Monday, August 24, 2009

First day of class blues

As if the first day of classes wasn't already depressing enough (just kidding...I really do love being a student), I just found out my car needs a new power steering pump.

The damage? I'm too devastated to recreate the quote here, but let's just say it's brought to you by the letter "G".

Who needs some cheering up? I do, I do! How about some stories about the food industry. Oh wait...this will only drive my spirits even further into the ground.

Except that Nicholas Kristof has a cute anecdote about a chicken who thought it was a goose (an example of the soul that industrial food has lost).

And except that in TIME's expose of industrial food, they have this to say:

A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."
They also have pretty photos:


So, things aren't that bleak. I'm going to go home, drink a beer and finish reading a Japanese crime novel about prostitutes, glass ceilings and social strata. Life is pretty good, actually...

Friday, August 14, 2009

Novelists get sober: the best thing in the world for some, the worst for others

Check out this article by Tom Schone on how writers fare when they sober up.
Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a “better listener”.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.
Come one, somebody's got to have written a similar article about great journalists.

(Thanks to Yiyan for the tip!)

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/12/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Daily Diigo Bookmarks: What has Jordan been reading on the web today? 08/03/2009


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.