There’s no shortage of praise going around for Updike’s work in the wake of his death, and I’ve been hesitant to jump in because well, there’s that prohibition against speaking ill of the dead. For all I know, in his personal life he could have been an exemplar of many fine qualities — I wouldn’t know. He was certainly productive, writing three pages a day over a lifetime he produced more than 40 novels, collections of essays, and short stories. However, I found his work repellent. The pervasive and unrelenting misogyny is only a part of what I hated about…
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I sometimes go on jags where I’ll find a new writer and read three or four books in a row, and Sebastian Barry has been one of those writers for me this winter. Irish literature was my undergraduate specialization — I went to Dublin for a semester my senior year to study Joyce (and lucked out and also got to work with Eavan Boland before she became famous). So it’s been a delight these past couple of years to discover Anne Enright’s work, and now, Sebastian Barry. Barry is an interesting figure — his mother was the Irish actress Joan…
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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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Over at Grist, Tom Philpott has a fascinating proposal for how to use the stimulus money to stimulate the local food movement. Among his proposals: reinvest in local food infrastructures: slaughterhouses, meat lockers, and school kitchens cook real food in schools again — he proposes a Cook for America program for culinary school grads mired in debt. Based on the Teach for America program, it would get real food, cooked on site, back into our schools. The comments are also worth reading because Grist’s readers have some terrific ideas. I know that I would not be able to eat as…
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I’ve been listening to a lot of back episodes of The Splendid Table lately. My local NPR station doesn’t carry it, but I’ve been downloading episodes to my iPod and listening to them in the car or at the gym. Apparently, they had a year-long listener experiment in locavorism — they selected a dozen or so readers who tried to eat 80% local food for one year and blogged about it. So yesterday I had to do some errands and I was listening to the host check in with one of the locavore eaters, this is perhaps the second one…
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“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King “We are, and always will be, the United States of America. “It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to…
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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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… is stay home. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers, has a lovely piece over at Orion in which she quotes Gary Snyder: “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.” Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot about the economic situation — as much as I’d like to be economically independent here at LivingSmall, I’m still a good ten years away from that, and my Corporate Job depends on the world economy not collapsing entirely. And while I don’t want to see a world recession or depression, it also seems to me that perhaps we…
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I’m having a very hard time here at LivingSmall believing that Yes, We Can indeed do it this year, that we can vote a “transformational” leader into the White House. Despite the newspaper endorsements, despite Colin Powell’s strong endorsement, despite the 100,000 people gathered beneath the St. Louis arch — I’m fighting a nagging sense of despair. The racism on display at the McCain rallies is so … what? horrifying? frightening? appalling? The open calls for violence, the gleeful finger-pointing and sneering claims that everything is just fine in America, that our wars are just and our financial system is…