After calling in for the Orwellian “Tele Town Hall” my GOP Senator, Steve Daines held last night, and after this morning’s news that the GOP Congress has approved Scott Pruitt for EPA, I’m filled with despair and heartbreak. And anger at every single upper middle class person I know, which is pretty much every one I know, who continues to blithely fly around on airplanes and drive SUVs and buy new stuff just because they feel like it. We, the generation of selfish overconsumers, who have ruined the world for everyone else. To all “my” kids — to the whole…
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I started LivingSmall in 2002 not as a lifestyle blog, but as a political statement. My original tagline was “Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and the Subversive Power of Living Small.” I moved to Montana not only because I could afford a house here, a house I managed this summer to pay off, but because I wanted to deliberately disconnect from the terrifying engine of consumer capitalism that I saw devouring the Bay Area (and pretty much the rest of America). This has always been a political project, and now, as we see the monster who is us — the big…
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKOvqXoWB7s I’ve been watching the Wisconsin protests pretty obsessively. I about half grew up in Wisconsin, between staying at my aunt’s house in Cambridge, living in Madison in middle school, and going to college at Beloit and I’ve been deeply encouraged by the good people of Wisconsin, rising up when it became clear that the corporate overlords just want to take everything. I’m working on a post on the other blog about this pernicious idea that people who work with their hands are not as intelligent as people who write or otherwise work in the knowledge industries (academia, writing, television,…
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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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So I went off to vote this morning — we vote at the fairgrounds here, and as always, the act of voting restored some of my confidence in the American people. There we all were — ranchers in their muck boots, my fellow Democratic activists, the guy who fixes boilers, and next to me, a very very very old woman (who said “God Bless You” to the election worker as she handed over her ballot to go through the counting machine). It was, to say the least, a diverse group. And yet, was there shouting? Was there tension? Were people…
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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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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…
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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…
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I’m in a deadline zone, but here are some interesting links from around the intertubes that I thought you all might like: Weeds, being what they are, have developed their own Roundup-Ready varietals. Guess that whole GMO thing was so well-thought-out, eh? I have to confess, I used to resort to a little casual Roundup use around the LivingSmall ranchero, but between the frogs, and the cancer cluster in which I grew up, and my amazing Bernzomatic Outdoor Torch, I now just burn weeds up instead of spraying them with the dreaded Atrazine. Fellow Ethicurean, Steph Larsen, has incurred my…