The weather here is still awful, cold, grey, damp and just dreary, but in my basement, spring has begun. This is the system I rigged up a couple of years ago. I kept seeing all these expensive propagation systems in catalogs that I couldn’t afford, so I built my own. I bought a bunch of ten dollar shop light fixtures at the hardware store, some light chain, some s-hooks and the most expensive part of it all was the grow light bulbs. I had the metal shelving — Patrick bought a whole bunch of shelving for his business just before…
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So, the MH and I have been watching this Imus mess unfold together, which has been interesting since my beloved MH has quite a mouth on him, and is the first to admit that he’s been known to shoot it off inappropriately. But even the MH agrees that Imus was an idiot, especially after yesterday’s press conference by the coach and the team. We’ve spent all winter watching high school basketball together, and those girls are only a year or two older than our girls team (who performed much better than the boys did this year). They’re just kids those…
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Via Bookslut this morning: “You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a ‘witch hunt.’ Then I scrolled down to the comments section.” I was raised by women who got left holding the bag, by a mother and a grandmother who got stuck trying to support children after having believed they’d never be responsible for the financial end of things. It wasn’t pretty (see below on serial financial disaster). I knew, in my bones, from the time I was about ten that if I wanted…
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People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…
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So Meg at megnut is throwing up her hands and isn’t going to worry anymore about what she eats while at Salon, Barry Glassner talks to Tracie McMillan about the religious and sociological roots of America’s strange and inconsistent anxiety about food. Meanwhile, at the LA Times, Alain Passard comes to America to cook with his fellow chef/gardener David Kinch at Manresa and notes that “If I didn’t have my gardens, I would no longer love to cook.” Seems to me the only thing to do is to join Meg, and simply start following Michael Pollan’s key points about food,…
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This weekend it’s time to start the tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers and zucchini in the basement under the grow lights. I’ll probably also put in spinach, arugula, and onions — the earliest of early spring crops — the things that can withstand some snow, a few more frosts. There are bulbs coming up, and the iris are poking through the debris of the winter … Because I’m underwater at work, here’s a link to a great article about building gardens in low-income neighborhoods — teaching people they can grow their own food in areas where there are not only no Farmer’s…
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The seductive thing about Theory is that once you get a meme like hyperreality in your head, you can spend days (weeks, years, academic careers) viewing various unrelated bits of news through the filter of that particular theory. For example, writing the headline … is it because I spent so many years in academia, or because I am submerged in the welter of culture that the phrase “creeps in” is automatically followed in my head by “on little cat feet.” I have to go look up that it’s Carl Sandburg, but it’s stuck there, just like so many other bits…
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Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 79. I went off to the University of Utah with a running start on Place Last Seen, a novel in which I wanted to explore, among other things, what happens when we come up against the undeniable reality of the physical world. What I encountered there was a department enamored of the (genuinely interesting) ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida et al, ideas which in Baudrillard’s case included the argument that reality has disappeared altogether, leaving us with only simulation and hyperreality. While I never did buy into the essentialist cast of these…
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Gee, when you make it easier for women to have kids without giving up all their independence, financial security, and career trajectory, they have more children. Here’s the money quote: Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates. How did what’s been called “the fertility paradox” come…
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I watched a lot of high school basketball this winter — the MH’s son plays varsity and while sadly, the boys’ team didn’t do so well, the girls won their division and they’re going to State. If you’d told me a year ago that one of the highlights of my winter would be high school basketball, I’d have scoffed like the hipster I thought I was — high school basketball? I didn’t even like high school sports when I was in high school. But the MH wanted to go watch his boy, and I figured if I can get through…