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November 22, 2004
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.
Posted by Miki at November 22, 2004 06:20 PM