Snow! For the first time in forty-one days, we have snow. Piles of snow. A foot of snow. Our local ski area is, for the first time all winter reporting powder conditions! Whooo hooo … of course, I’m working today, which is why I’m here posting rather than up there skiing, but perhaps later this week I can play a little hooky.
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Bookslut pointed out this review of The Lovely Bones at the New York Review of Books. I just finished reading Alice Sebold’s first book, her memoir, Lucky. The most interesting aspect of the memoir was it’s narration of Sebold’s changing relationship to her own victimhood, and the ways that her attempts to deny and repress the emotional impact of being violently raped hobbled her emotional and artistic life for many years. I haven’t read The Lovely Bones yet myself, but I want to use Mendelsohn’s essay as a jumping-off place for a discussion (which I assume will be ongoing on…
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The Buffalo Stew went over well … it didn’t in the final analysis taste all that different from beef stew, but it was delicious. Bill and Patrick ate big plates full, and the dogs are happily scrapping over the short rib bones in the living room.
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Faith I went to Mass this morning for the first time in ages. The Cardinal Law/pedophilia scandal was the last straw for me for almost a year, and I’m still deeply ambivalent about my future as a Catholic. Somehow, the scope of the molestation, combined with the scope of the cover-up, sort of made it impossible for me, for a very long time, to ignore the clear message from the hierarchy that the Church is concerned first and foremost with it’s own power as an institution. This hit all my Big/Small buttons, and I just couldn’t go to Mass. Not…
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Book Alert For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, by Dan O’Brien. He’s one of those writers who other writers rave about, but who isn’t well known to the general public, but he should be. This is a terrific book about O’Brien’s long struggle to keep his ranch afloat, and the huge leap of faith he took in the early nineties when he converted the ranch from cattle to buffalo. It’s also about the ecosystem of the great plains, and how we’ve messed it up, and…
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Vegetable Experiment of the Day — Braised Endive One reason I’m experimenting with vegetables is that I’m planning my garden for next summer, and I don’t want to wind up with a freezer full of fine organic veggies that I don’t like to eat. Also, I’ve been living the past couple of years with my brother, a guy who won’t eat “wet leaves,” so now that we’re no longer roommates, I’ve been going to town with wet leaves. About a week ago, I bought some endive. At least I think it’s endive. It’s a variety that isn’t as curly as…
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Cauliflower and Carrot Gratin Who would have thunk it? This was outrageously delicious — and to think, I’d been about to write it off as a disaster. Here’s the deal, I’m trying to widen my veggie repetoire, and I seemed to remember an entry early in the Julie/Julia Project about cauliflower gratin, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. I added carrots to mine because, well, it was a small cauliflower and it was so white … I like a little color in my food. Here’s what I did: cut the cauliflower into florets and cut one big carrot…
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Since Jeanne d’Arc was nice enough to post my response to her blog on the Vatican’s rush to cannonize Mother Teresa, and since I did say in the header that this blog would be partially about faith, you may want to look at The Stigmata Incident, a piece I wrote for the Salt Lake Acting company a couple of years ago.
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Bookslut has a surprising conversation about the independent bookstore issue. I must say, I agree about the clique-ishness of too many independent bookstores. If they want to survive, they need to stop vibing people
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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…