From Swanson's to Permaculture

Here are two Ted Talks by food-paladins Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan.

Note the common indictment: organic does not mean sustainable.





More:

The Oil We Eat

"All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. "

Can Organic Farming Feed Us All

"We are not simply talking about a transition away from synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, but a transition to a different sort of food system. I think that the philosophy of organic agriculture is closer to this food system--more equity, more healthy foods and fewer processed foods, more interaction between farmer and eater--but current organic farming standards around the world say very little about these sorts of social, ethical, and economic issues."

Also, something worth reading (seriously, read this book)

Detroit, Rock City

How do we reconcile the desire to let the proverbial free-market scythe lop off the heads of overpaid, nearsighted, and environmentally negligent Detroit auto-czars with the human consequences of that action?

Re: Not Sounding Hackneyed

Two interesting interviews with Natasha Wimmer, Roberto Bolaño's translator for The Savage Detectives and 2666:

Here and Here

No hay nada mejor que la papa

How can I get myself invited to this man's home in the Uruguayan Hills?

The Devils

You were a "victim of semiromantic anarchism
In its most irrational form."
I was "ill at ease in an ambiguous world

Deserted by Providence." We drank gin
And made love in the afternoon. The neighbors'
TV's were tuned to soap operas.

The unhappy couples spoke little.
There were interminable pauses.
Soft organ music. Someone coughing.

"It's like Strindberg's Dream Play," you said.
"What is?" I asked and got no reply.
I was watching a spider on the ceiling.

It was the kind St. Veronica ate in her martyrdom.
"That woman subsisted on spiders only,"
I told the janitor when he came to fix the faucet.

He wore dirty overalls and a derby hat.
Once he had been an inmate of a notorious state institution.
"I'm no longer Jesus," he informed us happily.

He believed only in devils now.
"This building is full of them," he confided.
One could see their horns and tails.

If one caught them in their baths.
"He's got Dark Ages on his brain," you said.
"Who does?" I asked and got no reply.

The spider had the beginnings of a web
Over our heads. The world was quiet
Except when one of us took a sip of gin.

- Charles Simic

Charlatangent

When I was in 7th grade I was infatuated with my thirty-something math teacher, Mr. Giorgi. Instead of teaching us algebra, he told us stories about defending himself from San Francisco gangs with a crowbar, or eying down a particularly antagonistic swathe of Hell's Angels on the open road in Arizona (the Mr. Giorgi-is-threatened-by-a-menacing-group-of-evil-doers-and-performs-badass-maneuver-to-escape-story had a number of permutations). The veracity of those yarns, in retrospect, seems patently dubious, but, as a 90 lb pre-pubescent, Mr. Giorgi embodied everything I had ever wanted to be. He was devilishly handsome, dating a beautiful/mysterious woman, and the object of innumerable school girl crushes. In sex-ed he was the only teacher who attempted to verbally describe an orgasm (for those of us who hadn't yet been there): "It's like a great release of energy, you know? It's like you've just been so pent up for so long and..."
After he said this the other teachers nodded gravely. "What wisdom," I remember thinking, "he is a poet also."

One day, Mr. Giorgi stopped class early. He told us he was about to give us something that we would take with us for the rest of our life. He told us that "alllll this," everything around us, "this classroom stuff," wasn't shit compared to what we were about to hear. What we were about to hear was infinitely more important than math, which we "probably wouldn't use after the 12th grade."

Then he played this on his stereo:




Four years later Mr. Giorgi was fired after getting in some sort of verbal dispute with another teacher. He refused to leave campus and, reportedly, the police had to chase him around the North Quad during recess in order to apprehend him and remove him from the premises. Last December I thought I saw him when I was driving home from a friend's house. But John looked also, and he said it probably wasn't him.

Some things are better left unsaid

Flat on the ice

"In them one sees the confused impurity of the human condition, the massing of things, the use and disuse of substance, footprints and fingerprints, the abiding presence of the human engulfing all artifacts, inside and out. Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it."

- Toward an Impure Poetry

Everything Belongs to Us!

TELL YOUR FRIENDS:

Something worth reading



Something worth listening to

Disinterested?

With Christopher Buckley's new memoir coming out, it seems relevent to revisit Chomsky vs. William F. (Pup) a la 1969. Well, no, who am I kidding, I am not going to read that memoir - I just wanted to post this video.

Father Death

Tearful truths I cannot scorn

Tradiiiiitiooon, Tradition

"The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past."

- Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot