the educated serf

After a book writing hiatus, I am back a little, just a little. Not that there was a huge groundswell of demand for me to return to this, but well, it's here when you find it. In August I managed to finish a book, have interviews for two good academic jobs, return to Pittsburgh without major trauma, and well, isn't that enough? I'll be posting soon on that new job (I got one of them) and other items, but here's a nice photo of the world's biggest gluten-free sign at Soergel's Orchard in Wexford, PA. They've opened a big natural foods and gluten-free section that's as grand as the sign.

Well, we are here in western Massachusetts for the month of July. I am sitting in a Panera, the least local or interesting place where there's wifi and coffee, but it is close to the movie theater where certain minors are watching a movie on the most glorious sunny day imaginable. This is not the Allison Park Panera, where it's very folksy and familiar (as familiar as an overpriced chain can get) but also very homogeneous. I have managed to find things I like and people I who share lives and interests. There's a kind of adjustment that seems inevitable, but takes work. Here's there's a set of grandparents, three kids, and a mom with a t-shirt that says "You know what's SO gay? My family..." So, yeah, you would not get that in western Pennsylvania suburbia (maybe in the city; just maybe). Getting here has been like a bumpy landing while traveling on a propeller plane: it's scary before you're sure it's going to work out. The lands

Yesterday I spent some time out at Meadow Rock Farm weeding garlic.  Susan, who lost her husband only a short while ago, is hard at work keeping the CSA running on her own.  Her aunt and uncle and their honey-colored bassett hound were there hooking up some truck-based watering systems, washing out bins, and just generally helping out.  I did not get to stay for hot meatloaf sandwiches, which is sad since it sounded better than sitting in the bleachers watching a soccer game with a lot of suburban live-through-your-kids types.   I'll be going back soon -- I have more garlic to untangle. My weeding skills are a little rusty -- especially when you're facing a plot that's had some heavy growth.  Thistle and dandelions, I was prepared for.  But wild geranium plants with carrot-like root structures were driving me crazy, especially since they like to grow right up against the garlic root bulbs.    I wish I could run back up there today and do the other two thirds of the plot.  

( image: gil and lisa listen intently; craig harris and abby on the right -- literally, not intellectually!) Every year for the last eleven years, I've gone to a conference sponsored by the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society.   Those names are a mouthful, but the issues discussed by academics and activists are practical, significant, and easy to digest if you care about the way we lead our everyday lives.    We discuss sustainable projects ranging from growing methods to labor to consumption, the historical and contemporary conditions that produce cuisines through the mixing of cultures and ingredients, the unequal distribution of goods, services, technology, and information that shapes what we grow and how we eat.    Well, the list goes on. I have just returned from this year's conference, which was in State College, PA, a town I've been visiting regularly since 1981 (in-law family).  Not as exciting as last ye

(maybe some photos soon...i used real film in a 35mm camera.  slows things down a bit...) I bought some perennials on Monday.  Things with silver foliage. Straw-like flowers. A scented geranium.  Something with purple leaves.  Variegated sage. A lupine -- because two tiny ones came back on their own and they're too fragile to accomplish much bloom this year.  Cut them some slack -- give them a big sibling to do the work for this July and then next year they'll be big and this one will be setting up shop more permanently.   Last year I pulled out a corner of the endless pachysandra that wraps around our house and started planting a few things: a little mint and oregano and the lupine.  They got all gangly by fall but they came back this year with more heft.  Just today, I planted the whole corner full of what I bought.   I think it's because Zack rototilled a big area in the yard, serious about getting a vegetable garden in.  It messes with the pristine yard effect, which I

This is a picture of Erik Selby ,  farmer and  radio announcer.  He and his wife Susan  and his father-in-law ran a beautiful CSA called Meadow Rock Farm in Butler, PA.  Erik passed away suddenly last week and I am saddened by it. As writers, there are certain issues that draw us in but remain elusive.  To speak about knowing someone and about loss is to enter into the realm of the cliched and the overwrought.   For me, it's almost impossible to write without considering the ontological, especially knowing the Other, so I've got to enter that fray each day armed with descriptions, new and old.  But loss is complicated in a different way.  The losses in my stage of life, in my geographic, social, and cultural context are different from the losses of those who live with war or poverty or other hardships.   I quote at length from a story by Jane Smiley, who has chronicled the kinds of worlds I often inhabit:   ..it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arriv

I just love this.  I don't have the original photographer info -- it was circulated in a email -- but I wish I could get in touch with this person and tell them how much I love this.   Anyone who's ever had a baby give you that kind of kiss knows that this is one happy pig.   And having hugged a few pigs, I can say that the baby is clearly blissful, too.   Pigs are good creatures.  H1N1 really should be named  the "Humans are disease-carrying messes" virus.   My apologies for not having more to say lately. It's all being absorbed by the great big end of the semester/finish a million projects writing machine.  

Hey! Take your shoes off!  Yes, well, it's still mud season here in western PA (and I'm sure it's just barely that in western MA), but Tom's Shoes, the great company that sends shoes to developing countries (NICE new beautiful shoes, too, not just your worn out Nikes...), is sponsoring an event on the 16th -- it's go shoeless day.    I explained the event in detail on the Green Connoisseur Blog on April 14th (today, underneath the morel mushroom mention...) so take a look and consider kicking off your shoes while your tooling around the office, walking over to lunch, or hanging out on campus.  And if you've got the bucks, Tom's shoes come in an amazing variety of colors, shapes, styles (vegan, less vegan, yoga-inspired, and so on), and for each pair you buy, one pair gets donated to a kid somewhere who might get to school and back without risking infection and parasite-borne diseases through their feet.   

If I were able to do this more, pretty much every single post would be about my friends.  It's no accident that somehow the things I write about are, underneath, really about how we strive for these relationships despite all the obstacles.    I don't want to write about how much I miss the community of people who held me together in Pelham and Amherst.  It's one of the other critical aspects of my life where words fail.  I have been working hard on finding local friends. I'm doing okay at it. Not great, mind you, but okay.  The cultural divide is sometimes uncrossable, the geography of suburbia unforgiving, and the weirdness of academia infuriating.   The other day I compared it to how my African American students feel when they are in the minority in class and everyone expects them to "speak" for the black experience.   As. if. there. were. just. one.   Through all this, I am unaccountably blessed (and I almost never use that word) with a far-flung network of

Quest is literally looking down on my work right now.  He seems so cute and tiny in this picture as compared to his belly shot on the left (see "The CDC Can't Map Me"...). I have been thinking about cats lately, even though the dog tends to occupy my imagination more fully.  Warren asked, on his Facebook page (!!!), "do pets make us better writers?" and of course the answer is yes.  Emmett is warming my chair right now.  Leah's 18 year old cat Fez passed away last week -- Arlene and Martha shepherded him through life without Leah and then a sad but safe acquiescence to age.  His passing inspired a whole host of poems and reminiscences, not surprising since Leah's world was full of writers and cat lovers.  Here is what I wrote to Arlene: I am just back from Baltimore -- no people home (they are out eating Japanese, something I am sure they do regularly when I am away) and after the dog has wiggled and jumped on me and made it clear that she hates when I l

As those of you who actually read this schlock know, the last few years of my life have been profoundly shaped by the illness and loss of Leah Ryan.   I still find it impossible to capture my relationship to Leah in words (she was my friend -- that's good enough), although I struggle almost daily to honor it in the things I produce (schlock comments aside), whether it's cranky and irreverent or subversive and commercial, high brow theory or kitsch.   Leah's writing embodies all that and more and her outlook on life remains an enduring legacy that carries me through the day.   I know I still have a lot of work to do to live up to what she offered, even if it's just the ability to enjoy life as it comes at you.    This weekend had a lot of the usual mixture of seriously mundane annoyances and little pleasures.  The people here in Pittsburgh continue to challenge whatever tiny reservoir of patience I actually possess. (Today some parent tried to convince me that eggs were

So, we went to NYC for Zoe's gymnastics meet, in which she placed first all around, (level 7, age 13 and up).  Not so shabby, we think, but even better because afterwards we got to spent a lot of time in Chinatown and went to Canada (the gallery, not the place) and saw Xylor's work hanging up.  Here is one of her paintings -- to me, they feel a bit claustrophobic photographed this way, whereas in reality, you need the breathing space of a wall and the dimensionality of the canvas around it so the numbers and colors don't zonk you too hard.  Or maybe I'm missing the point... Anyway, we ate dim sum and went to the Armory show where Sarah's work was up in the Metropolitan 23 space. Here's the piece everyone liked the most.   Then we went with Saul to the top of the Empire State Building at night, which I'd never done before.  It's a gorgeous building with amazing marble and endless ropes to guide you through their attempts to get you to spend more money.  F

'Tis a bit of a random Friday.   The Girl Scout cookies have come in, which is rather ironic given that it's Friday and it's Lent here in the highly Catholic suburbs of Pittsburgh.  Luckily for those that have not given up sweets, I am happy to point out that there is no lard listed in the ingredients... The dog reverted to a feral state when she discovered an injured deer on our walk and as I slogged after them through deep deep muddy swamps I decided that, as a form of exercise, this was clearly inferior to yoga.   I also take back anything I may have said earlier in this blog about her lack of instincts, which have now resulted in her being given some anti-inflammatory drugs, glucosamine, very harsh words, and an undefined term of house arrest. My sister sent me this lovely bit about how employees at Lego get little lego people with their names on them to give out instead of business cards.  If I worked for Lego, I would want a Xena the Warrior lego person to give out.

Ten Second Rant Tragic Misreadings, Gender Trouble, and Me On my way to teach Paris Is Burning , Judith Butler, and theories of gender and performance। Seat of the pants, as they say, which is probably crazy given the subject matter. For some reason when I type in a title to this blog entry, it automatically converts to Japanese. That all pretty much sums up the postmodern condition as it exists today, here, in Pittsburgh. Sometimes experiencing gender -- and drag in particular -- is a bit like cognitive dissonance. You know something's not quite as it appears, but you can't always name it, and in other ways, at the same time, everything is perfectly natural. Perhaps this is a drag life, in a way, since I have cognitive dissonance about my reality that goes way beyond the grumpy religion state of mind. Tragic misreadings of the map of power, indeed, Dr. Butler. Today it's knowing how to explain Althusser and interpellation, understanding how that works in the other

Midget dogs don't usually inspire me much, but to me, this is the iconic image of grumpy .  I am sitting in my windowless office, complete with a tan push-button phone, brown file cabinets, cork board, metal desk, and a chair with no wheels, no arms, and the exact ergonomically wrong size for said metal desk.  I am not angry -- my partner of 28 years often collapses all my "not happy" moods into one lump category of "angry."   But this dog pretty much sums it up.    And honestly, I don't think we should give our emotional states too much press, if you know what I mean.  The business of living is far too complicated to give in to feeling states.  But I do know it's perilous to ignore them, too.   Being grumpy comes from surveying the landscape.  We had what must have been the aftermath of the Oklahoma tornado blow through here last night: not the full brunt, but reported 90 mph winds knocking down branches and trees and a few power lines.   That's a

Remember when email was new and exciting and you sent it to everyone all the time and then sometimes people didn't write back immediately and you got annoyed and swore off email, but then, well then you were back again because it's how everyone communicates, even though there are still those people who never, ever, ever bother to grace you with a simple "I got your message and I'll get back to you later" kind of response?      And then there's Facebook, where it's not really clear how much you really should be telling all those folks you friended because they were friends of your friends or you sort of recognize them from college but even then you weren't so sure what you had in common.    And now it's blogs, where we write and write and sit dejectedly waiting for comments or followers or some sign that it's not just a lost diary in an attic that no one will ever read unless you have a kind uncle or an aunt who's a literary agent or you wro

definition: you have applied for so many jobs that you forgot what your core competencies are. (source: http://artataq.wordpress.com ) I would like to say a few things about core competencies, but I am having trouble.  I don't know if I've forgotten (so I'm not sure you could say I have destinesia...) but I definitely can't be sure they're functional.  I did walk into a classroom of 40 people yesterday and manage to teach a whole session and no one ran from the room screaming, so I suspect it was fine.   Some of them even talked to me after class, so I stand a chance of remembering their names.  It isn't their fault that some of their professors are only tangential to the larger workings of the institution, so I do feel the usual (and entangling) pang of responsibility for their intellectual well being while they are in my care.  Perhaps this is my core competency?  Lately it has felt more like a big anchor tying me to something I love to do but which offers ver