I picked up this book at the library last week. It took only about an hour to read, but offered a hearty serving of, well, food for thought (sorry for that). My main qualm about his book was his rather vague and imprecise references to the “Western diet.” He praises Mediterranean diets–and his forbears’ Jewish diet–for being much healthier than modern American food habits; yet he continually castigates “the Western diet” for its flawed nutritionism and failure to approach eating from a holistic standpoint. I suppose he is equating the “Western diet” with the American diet, although obviously France and Italy count as “the West,” right?

I do think Pollan made some very useful observations about how we eat, however. His wholesale denunciation of food science–for example, infusing whole grains and protein hither and thither–was interesting in sight of my history of medicine course a few terms ago. We studied science-fueled fads like the glandular extract craze of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the attempts of scientists to reduce food to its component parts (carbohydrate, fats, etc). I feel a little less cynical towards having the extra bit of fiber in my ice cream than he does, I suppose, but I can buy his point that meddling with food can make it less healthful for the human body.

These days, a la Pollan, I avoid processed foods as much as possible; I don’t eat chips, soda, frozen meals, that sort of thing. I simply feel better when I eat food that I have made from scratch (although I haven’t gotten to the point of baking my own bread!). I find that Chinese, Thai, and Italian food are the easiest for me to make. However, I do like a spot of white rice and non-whole wheat pasta here and there.

Plus, when making my own food, I can count the calories, which is essential to my weight-monitoring. I have been counting them more or less every day since February and March, and it has really made a difference in how much I eat, and what I eat. Worlds of difference in how I feel! I am not obsessive about calorie-counting, especially when it comes to stuff like baby carrots, lettuces, and so forth, but do my best to be consistent about dense, rich foods like meat, oils, pasta/rice, and sugar. So that’s my main tip-of-the-hat to food science and nutritionism: I count calories.

But I am contemplating a few more changes on how I eat, what I eat. I have noticed that many of my friends are eating differently these days, too: lots are vegetarians, or lacto-ovo-pescatarians, or some variety thereof. Basically, the main question is: what do you eat, how, and why?

Subissues are:

1. Every time I am in the grocery store, I stand in front of the produce and debate whether I should go with organic or conventional. In your opinion, is organic worth it? I think fruit especially tastes better when organic, but…it’s so darn expensive.

2. Meat. I like meat. I don’t eat a lot of it; perhaps 3-4 oz. twice a day at most, and then infrequently. I have lots of vegetarian days inadvertently, because I think meat is too expensive. I don’t really eat beef, simply because I don’t care for the taste, but I love pork. And seafood. I can leave the rest. Should I eat meat? How?

3. CSA boxes–I have been hearing a lot about these. Are they worth it, and how much are they? I think I would just end up with a lot of wasted produce.

4. Other food books to recommend? Not so much recipes or diet books or “domestic fiction,” but some thoughtful, provocative discussions of food? I’d especially be interested in books that made you change something about your eating habits.

And to close out, here’s a picture of a shared meal for Mr. P and I: a cup white rice each (340 kcal!! Ridiculous!!), bok choy with garlic, Chinese chives speckled with bits of bacon, and an egg-tomato-scallion scramble. (and also my toes, although those are not for eating).

Due to a light illness, I spent the weekend in quest of something entertaining to wile away the sniffling hours. Naturally I was in no mood for any academic folderol; I instead dipped into the stacks of the local public library. I spent the rest of the weekend loafed out on my couch, playing Super Mario Galaxy and reading.

2. Persepolis & Chicken With Plums

I have not seen the movie, no. Though after reading Persepolis 1, I may have to find it in the theaters. I feel reluctant to subject such a pleasurable reading experience to the problems of translation between various mediums; however, Satrapi’s writing/drawing is so wonderfully poignant that I can’t get enough of it.

There is some inherent difficulty in talking about (writing about?) a graphic novel. While graphic novels certainly do have plots, much of the meaning is so deeply imbedded in the images themselves that it’s difficult to express how and why a graphic novel works the way it does on the reader. Simply focusing on the language is not enough.

Still, things that stood out to me: Satrapi’s glittering sense of self. Persepolis lends itself to that, obviously, as a memoir; it is brave without overstatement, humorous without strain. I never found myself feeling irritated with the narrator, which was the case in reading the graphic novel La Perdida (bohemian young woman finds self & trouble in Mexico). Even in Chicken With Plums, in which she’s hardly present as a character, the elliptical storytelling and smooth overlap of fantastical elements–such as Azrael, the Angel of Death, or a naked Sophia Loren–with the details of a particular person’s life make Satrapi very much present.

Thinking back briefly to La Perdida: perhaps the problem with La Perdida was that the main character was largely unsympathetic–personally, I met a lot of middle class kids with ethnic/hipster-ish longings in college, and didn’t care for them. Hipsters drive me crazy. Crazy. More than that, however, was that I sensed that the main character was a thinly disguised stand-in for the writer/artist, and the lack of forthrightness there bothered me. I generally dislike books that are about a character’s (or an author’s) search for “self” or “identity,” whatever that means. It can, however, be done very well, in the case of Persepolis. But Persepolis is all about a person forced into unusual circumstances (which makes a hero). La Perdida is about a person who seeks unusual circumstances (which makes her somewhat unsympathetic, but perhaps that was the point).

That’s probably my problem, however, and maybe not truly reflective of the merits of Abel/Satrapi.

2. Ascending Peculiarity

I had a college roommate in the days of yore who adored Edward Gorey. I couldn’t understand it very well myself. I found his art mesmerizing: the obsessive cross-hatching, the distinctive melancholy. However, it never struck me as anything spectacular or mind-blowing, and this glimpse into his life confirmed my opinion of Gorey as an eccentric and nothing much beyond that.

Ascending Peculiarity is a collection of interviews with Gorey, with some of his drawings tossed in for good measure. They were bound to mention his affectations: rings, a long fur coat, numerous cats, a love of tv re-runs. The sense I got of Gorey was a very privileged, mild-mannered, kind, introspective creep (without the malicious connotation) who had very little to say.

The one thing I did find interesting was his obsession with the New York City Ballet; Gorey attended every single performance for some 17 or so years, developing a special affinity for Balanchine. However, it’s not even clear why he was drawn to ballet…not that meanings or explanations or purpose had any value for Gorey. Towards the middle of the book I read that he was a fan of Samuel Beckett, rolled my eyes, and closed the book.

Gorey I suppose is very interesting, but not for me. I think I only picked up this book because I thought of my old roommate when I saw it.

3. Black Boy, by Richard Wright

Assigned for my students, to give them a sense of the Jim Crow south. This memoir is beautifully written; I got a real sense of Wright weighing his words, testing the tautness of his sentences and paragraphs. The book moves at a perfect pace; it’s impossible to lose interest in the narrative.

My only other observation is that there is not a single sympathetic character in the entire book, not even Wright himself. Perhaps this is reflective of Wright’s attitude towards life and humanity at large, or reveals the crushing consequences of Jim Crow; however, as a reader I found it quite oppressive. Could it be that there was not a single happy and compassionate moment to speak of in the years that Wright recounts? Maybe. Wright as a character is perpetually alienated and distant from all that he describes, which reminds me of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which also expresses a great deal of cynicism towards pretty much everything.

A good read, but not even the slightest bit optimistic. A complete and total downer.

4. The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell

I was pretty excited to pick up this book; as a fairly rabid devotee of sci fi in my youth, I consumed untold hundreds of shitty pulpy novels. I felt that my taste in scifi/fantasy had evolved over the years, however: I dutifully read my Asimovs, my Poul Andersons, my Herbert, my Bradbury and a bit of Sagan. So seeing that this book promised to engage with questions of alien encounters, God, religion, etc. appealed to me.

Ugh, terrible. Terrible. The title is drawn from the biblical verse that “not even a sparrow falls without God’s knowing it.” A team of explorers and Jesuit priests make their way to a newly discovered world, only to encounter disaster. Thus “the sparrow” is supposed to refer to the question of God’s terrible nature…or something. The end of this story climaxes in the forced alien gangbang sodomizing of a priest (I can’t believe I just typed that), which is ridiculous, even for a scifi novel. Even the rest of the story itself, which strains to make some sort of statement about God, is left fanning itself in a corner, bored, disconnected to the end.

I should have heeded that split moment of foreboding when I noticed that the book had an interview with the author in the back, as well as study questions for reading groups. When an author puts all her cards on the table like that–basically explaining what she was trying to do with the story–what’s the point of reading the damn thing at all? Similarly, I noticed study questions in Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist, which was also a pointless exercise in New Agey self-affirmation. Capital B Bo-ring.

5. The Family, Mario Puzo

I once TA’d a course on Renaissance Italy, so I thought that this novelization of the exploits of the Borgias would be a fun romp.

Nope.

The characters were thin beyond my lowest expectations. The weirdest and least believable episode in the book came early, with Pope Alexander overseeing the incestuous union of his daughter and son (historically unproven, btw!!) while sitting on his throne. I mean, what a provocative scene. Yet it was given no believable context or rationale, and what could have been a grossly powerful moment was just…sort of blah. Puzo should have taken a few lessons from Judith Krantz.

6. The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

In my defense, I read the Godfather before I read The Family; but I thought I’d end my reviews on a good note. This is much better than The Family, which was Puzo’s last novel.
However, given my love for all things Al Pacino, and love for the first two Godfather films, I had been keeping my expectations as low as possible for the book.

I liked it. The plot was very complex, and the characters were somewhat thin, but decently well-muscled for a mass market piece of fiction. It was definitely not as good as the films. Coppola gave the characters of the film so much more ambiguity, and therefore humanity. This may reflect again the issue of medium; film must say a lot in a few moments, whereas a writer is free to ramble on for pages about a character’s hair, his thoughts on Proust, his taste in wine, ad nauseum.

Also interesting to me was Puzo’s inability to write a half-decent female character. Kay, Michael Corleone’s wife, had the most potential; how can a woman reconcile romantic love with moral principles, etc? But she was written as basically an accessory to the character of Michael. Which for a novel on organized crime is probably fine, but one hates to see a wasted opportunity. Puzo’s weakness with female characters also emerged quite obviously in The Family, where all women were either moms, hos, hotties, or crones. Or some combination thereof.

Perhaps I’m being too critical? Blame it on the rhinovirus. But it was a definite pleasure to simply hang off the edge of the couch and thumb through a few fluffy books.

Sorry for the lame title. You would be lame too if you spent all week reading about the American Revolution (and I still don’t know the difference between Bailyn’s formulation of Republicanism vs. Gordon Wood’s. I feel dumber by the page).

I wanted to buy a card for a member of my cohort who is getting married next month (in the shmancy Mormon temple!), so I made my way to Borders about 2 hrs ago. Little did I realize that the Harry Potter premiere was tonight of all nights! The place was swarming with people in Potter garb, and their bedraggled parents/friends/spouses. Really quite festive. There were balloons, streamers…I could feel the electricity in the air.

I wish I could share in the fuss. But I have never gotten into Harry Potter, which is peculiar because I am a big fat science fiction/fantasy aficionado. And I’m not a terribly picky scifi consumer; along with the classic Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, I also read Dune, all things Tolkien, even the novelized Star Wars series. I think I even read the Anne McCaffrey series about fire-breathing dragons. As for juvenile scifi/fantasy, I adored the Tripod trilogy, and all of Lloyd Alexander’s books. I was and still am omnivorous when it comes to fantasy and science fiction.

I encountered HP in high school, when I read Harry Potter A L’ecole Des Sorciers–the very first Potter book–for AP French. It was OK, but didn’t capture my interest in the slightest. A few years later, shocked at all the hubbub, I borrowed a friend’s copy of…the Goblet of Fire, I believe…to see if I had made a mistake, and to see if I could blame the French for my indifference. Alas, I was simply not into it. Luckily I read the His Dark Materials series immediately after, and my faith in children’s fantasy was reaffirmed. Philip Pullman is bitter about the Harry Potter success, and rightly so; His Dark Materials is just…mind-blowingly good, echoing Paradise Lost with humor, fantastic characters, and a wide imaginative scope. I wept at its end.

I admit to being in the minority in my feelings toward Harry Potter. But in all honesty: I felt the narrative was weak, the characters thin, and the prose too full of cliches. The emotional development of the characters was akin to a Sweet Valley High book. However, Sweet Valley High with wizards is just that: Sweet Valley High with wizards. And the little shiny things like the Bertie Bott’s Beans! and FedEx owls! and wizard shopping mall! made it feel hackneyed and forced. In good fantasy, I want to be seduced by wondrous things; J.K. Rowling tried to bribe me with fluff and clumsy whimsy.

That said, I appreciate how much this book means to so many people. I loved being around those Potter-ites, and love hearing about my friends’ plans to be among the first to read it. It’s just so…exciting!

I do think swollen academics like Harold Bloom need to de-bunch their panties about the whole affair. This review from 2000 certainly echoes some of my own dislikes about the series, but I’m not sure Potter-mania is associated with the dumbing down of American civilization.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a pretty badly written piece of popular fiction, but still significant and worth a look for all that. And we still had Flannery O’Connor, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, etc. after Harriet Beecher Stowe published her piece of mediocre blaxploitation. All is not lost. In any case–and I am glad for it!, Potter fans are not going to pay attention to me or a mumbling professor that looks like a depressed Grouper. Unless his name is Dumbledore, or whatever.

*edit: one thing that makes me extremely happy about HP is that a children’s book author is richer than the Queen of England. All hail J. K. Rowling!

First of all, who says LA isn’t cultured?The LA Festival of Books took place this weekend and was a glorious, dizzying event, and apparently, the largest book festival in the country. As Mr. P and I wove through the crowd, I kept thinking to myself that this is as close to an ideal society as one could get: lots of free stuff, many different kinds of people, different ideas, and most importantly, a world exalted by books of all kinds and levels. Lest I wax (too) rhapsodic on this issue, let’s get to the pictures.

Smokin’ hot Stephan Pastis! Usually I’m quite suspicious of men in goatees, but I have to say that Pastis was a charmer. Not in a direct way, but in a shy, clearly-was-awkward-when-younger, incredibly polite adorable way. I have always enjoyed Pearls Before Swine (wonderfully twisted), and he was gracious enough to draw a picture of Pig on my book.

That would be Wiley Miller of Non Sequitur and Bill Amend of Foxtrot. It was remarkable how much Amend resembled Jason. Like Pastis, he was clearly introverted, but very funny during the panel and friendly to his fans. I got a little sketch of Jason from him.

This picture doesn’t do justice to the size and busyness of the whole affair. I got 6 books (7 including a free copy of the Qur’an; I would’ve taken a free bible but those people wanted a home address. Pfft.), one of which was a signed copy of the Martian Chronicles. I was happy to hear that Ray Bradbury is still going strong (I saw him at the Festival last year). I didn’t get to see him this year, unfortunately. Other popular notables at the festival included Harry Turtledove, Julie Andrews (yes, Mary Poppins!), Mary Higgins Clark, Martin Yan and so on. I’m always amazed by the people they manage to pull in. There were plenty of academic presses there to keep things interesting for academics and boring for everyone else, and I got a good sense of what press publishes what. Filed away for post-dissertation times.

My only complaint is that the food prices were ridonkulous–Disneyland ridonkulous at $5 for lemonade, $7.25 for a measly Panda Bowl! Luckily Mau and I could just head back to my apartment for some grub.

It was nice to see UCLA populated by more than just a bunch of blasé college students. I’m already looking forward to next year’s fair.

When I was just beginning to think about grad school, one of my professors warned me that I would be poor throughout. On the other hand, she rhapsodized about it as “fashionable poverty,” or a strain of what Sandra Tsing Loh calls being a part of the “bohemoisie.”

Now that I’m here, I can’t say that being poor is all that fashionable, especially being in LA; but it is far more bearable than one might expect. To refer again to Sandra Tsing Loh, she wrote a fantastic review of Money: a Memoir, which considers our obsession with women’s economic status. It got me thinking. Liz Perle’s “Memoir” concerns women and money. Rather than the well-trodden road of the evils of Walmart or the 50 cents to a dollar argument, Memoir takes a professional/middle class view:

Craving not just the convenience but the metaphorical stability of a double oven, Perle admits to being a member of “the emotional middle class,” to experiencing downward mobility as a kind of “egocide,” to caving in professionally to her own acquiescent “inner stewardess” (who’s too polite to protest a bad job assignment or lobby for a raise). It’s fertile, relatable territory — what woman, feeling blue, hasn’t practiced retail therapy (during PMS, how often have I fondled aromatherapy candles named “Tranquility,” rosemary soaplets startlingly named “Refresh!”)? What XX-chromosomed human hasn’t hoped her dreadlocked spoken-word barista may one day transform into a (still soulful) stockbroker with a bulging portfolio? (For one singletess in Perle’s book, saving money is actually painful — it’s an admission that “no one is coming to take care of her.”)

Then Loh makes a suggestion:

What if, instead of trying to change the still-male-dominated worlds of government and business and contemporary work culture from the top down, we American Women in Financial Jeopardy went the other way? To fill our womanly coffers with the cash we need, what if — in a group strike à la Lysistrata — we all just said no to … buying stuff we don’t need?

She has a thorny indictment of the depths of our consumeristic void:

I can’t name one female self-help book that urges you, now that you’re forty, to simply accept … the extra seven pounds (talk about egocide). If we were all wearing sarongs, no one would know the difference — that’s why we need skinny jeans. When it comes to oppression, jeans are our burka, our religion, our god. We labor for the jeans, we starve for the jeans, we pray to the jeans that they’ll close … The fact that we’re paying $300 is only good news. Female emancipation is always defined in terms of expanding our economic presence. Our personal power is defined by our earning, our cultural power by purchasing, how we vote with our dollars.

Which is to say, conversely, the woman who buys nothing is nothing.

Nothing … nothing … nothing.

I resent it bitterly, and I am in revolt.

I highly recommend the whole review. I got a lot out of it. Now, as a woman who really has very little (about $1,000/month for rent; my stipend pays pretty much just for rent and food), what am I to make of finally being fashionably poor? A member of the bohemoisie?

To tell you the truth I like it a great deal. But I am not a member of the bohemoisie, and I am far from fashionable. I am just…a poor, dumpy (happy) intellectual. No dazzling Sontag am I.

There are definitely intellectuals–definitely quite a few graduate students among them–who ARE a definite part of the bohemoisie. They know how to be stunners, somehow, on our shitty budgets. But even that takes money and effort and attention to consumer culture. I lack that. Not from an initial want of such adeptness, I guess, but just from unfamiliarity with it. And that initial want faded into apathy.

Sweet, sweet apathy. It gets slammed far too often. One can care only so much, you know? And what capacity one has for caring really ought to be devoted to certain things, or people. And being that my particular brand of apathy is enforced by the iron hand of my stipend, it gives me a good vantage point for reflection.

I don’t have a car; I ride the bus ($.25 with student ID!). I use the student gym. I eat out once or twice a week, on the tab of my loving boyfriend. I have bought exactly 2 pieces of clothing since September. I saved the nifty plastic containers from Indian takeout to serve as tupperware. I haven’t bought a single piece of fiction since the summer. I purchase gifts through the year when they’re on sale to save for the holidays. I buy housewares from Ross and Ikea if I’m feeling extravagant.

Speaking of extravagance, I admit to having some major, major expenditures this year. I bought a new computer after my old one crashed, and Word and Endnote to go with it. I also pay for ballet classes. After my 6-yr old (read: ancient) iPod crashed last week, I invested in a new iPod nano. I guess for me, these things don’t seem to be extravagances: I need a computer for day-to-day academic work, and without an iPod I won’t exercise. As for dance, there is a deadline. Once I hit middle/old age, my body will simply not respond as it does now. So it’s now or never, and I will deeply regret it if I don’t, so my choice is clear.

As Loh says, “Truly cheap people are, in their secret hearts, individuals. Iconoclasts. Rebels.” Hear, hear. But I’m no individual/iconoclast/rebel by choice. Such is the state of the unfashionable low-income grad student. Somehow I’ve become the lowest common denominator of all these categories; still, like Loh, I’m pretty content.