Don’t ditch the bookmark, yet…

Crazy couple of months.  We moved (again), I started a new job, and I’m prepping for a July 8 exam.  But I miss the blog, even when I’m ignoring it, and will attend to it shortly.  Among the attentions I intend to lavish upon it… IT might move, too.  WordPress is so maddeningly slow so often.  We’ll see.  I’ll keep you “posted.”

“Food Matters”

A book review guest post by Duff Beach.

Spend less money, eat healthier, and save the environment.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Mark Bittman’s Food Matters is a must read.

A good friend once said to me, “Moderation in all things . . . including moderation.”  Good advice that fits Bittman’s cooking style (see his award winning cookbooks How to Cook Everything and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian).  He provides simple recipes with several easy variations to make cooking great meals easy.  In my household we are devoted followers of the Bittman school of cooking, so much so that our copy of How to Cook Everything is that tattered, dog-eared, food-stained, broken-backed cookbook your mom may have had in her kitchen (my mom’s was the Joy of Cooking).  We like food, and Bittman has taught us how to make it for ourselves, simply, easily, and with tasty results.  So when Bittman published Food Matters, part industrial food production exposé, part cookbook, I had to give it a try.

Food Matters appeals to the moderate’s sensibility.  Bittman doesn’t tell you to be a vegetarian (he says he couldn’t do it).  He doesn’t tell you you need to shop at your local farmer’s market (though it’s not a bad idea) or Whole Foods.  And he doesn’t push any eating fads.  Instead he suggests moderate changes to our diet.  Cut back on dairy, poultry, pork and beef.  Cut way back on junk food (question any food with more than 5 ingredients).  Eat more grains (brown rice, oats, barley, etc.), legumes (he really likes beans, though I find, outside of hummus, I have a hard time getting on board), fruits and vegetables.

I was talking with a friend about this the other day (a vegetarian, at that).  She finds it easy to eat the right number of fruit servings per day, hard to get there with veggies.  Sound familiar?  When I came back from Costco (I’m not a locavore, but the strawberries were direct from Watsonville, less than 100 miles away) my wife was more than a little skeptical at the volume of vegetables I brought with me.  I threw together (and that’s about accurate, slice, stir, season, put in the oven) one of Bittman’s staple vegetable suggestions on Sunday to bring for lunch for the week.  Mi espasa tried a little and was blown away at how good it was.  I’ve been loving my Food Matters inspired lunches, and having no trouble getting enough veggies in my diet.  My point?  Bittman makes these foods accessible and yummy . . . and I’ll use all those veggies I bought.

The benefit of eating these great-tasting plant-based meals?  More nutrition, fewer calories, lower weight and cholesterol, and, as Bittman makes a big point of, it’s much better for the environment.  He doesn’t claim to write a treatise on everything wrong with industrial food production, but he does a nice job of presenting some compelling facts about its ills, including the brutal conditions factory farms subject animals to, the energy the industry uses, and it’s impact on the earth, including global warming.  As he puts it, if Americans ate, on average, three fewer cheeseburgers a week, we could drive our SUVs guilt free.  Bittman includes a blistering critique of the government’s complicity in the destruction of both the environment and our health.  The bottom line is that industrial food production, primarily surrounding animal products, is out of control, damaging to our environment, and damaging to us.

Bittman’s remedy is moderate, simple, and tasty.  Following his advice we become better stewards for ourselves, our families, and the environment.  In short, food matters.

My Incredible Shrinking Attention Span

I’m trying to read or reacquaint myself with about 30 books for an upcoming exam, and the process is confirming a suspicion that has troubled me the last six or so months.  My ability to concentrate on books, or even long articles, has gone AWOL.  I love to read; I NEED to read.  I am rarely caught anywhere – in any waiting room, line, or public transportation vehicle – without reading material.  If I am, I  will scrounge for a freebie or even buy something.  But it has been getting harder for me to get through books, especially with any meaningful retention.  Since other mid-40s friends have the same complaint, I worried that this is an aging thing.  How do I combat that?  But then I read this article in the NYT about Winifred Gallagher’s new book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.  It got me thinking about, well, focus and attention.  I do most of my reading online anymore.  I almost never read a “real” newspaper, although I still read some wordy magazines (Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Bay Nature).  I read “newspapers” online.  I read blogs.  I read online summaries of articles before I decide to print, read and notate hard copies.  And since it’s hard on the eyes to read all that stuff online, I’ve become even more selective and merely skim postings that stretch too far across or down the page, or that have uncomfortably small print.

That’s what made me begin to wonder whether spending many hours a day on the computer (until January I worked as a statistical programmer for several years; it paid the rent and guaranteed even more hours in front of a monitor) and on the the internet is to blame for my Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.  Nicholas Carr wondered something like that too, in his much-Googled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Atlantic Monthly, July/Aug 2008).

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.  My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing.  I’m not thinking the way I used to think.  I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading.  Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.  My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose.  That’s rarely the case anymore.  Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.  I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do.  I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text.  The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Some have made a good case for the internet’s encouragement of nonlinear, “networked” thinking (see this post by Scott Carp, for example ), but Carr is concerned about the evolution away from “deep reading.”

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.  In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.

Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

He quotes Richard Foreman’s vivid description of a generation of “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I think I want my analog brain back.

Brief blog hiatus, but tweets will continue

I’ve got another exam coming up and need to devote more attention to it in the coming weeks, so things will remain quiet around here for awhile.  (As they have been for the last many weeks!)  Do check the Twitter link from time to time, however.  That’s where I’ll put stuff I don’t want to forget to share.

Earth Day, 2009

Polar Bear image from National Geographic's "Picture of the Day," 4/16/09

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them the Willows, or Peregrine’s Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently, it’s hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of planet Earth is overall a good idea.  –  Barbara Kingsolver

If we think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, we see that we are the earth; we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.  — Joseph Campbell

Love to throw yourself on the earth and kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love. — Feodor Dostoyevsky (This one reminds me of a scene in John Steinbeck’s wonderful novel, To A God Unknown.)

(Source for all three quotes, Sun Magazine, July 2008)

Risen, indeed

On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus*

It is for all

‘literalists of the imagination,’

poets or not,

that miracle

is possible,

possible and essential.

Are some intricate minds

nourished

on concept,

as epiphytes flourish

high in the canopy?

Can they

subsist on the light,

on the half

of metaphor that’s not

grounded in dust, grit,

heavy

carnal clay?

Do signs contain and utter,

for them

all the reality

that they need? Resurrection, for them,

an internal power, but not

a matter of flesh?

For the others,

of whom I am one,

miracles (ultimate need, bread

of life) are miracles just because

people so tuned

to the humdrum laws:

gravity, mortality –

can’t open

to symbol’s power

unless convinced of its ground,

its roots

in bone and blood.

We must feel

the pulse in the wound

to believe

that ‘with God

all things

are possible,’

taste

bread at Emmaus

that warm hands

broke and blessed.

* Denise Levertov, Stream & Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes

(once again, WordPress refuses to allow the spacing I tried to recreate from Levertov’s book)

Image: “Two disciples at the tomb,” by Henry Ossawa Tanner

(Coincidentally, I used him at Christmas, too.  When I chose this image, I didn’t realize it was the same artist until I made out the signature at the bottom.  Cool.)

An update to promise an update

Doncha hate that? I promise a real update is coming. Meanwhile, Twitter is working the way I hoped it would – it’s encouraging me get short items up quickly, instead of letting them turn to compost.

Left at the Altar tweets

I’ve gone and done it.  Left at the Altar tweets.  You can see a little “recent tweets” widget in the sidebar of this page.  My fervent hope is that this will help me keep things a bit livelier around here, since Twitter allows only short-and-sweet blurbs.  I can quickly post links that might otherwise sit around getting stale while I think of clever things to say about them, or while I summon the patience to deal with WordPress’s often sluggish interface.

Check it out when you have a chance!

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

As I think I mentioned before, I’m trying to “get” – as in comprehend, grasp, understand the lure of – Twitter.  As a medium for publicizing every random thought that crosses an individual’s mind, it strikes me as incredibly self-indulgent… curvatus in se.  As a medium for exchanging little unanchored, one-sided bits of conversation with one’s fellow followers, it seems cliquish and alienating.  But as a microblogging device – which I’ve seen it used as, to intriguing effect – it holds some interest for me.  It might be a way to dash off Left at the Altar quickies when I don’t have time to think of titles or ledes, thus keeping things a bit more fresh and timely around here.  So whenever I see a link touting that someone or something is tweeting, I check it out.  Research, you know?  And sometimes I check out who the Twits are “following,” too.

Which is the only conceivable way I can imagine that I found myself on Joan Jett’s Twitter (site? board? feed?).  Yeah, that Joan Jett.  Not exactly at the forefront of my consciousness, but once I saw her name, I had to click.  I mean, “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” was an anthem when I was in college.

Well, I have to admit, she looks quite fit and healthy at, what?, 50ish?  51, according to Wikipedia.  I also have to admit that I’ve never listened to a whole Joan Jett album.  So I must take Wikipedia’s word for it that her songs “often featur(e) lyrics surrounding themes of lost love, criticisms of insincerity, the struggles and resolution of the American working class, and the quest for authenticity.”  ‘Cuz that all seems a bit high-falutin’ for the likes of Do You Wanna Touch Me.

Transitions

Our dear old (16 years!) boy, Baxter has been slowly failing this year and late last – but has all the while shown such spirit and determination that we kept hoping he would decide when he was ready to move on.  We didn’t want to have to make “the decision” for him.  But the first week of March was especially difficult, and he took a sharp turn for the worst.  We had him euthanized on Saturday, March 7.  (In the process, I think we also found a very good and kind local vet, so that may have been Baxter’s gift to the rest of the nonhuman household.)  What a gaping hole he leaves behind.  We are going to miss him tremendously.

Baxter has appeared on this blog many times.  Here’s a little retrospective:

http://leftatthealtar.blogspot.com/2006/08/so-far-so-good.html
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/08/25/baxters-big-scary-day/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/07/05/life-is-a-highway/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2006/06/09/friday-desk-clearing/
http://leftatthealtar.wordpress.com/2005/10/10/blessing-of-the-animals/
http://leftatthealtar.blogspot.com/2004/07/baxter-his-right-eye-has-been.html