I found this short excerpt on NPR tonight. Slavery is still exists. Yeah, I thought, in symbolic way. But, author Benjamin Skinner writes in A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, that you can still buy people - yes, human beings for sale - today. Check it out at Author Struggles to Stay Removed from Slave Trade and read an excerpt from his book online.
I just finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It was a good, quick read. One of the quotes I liked from the book is found in the “Eat Food: Food Defined” section.
When you eat from the farmers’ market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet - because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the market. The CSA box does an even better job of forcing you out of your dietary rut because you’ll find things in your weekly allotment that you would never buy on your own. Whether it’s a rutabaga or an unfamiliar winter squash, the CSA box’s contents invariably send you to your cookbooks to figure out what in the world to do with them. Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers; for one thing, when you cook at home you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated diglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup.
We are almost at our 1 year anniversary of joining our CSA and it has made a a huge difference in how we eat and how we approach food in the grocery store. I actually look at produce based on what is in season and where it is grown now instead of buying on impulse based on what I feel like eating. A few weeks ago, we received pea shoots in our box. I had no idea what to do with them. I looked online and found a really easy recipe and now I look each week with anticipation in my box to see if more pea shoots are included. Tasty!
I recently started reading Auster’s work. It began with The Brooklyn Follies that my Oregonian friend lent me. I flipped through the books she lent me and picked one to read with the best opening. Auster’s first line got me hooked and I couldn’t put it down. My next Auster novel, The New York Trilogy was found at a used bookstore. Little did I know that it was really a collection of 3 short novels, experimental detective fiction pieces, that launched Auster’s budding career as an author.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not so, I also found out that he was appearing at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. On a whim, I purchased tickets for my husband and myself. Little did I know that the event tonight was not just a conversation with Paul Auster, but was really a screening of his new movie The Inner Life of Martin Frost followed by a conversation with the author/screenwriter/director himself. The night was thoroughly enjoyable. The movie was beautiful. It reminded me a bit of Lost in Translation. (My husband didn’t see that movie, so please comment if you have seen both movies.) The dialogue or narrative, which is essential to Auster’s written work, fades into the background of this visually stunning film. Afterwards, I caught myself smiling while listening to Auster speak. He comes across…hmmm…well, as my husband noted, not pretentious. When speaking about his writing process, Auster reflected back on some lines of the film saying that he has never witnessed the birth of an idea - one moment you have a blank and the next moment it is there.
My wanderings into Auster’s work have peaked my interest to read more of his novels - and to go back and re-read the previous ones more closely, with a pen in hand. I foresee another trip the used bookstore soon. I recommend The Inner Life of Martin Frost to viewers looking for a film that you watch in silence, with hot mugs of tea or glasses of dark red wine. It is a movie to be savored, not rushed.
This is for my Minnesota friend - an excellent storyteller and who also happens to be reading Auster’s The New York Trilogy.
Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them. But this is a difficult point, and I can’t be sure of any of it.
These few lines made me stop reading and think. I don’t have something profound, concise and clever to write as a response to it yet, but still wanted to share it nonetheless. Enjoy.
‘Well done, Lucy Snowe!’ cried I to myself; ‘you have come in for a pretty lecture - brought on yourself a “rude savon,” and all through your wicked fondness for worldly vanities! Who would have thought it? You deemed yourself a melancholy sober-sides enough! Miss Fanshawe there regards you as a second Diogenes. M. de Bassompierre, the other day, politely turned the conversation when it ran on the wild gifts of the actress Vashti, because, as he kindly said, “Miss Snowe looked uncomfortable.” Dr John Bretton knows you only as “quiet Lucy” - “a creature inoffensive as a shadow;” he has said, and you have heard him say it: “Lucy’s disadvantages spring from over-gravity in tastes and manner - want of colour in character and costume.” Such are your own and your friends’ impressions; and behold! there starts up a little man, differing diametrically from all these, roundly charging you with being too airy and cheery - too volatile and versatile - too flowery and coloury. This harsh little man - this pitiless censor - gathers up all your poor scattered sins of vanity, your luckless chiffon of rose-colour, your small fringe of a wreath, your small scrap of ribbon, your silly bit of lace, and calls you to account for the lot, and for each item. You are well habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life’s sunshine: it is a new thing to see one testily lifting his hand to screen his eyes, because you tease him with an obtrusive ray.’
I have been attempting to read Villette for quite a while. Finally, due to some recent illness, I have finally turned my attention fully to Villette and am finally making some headway. While reading yesterday, I came across this quotation at the end of Chapter 28’s “The Watchguard” and could not help but smile. First of all, just check out the punctuation of this paragraph! Can you imagine one writing like this today? Next, I love the way the heroine has these internal conversations or rather, reflections, in isolation at the end of the chapter. It is a kind of cliff note for the reader who hasn’t been paying the closest of attention in the chapter. It is Bronte’s time to really search Lucy’s thoughts and inner monologue to bring the reader closer to this heroine’s psyche. Last, I appreciate the commentary that each individual in a person’s life has a lens in which to view that person. Your mom may see you in one way, your co-worker another, your neighbor another, etc. Yet, if you threw down all of those perceptions done on the floor together, you would see that the perceptions contradict one another, reflecting that one person cannot be encapsulated in one description as we are like water, constantly changing, moving with the ebb and flow of life.