22 posts tagged “reading”

i've been thinking about michael pollan's work.  he's totally right.  i believe him.  i read the omnivore's dilemma last summer, in defense of food this summer, his stuff in the NYT. 

it makes me angry.  heard him on fresh air yesterday talking about how cooking has become a spectator sport.  i don't have cable so i really can't participate in that way.  i prefer to learn to cook.  i've been cooking a lot this summer.  sometimes i enjoy it, sometimes i don't.  i think it's important though.  he said someone told him that cooking your own food is going to be gone in 2 generations or something like that.  going to be as foreign as killing and prepping your own chicken is to us today.  i think that is sad.  it also makes me think about what else we don't do anymore. 

recently christie and i were talking about the crafts that our mothers and grandmothers did and how we struggle to remember how to do them and that it is important to do them.  cooking is the same thing.  and you know what?  it's also women's work.  michael pollan in his eater's manifesto brings up mom as cook and how your grandmother used to cook a whole bunch of times.  but he doesn't really problematize gender in that context.  women have been the ones to cook.  and what is happening is that women are working and are too tired to cook now.  and that is one thing that he doesn't really acknowledge in the context of all these bigger food trends--that much of these changes are gendered.  maybe it doesn't matter.  and maybe it really doesn't matter to him.  but teaching your kids to cook is important.  and it's usually mom who does that cooking and teaching and she usually just teaches it to her daughters.  ummmmm.....

reading these two books.  Both were excellent.  Very different from each other.  Highly recommended.  Apparently Kate Winslet is in the movie adaptation of each, but that's not why they were good.  Go read.

I finished Blue Angel.  It was good.  Very cynical.  The ending was a little bit of a let down for me because you never get the view from the girl.  She really gets her prof good.  But you never get her pov about it. 

And the Omnivore's Dilemma is going well so far.  I'm only about 30 pages into it and already depressed.  Apparently, everything we eat has corn in it.  I don't have anything against corn per se, but it would be good to know when we're eating it and when we're not.  Don't you think?  It's in everything!

I'm eating a BANANA!  I'm pretty sure that it doesn't have any corn in it!  But who knows!?

It's been a strange day.  Nothing really weird has happened.  It's just a little off.

I heard People Are Strange on the radio today and I realized how much I missed it.

Took Moonpie to the dr this morning for his 2 month well-check.  He's 14 pounds!!!  He's 23 inches.  He's huge.  Doing great.  They gave him a round of shots though, that's not so great.  After, we couldn't go home right away because people were working at the house and so we walked around Barnes and Noble for an hour or so.  I finally bought The Omnivore's Dilemma, which my good friend M had recommended to me months ago.  I read 8 pages so far.  So far, so good.  I'm already impressed and depressed by what he's saying. 

And Moonpie is not himself exactly because he got those shots.  He was really good at the pediatrician though.  Good baby.  I think that his little thighs are hurting him now and so it makes him cranky.  He's sleeping a lot, albeit restlessly, and not eating as much this afternoon.  The not eating part messes up my boobs.  Hard to stay balanced.

Both of my parents have called today.  I talked to my mom but my dad just left a message because I didn't have the phone by me and Moonpie was screaming in my face. 

M called today but, again, he was screaming and I didn't get to answer.  I want to call her back now but I don't dare take the chance since I think he's going to wake up again any minute.  I do want to talk with her though.  I miss her.

I started reading a co-authored paper that I'm trying to contribute to with my friends/colleagues A and C.  I'm on page 7 I think.  It's good so far.  I'm trying to be helpful.  They've done the real work so far.  I'm taking a break because Moonpie keeps making big wild animal noises in his sleep and I keep having to get up and down to check on him and so I'm not concentrating well on what I'm reading.  So I gave up for the minute.  Gotta go get Monkey from daycare soon anyway.  I should be able to power through tomorrow and finish it up.

I started reading Blue Angel the other night.  I'm about 30 pages into it.  It's good so far.  The mister read it a while back and suggested it to me.  Said I would like it.  It's about academics in a small VT college.  Very cynical.  I think I know why he liked it so much.  

For the past three or four days or so it's been overcast and sticky out.  Wonderful weather.  Reminds me of Florida.  And this afternoon it's threatening to rain a bit.  It's been doing that a lot...threatening.  I'm ready for a downpour.  That would be a great end to this off-kilter day.

I don't know if anyone else noticed this article on the casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago.  I had no idea.  I thought it was really freaky.  When the Israelies are concerned that American Jews are getting too cheeky with their leaders, we should probably be concerned too.  Maybe it only interested me so much because I live in Las Vegas.  And because the article references an incident that Adelson had with one of our most famous/popular local columnists.  Anyway, half way through I almost stopped reading it because I felt like it was just so dark.  Then I kept reading because I thought I should go ahead and face the darkness.  Work through it.

It was a similar feeling to how I felt when I read this article about the political gadfly asshole, Roger Stone.  Again, it is totally freaky how dark this guy is and how twisted his existence is.  The man has Richard Nixon's face tattooed on his upper back.  Does that sound like a reasonable person to you?  And the fact that he's all wrapped up with our messed up politicians is very disturbing. 

Who are these men?  Why are they so scary?  Why do they have such power?  Why are they important enough to merit profiles in the New Yorker?

And I just can't bring myself to read Sy Hersch's most recent article about how Bush et al. are gearing up for an invasion of Iran. 

I also came across this today on the Huffington Post and actually had to double and triple take to be sure that it was a joke.  (Even though he did, in fact, make yet another comment about killing Iranians.  Here's the video.)  This guy really scares me too.   He's totally dead behind the eyes.  Very disturbing. 

Fortunately, I also read this article recently by one of my fav medical writers for the New Yorker, Atul Gawande.  This one is about the science of itching.  Fascinating.  (That's me trying to end on a positive note.)

Finished reading the latest Sedaris book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  The mister got it for me as a surprise about a month ago.  Good and funny as usual.  I had read several of the essays before (I guess in the New Yorker).  Still, he makes me laugh out loud.

BTW, I finished Spook by Mary Roach.  Awesome.  She is so good.  And I found out that she will be here in Las Vegas doing a signing at a Border's this week.  I'd love to go but have a feeling that it's unlikely.

Her new book just came out, Bonk  .  This one is about sex so that should be fun.  I don't have it yet but it's on my list of things to get.

Yes, that means that she' got three books out: Stiff, Spook, and Bonk.  How can you beat that?  See why I like her so much?

Just finished The Courage to Survive by Dennis Kucinich (yep, that Kucinich).  It was good.  Easy to read.  Moved quickly.  Optimistic and interesting.

So you might have figured out by now that I tend to read the New Yorker every week.  It's the one thing that comes in the mail that I pretty much read cover to cover.  I also get The Nation, Wondertime, Parenting, and Yoga Journal but I don't read them nearly as thoroughly or with such dedication.

So the latest issue of the New Yorker was the Money Issue.  When it arrived I was like, Oh great, that should be fun.  It's the same way that I generally feel about the Style Issue every year when that happens.  Not too excited.  Turns out that I read pretty much everything in there over the weekend and I think that it was one of the most coherent issues of the magazine that they have put together recently.  The articles really flowed from one to another even though they were very varied and they were totally interesting.  I even liked the story by Jeffrey Eugenides, Great Experiment, and I rarely enjoy the fiction in this magazine. 

I also figured out that I really don't understand anything about money.  This is not really a new thing, but reading all of these financially informed articles kind of slammed it home (or maybe it is really those articles combined with doing our taxes over the past couple of weeks).  For example, there is a whole article in there about the first Black CEO of a Wall Street Firm, Merrill Lynch.  The point of the article is supposed to be a profile of this man and how he rose through the ranks and made all these impressive changes in the company and then how he was vilified when ML lost a bunch of money (and cred I guess) in the current mortgage lending crisis.  Or at least I think that was the point of the article. 

What I kept thinking about however, was not, Wow, this guy is amazing, or Wow, this guy is a jerk, or Wow, anything to do with this guy's success story.  Instead, all I kept thinking was what do these people actually do?  I don't understand buying and selling loans and securities, moving money around, moving debt around, I mean, I just don't get it. 

This is how lost I am: let's say you work for ML...how do you know what to do when you get to the office in the morning?  What do you do all day?  I don't understand what any of those kinds of jobs actually entail.  At all!

And this may be why I liked the Eugenides story.  The main character in the story doesn't get it either.  Of course, he gets involved in an embezzlement scheme, which is way beyond anything I could imagine doing, but still!

I've got a lot to learn.