• books - dead people - domestic life - politics - Thinking - writing

    Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism:

    February 20, 2003 - By 

    Sylvia Plath, Baking and Feminism: There have been a number of articles on the web lately about Kate Moses new book Wintering, a fictional account of Sylvia Plath’s last months when she was writing Ariel. The piece that got me thinking was the essay Kate Moses wrote for the Guardian called “Baking with Sylvia”. In this essay, Moses talks about how for both herself and for Sylvia Plath, baking was a way of creating order out of chaos, and how as she found herself up against her deadline for the book, Moses also found herself baking on a near-daily basis,…

  • books - politics - Thinking

    White House Postpones Poetry Symposium

    January 30, 2003 - By 

    White House Postpones Poetry Symposium Both MobyLives and Blog of a Bookslut have blogged this today, but what really struck me was the following statement from the White House: “While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum.” While I appreciate that the First Lady is at least interested in books, and in promoting literacy, one has to wonder where on earth she got the idea that the “literary” is not political. Please. Good for Sam Hamill,…

  • domestic life - Making - politics

    Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins.

    January 28, 2003 - By 

    Sometimes all you can do is iron the napkins. I’ve discovered that of the blogs I read daily, the ones I really look forward to are the domestic blogs, particularly Julie, and Leah who Struggles in her Bungalow Kitchen. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about domesticity lately, and the unexpected pleasures I’ve discovered in domestic life. I’ve come late to this, having spent much of my twenties and thirties avoiding domestic entanglement. I had one of those childhoods that make one want to get out of the house as soon as…

  • food - politics - Thinking

    The Meat Problem

    January 7, 2003 - By 

    The Meat Problem The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve…