Wild Read by a Wild Woman

The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith

Ex-vegan radical feminist anti-pornographer born-again farmer from the city etc. My boyfriend is getting sick of me referring to him as "the patriach" but that's just my geeky sense of humor. Lierre Keith has done a lot of very interesting research, which she turns to very provocative use. She calls veganism "part cult, part eating disorder." You go, girl!

Hard but Good

One of the books that I have been dipping into is James Herriot's "All Things Wise and Wonderful." It's another 25 cent book. Definitely not the latest thing. Herriot relates his experiences as veterinarian - pre-penicillin! - in the English countryside in the 1930s. What is striking is the richness of the lives of the people and animals he writes about. There is bitter cold, rain, and war, dirty barns and deep snow, but there is also the deeply satisfying beauty of open countryside, and the unpredictable revelations that come from living with and among other species. There is also the unrelenting labor that comes with making a living in agriculture. "Them were hard days," says a retired farmer wistfully, "hard but good." Herriot also describes unflinchingly the characters who have been ground down to dour rancor by too many hard and hopeless days. That is one of the reasons that so few people today are in agriculture. You don't have weekends, holidays, or guaranteed sick days. You don't have much time or energy for philosophizing or art. And yet your life is art, but it's not the kind of art that is clean and shiny and for sale. It's unpredictable, often quite grubby, and just as often blazingly glorious. It is not something that you can buy at Neiman-Marcus, ever. You find your art in your hard but good days, in the poetry of making.

Ua on Big Pharma

My daughter, Ua, who is 8, said something hilarious, and sad, last night as we were driving home. She said thoughtfully: "I don't know about these "doctors", they are making up all these drugs and nobody wants to buy them." I laughed. Undeterred, she continued with her business analysis: "Grandma and Grandpa use Tylenol and Advil, so I guess they are doing OK, but Symbacort and all these other ones that have ads on TV, nobody wants them. But they just keep making more and more ads."

The Power of Limits

"To hard-core nationalists and neoconservatives, the acceptance of limits suggests retrenchment or irreversible decline. In fact, the reverse is true. Acknowledging the limits of American power is a precondition for stanching the losses of recent decades and for preserving the hard-won gains of earlier generations going back to the founding of the Republic. To persist in pretending that the United States is omnipotent is to exacerbate the problems that we face. The longer Americans ignore the implications of dependency and the longer policy makers nurture the pretense that this country can organize the world to its liking, the more precipitous will be its slide when the bills finally come due.
A realistic appreciation of limits, on the other hand, creates opportunities to adjust policies and replenish resources - perhaps even to renew institutions. Constraints subject old verities to reconsideration, promote fresh thinking, and unleash creativity.

Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, 174.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone that has commented on my blog either here or to me in person! I really appreciate it.

As my daughter would say (and she wasn't even around when it started): "That was the best decade ever!"

Here's to the beautiful and tough world we live in, to grief and joy, and all the blessings that befall us everyday.

The Magic Mountain

I picked up Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" (1924) in a really good translation by the unimaginatively named John E. Woods amidst the bodice-rippers on the twenty-five cent table at the Na'alehu Farmer's Market the other day. I came across this line last night: All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal - then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, the the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to that individual's physical and organic life. To track that sentence down took great skill in hypotactic sentence construction, of course, but even more courage. Going there, to the place where we all measure ourselves against what the world secretly whispers to us and what we expect of ourselves, is to visit a place of great incoherence and vulnerability. Just to speak of such things sheds a little light and courage in the darkness where we all go fumbling to make a life. Thomas Mann's novels are vertiginous, often almost frightening reading experiences. Well, and to live in Germany through the first world war and its aftermath would give you a front-row seat on the catastrophic melt-down of a civilization.

Post global

We are, I'm thinking, moving into a post-global world.
It is, in some ways, a post-apocalyptic world.
The great global system crashed, and now we know that turning every place into every other place just isn't very smart. Because you lose too much of the particulars that add up to a reality worth living in and being passionate about.
We lost track of the basics - of how life and lives are sustained - because we made money the measure of all things. But we didn't measure everything in money, not the things like sanity and safety, breast-milk and soil fertility, coral reefs and fresh eggs. So we were making flawed calculations and flawed decisions, becoming more and more alienated.
We are going to need to learn how to assign value to particulars, without making these places, people, or things globally interchangeable. We are going to have to learn how to value what is most valuable, in some kind of common language like money. I'm not sure how this is going to happen but it will, because there is no other way.
And we could lead the way.