you don’t believe me). Patrick and I used to laugh about it, because we both thought I’d pulled my punches and had made her sympathetic, or at least much more sympathetic than in her earlier incarnations. I wasn’t entirely surprised when she was greeted with a hail of criticism because…
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Look what the UPS man brought me yesterday — It’s always a surprise to see something you’ve written in an actual book, one that was produced by someone else, and has managed to independently make its way into a store. The first time I saw Place Last Seen in a store I had an inexplicable urge to scoop them all up and take them home, as though it was somehow dangerous for my wee book to be out there all by itself. And then of course, Patrick picked up a copy in each hand and started waving them overhead while…
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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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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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New CookBook Slut article is up. I get a little ranty this month about food politics. “The Revolution Is Here” One of the questions that has come up over and over both on my blog, on other food blogs, and when talking to people who aren’t into cooking or food is, why even bother? Why do we cook in the first place, when there are whole supermarkets devoted to replacing home-cooked meals with meals-in-a-box, or in-a-frozen-bag, or even precooked pot roasts direct from the bowels of Swift and Armour right to your supermarket meat case? Why bother when clearly all…
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In honor of Memorial Day, and because the lilacs just bloomed, a little Walt Whitman. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed 1 WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring; Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. 2 O powerful, western, fallen star! O shades of night! O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the…