Monday Miscellany November 2, 2009

I’m already mourning the passing of the Season of Wearing Cute Dresses in a pretty hardcore way. Yuck. Forgive that I already posted a picture of this outfit (which I have christened “You’d Never Guess She’s a Man-Hating Anarcho-Feminist,”), but I did a lot of tailoring to it to make it fit (there was a LOT more lace) and I’m pretty much in love with it. Those tights have little twee hearts on them!

Lots happening out there in the world, plus I am over my horrid mood of last week! Let us celebrate with links:

My BFFF (extra F for how Fucking much I love him) Than Luu is doing some ridiculous food blogging on his travels around the world with his band Black Gold (Oh look! Another opportunity to mention the music video I was in, how handy!). Check it out!

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Speaking of bands, while I was engaged in a horrible Halloween depression spiral, my sweetheart was in Louisville mixing THIS. Wow.
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Profanity-laced hilarity courtesy of McSweeney’s.

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The new Bloodroot calendar is out! In the two years since Bloodroot published the gorgeous cookbook set that I was honored to have had a hand in creating, they have been publishing a calendar with new recipes. The calendar is super gorgeous and filled with 99% vegan recipes straight out of my mentor Selma’s head–snap it up!

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I’m happy one of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Safran Foer, Ames, and Letham) wrote a book about why you should be vegan or whatevs, and I’m happy that famous blonde actresses are writing vegan cookbooks, all of that is well and good. But these books are written for non-vegans—why people have to keep pointing them out to me I have no idea.

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Speaking of another of the Bklyn Jonathans, Ames wrote that new show Bored to Death and though I haven’t seen it I completely loved & agreed with Nancy Franklin’s recent New Yorker review (I basically agree with everything Nancy Franklin has ever said though.). Particularly this part:

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia.

My god, YES. I suffered through a Jonathan Ames audiobook (which I refuse to Google to figure out the title, as I am unwilling to spend one more second of my life on Jonathan Ames) once, and every second was pure torture.

On the other hand, everyone says this new series is good. Oh, the pain.

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And a few work-related miscellanies:

Heya Baltimorites (?)! Check out Brunie’s Bakery, a cute small-batch vegan bakery in your fair city. Recently their head baker emailed me to say that she was making the wedding cake for the woman who ordered the aforementioned wedding truffles from last week and she just sampled and adored a few truffles. How nice is that? I love it when things like that happen. Vegans can be a crazy bunch, but overall we are such decent, sweet, friendly people, no?

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(All that follows is NSFW!)

So, this erotic chocolate shop in Belgium wants to sell ye olde vulvaz, and I hope we can make it happen. How hilarious does it look? My favorite product so far is the “Candy Gay String.” And while I find these deeply, deeply horrifying….I must say they are pretty well done! And they remind me all over again to be annoyed that no one (Beloved TCHO! Are you listening?) makes high-quality vegan (coco milk!!!) milk chocolate and white chocolate. Oh, and I have this mold! I once made it for my sweetheart filled with peppermint patty filling and presented it to him right before he left on a tour. It was too much sugar (a solid inch or so of peppermint patty filling, I’m not sure quite what I was thinking) and he couldn’t eat it in front of anyone and I fear a lot of it went to waste. But it was adorable!

“Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman October 10, 2009

More than putting another man on the moon,
more than a New Year’s resolution of yogurt and yoga,
we need the opportunity to dance
with really exquisite strangers. A slow dance
between the couch and dining room table, at the end
of the party, while the person we love has gone
to bring the car around
because it’s begun to rain and would break their heart
if any part of us got wet. A slow dance
to bring the evening home, to knock it out of the park. Two people
rocking back and forth like a buoy. Nothing extravagant.
A little music. An empty bottle of whiskey.
It’s a little like cheating. Your head resting
on his shoulder, your breath moving up his neck.
Your hands along her spine. Her hips
unfolding like a cotton napkin
and you begin to think about how all the stars in the sky
are dead. The my body
is talking to your body slow dance. The Unchained Melody,
Stairway to Heaven, power-chord slow dance. All my life
I’ve made mistakes. Small
and cruel. I made my plans.
I never arrived. I ate my food. I drank my wine.
The slow dance doesn’t care. It’s all kindness like children
before they turn four. Like being held in the arms
of my brother. The slow dance of siblings.
Two men in the middle of the room. When I dance with him,
one of my great loves, he is absolutely human,
and when he turns to dip me
or I step on his foot because we are both leading,
I know that one of us will die first and the other will suffer.
The slow dance of what’s to come
and the slow dance of insomnia
pouring across the floor like bath water.
When the woman I’m sleeping with
stands naked in the bathroom,
brushing her teeth, the slow dance of ritual is being spit
into the sink. There is no one to save us
because there is no need to be saved.
I’ve hurt you. I’ve loved you. I’ve mowed
the front yard. When the stranger wearing a sheer white dress
covered in a million beads
comes toward me like an over-sexed chandelier suddenly come to life,
I take her hand in mine. I spin her out
and bring her in. This is the almond grove
in the dark slow dance.
It is what we should be doing right now. Scrapping
for joy. The haiku and honey. The orange and orangutan slow dance.

in which I officially admit to liking something a dude did September 24, 2009

Happy fall, darlings!

I happen to hate fall, but I take it that apart from me (and blogreader Brittany—to me she is BFF Brittany, but you probably know her as blogreader Brittany) fall is universally beloved, so have at it. It’s pretty, I’ll give you that. And it seems that some people actually like dead things littering every inch of the earth that you have to painstakingly capture and discard, so I hope those weirdos are really living it up (and when you’re done living it up at your place, please feel free to come over to mine and do some raking, for I am already behind).

I’ve been busy cooking and chocolatizing and preparing to have a few friends over this weekend for fried green tomatoes (East Coast peeps: go to any farmer tomorrow and I guarantee they will give you all the green tomatoes you can haul away—go!)  then the Last Supper art show thingie on Saturday–busy week! If you’re in the Brooklyn area be sure to come check it out. I am totally tickled that I am officially an “artist” (because everyone knows that what makes you an artist is being called one online).

I had a bunch of tryouts for the poem I’d be writing in chocolate for the Last Supper event, and finally settled on a Susan Griffin number called “Bread.” It’s pretty, and it fits on a large sheet pan that will fit in the back of my car, which is apparently what I look for in poetry these days. You might remember Susan Griffin as the author of the seminal ecofeminist text Woman and Nature—I had no idea she was a poet until I stumbled across a book of her collected poetry at my friendly local bookshop (discounted to $6 because of a stain on the spine I am resolutely telling myself has to be coffee).

One of the runners-up for the choco poem was pretty much anything by Matthew Dickman, my current poet crush. In the end I had to rule anything of his out because I couldn’t find a suitable poem that was the requisite sheet-tray length, but I’ve been mightily enjoying his one and only book, All-American Poem.

My god, what a giantly sweet mass of cotton candy of a treat this little collection is. You can read it like a novel and it’s just as tasty as if you read each poem slow like an English major, coaxing out all the allusions and flourishes. And it’s magnificently, generously sexy too—as sexy as the author photo on the back, which is saying a lot.

I’ve been walking around for about a week now whispering Matthew Dickman wonderfulness, feeling the special deep-down happiness that only taut lines strung together in surprising and ultra-clever ways can create. My sweetheart, a dude who bore witness to me spending the last two years of college only reading women poets and who didn’t bat an eye when I literally segregated our books by gender and put all the feminist books and poetry in a separate room so they could “breathe,” has been amused by the whole thing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you liked a poem by a guy before,” he said, all bemusedly and shit, the other day. He’s probably right. No one says they like Shakespeare (verily though, I do, and I have the iPhone app that proves it) or T.S. Eliot (do I dare disturb the universe? In truth, though I very much like Eliot, my thoughts about him are mostly in the “I wonder what Virgina Woolf really thought of him?” vein. In truth, I very much wonder what Virginia would think or did think about a great many things in a week…is this weird? To wonder what Woolf would make of Facebook? I would so like to know.) When Jacob’s not home and I can’t sleep I read Rimbaud in French out loud to my cats…and that’s about it. A little Donald Hall here, a dash of Mark Strand there (you know: ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.’)  that one W. S. Merwin book about Hawai’i—done with dudes.

Dudes are usually such fantastically boring poets, you know? But the ladies: my Adrienne Rich first and foremost, then that sad old Plath who will never get out of my head because she does not do you do not do any more black shoe & I’ll probably be mumbling about eating men like air on my deathbed, and Denise Levertov and Joy Harjo, Haunani-Kay Trask and of course the doomed Sexton, my BFFFF Dorothy Parker and her polar opposite,  Emily Dickinson. Audre Lorde Audre Lorde Audre Lorde. Marge Piercy and Grace Paley and yeah, now and then, maybe just a little Katha Pollitt too. Katherine Mansfield and Anais Nin. Be still my heart, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, Christina Rosetti and Nikki Giovanni and Phyllis Wheatley and even good old Sappho, sure. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton and Carolyn Forche and Louise Gluck–even Erica Jong, in high school, under the covers, secretly.

Once you start only reading novels and poetry by women, it’s so easy never to stop, to just forget that whole fucked-up boy world exists. I heard this fucking doucher James Ellroy on NPR the other day, and it reminded me all over again why dudes like him have ruined novels by men for me–seriously!

But, as my 73-year-old BFF Selma is fond of pointing out: men these days are different. Softer. Matthew Dickman is one of them, and, rightfully, his poetry reminds me of that great lesson we’ve been letting poetry teach us forever: how amazing it is to be alive, right now, here.

This book in my hands, these words in my head.

thirteen things I learned from a Temple Grandin book June 9, 2009

Animal rights people (and I firmly plant myself in that camp) generally are not fans of Temple Grandin.

Here are some bulleted points about her, courtesy of Wikipedia and her own site, just so you know who we’re talking about and what she’s all about (also, here is a good bio that discusses the connection she feels between her autism and life’s work of creating humane deaths for animals.):

• “Dr. Temple Grandin is a designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.”
• “I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we’ve got to do it right. We’ve got to give those animals a decent life and we’ve got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.”
• “Grandin is considered a philosophical leader of both the animal welfare and autism advocacy movements. Both movements commonly cite her work regarding animal welfare, neurology, and philosophy. She knows all too well the anxiety of feeling threatened by everything in her surroundings, and of being dismissed and feared, which motivates her in her quest to promote humane livestock handling processes. … In 2004 she won a “Proggy” award, in the “visionary” category, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” (W.O.W. Peta now gives out awards to people who help kill animals!)
• “Some philosophers think animals are not conscious because they do not have language. I am autistic and I think in pictures. If the philosophers are correct, I would have to conclude that I am not conscious…Consciousness developed in the phylogenetically old parts of the brain so it is likely that even simple animals [??] have a simple consciousness. Conscious thinking in mammals and birds enable flexible problem solving behavior in a novel environment. Mammals and birds are also socially conscious. Consciousness may be a matter of degree as brain complexity increases.”

So there we go.

I’m an abolitionist, and don’t see much space for people rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and all that, so her work didn’t exactly float my boat. But Selma (who recommended the book to me) and I had a good talk about it, and in the end we came to the same conclusion: the whole world is not going to become vegetarian in our lifetimes, and therefore, though we don’t want to admit it, her work is incredibly useful. In truth, Temple Grandin has done to alleviate animal cruelty than I have done, for sure. But (this is the lesson of Temple Grandin + animal rights: there is always a “but”): I can’t imagine what she could have accomplished if she shifted her views just a bit to the vegan side of things, and that thought depresses the hell out of me. She’s clearly a powerhouse, and I wish she was more on my side.

All this is fairly tangential to the book I just finished, though: Animals Make Us Human. As Amazon describes it, “Picking up where Animals in Translation left off, Grandin provides pet owners, farmers, livestock managers, and zoo keepers with concrete suggestions for improving the lives of the animals in their care.”

Hrumph, “pet owners.” Someday I guess we should talk about that on the blog, though Dustin’s interview touched on it a little. I try to provide my cats with some semblance of a real cat life, and I feel like the book gave me more tools to do so. In truth, I deeply liked the book, and it taught me a lot. However, I gave the chapters on cows, pigs, chickens, and zoos only the barest skim because I didn’t want them to make me angry. How wonderful to be an adult and not to feel pressure to read an entire book!

Here are just a few of the many interesting points she makes, which I will copy here in the hopes of “reaching across the aisle” and admitting that even those who are not as awesomely hardcore as me about animal rights still make valid and fascinating points:

• Yet another reminder of why I don’t have a dog, p. 32: “The reason I think the most natural existence for a dog is a fence-free, mostly outdoor life with a human owner [ugg] is that this is probably the way dogs lived with people a hundred thousand years ago when wolves first evolved into dogs…”
• p. 33: “What dogs probably need isn’t a substitute pack leader but a substitute parent. I say that because genetically dogs are juvenile wolves, and young wolves live with their parents and siblings.”
• p. 41: Passage about why dogs need other dogs. Reminder #48577367 of why I don’t have a dog.
• p. 41: “This is a huge change in the lives of dogs from just twenty or thirty years ago: dogs aren’t free anymore. I don’t think anyone knows what the effect has been. I believe that if you did a…study of dog-directed aggression, you would find there’s more of it today than there was when I grew up….”
• P. 42: “It’s almost as if dogs have become captive animals instead of companion animals, and the house or fenced yard has become like a really fancy zoo enclosure. So, when you buy a dog today, you have to think about how to make up for the fact that he’s not going to live the life that comes naturally to him.”
• p. 55: She talks about full-body restraint (“putting an animal inside a box with its head sticking out of a hole in the front, and filling the box with oats so that the animal’s entire body up to the neck is encased in grain and it can’t move.”), and how it makes dogs, cows, and many other animals (including herself) much calmer—one of the things she is famous for is inventing a “squeeze-box” she can go into when she is stressed out. Pretty fascinating stuff. I’d like a squeeze box in my kitchen please!
• On to cats: p. 73: “Domestic cats aren’t totally domesticated the way dogs and horses are…[one reason] people see cats as being more solitary than they are is that cats have less in common with people as a species than either dogs or wolves do, regardless of domestication…”
• Adopt a black cat! p. 77: “Sarah Hartwell, a shelter worker in England, calls black cats “laid-back blacks’ and tortoiseshell cats ‘naughty torties.’ That description is supported by a handful of studies showing a relationship between fur color and behavior….Black cats are more social overall, whether it’s with other cats or with humans.” (In my house this is completely untrue—my black cat Sula is completely antisocial, except with Jacob & I, and is the least laid-back cat I’ve ever seen. Our tortie, Cleo, is all sweetness and light…but also fairly anti-social most times.) There is another reason you should adopt a black cat and dog, too: Black Dog Syndrome. (I feel weird quoting passages where she relies on animal studies that were most likely done in laboratories under horrible conditions that my ethical beliefs preclude me from believing are morally acceptable. It was a constant problem as I read the book.)
• p. 97: an interesting explanation of why cats get stuck in trees that I am too lazy to type out (it involves the way their claws are shaped), and an explanation of why cats’ obsessive behavior helps them learn.
• And now onto the really controversal stuff: p. 255: “In the 1980s, the Humane Society of the US donated money to fund the development of my center-track restrainer system for meat plants [meat plants??? Oh, honey.] They would never do that today. Few animal welfare groups would fund something to help reform and improve the livestock industry. As people have become more abstractified [?] they’ve become more radical, and today the relationship between animal advocacy groups and the livestock industry is totally adversarial.” Of course, I disagree with her, but I also worked hard to listen to her interesting points and perspective. I don’t see why there can’t be space for everyone: animal advocacy and animal rights groups of varying shades of absolutism on one side, and the “livestock industry” on the other. I don’t choose to work with animal welfare groups and with people working to make animal slaughter less stressful, but I wish those people well, just as I would hope that they wish me—someone working to end animal consumption—well.
• That said, here’s the absolute stupidest quote in the book: p. 297: “I vividly remember the day after I had installed the first center-track conveyor restrainer in a plant in Nebraska, when I stood on an overhead catwalk, overlooking vast herds of cattle below me. All these animals were going to their death in a system I had designed. I started to cry and then a flash of insight came into my mind. None of the cattle that were at this slaughter plant would have been born if people had not bred and raised them. They would never have lived at all.” WTF!!!!!!! Talk about pro-life! There it is, to a completely idiotic degree. That’s some deep-down bible-belt idiocy showing there, if you ask me. It’s like those people who say that if we didn’t eat animals cows would stampede us or something.
• Back to dogs: p. 300: “The more I observe and learn about how dogs are kept today, I am more convinced that many cattle have better lives than some of the pampered pets. Too many dogs are alone all day with no human or dog companions. Recently I walked own a resiential street in a neighborhood close to my home, and I was appalled to hear three different dogs barking or whining in three different houses. Separation anxiety is a major problem for many different dogs. One of the worst cases of separation anxiety was a dog who broke off his teeth trying to escape from a yard where he was alone all day. Just as this book was going to press, I visited Uruguay in South America. Pet dogs with collars were running all around town with no leashes. Nobody was concerned about dog bites because the dogs were all well-socialized.”
• “Some people think death is the most terrible thing that can happen to an animal. Dogs that run loose are often killed by cats, but their social life is probably better. Dogs that live a more confined existence are less likely to get killed, but their quality of life may be poorer unless their owners spend a lot of time playing and interacting with them.”

Food for thought, no?

Monday Miscellany: trifles, truffles, trimesters, tits, and truths. May 19, 2009

2 AM on Monday night is still Monday, if you ask me.

Sydney, my sweetheart’s mom’s too-cute-for-words pup

Scrapbookin’: LL’s BBs mentioned in the PokJo!

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This email made my life:

Hi, Lagusta—it’s [my awesome client]. I just have a quick question for you: do you have a record or remember when I  started getting food from you? Someone asked me how long I’ve been a vegan and I just didn’t know…let me know if you know.
I really love your food and am now completely into being a vegan and an animal rights activist.
Keep up the good work!
[My awesome client]“

Even more awesomely, the answer is: January 2005!

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I’m not exactly hating on her, because her book looks moderately interesting, but I think it’s weird that this Ayelet Waldman (wife of Michael Chabon) lady gave a fairly professional, intellectual interview to LenLo last week (the comments on it are hilarious, by the way, gotta love those WNYC jaded listeners!), as well as a weepy, no-details-about-the-abortion-spared, secrets-spillin’ interview to Terry Gross on Fresh Air (and, as befitting a national NPR audience, the comments are pretty ridic.). Were they edited this way, or did she tailor her responses to fit the tone of the shows, or was it a coincidence, or what? Either way, I can’t say I respect anyone with 4 kids (I’m an old school ZPGer*), but I sure like this lady’s crazy honesty.

Terry was mad shook up by her frankness though. Here is the actual transcript: “Well, well Aye-, Ayelet, I, I, I really appreciate how much pain, um, this abortion caused, and, wh-, what what it’s like to, to, you know, re-, re-, reveal the first one you had, I, I, I just want to thank you for, —you know, sharing that part of your life with us, so. Let me, let me tell our guests who I’m I’m I’m speaking to. My guest is Ay-, Ay-, Ayelet Waldman…”

It look me about twenty listens to type that all out, but it was worth it: I love it when Terry gets flustered!

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The only difference (well, let’s say, the major difference) separating the nouveau hipster burlesque thing from the old school stripping thing is class consciousness: my feelings exactly. It started out being truly interesting and subversive and—quelle surprise—has devolved into cash and ass. Totes.

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Hey, Veronica, look! We were just talking about the giant cooking-beans-in-salted-water debate!

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And to end on a downer: this Troy Davis fiasco is just horribly depressing.

*Which reminds me: over the years, a few feministy mothery women have told me that the “I’m allowed to openly hate any couples with more than 2 kids” zero population growth argument I always spout doesn’t hold water from an environmentalist point of view. No one has ever explained why I should change my position to my satisfaction, so I’m staying ZPG-smug (technically I am negative population growth smug, which is very smug indeed) unless someone smarter than me changes my mind. Give it a try! I’d like to hear your best! Until then, I will be the one glaring at the families of three and above. (Full disclosure: I glare at all families! But you knew that.)

monday miscellany: wet like a cherry/from a bloodbath of birth May 11, 2009

If you ever see a yellow spoonula (yeah, I said it) like that little lady up there, buy like 20. It will be your kitchen BFF forever. Yellow spoonulas of the world unite!

Black garlic—a fermented food I’d never heard of! I’m planning on buying some then trying to make it myself. I’m sure it’s bursting with multi-layered savory flavors. Woooo-umami!

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Gays! Wanna get married, against my advice and that of other commenters on this very blog? Go to Connecticut to do it all legal and shit, and have your ceremony at Bloodroot! I just made this page for them advertising the beautiful wedding you could have at the 32-year-old restaurant, complete with a “licensed lesbian Justice of the Peace.” A licensed lesbian! It’s not every day that you see such a thing.

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Jay Blotcher’s piece on the perfectly strange couple who run Jolly’s Good Grub in Saugerstock (or whatever that place between Woodstock and Saugerties is) in the new Edible Hudson Valley (that link is just to the table of contents, the article isn’t online) was just so Hudson Valley awesome. They are a couple married as a man and a woman, but who now live as two women. It all seems very complicated and post-revolutionary and I-reject-my-birth-certificate-y and it just warms my heart.

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Snapping asparagus spears: Just one more thing your mama lied about (or, in my case: had no idea about in the first place). Harold McGee debunks the myth that it’s the right way to treat everyone’s favorite phallic vegetable (sorry, salisfy).

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I’ve never heard of this band Cornelius, but Jacob just informed me that he saw one of their shows in Japan and it blew his mind so intensely that he pretty much died, and that the graphics show thingie thing behind the band was off the hook too, and that they have a girl drummer (my special weakness), so I’ve been YouTubing them and sort of dying a little myself. Time to go to Japan again perhaps! They are a wee touch too proggy/math rocky for me to totally die, but good to watch while chopping asparagus, for sure. They remind me a touch of my sweet sweet sweet loves The Faint, especially the amazing lightshow.

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Peeps be blogging about their love for the lusciousness!

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Sorry babymamas, but oh boy, this sums up what I so often feel about The Pregnants. The two coolass girls who make up Garfunkel and Oates, Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci, are my new go-to YouTube faves. One part Flight of the Conchords, 1/2 part Riot Grrl and eighty thousand parts cute as shit = YUMS.

Oh, speaking of The Pregnants, my friend Liz, who is not a Smug Pregnant at all, is about to have a baby any second. What’s up with that baby, Liz? Pop it on out and let me bring you some post-preggo whisky!

And!! Late-breaking news! I JUST found out that one of my very closest girlfriends is pregnant, and if there is anyone who would appreciate the above clip without being offended by it, it’s her. I totally cried in happiness for her when she told me she was poppin’ out kid #2. Feministy pregnancy issues are her life’s work, so it’s more than awesome for her to be pregnant again. When I called her up (two seconds after getting a long email that ended all stupid-casual with the throwaway closer “Oh, did I mention that I’m pregnant again?”), we had a great conversation about a Facebook “discussion” she is having because someone posted an abortion “joke” (it involved calling aborted fetuses “children”) that wasn’t funny and she responded.

One of the points she made in the argument was “Aborted fetuses are not children. They are medical waste. Or donatable tissue samples. Ask anyone who works at any abortion clinic. We know the facts.” Her telling it like it is made me love her harder than I ever have before, though when I declared my intention (via a Facebook status update, of course) to get t-shirts made up that said “aborted fetuses are medical waste” she very wisely pointed out that “I think out of context it might get misinterpreted. Like, abortion is wasteful—which it’s not. It’s a great way to conserve resources.”

God damn, I fucking love my friends.

And my grandma was named Muriel, too! So there! May 9, 2009

Tonight I was explaining to my friend Noel (you know Noel!) about how I am in this ludicrous bloggy phase of my life right now and how I feel it’s saving me all this money in therapy dollars and Jacob’s precious hearing.* I explained it thusly: “You know that Muriel Rukeyser quote about how the world splits open every time a woman tells the truth about her life or whatever?”

And she got it. 1970s feminists get that kind of jive. And it made me remember how much I love MuRu and that quote, and I figured I’d toss it on the blog. So I did, see right.

Then I Googled it and realized that that quote is perhaps THE “I was a Women’s Studies major and I have a blog” quote, and now I feel super sheepish. (Also, I can’t get it to properly space itself so I have to use the annoying / between lines and that is sort of / kind of / just a little bit / irritating / the hell out of me / like / like no witty simile I can think of right now.)

Am I being super dorky with my overly sincere quote here, or what? My love for The Ruke is blinding me, and I can’t decide. Am I tossing on my blog the equivalent of an American Apparel dress and zigzaggy hair on a hipster girl in Williamsburg? Am I cliché to the max?

If so, I’d like to state that I’ve been loving Rukeyz since before half those girly bloggers were born, probably. How can you not love her?

I’d rather be Muriel

Than be dead and be Ariel.

I mean, come the fuck on. She’s the shiz. Take that, Sylvia!

The Poem as Mask

Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and
wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
myself.

There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.

Oh, baby. Tell me more.

——

*Sample dialogue:

Me: “OMG OMG OMG SO LIKE UM SO LIKE OMG so I was reading this article and did you hear about that dude who and Brittany’s blog says and what do you think of my hair and HuffPo says and I have so much more cooking to do whine whine whine and try this chocolate and look at this Lolcat and OH!!! LISTEN TO THIS!!!!”

Repeat x10,000

Jacob: [weary, bleary, trying to get work done]

Me: “BLAH BLAH BLAH OMG OMG OMG OMG”

Jacob: “Shhhh…it’s 4 am.”

Me: “Why must you tamp down my natural effervescense?”

Jacob: “Of course, I want to hear all about it. But sometimes…it hurts.” Unspoken: “Literally, my love, it hurts. Because you have been talking for eight hours straight. And sometimes doing weird dances to punctuate your points that make me wonder if you have to pee.”

I was born with excess energy, and it’s a pretty constant problem. Once I had a sip of coffee and was up for three days. Blogging suits me, that’s what I’m trying to say.

from the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association newsletter December 9, 2008

“Please note that we cannot accept any dishes brought with wild mushrooms. This is very important as we don’t want anyone inadvertently poisoned! Store bought mushrooms are fine, and non-mushroom dishes are also fine. Feel free to bring beverage of your choice.”

Damn! I’m always telling neophyte mycophagists* the importance of taking mushrooming seriously, and this really makes the point: the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association is full of paranoid ’shroomers! I completely agree though—there is no way I’m eating some random wild mushroom dish at a MHMA potluck, or any potluck, for that matter.

But my god, I love the mushrooming world. I love the Latin names, the prettiness of all those “myco”-prefixed words (mycoremediation, mycology, mycophagous, mycophagy), just everything. I was never into science or botany or biology or anything like that as a kid (though my grandfather was a well-known Chicago naturalist, I never met him, sadly), and my hunger for myco-knowledge appeared suddenly a few years ago and has only grown with time.

I’m planning to finally read Mycelium Running this month, have any of you read it? I sort of always pretend to have already read it, because I’ve read excerpts and so much about it and the greatness that is Paul Stamets, but I figure it’s time to stop fiddling around and just read it. Mycelium: another adored word in my collection. Tempeh makes a mycelium too, did you know that? Myceliums are everywhere. (This is not related, but I want to brag here that I made some tempeh in a log shape recently and it turned out pretty good! It was barley-soybean tempeh, pretty tasty! This is even less related, but I am thinking of getting some t-shirts printed up that have a cute drawing of tempeh and the words “the soyfood with culture” –how awesome would they be?)

My mate Gary Lincoff was just on LenLo, did you catch it? Is it just because I am out-of-my-mind exhausted, or are all the comments to that segment hilarious, mostly unintentionally so?

It is 1 AM, I have been working long, long days for too many days to count; I am going on a quickie vacation tomorrow then a long, long one next week; the house is clean and tidy in preparation of housesitters; and in just twelve hours I will be shedding layers like my childhood rattlesnake pet shedding skin: in short, life is wonderful. And I got to slip a few semicolons into this post! My happiness is complete. I am going to celebrate this moment by indulging in my favorite pastime: eating carbohydrates in bed.

See you soon from a whole other side of the country, mates.

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*I mean, even after many workshops and classes and forays, I consider myself a neophyte, too, but I sure seem to run into a lot of scarily trusty new ’shroomers who tell me weird “rules” that are totally not true—all blue-stemmed mushrooms are not tasty and/or edible and/or psychedelic, people!

burn before watching October 10, 2008

I dedicate this photo to the Coen brothers’ useless, spiteful (and a little bit funny) movie.

In my grand tradition of simultaneously loving and hating The New Yorker Magazine, here are a few rants and raves:

The rave, it’s a big one: sometimes the NYer is so fuckin’ right on that entire years of irritation are mitigated by one single movie review.

The other night I came home from seeing the new Coen brothers movie, Burn After Reading, and all I could think was “I’M DONE.” I can’t ever see another Coen brothers movie. IT’S OVER. My friend Nelson had warned me that I wouldn’t like it, and I went to see it anyway – people in my snotty little socioeconomic group are supposed to like the Coen brothers, you know? I figured I’d give it a chance.

Aside from a scene near the end that made me truly and literally sick because of an event in my past (Stupid spoiler alert about a stupid scene: The Coen brothers couldn’t have known that I had a friend who was killed with a hammer, but I still blame them for the hours of deep black misery I suffered after leaving the theater.), there was nothing bad about the movie, and parts of it were funny and it was all well done, well lit, intelligent, intellectual, great acting (I have a serious crush on Tilda Swinton), casting, costumes, sets, all the rest. They are pros, perfectionists, all that. But they make such profoundly useless movies, and I’m not going to waste any more of my life watching them.

But I’ll let David Denby tell you what I truly think about this movie, because I am convinced he got into my heart and head and brought out into words my exact thoughts on it (magically he did this before I even saw the movie).

On to the rant: In other NYer news, the September 22, 2008 issue appears to be written by 11 men and 2 women. I’m just saying.

Ending with a rave: I don’t think I’ve laughed at a Shouts & Murmurs (the part of the magazine that white dudes wearing loafers are supposed to think is funny) since I was twelve and didn’t understand a word but laughed because I wanted so badly to be a New York sophisticate. Once in a great while they are archly witty, that’s the most I’ll grant them. I have never cracked the tiniest smile at anything Jack Handey has ever written, that’s for damn sure. Maybe they are funny to some people somewhere (the Upper East Side of Manhattan, perhaps? Certainly not the Upper West Side, home of many Lagusta’s Luscious clients!). 

But George Saunders’s “My Gal” – oh my god. Aside from that profile of the fruit detective (David Karp!) that I’ve already linked to about a zillion times, it might just be the very best thing I’ve ever read in the NYer! My pal John mentioned to me last week that the Dreaded SP spoke in “weird clauses,” and, not being one to subject myself to the horrors of her visage by watching the debates, I wasn’t all that sure what he meant. But since then I’ve watched a lot of clips (and a lot of Tina Fey), and, George Saunders, all I have to say is: YES.

Tuesdays, you are my sunshine September 24, 2008

You know what’s weird? I can wash silverware in my dishwasher at home just fine, but 15 minutes down the road, my pro kitchen dishwasher makes silverware all rainbowy like this. I had the water tested at a fancy lab and everything and it’s just fine, but it is strange. And strangely beautiful, don’t you think?

[Warning: this post is completely useless. It includes some rambling about good vanilla beans, otherwise it's just the kind of bloggy nothingness that kept me from starting a blog for several years. But I sometimes feel the need to prove to the Internet that I'm not all vinegar and snark and despair, so happy-day posts like this seem needed for balance once in a while.]

Ah, the power of a day off – off from work, off from the intimidating To Do list. I have lots to do, but it’s a sunny early fall Tuesday, and I decided to spend a whole passel of hours just chasing the sun. While waiting to find out if Congress will sell our futures to Wall Street, it seemed prudent to enjoy the dregs of the world left to us working class heroes.

First I rode my bike into town. My old school 1960s blue Schwinn, not the fast 1990s Schwinn that, admittedly, makes the 10-minute ride a dream. I can’t resist Blue Schwinny because of her amazing cuteness, but the truth is that foot brakes, no gears, and her zaftig frame makes the ride somewhat less zippy than a bike ride should properly be. But I was wearing a cute homemade shift dress, my hair had a freshly washed sparkle, and I had recently found an old pair of sunglasses that looked to me exactly like the pair Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (I opened a drawer labeled “art supplies” and found six pairs of vintage sunglasses I’ve collected over the years–ah,  the pleasures of being a hoarder). Schwinny (and perhaps a chic handkerchief over my hair, but I can never rock that look quite right) seemed the only option.

I went to town to be interviewed by a SUNY student for a term paper on local activist and community-groups for her class on social movements. She had chosen to focus on the Green Party, and as the figurehead (in name only – it’s really more of a collective) of the group she wanted to interview me. Her class sounded fascinating, and it reminded me that having a solidly activist college one mile from my house is a resource I should tap into more often. Her professor is active in the Stop Crossroads group, and I briefly thought about auditing the class next semester. The interview was fun – it’s always interesting to step out of day-to-day activist work and think about a bigger picture. The student was smart too, and seemed to be leaning toward changing her registration to the Greens. Success!

Baking soda and vinegar – best silverware polish ever, totally. I’ve tried everything, and keep going back to the classic bs +v. Can’t beat it.

After the interview I followed the sun onto Main Street with a plan to urge stores to sell Stop Crossroads bumper stickers and to drop off brochures for my own biz at the health food store, library, etc. (This scary economy is motivating me to become a bit more of a real business owner, sigh. Usually I am far too preoccupied with fomenting/fermenting revolution to focus on bizlady things like promotion.)

At my friendly local record store, my pal Rick said he would sell a bunch, and offered me a prime spot for my brochures right next to his cash register. He also asked if I happened to have any lunch on me, and while queries like this usually annoy me (with some exceptions – dinner parties, my too-skinny sweetheart – I lack that mothery gene that delights in feeding people), the truth is that I do have a bunch of leftovers this week and said I’d bring him some snacks tomorrow. He said my sunglasses looked nothing like Audrey’s, but that I myself look a bit like Ol’ Hep, and I have to admit that pleased even my cold radical feminist bones. (But Rick, they really are almost the same sunglasses – Wayfarers – except that hers were tortoiseshells and mine are black. Mine are authentically vintage, too, don’t I get some points for that?).

Then I popped into the health food store and talked to an acquaintance* of mine – everyone in small towns has friends like these, I suppose: I’ve chatted with her at parties, and while we’re probably not going to become BFFs or anything, I deeply like seeing her around. She’s got a certain artistic sadness about her I like. Not a gothy gloom, not a faux-artiste striped-legwarmers-in-August-because-I’m-quirky! kind of a thing, but big all-seeing eyes and an old soul way of being. We chatted, and though I couldn’t put out bumper stickers because the owner had to approve them, I did leave some of my own brochures, with some parting anxiety.

My brochures are so incredibly expensive, printed all fancily on thick 100% p.c. recycled paper with a little flax blended in, that leaving them places (which is why they exist, after all) is always slightly painful. A part of me wants to stand next to them and tell people to take one “only if you will really read it, please!“

My friend Than will not eat with real silver. Having inherited a lot of it and bought a lot more super cheap at thrift stores, I never use anything else, and am glad it doesn’t freak me out like it does him. Eating with silver brings such pleasure to a meal…even if I do have to hand wash everything.

Next I stopped in the library, and as I was dropping off yet more brochures in the entrance way, a friendly and not-too-crazy-seeming woman (it pays to be cautious – New Paltz is full of friendly crazies) started randomly talking to me about movies that the library shows for free, and had I seen 9/11 Mysteries recently at Water Street Market? I think she started talking to me because of the Stop Crossroads bumper stickers in my hands, so maybe she felt I should also know about 9/11 conspiracy theories.

When I told her that I hadn’t gone to the screening but was part of the group that put it on (the Green Party), she pulled out a copied DVD of it, saying I really should watch it. Then she gave me a card with her phone number on it and a list of other local events, two of which the GP was also co-sponsoring, and I gave her my (business) card and she bought a SC bumper sticker, and the whole thing was weirdly nice. She’s probably one of the many NP crazies, but it was sunny out and she bought a sticker and seemed to have a good heart.

I won’t watch 9/11 Mysteries though. My research into the topic does point to some small and perhaps some very large inaccuracies in the official 9/11 story, but I’ve decided that it’s just not an issue I can take on right now. You know.

Continuing on, I saw a friend and fellow business owner back at the café. We talked optimistically about how this weird and wretched economic stuff wasn’t going to affect our businesses because it was really only affecting giant corporations (secretly, I think Regan was half right–trickle-down economics works only in reverse–and I fear I am already feeling its effects, but maybe it’s just a coincidence). Then I mentioned wanting to buy some of her lovely orange aprons to match my lovely orange and yellow kitchen, and she said to come by anytime and she’d give me a good deal on them. “I’d be proud to have you wear my aprons!” were her exact words, actually. Nice.

I pedaled home and opened the mail: a birthday party invite, and–be still my heart–a packet of fifty vanilla beans from my vanilla bean guy on Maui. My vanilla bean dude has a teeny tiny vanilla operation that is beyond-organic–he hand-pollinates each vanilla orchid and each pod takes about a year to become a ripe vanilla bean. He also happens to sell his vanilla at such obscenely cheap prices that I literally blush when I send him the check (he mails you the beans then you send him a check, I am not making this up!) I talk about him here and give his phone number – if you order beans from him be sure to mention me! His beans are so cheap and awesome that I’ve stopped buying commercial vanilla extract and now make my own from ground up vanilla beans and good vodka.

With vanilla fumes swirling around the pink room, I ate summer rolls with peanut sauce, lounged around in the sun spots, and read no less than three magazines. On Tuesdays my cats are always grumpy after my compressed work week where I’m home only to sleep and brush teeth, so I try to make Tuesday Pet Day around here. Noodle sat right on Sarah Silverman on the cover of Bust and wouldn’t leave until she got good ear scratchies, Sula paced back and forth happily while I was leafing through Gourmet, and now Cleo is sitting on my lap as I savor the informative breakfast issue of the ever-fascinating Saveur.

Speaking of Bust – since I got some smack about it out of my system, I’ve been enjoying it a bit more (I also think subsequent issues haven’t been as irritating as that one). They are trying, those Busties. They are caught up in the capitalist system with its attendant celebrities and trinkets, and to a certain extent the business of revolution has been replaced by the business of lightly feminist cuteness, but no magazine can be all things to all feminists, you know? The rhymes drive me absolutely batshit crazy, but mostly it’s a little cupcake of a magazine, and everyone likes and needs a cupcake now and then. (I won’t extend the metaphor and tie it to a labored analysis of the vegan movement right now, but I could. Just know that.) It’s funny to me that the letters section is usually devoted to baby feminists gushing over how great Bust is compared with a standard women’s magazine. Bust is my guilty pleasure, and wondering what is in mainstream ladymags that makes Bust seem so revolutionary gives me absolute icy cold chills. Yikes.

In the spirit of sticking to the lazy day off theme, I am off to take a bath!

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*WOW. The WordPress spellchecker is so bad that I usually Google words I think I’m misspelling, and while Googling “acquaitenance” (I know when I’m misspelling, I just don’t always know how to fix it, isn’t it weird how that happens?) my own blog post came up first. Is that just because Google knew I am me? Please Google “acquaitenance” and let me know what happens! Actually, now that I look at it, that is probably such a horrible misspelling that I’m one of only a handful of people who consistently do it – how could I think it was spelled that way? Yet more shamefully, I have a minor in French! Mon dieu!