Theory of the Daily

Alack and Farewell.

Since I've been so lame about posting for so long, this is more a technicality than anything else, but I'm hereby putting Theory of the Daily on indefinite hiatus. The arrival of a new theoretician (or theoretician-to-be, at any rate) to the ToD family has been amazing distracting, and most of the posts I think of posting boil down to "go read the Christian Science Monitor's Living section." Until I have more time, sleep and inspiration, it's probably a good idea for me officially to stop feeling guilty about not posting. Many thanks to those of you who have followed my ramblings over the past few years (and even more thanks to those of you whose excellent blogs have provided such inspiration).

Two Books that Were Better than I Expected

• Confessions of an Organized Homemaker, by Deniece Schofield. I don't know why I overlooked this one the first time I thumbed through it. It struck me as basically a collection of organizing tips, and while I'm all for tips, after a while they all start to sound the same. What I had missed, however, was the author's emphasis on underlying principles, which I find much more useful. Most organizing books seem to have some sort of introductory apparatus in which they ask you to figure out why you're cluttered (what sort of psychological blockages are at work), and then a general decluttering scheme that usually asks you to sort your clutter into three or four different boxes or piles, and then some room-by-room advice. Confessions certainly does all this, and does it well, but what I found most useful was the reiteration of fundamental approaches. For instance, the author suggests that you always make things easier to put away than to get out, and that you make items as easy to fetch with one hand motion as possible. I found myself going through my house afterwards, tweaking my systems here and there with her fundamentals in mind, which in the end was much more useful for me than a list of more specific suggestions.
• The Wabi-Sabi House, by Robyn Griggs Lawrence. When I first started noticing discussion on the web about wabi-sabi (which according to this helpful Wikipedia article, is an aesthetic "sometimes described as one of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, or incomplete"), I thumbed through a few picture books on it and found myself rapidly annoyed by the aesthetic that might be described as expensively chic, meticulously crafted attempts to look unmeticulous. But this book, though it runs into some internal contradictions, does seem willing to wrestle with the incongruities between a centuries-old Japanese way of life and contemporary American efforts to turn it into a strategy for interior decorating. I can see how many readers would be irritated by the sometimes cheap solutions to that ambivalence--for instance, the recommendation that, one night a week, you practice washing dishes by hand in order to, I don't know, restore your connection to the dishes. But these kinds of tensions should be familiar to anyone who wants on one hand to live a simple life and on the other hand wants to have working plumbing and electricity. I came away with some respect for the author's honesty, as well as some decorating ideas. And it's not every home decor book that quotes not only from ancient Japanese tea masters but also from P.J. O'Rourke and Baudrillard. (You may find the amazon.com review posted by this reviewer a more helpful commentary than my dithering).

Men and the art of dodging housework:

Yes, many more men are willingly pitching in at home these days, especially in caring for children. But the gap between the amount of housework fathers do and the amount mothers do has actually widened slightly, according to Rudy Seward, a sociologist at the University of North Texas in Denton. Mothers in 2003 reported doing almost three times more housework than fathers, averaging 17 hours a week. Fathers reported spending six hours, on average - down from eight hours a week in 1989.

Courtesy of the ever-vigilant Rebel Dad, a Washington Post article on stay-at-home-dads that is not without some useful thoughts for mothers as well:

To be a father in America looking after children during the day is to escape expectations entirely. We are the ghosts in the machine of childcare. I don't think climbing the wrong way up the sliding board is so awful. I don't care as much about which preschool my daughter gets into as maybe I should. The progress of my daughter's potty training certainly isn't something I want to talk to you about. (She'll get it when she gets it.)

Getting to Know It

Big changes are happening this summer over here at Theory of the Daily, the first of which has been the purchase of our first home. After years of apartment living, I'm finding the reality of the change takes a while to sink in. There is, of course, in my father's words, the awareness of "crushing, lifetime debt," but I still can't say I feel we own the place. I've been tracking little benchmarks that will enable me to determine when I've actually started living here, as opposed to simply inhabiting the space. When I no longer think more about the previous resident's occupation than I do of ours, then we will be living here. When I no longer have to fumble for light switches or consider which path to take to get from point A in the house to point B. When I no longer worry about whether the neighbors are being woken my my early-morning smoothy mixing, my singing along with Emmy Lou Harris CDs, my clumsy dropping of things on floors. But even then it's hard to imagine what actual possession of a house feels like. I still feel a sense of wonder and gratitude every time we turn into the driveway, as if I should be thanking the house for allowing us to enter it.

Lighting Out

At the recommendation of my husband, I've just finished reading Caroline Gordon's Green Centuries, a well-written and interesting work that has a nice eye for the details of the daily. If you're familiar with Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Great Meadow, you can place this book in that genre; otherwise I'll have to situate it more broadly in that vast territory between Laura Ingalls Wilder and William Faulkner. It's a pioneer story, with lots of gory pioneer violence (so be warned), but it's also a fascinating inquiry into the balance between "lighting out for the territories" and building a home and a civilization.

In addition to other minor characters responsible for settling my neck of the woods, the novel features Daniel Boone, who himself represents this balance in an important way. Susan Faludi's Stiffed has some good things to say about how his myth has functioned in American culture, and she's worth quoting at length:

"In its genesis, the story of Daniel Boone was not simply the tale of a frontiersman taming the world with his rifle and knife. Essential to the myth of his journey into the wilderness was his return from it to retrieve his family and establish a new community. John Filson, the author who first mythologized Boone's life in the late eighteenth century, was adamant on this point, as frontier historian Richard Slotkin observes: "For Filson, Boone's solitary hunting trips are, not ends in themselves, but means to a social end. Solitude has value in the Boone narrative only insofar as it contributes to the ultimate creation of a better society; hunting is noble only insofar as it clears the way for husbandry." Or, in words attributed to Boone in his as-told-to autobiography of 1784, "thus we beheld Kentucke, lately a wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts become a fruitful field; this region, so favorably distinguished by nature, become the habitation of civilization." Conquering "savages" on that frontier was only half the story, and not necessarily the important half. "Soon after," Boone recounted of his earliest forays into the hinterland, "I returned home with my family with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucke, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune." The risk only had meaning because it meant something for the future of his family and his society."

Faludi contrasts this myth to one that later eclipses it; that of Davy Crockett, "frontier wastrel." (It's worth noting that Gordon actually portrays Indians in her novel not as savages, but as better comprehending the role of domesticity in civilization than most of the whites). For all that we lament problems with stereotypes of women in our culture (and don't get me wrong, there are problems), I think that it is at least an equally serious issue that we have so few good images of masculinity, a masculinity that can address the family, domesticity, the work of building a home and a society. Gordon's novel is therefore, among other things, a useful way to think about the competing and yet often mutually reinforcing claims of a romanticized male sense of adventure on one hand, and a devotion to home, property and family on the other.

Home ec is now family and consumer science--and men as well as women are taking it. See also the Family and Consumer Sciences Resources Online (am I the only one who is slightly creeped out by the easy equivalence between "family" and "consumer"?).

Bad Fences

When I saw the link for this article, entitled "The Paradox of the Hedge," I just knew that it would contain a reference to Robert Frost's "Mending Wall.". I feel strongly that most people, and the author of this article is no exception, miss some salient facts about the poem: one, that the famous line "good fences make good neighbors" is not uttered by the persona in the poem most identifiable with the author himself (and is instead spoken by a character who is being gently mocked); and two, that it is the implied author who initiates the wall-building itself. In short, my reading of the poem is that it is bad fences in need of repair that make good neighbors, insofar as they are the occasion for social contact, even if that social contact is all about erecting boundaries. To my mind, this makes the poem much more interesting; instead of being a self-righteous claim that we should all get along, it becomes a meditation on the fact that the construction of inside and outside is itself the origin of society.

But the article itself, no matter how knee-jerk its use of Frost, is a worthwhile read because it addresses those very facts; a discussion of hedges in L.A. becomes a deeply interesting analysis of public and private, of the semiotics of landscaping, of what we want out of neighborhoods and of our own homes.

Whilst looking for something else, I came across Neva Goodwin, an "ecological economist" who sounds worth investigating. In this interview in Grist Magazine, she explains some of her key ideas:

standard economics textbooks all repeat that there are essentially three kinds of economic activity: production, exchange (or distribution), and consumption. In the textbooks on which I'm the lead author, we make the point that this leaves out an essential fourth activity: resource maintenance. How can you produce bicycles, cars, or anything if you don't maintain your production tools and machinery? How can you exchange goods and services if you don't maintain the social and physical infrastructure -- laws and communications systems? How can you "consume" (that's the term that's used) the pleasures of leisure time (music, cooking good food, athletics) if you don't maintain a healthy home and body? How can you produce, exchange, or consume anything at all if you don't maintain a healthy ecosystem, with clean water and air and other essentials for human existence?

Her interest in "resource maintenance" has important links to questions about domestic labor and its relatives, and she asks,

Why don't wages reflect the real value of work to society? The question that continues to motivate me is: How can we change the socio-economic system so that our human values will be better reflected in the signals we give, which in turn determine the character of that system?

I found this listing of her articles, and if I can bring myself to wade through real economic scholarship, I might read some of them. She works, by the way, with the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts, which sounds like an interesting project in its own right.

Happy Mother's Day!

A few selected Mother's Day stories:

• Behind every good chef is a mom: "Like many chefs, Susi says his work as a culinary professional is inextricably linked to his childhood and his mother's influence."
• Via rebecca's pocket, "M is For the Many Meals She Made."
• . . . And the latest update from the unfortunately-named Mommy Wars, "Battle of the Moms":

  "If our grandmothers knew we'd sit and watch entire channels on homemaking they'd think we lost our mind," says a laughing Ann Douglas, author of several parenting books, including the Mother of All Baby Books.

  "Motherhood has become extreme paranoia at times, filled with overprotectiveness and hyperprogramming. We are researching things to such degrees we almost paralyse ourselves."

Hi, Mom!

Two new books (as reviewed here) that look worth adding to one's reading list:

Four Tenths of an Acre : Reflections on a Gardening Life, by Laurie Lisle: "Lisle's range, wider than her long and narrow garden, takes in a world of horticulturists (both growers and fanciers) from well-known literary figures like Hawthorne and Wharton to those revered for their gardening-centric works, such as Gertrude Jekyll. Having recently moved north from Manhattan, Lisle immerses herself not only in her new home but in the depths of its three-century history, unraveling the construction of a local Georgian manor and analyzing the drawing of a young girl that Lisle finds at a neighboring town's historical society" (from the Publisher's Weekly review on amazon.com).

The Driveway Diaries : A Dirt Road Almanac, by Tim Brookes: "While working on a doomed book about commuting, Tim Brookes developed an odd affection for dirt roads. This led him to study his own driveway, a tiny dirt road, a masterpiece of inconvenience, a many-mooded borderlands in the balance of power between order and chaos" (from the alibris description).

When stuff collides. . .

From the Christian Science Monitor, two pieces on integrating approaches to stuff:

When consumption runs amok:

Welcome to the front lines of Venezuela's new class war. For the world's fifth-largest oil exporter, record oil prices have fed a major surge in consumer spending - and with it, mounds of trash. The trash, in turn, attracts scavengers, some of the estimated 60 percent of Venezuelans mired in poverty. With Caracas's notoriously irregular sanitation services, the capital's littered streets have become a battleground where moneyed and impoverished Venezuelans clash, and rats and cockroaches have become commonplace.

What to do when you really, really, really hate his (or her) pet rock collection:

In an era when remarriage is common and possessions are plentiful, deciding what to keep and what to jettison after saying "I do" can require diplomacy, patience, and perhaps a little friendly persuasion. Love may be lovelier the second time around, as the old song claims. But that doesn't mean the furniture, art, and bric-a-brac second-timers bring to their new nest always appear lovely to a new spouse.

I would guess that this is an issue for more than remarriages; people seem to come into marriage with more stuff period, at least in my cohort, in which people generally marry well after they've set up their own houses.

More on Food Writing

As I mentioned in this entry, I've been doing some thinking about what separates the great from the simply enjoyable food writers. One characteristic I've noted is that some of the best recognize that food isn't always pretty. Food is more than mere pleasure; it's connected to violence, pathos, bathos, and even (perhaps especially) death. One of my favorite pieces by M.F.K. Fisher appears in her Alphabet for Gourmets, in which she is treated to a wretched plastic meal by a man painstakingly, heartbreakingly recreating his dead wife's culinary style. We've left the world of connoisseurship far behind at such moments, and are all the better for it. John Thorne also gives us two excellent examples of the dark side of food, one from his own pen and the other from his reading:

"It should be noted, with wild mushrooms as with anything, that 'edible' does not necessarily mean 'tasty.' The shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) is a scrofulous-looking, deliquescent (i.e., 'self-devouring') mushroom that comes up in huge clumps even on city lots (I once picked a meal's worth from the grass edging of Boston post office). Most guides aver that it's not only edible but choice. . . at least if caught before self-digestion begins transforming it into a puddle of black slime. However, I find the intention is inherent in the flavor, each morsel attempting one last effort to consume itself even as I chew--a rather unnerving experience." John Thorne, Serious Pig.

"Food is not an innocent as sweet trifle to be played with, even though it appears to waltz so benignly upon our plates and tables. It is nature herself, stupid, cruel, and ruthless. Everything is food, including yourselves, even if it is only bacteria which eat you now. Nature is. . . no other than the mindless sadist who has commanded all living things to eat all other living things with a perpetual and inane violence. . . and whose supposed capacity to maintain harmonious order is merely the effect of the relentless whip that ensures continual discontinuity, the stick which flagellates every beast on its path to consumption." Lawrence Osborne, Paris Dreambook, quoted in John Thorne's Serious Pig.

"Food is not an innocent." I so like that. There is a sacred side to food that ought to frighten us into abrupt respect from time to time even during our most casual or riotous dining experiences.

News of the Daily

• Via Lifehacker, Jeffery Steingarten tells us to clean our plates:

  People should be ashamed of the irrational food phobias that keep them from sharing food with each other. Instead, they have become proud and arrogant and aggressively misinformed. But not me. When I donned the heavy mantle of food critic, I sketched out a six-step program to rid myself of all puissant and crippling likes and dislikes.

• . . . and although you probably already knew life was hard for working mothers, this article explores the issue a bit further:

  Many of the informal guidelines about what needs to be done in order to do a job well were established by people who didn't have to worry about picking up kids from school, scheduling pediatric appointments or unexpected snow days, Erkut said. "Many corporate jobs have been done by men and people have assumed that what a man can do is necessary for doing what is necessary," she said. "A man can stay long hours if he has another parent at home."

  The president of Mothers & More, a national support group for mothers in various stages of employment, Kristin Maschka agreed, saying: "I think it's one of the biggest frustration points for our members, this intractability of the work place to accommodate different life paths, including paths of caring for children or caring for the elderly. . . It's a really difficult climate, there's no two ways about it."

I think I've finally fixed my Movable Type problems. What I've been working on in the meantime:

Lessons Learned from John Thorne

When I first picked up John Thorne's Outlaw Cook, I wasn't as impressed as I had hoped. It wasn't that the writing wasn't good, or inspirational, or smart--but throughout it all I thought I detected I kind of reverse snobbery, a sort of reveling in having different exclusive standards from everyone else (Steve Jenkins, the "Cheese Maverick" of The Cheese Primer fame is an even more blatant example of this tendency). But now I think I'm going to have to go back and check him out again. Having just read The Pot on the Fire and Serious Pig with all the urgency I usually reserve for a good sci-fi novel, I'm feeling much more charitable. It's not that the snobbery has vanished, but in many cases it seems more thoughtful and even more warranted. But the real kicker for me is the way in which Thorne's often deeply researched pontifications widen the world of food and food writing. From an essay on the effects in Ireland of the transition from dairy to potato culture, to a lament for Maine roadside diners, he links simple taste and hunger to global history, folk tradition, sociology, and an almost existentialist meditation on blueberry pie. Reading him and thinking about other food writers and particularly those he praises (I've been dipping into Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed) I've been moved to generate some tentative theories about what makes good food writing good. These theories are offered in the spirit of literary criticism, that is, by one who teaches rather than does, but they are nevertheless in good faith:

1. Good food writers realize that sometimes food isn't pretty. It's about far more than just what tastes good.
2. Good food writers see food as deeply connected to the rest of human experience, and their notion of what constitutes the "human" is a generous one.
3. Good food writers, like many good writers, avoid adjectives and adverbs--but this avoidance is conspicuous in this genre because its sensual nature tends to make one reach for qualifiers.

My plan at the moment is to expand on these three criteria in a series of future posts.

Everything is conspiring to fuel (I almost said "feed" but then felt corny but then felt that I had to say that I almost said it anyway) my current obsession with food writing. I have Many Deep Toughts on John Thorne and Patience Gray, to be published at a later (but not to worry, not too much later) date, and now, via aldaily, a link to this article in The New Yorker, which is to my mind interesting less for its book reviews (although I want to read them all now) than for its profundities on the subject of food writing, including a distinction between the "mock epic" and "mystical microcosmic" schools and this passage, with which the article closes:

The metaphors of food are so closely tied to our sensations that they must be elevated to ring out. That would explain why good food writing, by cook or critic, has been so expansive in theme. All animals eat. An animal that eats and thinks must think big about what it is eating not to be taken for an animal. This largeness of vision (�I write of hunger,� Fisher said flatly, when tasked with writing about food) seems to have become harder to achieve, perhaps because the subject has become so specialized.

There is too much food in most food writing now�too much food and too little that goes further. When Liebling and Fisher wrote, they gestured from plate and glass to something bigger, outside the dining room�to France, or to appetite itself�and the gesture carried instantly, because there was little else in the room to absorb it. These days, the old twin circles (the family around the table, the cosmos beyond) have been supplemented by so many other circles of attitude that the writer points from the plate to�another writer. Like so many other subjects, food writing is constricted within these ever-tighter circles of opinion, when what we want from it is ever-broadening metaphors of common life. Metaphor is social and shares the table with the objects it intertwines and the attitudes it reconciles. Opinion, like the Michelin inspector, dines alone.

Alas, the Loh quotation in

Alas, the Loh quotation in the last post is already showing its age (as am I): the kitchen material to lust for now is not Corian, but (according to the CSM) concrete. Actually, it sounds pretty spiffy-looking.

Holy cow, it's been more than a month since I last posted!

It's taken me some time to figure it out, but the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly made it clear: Sandra Tsing Loh is their new Caitlin Flanagan. It was her article, "The Marshal Plan", a tongue-in-cheek review of the latest in parental advice literature (the latest suggestion? That "today's cutting-edge parents manipulate, threaten, deprive, ignore, spank, and get mad and scream at their children, and—why not?—drink") that finally got it across. But Loh's credits and interests seem to range further than Flanagan's, though she lacks the latter's ability simultaneously to irk me and inspire me. She's written for the Atlantic (warning; some of these may require subscription to access the full text) not only on that Flanagan fave, nannies, but also on conspicuous consumption and malls, and she's a performance artist and musician as well as a writer.

So after learning all this I thought I'd dip into some of her works. My first choice, A Year in Van Nuys promised to be a parody of A Year in Provence I thought that sounded good, since much as Peter Mayle gets me wallowing in enjoyable envy, if anything needs to be parodied, his books do. There was, I fear, less parody than I had hoped, but it was an enjoyable read. There were points at which I was reminded a bit too much of the thoroughly irritating Prozac Nation, with it's "I'm smart and precocious so why am I not happy?" schtick, except that Loh's self-deprecation was funny and sincere enough to mitigate that. But it was in the odd little novel If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home by Now that I realized what makes Loh compelling--she has her finger on exactly how the nuances in our consumer world speak to us (and how we speak back to them), how we arrange our world in logos and hierarchies of brand names--she gets lifestyle. I was struck by the iconic call of this passage, for instance:

Colin Martin’s kitchen was the most perfect thing she’d ever seen.

In a single stroke, it transcended time, space, scuffed-shoeness, battered careness, wrinkled-jacketness, lapsed-promiseness, decay.
. . .

In the center of the room, altarlike, stood a solid, golden country butcher-block table. Resting in one corner was a set of German carving knives. Colin had been chopping parsley, onions, yellow peppers, tomatoes—the ruby red slices fanned out to the right, elegant as a line of poetry. On the far side of it, a sink. . . Was it?

Yes.

“Corian,” read the letters discreetly etched near the faucets.

“Corian,” Brownwyn whispered. So Grecian, so pristine. She reached out her forefinger and touched it. “Corian,” she repeated, feeling a swell of longing so great she couldn’t stop the trembling.

Can we take this lust for kitchenware seriously? No--and yet, yes. I like to see myself as a fairly simple-livin' kind of gal; I don't have a lot of junk, I don't like to shop, I tend towards minimalism, I sew and knit some of my own clothes, cook most things from scratch, and so forth. But I love my Wusthofs and am probably going to devote an impassioned post to my first All-Clad pan. Things, brands, and perhaps more than anything, that vague but powerful promise they create, do speak to me, and it's Loh's gift to make me realize that with a feeling that is equal parts shame and delighted recognition.

Well, I planned to follow

Well, I planned to follow the serious and potentially controversial discussion of Fleming with a much more enjoyable discussion of Christopher Kimball's The Kitchen Detective: A Culinary Sleuth Solves Common Cooking Mysteries--and I'm still going to do that. But now I've also read the despair-inducing The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, so so much for sweetness and light.

• First the good news: Christopher Kimball, as some of you may know, is the editor of the august Cook's Illustrated, which in charming, ad-free format documents detailed taste testings, equipment evaluations, and painstakingly perfected recipes. He is also the author of the syndicated column, The Kitchen Detective. If you find Cook's Illustrated a little too fair, a little too respectable, you'll like Kitchen Detective, which features the same obsessive tweaking but with a decidedly personal touch--Kimball will tell you why he prefers one outcome to another, even when that preference is idiosyncratic, and the book is peppered throughout with various jeremiads against the death of home cooking in America (a favorite genre of mine, as it happens). The gist behind the book is that Kimball deconstructs classic recipes, testing old wive's tales, streamlining where possible, omitting useless or tasteless steps. I was greatly cheered, for instance, by the official confirmation that you don't have to scald the milk before making a roux. I've never bothered, mind you, but I've always wondered if I were missing something crucial. Apparently not. Another reason to like this book is that while Kimball may be obsessive, he's never fussy, and some of his recipes begin with "I started with X's recipe, but didn't think that the effort of ______ was worth it, so I cut that step." As someone who once thought she could make a living cutting superfluous steps from Martha Stewart recipes (until Everyday Food came along and did it for me), I applaud such moves. I haven't yet decided if The Kitchen Detective is a keeper--if I'm not sufficiently picky about the cookbooks I purchase they will force me onto the streets--but I will be cooking parsnips tonight following his "Ten-Minute Root Vegetables" recipe featured on the Splendid Table. [Bonus found while looking up links: an interview with Kimball].


• And now for something completely different. The thesis of The Two-Income Trap is that we err in thinking that the rise in bankruptcies is the result of profligate spending on the part of the middle class. Rather, it happens because so many families are forced to devote the greater part of two incomes to recurring expenditures seen as necessities, including, primarily, mortgage payments and the cost of a second car. Why not just buy a cheaper house? Because, the authors argue, there's an ongoing "bidding war" whereby the cost of living in a good school district goes ever upward. Middle-class parents who want their children to have a solid academic future find themselves unable to pay for basic living costs without two incomes--but that puts them at incredible risk should one parent lose a job (also an increasing trend). When moms stayed at home, the argument goes, the family had a safety net--if the father lost his job, the wife could always get additional work. But, the authors caution, it would be foolish to argue that we need to go back to a one-income way of life--or even that we could. Instead they propose a host of suggestions (from equal access to good schools regardless of zip code to re-regulating the credit industry), most of which involve radical changes in the government. Hence the depressing aspect of this book; I fear many of their solutions will never be realized, and meanwhile, middle-class families (especially, they point out, those headed by single moms) will continue on in their painfully vulnerable state. There are a few things one might be able to do on a personal level. The authors recommend being extremely careful not to get a mortgage that requires both incomes. Insurance, including disability insurance and long-term care insurance (the latter for one's parents as well as oneself) is also encouraged. There's an implicit message to put up with a whole heck of a lot before you get a divorce. I think the bottom line is that two-income families should attempt, as much as possible, to treat the second income as discretionary spending. But of course, that's impossible for any number of families. Thus the "trap" of the title, thus the depressive effect of reading the book.

Thomas Fleming is not everyone's

Thomas Fleming is not everyone's cup of tea. Editor of the self-described "paleo-conservative" journal Chronicles, his views are guaranteed to give almost anyone something to get mad about. Liberals will find his attacks on abortion and homosexuality distasteful; conservatives will be non-plussed by his rejection of the free market, global interventionism, international capitalism, and almost everything Bush stands for; I myself am most put off by his explicit anti-feminism. So I began The Morality of Everyday Life with some trepidation, despite the obvious attraction of the title for me. I found its argument fascinating, convincing, informative and--perhaps most surprising of all--scrupulously fair. Fleming essentially calls for a return to a pre-modern ethic in which our primary loyalties and affections are reserved for those closest to us: our immediate families, then our neighborhood, then our community, and so on. He derides the Enlightenment tradition of objectivity and universalism as dangerous myths that encourage us to sacrifice the real lives of those around us for the sake of abstract ideals. If this sounds like Nel Noddings or Carol Gilligan's "ethics of care," that's because Fleming, as he admits, shares with these (feminist) thinkers a belief in the moral priority of blood ties over theories of justice. He differs from them, however, in his belief that such an ethic is not the sole purview of women--though his ur-example of the morality of everyday life is in fact "mother-love." Fleming also encourages us to return to medieval casuistry, in which the specifics of each moral dilemma are taken into consideration, rather than trying to fit moral questions into larger categories, and he embraces literature as a particularly nuanced representation of the way real ethical complexities are navigated: "Ordinary people," he suggests, "seem to need a nontechnical casuistry that accords the real problems of everyday life the serious attention they deserve, an attention often (though certainly not always) denied them by academic philosophy."

In this book, whatever he may profess elsewhere, Fleming does not seek to defend the positions that make him so controversial, though he mentions them frequently. Instead, his target is the Enlightenment and the kind of international humanitarian impulses that have given rise to the bombing of Kosovo and the "liberation" of Iraq. Causes in general, even those dearest to Fleming, take backseat to our duty to live faithfully and lovingly as members of our families and local communities. I find this at once an enormously compelling idea, given my belief that so much of what makes life meaningful and worthwhile is located in the everyday--and an unnerving one, particularly in the face of the tsunamis (our era's earthquake of Lisbon), which cry out so urgently for a sense of shared humanity. But don't feel you have to go into this book seeking to be convinced. As Fleming himself says, "Even if readers end up rejecting these arguments as eccentric or irrelevant to modern life, I hope they will return to the mainstream of liberalism with a clearer knowledge of what the older tradition represents. One cannot rationally hold an opinion without considering the alternative." Unlike many who have made such claims, Fleming really is being "fair and balanced" here; he engages in no sneaky logical fallacies, he's equally hard on the left and the right; he acknowledges exceptions to his claims; and he often cites as background material texts that challenge his view as well as ones that support it. This argument struck me, all other merits and flaws aside, as being in amazingly good faith, and I recommend approaching it in the same spirit.

The Future

Christian Science Monitor is thinking about the future of the everyday: the future of love and marriage and the future of homes and housing are my favorites. In the latter, Sarah Susanka (she of The Not-So-Big House fame), claims that "People are going to recognize that the McMansions ... of today are going to be traded in for something that's more tailored. It will be a little smaller, because people are already really "getting" that square footage doesn't make them feel better...." I wonder if that's true; I haven't seen any signs of it--but I know when I see "big," I think "man, that would take a lot of cleaning."

Also, for fellow fans of essential oils (I'm pretty much an addict), one possiblity for their future is curtailing hospital bacteria: "Tests revealed that three essential oils killed MRSA and E. coli as well as many other bacteria and fungi within just two minutes of contact. The oils can easily be blended and made into soaps and shampoos which could be used by hospital staff, doctors and patients in a bid to eradicate the spread of these deadly `super bugs'." I wish they would say which three oils. . . Also note that according to one of these researchers, "'We are having problems finding this funding because essential oils cannot be patented as they are naturally occurring, so few drug companies are interested in our work as they do not see it as commercially viable. Obviously, we find this very frustrating as we believe our findings could help to stamp out MRSA and save lives."

I love this stuff. These

I love this stuff. These bloggers have a wonderful series of posts on "How We Work", which is best explained in their own words:

We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work. Here's a list of some stories and habits.

So how do you work? Or do you, like me, find ways of talking and thinking about work in order to avoid doing it?

Britian in general, and Scotland

Britian in general, and Scotland in particular, are doing well at putting dinner on the table:

Scotland emerges as the most "traditional" part of Britain in the survey, which reveals the table is re-establishing itself as the hub of the home, with more families enjoying a mealtime get-together and chat.

While I'm feeling all citational,

While I'm feeling all citational, after posting this entry, I've come across the two following quotations that seem to be somehow along the same lines. The first is from G.K. Chesterton's Heretics (thanks, Leah, for the inspiration to start reading Chesterton again), in which he suggests that

"The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless."

The other is from John Donne's "An Anatomy of the World":

There is no health; physicians say that we

At best enjoy but a neutrality.

And can there be worse sickness than to know

That we are never well, nor can be so?

That much I've got down. The rest of the poem I'm still working on. Donne can be like a crossword puzzle, only better in just about every way: I struggle to figure out one metaphor in hopes that it will intersect and give me a clue to another, in hopes in turn that eventually I'll be able to grasp the metaphor underlying the poem as a whole.

Post-Lapsarian Housekeeping

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithesdale Romance, which I have just started reading. The narrator, one Mr. Coverdale, speaking of a planned commune based on Brook Farm, laments:

"What a pity . . . that the kitchen, and the house-work generally, cannot be left out of our system altogether! It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of degenerated morals--from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day."

I'm not far enough along in the novel or sufficiently familiar with the character to know how much irony is intended here. . .

This is pretty typical. I

This is pretty typical. I post something celebrating the virtues of getting things done and then fail to post for the better part of the month. By way of explanation/apology/expiation, here are some of the things that have been distracting me:

• Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast-Food World, by Gina Mallet. This is a strange but oddly successful combination of some very disparate kinds of writing: a kind of genteel memoir in the style of M.F.K. Fisher, a thoroughly detailed and fascinating history of different food types, and a muck-raking expose on the order of Fast Food Nation. It works, I think, because the very dissonance is part of the thesis; Mallet seems to have lived at the exact last moment in the exact last place that one's culinary childhood could have taken such an unprocessed form. The fact that experiences like hers now border on the impossible leads inevitably, in thematic if not stylistic terms, to an indictment of the conditions that have prevented such possibilities. Read it and relive the historical (nostalgic but never romanticized) pleasures of eggs, milk, beef and kitchen gardens--and then find out just why they're so historical.


• The Disappearance of Childhood, by Neil Postman (to maintain the apocalyptic mood). I've read essays of Postman's, but this is the first book, following a recommendation of my sister's. It's exactly the sort of sweeping, daring cultural history I like, and it advances the theory that it wasn't until the development of print literacy that we were able to separate out a child's world from an adult's, and that, moreover, in doing so, we initiated a number of changes which, however slow to occur, rescued children from casual and frequent sexual abuse, child labor, and a host of other evils. Postman's warning is that as television dissolves the boundary between childhood and adulthood again, we can expect to see these protections revoked as well.


• The Village School, by Miss Read. I picked this up with some trepidation. A blurb on one of the sequels had Jan Karon assuring us that if you "loved Mitford, you'd love this place too," or words to that effect, and although I haven't read the Mitford chronicles, I have a prehaps unfair doubt about my love for them. There was a distinct possibility that it would be just too darn twee. But it was rainy and cold out, and I was in the mood for something provincial and veddy, veddy British. This is in fact a very gentle book, but a dry wit and a clear recognition of the bleak underbelly of rural poverty keeps it from sentimentality. I'm hoping these qualities prevail in the sequels--if so, I've got a good 30 or so of them to look forward to.

What Needs To Be Done

While cruising around the discussion forum on Mothering.com I came across an interesting thread about housekeeping and spirituality, which contained a still more interesting post about a book I've never read called The Continuum Concept. The author of the post writes:

I don't want to fall into the trap of romanticizing a culture I know nothing about, but regardless of how anthropologically true the source might be, this poster seems very sage to me. It's a great approach to getting things done--much better than my usual method [via caterina]--and I plan on trying it just as soon as I finish posting. . . .

Despite proof to the contrary,

I'm the last person to assess the medical validity of the above statement, but it interests me because it seems as much a philosophic as a scientific conundrum. I've been thinking lately about health and how to define it. This article makes the point that when we describe ourselves as healthy today, we often mean that we have been repaired, shored up, rather than that we are sound organisms. To that extent, our definition of health is largely negative--marked by the absence of disease, injury or pain--not by any positive, verifiable presence of health. What factors constitute health, as opposed to detracting from it? One of the potential problems with this question is that historically the answers have tended in the direction of the eugenic and the racial; health ends up defined according to the aesthetics of whatever group the investigator is trying to promote (so we see, for example, health defined in terms of the shape of one's nose or the cast of one's skin or the outward manifestations of one's intellect). And if we have a less (explicitly) eugenic representation of health today, it is still one that works backwards from the aesthetic standard of the supermodel and the celebrity. Can we define health positively without resorting to aesthetics?

A corollary to this train of thought is how to define healing. I've always been struck by the passage in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time in which Luciente, the representative of a utopic future, scoffs at our notion of medical side effects" "But [. . . ] all are effects! Your drug companies labeled things side effects they didn't want as selling points. It's a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers." Can we really even know how to cure ourselves if we don't have a positive model of health to serve as a standard?

Considering How Light Is Spent

There was a point, during my college years, when coming home just wasn't the same. My younger sisters were in college too; my mother during that time was caring for our dying grandfather and would often take the still younger siblings with her; my father's job had him driving all over the tri-state area, and there were times when I found myself alone in a house that suddenly seemed too quiet, too large, and too dark. I would run from room to room, turning on all the lamps and feeling increasingly desolated by the way the very light seemed stretched too thin, as if I were trying to make it fill some endlessly empty space.

I thought of this a few days ago while sitting on the porch in the evening, writing and watching the neighborhood cats. It was all enormously satisfying, until it began to show signs of getting dark. Suddenly the thought of streetlights coming on, or worse, of going into the house and turning on the lights seemed pathetic, as if all of our electrical lights were a lame attempt to substitute for the sun. Filling the house with light, I thought, is one of those acts of faith that brings the thing one wants to believe in into existence. We construct the coziness of our domestic spaces by coming inside, turning on our lights, believing in them.

When one drives through the country and one sees a house on a hill, with the sun set behind it and only the last of the day's light left in the sky, the lit up windows in the house seem like holes letting that sky through. They seem just as bright as the fading sun. Then there's a moment when the illusion skips a beat and you see that they are just lamps, trying hard to light the night and not succeeding terribly well. And then the magic reasserts itself, with a difference; the light in the windows is a promise, not of anything as dramatic as day, but of home, peace, family, the end of your own drive.

Wallace Stevens was a great one for pointing out how our constructions of things provide a sort of life-giving meaning in the absence of the meaning of things themselves. I think he would have understood well before I did why I tried to make light substitute, not just for absent sun, but for absent family. Examples abound, but see, for instance, "A Fading of the Sun" (ignore the Teletubbies and scroll down).

Much as it makes my

Much as it makes my stomach churn to hear it described as "gastro-lit," I'm generally pleased by the increase in what this article describes as literature in which "food is so central to the work that it becomes a character in itself." The article mentions and discusses several promising reads, but this one most caught my eye:

How To Cook a Tart by Nina Killham is a light, funny read about a food writer, Jasmine March, who considers herself a pro-fat gastro-guerrilla, waging war against low-fat, low-carb diets. Jasmine spends most of her time in her fabulous kitchen devising high-cal recipes with lustful abandon. When confronted by her husband's mistress, Jasmine's response is to assault the girl with whipped cream.

Good times.