Seattle was great fun — we went to the Cheese Festival at Pike’s Place Market, where we tasted many fine fine cheeses despite the crowds of corpulent tourists who could just as well have been at the free sample booths at Costco for all they cared about beautiful cheese — but who’s to complain? I tasted some lovely goats cheese camenbert, and any number of lovely bleus. I think my stepmother was a tiny bit shocked at what a cheese head I have actually become (that Wisconsin college education must be paying off). I kept saying things like “Point Reyes…
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I woke up this morning thinking about a comment that Leah, over at Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen posted on her website. Apparently, by blogging about domestic life, and in particular, blogging about cooking a nice dinner for her husband and young son on Valentine’s Day, she called down the Voice of the Disapproving Feminists upon her head. Apparently, choosing to love one’s family, and to think about the ways one cares for them, and to blog about this “does next to nothing to promote woman as a healthy, vitally aware, culturally meaningful being in the world.” Clearly, something about…
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Blogging has been slow here at LivingSmall because I just haven’t felt like I had anything interesting to say. It’s been a weird month — I’ve been a tiny bit depressed — I have to say, I sort of thought this grief thing would get easier at some point — like after I made it through the first anniversary, or got through the holidays — but it still just sucks. And trying to write this book isn’t helping — I mean, last January was SO horrible what with the crying on the couch with the dog in my lap, and…
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When last week’s article in the Boston Globe about food blogs came out and it listed Pim’s full name, I got to wondering. So I googled her and it turns out that Pim, of Chez Pim, and I not only work for the same very large computer company, but we’re in the same division, and even in the same building (which considering there are about 45 buildings on campus, is pretty interesting). Who knew? So I emailed her, and she IM’ed me this morning, and we made plans to go out next time I’m back in town. Small small world…
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Argh — I feel like the Bad Blogger. I’ve been so consumed by the Tsunami, by the subzero weather, by a rousing game of UpWords with Maryanne last night, and by getting my New Year’s resolutions organized ( a:sitting again in the mornings, b: writing writing writing the second and third sections of the memoir and c: reading Virginia Woolf’s novels in order [as opposed to the letters and diaries which I love]), that I haven’t gotten around to blogging. As for cooking — I made a bomber bolognese sauce with hot italian sausage and ground antelope the other day…
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Last night I was reading Tara Bray Smith’s memoir, West of Then, when I came across a familiar name in the text. It’s an unusual name, and I looked at it, and thought I wonder if that’s who I think it is? The age would be about right, and my friend also grew up in Hawaii in, shall we say, a sort of hippie household. So I called her up, and she said that yes, it was her, and that the whole thing has been really difficult for her. Smith used not only her first name in the book, but…
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There was a really dumb article over at Salon the other day about the heartbreak of being a midlist writer. The anonymous author is being duly spanked this morning in the letters for her whininess, and for the amounts of money she’s made over the past few years, which hardly seem to qualify her at all as midlist. Among the many, many things that annoyed me about this article, the one that hit closest to home is the idea that having a day job and being a “real” writer are mutually exclusive. I’ve seen this falsely romantic idea consign so…
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Yesterday I went to see the documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides. It was extraordinary. I’ve known about Goldsworthy’s work for a long time — when I was a bookseller, I loved Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature, but I’d never seen his work in motion. In the movie, there are these extraordinary images of his art floating out to sea, or a long sinuous chain of bright-green leaves working it’s way out of a pool and flowing downriver. Goldsworthy himself was also inspiring. I’ve been having a terrible time getting any work done these past weeks — my…
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I got an email from a reader of this blog this morning, taking me to task for being angry and unkind in The Anger Problem. Oh, and for writing beautifully about being angry and unkind. Well duh folks. I’m angry right now. I’m trying to work through it, but anger isn’t kind, anger isn’t pretty, and unfortunately Patrick’s death has, as I warned it probably would, significantly changed the tone of LivingSmall … so if you were one of those people stopping by for another nice dispatch about my happy life in my little Montana town, and what was growing…
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Crisis of Faith at LivingSmall Well, I’ve been having something of a crisis of faith about this whole blogging thing — not about blogging itself, but rather, about how on earth blogging about my own tiny little corner of the universe could in any way be a meaningful activity in the face of the global crisis into which our government is leading us. I mean really, we’re going to war and I’m blogging about cleaning? about floor machines? Compared to really insightful bloggers like Body and Soul, or Rittenhouse, or Blue Streak, or the Nielsen Haydens at Electrolite and Making…