Reading

Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life, a birthday gift from an ex. Klinkenborg’s the micro-essayist at the bottom of the centrist/FIRE-friendly pap that makes up the Times’ editorial page, but as I said I gave up my political blog. He, on the other hand, I can stomach, and well. He writes, “A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life.” Exactly. Part of me wants to have a rural life, but in the meantime I’m a member of a CSA, community supported agriculture: two hundred of us pay a South Fork farmer directly for 28 weeks of vegetables. This month I’m also helping build some bee hives in an East Village community garden.

Everyman’s Library recently came out with a one-volume edition of seven of Joan Didion’s non-fiction books, so I’m slowly making my way through We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. (Actually, I’m reading it in between migraines; that’s Didion-humor.) I’m in the White Album now: Polanski spelling wine on the dress she bought the day JFK was killed. This fat book is as essential as the same publisher’s collection of George Orwell’s Essays.

A piece in the Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/rosen ) reminds us of the “care crisis” women labor under in our dictatorship-of-the-market society. As long as we believe that social issues have individual solutions, as opposed to social (i.e. political) solutions, we will remain trapped in no-win situations. Meanwhile, except for the dust bunnies, I think I’d make a pretty good househusband.