Isak

The Births of a Nation

The moving conversations I had with midwives, doulas, doctors and parents still ring in my mind days after my article about home birth and midwifery went up and out. Which makes it quite a moment to watch "The Business of Being Born"--the film that actually incited the American Medical Association to cite it as a cause of its recent resolution to oppose home birth.

Personally, I think it should be required viewing for every American who has been, you know, born.

When I was in a 10th grade health class, we watched a hospital birth on a video. Feeling ill that day to begin with, I actually passed out at the sight of it. Went home and drank ginger ale and tried to recover.

When I saw the births on this film, each time, I felt a pull of emotion in my gut, a shiver on my skin, and tears in my eyes. My God. What else can you say about it? My God.

It's a remarkable movie.

Over in Scotland, my sister's having a baby any day now. She's taught me many things throughout her pregnancy, and one of them is how very differently birth is approached in another country. It as a point of comparison, for the good and the bad, cued me to realize that what I thought was "normal" isn't so much. She has both a midwife and a doctor, which is standard here. She wasn't planning on learning the gender of the baby, but actually in the national health system, they don't tell you the gender of the baby, ever, if it's your first child. She, who had two part-time jobs when she became pregnant and was on a visa, has 36-weeks paid leave. Her husband-to-be receives a paternity stipend.

My assumptions about birth--drawn largely from sitcoms and their ilk--are in all kinds of pieces, and I'm questioning how we in the U.S. approach families, from gestation on. Don't worry, I'm not feeling disillusioned; I feel real awe at the possibilities. Beginning with the wisdom of our bodies.

"I'll bet John motherfucking Updike doesn't even know who I am."

I've used this space to vent my feelings on the romanticized alcoholism of many a "literary giant." From Norman Mailer to Hunter S. Thompson, plastering oneself into bully-stupors too often comes packaged in bemused anecdotes.

Here, though, is another take: "How Come No One Celebrates My Alcoholism Like John Cheever's?"

You know, seminal American author John Cheever and I have a lot in common. He needed to drink a fifth of scotch before he had the courage to utter a word to another human being, and so do I. Much like Cheever, I'm completely blotto by 10 a.m. because of a deep, withering fear that my family will eventually discover my bisexuality. And, to top it all off, we were both born in Wollaston, Massachusetts, if you can believe it! But just because he's one of history's finest short story writers, Cheever's epic benders are considered delightful, whereas I've just got a "serious problem with alcohol."

What a bunch of horseshit.

Via Bookninja.

When I Was a Kid, There Was This Thing Called A "Book Review" ...

Now that the LA Times its about to print it's last book section--and beginning the sad era of shoveling any lit coverage to the calendar section, a move its book editors are protesting--Scott McLemee offers a stalwart essay on the "debt of honor" of writing about books in our periodicals. And on the way, he has insight into its pleasures.

Not all of it comes down to economics, though. We’re also talking about the effects of a long-term change in ethos.

People at newspapers ... once held respect, verging on reverence, for the printed word as such. A sort of continuum existed between the world of newspapers and that of books. The examples of H.L. Mencken, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, and Walter Lippmann seemed to prove it. Each had been a journalist and gone on to write things of a more durable nature; and knowledge of this possibility left its mark on others. ...

Over the years, book-review sections have existed because somebody in charge had a commitment to them – an old editor, perhaps, with an unfinished novel in the drawer, stored beneath the shot glasses. The oft-repeated claim that shrinking or abandoning book coverage is economically justified because publishers have stopped buying enough ads is nonsense. They never did; and anyway, no sports page depends on business from the teams it covers. The willingness to keep book sections alive was never rational in the narrowest sense. It manifested a sense of participation in print culture ...

... The Los Angeles Times Book Review was one of the last freestanding literary supplements in an American newspaper. Preserving it would have been a matter of pride to anyone capable of grasping that a newspaper is one part, potentially an honorable part, of print culture itself. Instead, the publisher is grasping dollars, and honor has nothing to do with it.

UPDATE: I just caught this other reason why it's curtains for those quaint things called "books" at the LA Times. Think it's just a west coast disease? Nope. Enter Exhibit M.

A Prize Of One's Own

It's a good day for bylines: a second article of mine is out today. It's headlined, "Women's Book Prizes Fire Up Literary Canon," it's over at Women's eNews, and here's an excerpt:

... The question of whether single-gender awards are still needed to transform a literary culture comes amid a boom of fiction written by women, including what's characterized as "chick lit." Women also form the majority of U.S. book-buyers and are becoming the majority in publishing house staffs.

(Orange Prize co-founder Kate Mosse) said the issue is not the number of books authored by women but the shortage of those books by women that are honored and promoted by literary culture. That is how books get in the hands of readers, and how the canon of literature is built.

Tuesday's Headline News

My latest article over at RH Reality Check explores midwifery and home births--particularly in the light of the American Medical Association's and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' recent resolutions opposing home births.

It was a peculiarly fascinating article, one that gave me a chance to talk with many amazing folks and to learn an awful lot. I'd definitely like to follow up on this, not just with more articles, but by personally engaging with it. Forgive the vagueness, but I'll tell more once I see if what I'm thinking about is possible.

The piece begins:

While another profession might have the popular reputation of being the world's oldest, you can make a strong case that midwifery is a more realistic contender for that title. The tradition of caring for pregnant women and delivering babies in homes or community spaces is ancient the world over. And it's present today, in the providers who practice within an American medical culture in which 99% of births take place in hospitals, presided by OB/GYNs. ...

Today you need a license in the U.S. to practice psychotherapy and cosmetology, to drive trucks and to be a mortician -- but not to minister to laboring women in homes or in birthing centers. Or at least, not quite ...

Attention Must Be Paid

Now, I didn't vote for Sen. Clinton in the presidential primary. Hell, one might argue whether the vote I cast was "voting" at all (oh, Michigan). But in this case, she's absolutely, 100% right. And we all need to be paying attention.

In an exclusive column from RH Reality Check, Sen. Clinton writes:

The Bush Administration is up to its old tricks again, quietly putting ideology before science and women's health. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them "abortion." These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

My god, what a cruel political trick this is, playing on people's emotions by using the word "abortion" to restrict their access to the absolutely vital, normal birth control procedures that allow us to live healthy lives and--when and if we're ready--to raise healthy children.

My one quibble with Sen. Clinton is the framing of this as a women's rights issue. Yes, it is one; women will be disporportunately harmed by this. But I don't think it takes a big mental leap to see how this political misbehavior hurts people of all genders, all ages. Family planning is a fundamental tool not only for the safety of our bodies, but for our neighborhoods.

Here's more from Sen. Clinton on the affect of this looming threat:

These rules ... could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They'll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.

The regulations could even invalidate state laws that currently ensure access to contraception for many Americans. In fact, they describe New York and California's laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to provide coverage for contraceptives as part of "the problem." These rules would even interfere with New York State law that ensures survivors of sexual assault and rape receive emergency contraception in hospital emergency rooms.

Great. Leave victims of rape to birth their attacker's child because you think emergency contraception--which is a mere extra-dose of a birth control pill taken within three days of intercourse--is an "abortion." (A framing that portrays abortion as if it were something always bad for all people, by the way).

And this is the environment where John McCain can't do anything better than mumble uncomfortably when asked--by his campaign chairwoman, no less--about the ridiculousness of insuring Viagra, while not insuring birth control? That's twenty-two "no's" for family planning. And, as we see in the infamous video clip, he forgot all about it.

Katha Pollitt's brilliant analysis on the behavior of the "maverick" goes like this:

So. John McCain is so opposed to contraception he voted against requiring insurance plans to cover it like other drugs, and either so indifferent to women's health and rights or just so out of it he doesn't even remember how he voted. That's the way to show American women you really care. 

This is not a trivial issue. There's the basic unfairness of not covering these essential, even life-saving drugs and devices, so fundamental to women's health and well-being, and the added insult of denying coverage while men are lavished with cut-rate erections.

Happily, there's still some sense in this mad world. I see hope in people like Pollitt and Sen. Clinton who are calling bullshit, and those folks who--despite political loyalties and party lines--can join them on this matter of basic common sense and human care.

Here's where else I see hope:

• Catholic for Choice just launched an international campaign to push bishops to end their 40-year ban on contraception--a mostly ignored ban, but one that's vital for re-centering the Church on the community justice that it manifests at its best. They released an exploration of the ban in a fascinating (and colorful) report called Truth & Consequence: A Look behind the Vatican’s Ban on Contraception.

• Heather Corinna continues to offer the most amazing and honest sexuality resource for young people (and, I dare say, all people) at Scarleteen -- and her good word is spread even further now with her Friday column, "Get Real!," over at RH Reality Check.

• The House State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee just passed a bill that will offer the largest amount of money ever dedicated to international family planning --- $600 million. Now, if only my government didn't think I was having an abortion every time I took a birth control pill, maybe we'd get somewhere on the homefront.

The good news is good, but don't let it overshadow how important it is for us to speak up and out, spread the word high and low, about the current extraordinary threat to our health, our privacy, and--yes, I'll say it--our free will.

Here's what you can do:

Read up--RH Reality Check is all over this with what they're calling the "Contra-bortion?" series, not just with Sen. Clinton's take, but with a variety of voices, web resources, and other informational tools that will keep you aware of what's happening, how it will affect you, and how it may affect your neighbors. For the primary source, read the HHS proposal here (PDF).

Tell Sec. Leavitt to block these new rules that are currently still in draft form.

Tell your Congressional representatives what you think.

Go Web 2.0. Blog about this. Email the articles. Post them on Facebook. Post comments on the articles. Make a short video on YouTube about this. Digg the articles about this. Post them to del.icio.us. Twitter about this. Text your friends. Bring it into Second Life.

Go Web 1.0. Write an article for a print publication--a viewpoint in a local publication, perhaps. Write a letter to the editor. Make a zine. Make a pamphlet. Write a book. Write a dissertation, a thesis, a classroom essay about it. Hold a rally. Give a speech. Have a conversation. Call into a radio report about this, or a local television channel. Hold a discussion circle with your friends and neighbors over a potluck. Talk to the people you trust with your health.

Read more--The New York Times has a report on how "the Bush administration wants to require all recipients of aid under federal health programs to certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and even certain types of birth control." This is directly related to the HHS regulations.

Join in. Count yourself among those who care by joining one of the many admirable organizations you can count on in times like these: Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Choice USA, SisterSong, Catholics for Choice, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the Guttmacher Institute, and many other worthies.

UPDATE: I hear that ABC News is reporting that more than 100 members of Congress sent a joint letter to the White House yesterday "urging him to "halt all action" on a proposal they argue would change the definition of abortion, and drastically limit women's access to birth control."

The Russians Steal My Heart

Their names ring bells inside me: Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Vladmir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Turgenev. With strange slippery stories and poems, visionary novels and novellas, they'll have me coming back to them my whole life long.

One Russian I haven't read yet is Maxim Gorky. I know nearly nothing about the guy, actually. Happily, a feature in The New Republic on Gorky, and particularly his "reminiscences" of Tolstoy," gives me a starting place. The occasion? A new translation of Gorky's memoir of Tolstoy by Donald Fanger that TNR calls "fascinating."

When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. ...

The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.

(Gorky's) memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. ...

Curious Searches

I'm amused by the Google searches that have led recent visitors to this website. I couldn't make this up. Isak has been one of the top items turned up by Googling the following phrases:

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Malcolm X, glasses (on www.google.nl)

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joan didion t-shirt (from www.google.co.uk)

O, ye varied seekers! O, hilarity! O, if only I could offer you all what you are looking for!

The Fortunate Fiction Writer

Like most writers, I've had a lot of lame workshops in the past. And I'm not even talking about the classroom kind.

In a poetry class in college, we had assigned small groups. We were supposed to spend our Thursday session out in the world, sharing our poems with each other, talking passionately about craft and writing we love in a very "non-workshoppy" way. It was a great concept by the class teacher, Ken Mikolowski, one meant to make the community piece of a vibrant poetic life as meaningful for us young folks as it is for him.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much out of hanging around with my group. One fellow rarely showed up. Two others had the passion, but had trouble delivering anything but compliments, or, if on the rare occasion they didn't like something, they offered the vaguest of vague lines: "I just didn't find it satisfying." I didn't like the poems I read from that group very much, which made it hard to feel engaged in supporting the writer to make them better. I don't think that mattered much, because I'm not sure the writers cared much beyond the first draft. And I didn't feel like being the asshole who dared be specifically negative.

Not that I had it all together. It was hard for me to muster the energy to try very hard on any poems or revisions for the group. I distinctly remember taking a few lyrical passages of my stories, inserting line breaks in them, calling them poems, and passing them to the group for feedback I didn't care about.

I had another workshop with a couple pals in Boston. A fiction one, which instantly engaged me more. Well, two of us wrote fiction. The other wrote poems.

Ah, a classic set-up: bright lights, big city, Tuesday evenings in coffee shops to talk writing and make lists of book recommendations in my Moleskine. I had more fun, because I liked these cats, but this workshop fizzled out too. Something felt forced--we all liked to write, we were friends, therefore we should be naturals to critique each other's work, right? That assumption was wrong; we just weren't as invested in what each other was trying to do in order to be much help. The hyper-politeness of my past poetry group was blessedly not there, but neither was the passion that makes this sort of thing take off.

I tried a couple rounds using Craig's List to connect with other fiction writers. That turned out exactly how you think it turned out.

But now. Now.

I have one that works. I have one that's as exciting as those I jealously heard others tell of.

It's with six gals I know from my MFA progam. Most of us got going last February; there was one who had to step out, two others who stepped in. We send out our stories to each other on the 1st of the month, returning stories with line-editing and letters on the 21st; it's a pattern familiar to us from our program and, happily, that means we have a common basis for the thoroughness and care expected in our editing. There are times when one of us steps out for a month; there are times when we send something longer than the (very general) guideline of 20 pages.

While standard workshop etiquette is to avoid being prescriptive, we have come to embrace it; we are all strong enough as writers to take the feedback for what it is. I for one have loved hearing alternative visions or ideas for my work. My response to it helps me gauge where to take the story at hand.

The magic of this group is that I have enormous admiration for the stories I'm reading; I am downright excited to help imagine how they can move forward. This sets up a basis of trust for the responses I get back on my stories. And over time, it's been interesting to get long-view feedback. What are my patterns, for better and worse?

We're also considering using Skype or another tool to continue conversations that have come up in our letters--about race in fiction, for example, or about managing narrative disorientation.

Today, I got back responses on a story of mine called "On Being the Daughter of a Man in Prison." I've been knocking around with this story for ages. One of it's trademarks is its manipulation of point-of-view; it moves between first- and second-person. But I've struggled in making the transitions have the impact I want them to have--to be noticed, but not be bewildering; to resonate, but not diminish all the other stuff going on in the story.

I sent a draft of this story to the group earlier on, and by god if I didn't take a big step forward with a story that's stagnated in my own bewilderment of how to work out its problems. This month I sent the revision--to a smaller section of our workshop, as the gals who are still students at Warren Wilson College were down in North Carolina for the MFA residency.

They pointed out the places where my POV switches aren't quite in line with my intentions. They pointed out opportunities for expansion. And they celebrated what works, which I needed to hear.

So inspired was I, I immediately went to work on the story this afternoon. And after several exhilarating hours, I think this story is finally ready to be sent out in the world.

I'm left feeling immense gratitude for the sharp-sighted, generous, and exceptionally honest readers in this workshop. I'm left feeling glad that all those lame workshop attempts in the past didn't get me to a point where I swore them off altogether. I'm left excited to see what new work I'll get to read from them in August--and what work of theirs that you too will soon read, because these talented writers have a place out in literary land.

On a Play, a Priest, Napalm, a Trial, and a Spiritual Base

Awhile back, I found and read a strange little play called The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It was by Father Daniel Berrigan, the creative nonviolence activist, Jesuit priest, and poet. Among his many direct actions of civil disobedience, he's remembered for one that dubbed him a member of the title's Catonsville Nine: forty years ago, he, his brother, and six others walked into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, took a set of draft files outside, and burned them with homemade napalm.

Here they are:

The play told the story of their trial for destruction of property, a trial that refused to allow the "why" for the action to enter the court testimony. As Berrigan tells it, in the one-act play that draws from the trial's transcript, the nine of them pointedly returned again and again to the why, and the powerful spiritual tradition that informed them. Their words of the nine come to reverberate like an ancient chant. He writes their language in verse, like a scripture, which contrasts with the unnamed court officials' prosaic speech.

The Nation profiles Fr. Berrigan, now 87, "forty years after Catonsville." And journalist Chris Hedges places Berrigan's story in its context of radical spirituality:

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

"Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians," he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. "She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking."

Berrigan's relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton's "great contribution to the religious left," he says, "was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, 'Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.'"

Hardly packaged up in history, Berrigan resonates in our modern moment: election year 2008, an era incessantly referred to as "post-9/11," a time when we wrangle over mediocre responses to global warming and get ourselves all in a fuss over a New Yorker cover.

The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would be illegal." He is critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church" ... He despairs of universities, especially Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. ...  And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now "disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline."

"The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life," he says. "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base."

What then is to be done? Is there nothing but mourning left for us ... or, in spiritual terms, are we experiencing our lamentation?

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go." ...

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

"The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living--the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet--was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place," he says. "We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation."

This seems a good moment to raise a glass to Tom Lewis, another one of the Catonsville Nine, who continued his life committed to creative nonviolence. He passed away last April.

Jonah House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker that has been a home to the Berrigans, Lewis and countless other good souls, celebrates Catonsville's 40th anniversary with an interesting online library (for which all images in this little essay of mine are credited) that is still there for us who couldn't attend the films, conversations, potlucks, teach-ins, vigils and witnesses that Jonah House facilitated in May.

For your exploration, consider also "Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File."

But once you're done exploring, for now, what are we going to do? There's so much that's possible ...

How To Guarantee That Anna Will Read Your Article

You begin it with two paragraphs that are something like Jason Webber's opening for an article in the summer issue of Bitch. titled "Prince and the Revolution: Why the 5'2" singer is the biggest male feminist rock star of the last 25 years ... kinda":

Dig if you will the picture--the United States, 1982. Ronald Reagan is in his second year as the president who will have waited until 21,000 Americans have died of AIDS before discussing it in a speech. The Equal Rights Amendment once again fails to be ratified, thanks in large part to Phyllis Schlafly and the religious right. A Gallup poll reveals that 51 percent of Americans find homosexuality immoral.

And beamed onto television screens across this recession-plagued nation, from a fledgling cable channel known as MTV, a diminutive man, sporting a purple trenchcoat, mascara, heels, and the most lascivious smile this side of Rhett Butler gyrates on a soundstage, singing an innuendo-drenched song called "Little Red Corvette." His name is Prince, and he's come for your children.

Interlocuting on Intercourse

Jane Smiley's review of Robert Olen Butler's Intercourse: Stories borrows the form that verges on Platonic dialogue. No, really. With more than a touch of humor added in. Seems to be a right strategy to describe Butler's book, which features the dual monologues of couples who are having sex ... from Adam and Eve, to JFK and Hitler, to newlyweds who are interrupted by the sinking of the Titanic.

Jack: Read me a line.

Jane: "The sex was so good that even the neighbors had a cigarette." He gives that to Milton Berle.

Jack: (laughs) That was good.

Jane: He's having sex with Aimee Semple McPherson.

Jack: How does she like it?

I ... Can't ... Wait

What I will be orienting my weekend around.

REVIEW: Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Michael Pollan's most recent investigative journalism wonder has got me bandying the word "nutritionism" about. I mean--he means--to describe a cultural ideology that places value on nutrients rather than food itself. That is, the parts rather than the whole. Unfortunately, decades of parsed nutritionist science--and the political wrangling that often intersected with it--have brought us to a point where most of what we're eating isn't really food. It's edible. It's chemically altered to be infused with a vitamin or fiber or what not. But as a product of nature, hardly. It's a product of a laboratory, and the scientists we are trusting with our health.

And now, as Pollan repeatedly points out, we're in the weird position of turning to investigative journalists like himself to find out what to eat; we're perhaps the first full generation so disconnected from our land and history, the great teachers of eating of those who came before us. There's a lot of profit from the widespread confusion over food--and a lot of illness too.

For my part, I find myself saying crap like "oh fish oil's really good for you" and "choose the tea with antioxidants in it," even though I have no idea what I'm talking about, and, as Pollan indicates, is playing into the food-as-parts rather than whole foods. It's a little frightening to see how susceptible I am to this food marketing, even when I've been more intentional about eating unprocessed, non-chemically soaked food in the last few years.

I think it's interesting that this book approaches food from a health vantage point; I hadn't really noticed it was missing from his other book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is a brilliant work that focuses on ethical and environmental nature of food. I rather assumed that it was all the same thing: what's ethically and environmentally good is also healthy for me. But I'm glad he's playing it out in this follow-up. He's a fantastic writer whose commentary leaves room for nuance--nothing's wholly one thing or another which is, um, just how life is. And his writing is compulsively readable.

It can be daunting to think that nothing less than a culture change is in order: Pollan is right about food not merely being 'fuel,' but inextricably tied to our social lives and work lives and family lives. I would've liked more from him on how to facilitate such a big change: he basically says, yes, food will cost more money and time, and it is worth it. I believe him. But while he makes a good case for anteing up the money (pointing out that it's not so much an issue of affordability for most of us as it is of priority, and he also advocates eating less), he gives less space to the time issue.

I'm not used to spending a good deal of time cooking my dinner and especially when I eat alone--now that I'm in my own apartment for the first time ever--I've found it difficult to create new habits where I make my meals a priority of time and effort.

I tried the night I finished In Defense of Eating. Cooked. Lit a candle. Took all the crap off the table I eat at. Even said a prayer before I dug in.

One guy I lived with at Haley House  led us through an exercise on retreat once, during a meal of lentils that he made and we ate with our hands, where he had us not pick up our next bite and hold it before us while we chewed. You merely had to swallow before preparing your next bite. And it was hard. I never realized I had this gulping habit of eating. That night Ifinished Pollan's book, I tried it again, putting down my fork between bites and it was still hard.

But I suppose there's nothing to do but be patient with it and myself. Pollan talks about mind tricks to play on yourself to adjust your eating habits (like using smaller plates, since so many of us fall victim to visual cues in our eating, rather than how we feel), and I'm thinking of one for me: approaching the table I eat at as if it were something of an altar. (The candle gave me the idea.) What if I didn't drop my shit on it, as I would never do to an altar? What if I considered it sacred space? How would that affect how I eat, whether I have guests or I'm by myself? I'm going to try.

Speaking of culture shift: there are so many skills that we've lost in this nutritionism era. There's so many finds at the farmer's market that I can't name, let alone cook. I find myself gravitating to carrots, tomatoes, the usual-looking things. But I want to learn about all that other stuff, and how to prepare it. I wonder where one can go? I need to ask friends and soon-to-be friends. Wouldn't it be cool to have an evening, or series of evenings, where friends taught each other how to prepare a food the other(s) don't know about? Not just a dish, but a dish where the primary ingredient is something the others barely recognize.

I think our culture's ready for this shift. The Food Network, all these foodie books, the popularity of farmer's markets, the rise of organic--it seems to me to be a broad-scale movement reacting against the tide of crap food and science written about in this book.

One last thing about culture: it irritated me that Pollan used "Mom "as a stand in for the "old" way of doing things, I guess because it doesn't resonate with my own experience. I've had a growing distaste for processed food for years, and when I come home to my parents, and my mom puts herself out to make me a meal that she thinks I will love, that she thinks is healthy, but that is very processed and doesn't appeal to me, what to do? Generally, I eat it anyway. Who wants to criticize a meal made for you? When I'm in their home?

But still, I'm frustrated by not being able to communicate that, after a few days, I really want something fresh. Or why I don't want to eat the canned peaches that are coated in sugar and preservatives that my dad tells me is good for me. I don't know how to follow my own instincts for how to feed myself without coming across like I'm judging my very kind and generous parents.

The Choice of the Subscriber

I don't have much money to subscribe to my favorite lit journals. Hell, I'm in a fury to pay off loans from my undergraduate and graduate days, which means I'm mowing lawns and writing articles at a frenetic pace alongisde my full-time gig. But there's so much good work out there, and I believe so deeply in doing my part in sustaining a vibrant literary culture, that I make room in my budget to subscribe to at least one or two of the best out there.

Of course, this means I have tough choices to make. I've been musing over the last week or so about what lit journal I was going to subscribe to, having room right now for only one. I've already got some Crazyhorse coming to me, which is a joy, but what else?

The shortlist included:

• Hayden's Ferry Review
• One Story
• Brick
• Glimmer Train
• Tin House
• Black Warrior Review

I'd love them all, of course. But here's what emerged as my top choice.

This also seems to be the right time to offer a sorrowful good-bye to a real great lit journal: Other Voices. They're transitioning to a book-only company and losing the magazine, which is a loss to us all. The Ontario Review, which I never knew well, is also closing up shop after the death of Raymond Smith, its founder and editor (and the man who moonlighted as Mr. Joyce Carol Oates).

Bat Segundo Buried

Oh, dear! Sorry news, indeed.

If it's not going to be Bat, what new literary alt media project will fill the void? Who's going to step up?