I just finished a rather provocative little book by NY Times journalist and author Michael Pollan. "In Defense of Food" takes a look at the history of "nutritionism" in America and paints a nice picture of why our country has such an unhealthy food culture (or lack of any food culture at all). As someone who considers himself to be a fairly healthy person to begin with, who is already very conscientious of food issues, shops at the farmers market, buys organic everything, and eats whole food over processed food whenever possible, I didn't find anything new in the practical side of the book. What I found fascinating was the very well researched study of America's relationship with food back to the founding fathers - how nutrition science, food industry and government regulation have all acted to take away real, unprocessed foods from the shelves of American grocery stores, and replace them with imitations - processed "food-like substances" that are nothing more than a collection of different manufactured nutrients that, try as they might, don't add up to the sum of their parts. Using a very common sense approach, Pollan walks through what's wrong with the concepts of nutritionism and why, ultimately, we'd all be a lot better of if we just ate real food. The problem is that real food is harder to find than it used to be - because the food industry has lobbied government entities to relax food labeling guidelines, substances that are imitation foods can be sold without being labeled as such. For example, real bread would have a few ingredients - floor, water, salt and perhaps a little honey or some other grains. But look at the ingredients of the typical loaf of bread in the supermarket and you'll find dozens of ingredients that are not food - they are chemicals, artificial substances that all together make up something that looks like bread, and tastes like what we think bread should taste like, but that really isn't bread at all.

I hope people who currently are not conscientious about food will read this book and change their conception of what food is and what eating should be. I suspect, though, that the book's biggest audience will be people like me, who already have a strong awareness of the issues discussed. But, still, I don't yet have a vegetable garden and reading this book has raised that on my priority list. Perhaps when I finish putting my bathroom back together I can finally get out and start planting vegetables.

For one month now I've doing what I previous thought not possible in the triangle - I am commuting to work via a combination of biking and busing. The buses here are not perfect, that is for sure. But as long as you are going at rush hour, and as long as you can go several miles on bike, then you are all set. I bike 6 miles to RTP, then catch an express bus to NCSU, then ride another 2 miles to work. We have showers at work, so it's really perfect.

This past week marks the first week that I rode every day. Yup, I'm tired. But I feel awesome.

I just finished reading my first novel by EL Doctorow, 2001's City of God. I had recently read a very interesting short story by Doctorow in the New Yorker and we had this novel lying around the house that neither of us had ever read. This is a truly incredible book. I didn't know much of anything about Doctorow, so discovering that he has been writing novel's since 1960, and that his credits include Ragtime and Billy Bathgate, was interesting. He has many, many works and I'm not sure where to begin for my next one.

City of God is not a casual read, it's a very literary work that requires some careful reading, and I'd imagine many discoveries could be made in deep discussion/study of the work. The book is divided into small snippets of different perspectives. The major conceit is that the primary narrator, Everett, is writing a biography/novel about the life of Pem, a parish priest in New York City. Some snippets are from Everett's discussions with Pem, some are excerpts from the novel he is writing, letters from friends and colleagues, some are notes from Pem, several read like journal entries. Then there are some perspectives that I don't quite understand. Musings from the "Midrash Jazz Quartet" - the words of a poetic jazz front man crooning long philosophical verse presumably in a small NYC jazz club. Pem is going through a major life crisis/transition about his faith, as he falls in love with a progressive widower rabbi (Sarah). Much time is spent on the Holocaust, specifically in the story of several Jews in a Polish ghetto (not Warsaw), and the fate of the detailed diaries kept by one of them.

What strikes me about the book is the beautiful, often incredible prose, that is loaded with some very compelling philosophy. It's not easy to pull off something this weighty without it seeming forced, didactic, cliched, or just awful. But the juxtaposition of Everett, a skeptical New York writer, with Pem, a deeply wise if disillusioned man of thought and faith, via some of the most incredible prose I've read in years, provides the perfect vehicle for this kind of discussion.

So all this talk about having to protect the public from renegade judges who "legislate from the bench" seems to only apply to cases where the court is trying to do thing like give people equal rights. Yesterday the court subjectively ruled against free speech and nullified an act of congress. There could be no more direct example of legislating from the bench than this - they nullified an act of congress! It's going to be a long half century.

it's been a fairly busy couple of months... had a strange dream last night where I was in some kind of world that I couldn't figure out. IN the future, maybe... customs were different. I think we were traveling, a group of us... there were snakes and strange protocols for how to dress... wish i could remember more...

Last week I went to Portugal for a wedding, and while I was gone Lisa picked up our new dog. Pictures of these things are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/sam.folkwilliams/

I finished Mrs. Dalloway... and I have started to read it again. Truly incredible book. Reading the first few pages again after I have completed it opens up a whole new world. It's really very satisfying and exciting.

Also finished the Stone Raft, which is very strange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Saramago). This is our book club book but we didn't have time to discuss in PT. I have a lot of thoughts on it that come and go. Will try to articulate later.

Portugal was quite amazing. A wonderful country with incredibly nice people. Very relaxed and open and beautiful and not at all pretentious or expensive. Highly recommended it as a vacation destination. I went surfing for the first time, which was scary and fun and exciting and painful all at once. Yes, I got hit by my board and it hurt. The country is old and it feels old. There are lots of old people with sun-worn faces and wool caps. People are out in public all the time - rather that staying inside their homes. Cafe's do not have to-go cups. People drink their coffee at the counter or at a table and finish it before they leave. Even at the truck stop on the highway. The coffee is espresso and you can not take it with you. I guess that means people have time to sit. It only takes five minutes, but when was the last time you actually drank your latte inside Starbucks in a for-here cup (on your way to someplace)? People walk instead of driving. Gas was about $80 euros for a 10 gallon tank, which is about $110 dollars. One result? Not as many fat people. Portugal makes Port and cork. Everyone knows about the Port but I didn't know about the cork. Cork is made from the bark of oak trees. In the south you drive through the country side where they harvest the cork and you can see these trees stripped of their bark. It grows back... and cork forests are really good for the environment. Then the trucks piled up with the bark cylinders on the back. I wish I got a picture of that (see here: http://www.uwec.edu/Geography/Ivogeler/Travel/Portugal/cork-loop.htm). Portugal is a small country but it has everything that makes me happy. It has mountains and it has beautiful beaches. It has a wine country (the Douro valley - quite something). It has beautiful old cities and charming small towns. The vegetarian cuisine could be better, no doubt about that. But with some patience and digging you can find wonderful food. It has a rich cultural heritage and a strong sense of national pride. The government leans left (the current president is a socialist) and people are generally sensible. I will definitely go back to Portugal, and next time Lisa will be with me...

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust as they just turn over the weeds with pearl.
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Well, on the one hand - they don't write sentences like that anymore, do they? Clarissa, as she is referred to at the top of this passage (rather than as Mrs. Dalloway) comes home from her outing to get the flowers. (At some point I want to make a chart of all the people she meets on this outing and try to get a better handle on their stories - I'm sure it's been done, but not by me...). Seeing Lady Bruton and being denied an invitation to lunch with Richard, has ignited these feelings. She is not jealous... but, somehow, the encounter reminds her of how young she is not, how much life has become bland and uninteresting.. and, it seems to be, she might be contemplating suicide. If not suicide, just death. The suspense that a diver feels before jumping off the cliff into the water below. What is this suspense, in her case? She get's this feeling often. This feeling that she is about to take the plunge...

I have been making a lot of trips to NYC for work lately. A couple of friends and I have started an NYC book club; we meet and discuss novels while I am in town. This has gotten me reading novels for the first time in many years. I'm enjoying it tremendously - it has really been filling a void for me. Gives me a chance to not think about work for the hours that I'm submersed in the words, plus it's just amazing to rediscover the literary world.

So far we have read three books:

- Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg. This is /not/ to be confused with "Akila and the Bee". I was skeptical about this one at first, but it quickly moves from a story about a girl in a spelling bee to a story of the desire for transcendence by all the members of a suburban family of four which is quickly imploding. Goldberg has an interesting way of capturing the inner worlds of all four characters as they each go down a somewhat frightening road of self-discovery (or self-oblivion)...

- Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book is truly wonderful. I first saw the movie, which is also stunning in its own right (though a mere shadow of the book's layers of complexity). Foer's stories wrap multi-generational histories into mystical, "magical reality" worlds of improbable, yet perfectly plausible, series of events. I definitely think he will be an interesting writer to keep an eye on over the next several years. One aspect of this book that really grabs me is the way two totally separate stories of self-discovery play out in parallel. There are really two main characters who, through meeting each other, set on a path that changes their lives to some degree. These journeys are intertwined yet completey independant of one another.

- Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close - also by Jonathan Safran Foer. This book unmistakably continues Foer's unique style from his first novel. It is the first work of art that I have considered which examines the events of September 11, 2001. Foer does this through the perspective of a precocious child who's father died in the WTC. This means that he avoids the multitude of political and cultural/religious traps that could easily be fallen into. The child's story has nothing to do with the implications of the event, and looks at it from a much more fundamental level. The other story playing out in this novel is that of the child's grandmother, who seems to live in an interesting world only loosely based on the reality that holds most of us in line.

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in the their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economize, not buying things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party.
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Analysis forthcoming...

While visiting my parents for New Years something rather amazing happened. My mom was looking for something an came across a box that she had taken from her mother's garage a few years ago while helping her move. She had never opened the box until now. In it, we found an amazing array of items tracing the history of her maternal family back to 1680. At some point in the early 20th century someone sat down and tried to catalogue the history of the Clark and Orton family. Among the items we found were a landgrant, from 1820 signed by president James Monroe. There were also some letters from Clark Orton, written in 1865 to hise wife Mary while he was fighting in the Civil War. Also striking were photographs from that Era through the early 20th century. It was very overwhelming to see all this stuff and made me think we need to somehow archive everything, give it to a museum, digitally scan it, etc, etc. Hard to believe these things have survived for almost 200 years in a box, moved from generation to generation... Here is one paragraph from the Civil War letter:

Mary, you wanted me to come home and cheer my lonely Mary. O, God – I would if I had to walk all the way on my hands and feet. Mary, keep up good cheer and don't weep after your loved one. The time will run fast away when you and I will meet again. I will shave off my mustache before I get home so we can have one sweet kiss, Mary.

The letter is interesting because it goes back and forth from very poetic love sentiments, and very practical observations of his surroundings and things that need to get done...

This really made me chuckle.... random subdivision name generator