Pantry Matters

I have (another) confession to make. I am easily seduced. By chefs, that is, and by chefs on television especially. Occasionally the stars and planets will align properly and the local PBS station will string a number of really good cooking shows on a Saturday afternoon, and I'll pour a glass of wine before 5 pm and sit back and enjoy them. The current lineup includes old Julia Child and Jacques Pepin episodes, and a newer entry, Avec Eric ("We cook, therefore we are"), which I just love. But I also delight in people who simply cook and write about cooking.

By far my favorite foodie is Mark Bittman, whose book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating provided my Saturday morning reading this week. A couple of weeks ago the combination of a bit of extra cash and a 40% off Borders coupon produced two amazing additions to my cookbooks/books-on-cooking library: the Bittman book, and the companion to PBS's Spain: On the Road Again, Spain: A Culinary Road Trip, mostly by Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow--but Bittman and Spanish actress Claudia Bassols were both along for the ride. Beloved Spouse and I enjoyed the show enormously, and I'd wanted the book ever since.

So, snuggled down with the puppies (the BS is in New Haven coaching this weekend), I bit into Food Matters (sorry) and came away--as often happens when I conduct my Sabbath business of reading all morning--inspired.

Nearly ten years ago, when we first looked at this house, two things sold me: the half-acre property with a huge compost bin (useless as it turned out) and a fence full of blackberries (now long gone), and the pantry: a pantry just about the size of the one in my grandmother's kitchen at Cottonwood, where she used to put pies to cool, and which always smelled fabulous. If I ever come across that smell again, I'll undoubtedly swoon with pleasure.

My pantry, alas, doesn't have much of an odor, and if it did, it would probably waft up from the dog food bins. It's also occupied by a large hot water heater (artfully omitted in the photo; it's to the left of what I shot) that takes up way too much space. We had planned to replace the original heater with a tankless job, but the old one died on us last winter and we couldn't afford to wait the two weeks it would take to get the tankless version installed, so we had to simply replace it with a traditional, though more energy efficient, model. Some day we'll donate this one to charity and do the right thing, but for now I have to live with The Hulk.

When we were in the process of bringing the house up to code after we bought it (it had space heaters in every room, some freestanding and some built in), a safer central heating unit had to be installed, and the contractor wanted to put it in the pantry. Good thing for me that there was another alternative--a large closet adjacent to what is now the study--and he tucked it in there. The closet also houses the Beloved Spouse's tennis things, so everybody won out; and I got to keep my pantry.

Over the years, however, the pantry itself has become something of a mess, and it perennially attracts moths, so that anything not completely sealed (such as boxes of cereal or pasta) ends up with extra protein in it. The other problem now is that as I try to reduce the number of processed foods we consume, the tired shelf coverings are beginning to show, and the whole room screams for an overhaul.

What Bittman's book did for me this morning was to add direction to my already-recognized need for reorganization and general spiffing up. Little in the book is really new to me, but his approach is straightforward, no-nonsense, and a bit of a smack upside the head for those of us who preach something and don't always practice it. I do need the occasional kick in the bum to keep me honest, and Food Matters has provided the latest one.

If anyone else needs a nudge, I recommend Jane Goodall's Harvest of Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating as well. Surrounding oneself with inspiring philosophical and practical advice is one way to keep interest and energy focused on a worthwhile project.

For advice on what to put in a pantry, Aglaia Kremezi's beautiful The Mediterranean Pantry can't be beat in terms of recipes for condiments and seasonings, but a more complete list can be found in the pantry section of Clifford Wright's A Mediterranean Feast, my current food bible.

Whilst scooting around the internet on the topic of pantries, I came on Everything Pantry--a bit cute here and there, but there are sections on vintage pantries and butler's pantries. My breakfast room, which connects the kitchen and the dining room, shows signs of once having been a butler's pantry, which would have made the current pantry more of a scullery. I'm grateful for the built-in sideboard that would have held cutlery and crockery in the years after the house was built, and still does.

The Perfect Pantry is a blog focused on this very topic, with some nice entries on how to stock and use ingredients, plus a nifty continuing exploration of "Other People's Pantries"--for the food voyeur. For stocking and preserving advice, nobody is better than Sharon Astyk on Casaubon's Book. Her philosophical approach meshes nicely with Bittman's and Goodall's books.

So here's the plan: I'm tripping off to Home Depot today for better shelf paper, or perhaps some cork sheets. BS and I bought floor tiles last year to be used in the pantry and the back-porch laundry room, so I'll probably spend some time figuring out how best to install those. Since I painted the room white when we moved in, it doesn't really need to have that re-done, so I can concentrate on reorganizing shelves, rethinking contents, and simply cleaning up. I'll post the results eventually, but don't hold your breath. Inspiration comes and goes as the work load increases, and since I have grades due on Tuesday, I'll undoubtedly run out of steam as soon as I have the shelf covering in hand.

Ruminations on Weaning

I was inspired this morning by an editorial article in the Dallas Morning News on breastfeeding, prompted by the death this week of La Leche League founder, Edwina Froehlich, at the age of 93. Thinking about nursing babies leads to reminiscences of "those days" around 30 years ago, when it seemed that I had a child attached to a nipple for the better part of six years of my life--and I only had two kids. But although I was not a La Leche League member until I moved to Dallas and was searching for some kind of community in this god-forsaken corner of the universe (sorry, Dallasites, but I never have been able to learn to love this place and still think of myself as living in exile), and even though I fondly referred to my fellow members as "the militant milkers," I nonetheless kept nursing my kids until long after "normal people" had weaned theirs and sent them off to pre-school.

I was gratified to learn that about 75% of American mothers now at least attempt to nurse their babies, but not at all surprised to discover that Texas is somewhere near the bottom of the stats. Once, when my daughter was about eight months old and we had visited a mall so my husband could take my son skating, I sat in the observation area happily watching them scoot around the ice, and nursed the baby, who was covered by a shawl so completely that only her little feet poked out. I noticed a woman glaring in my direction from a few seats down in the row ahead of me, and when she caught my eye, she scowled and said "That's just disgusting. Can''t you do it in the bathroom?"

Even then I was a bit of a snark, so I smiled pleasantly back at her and asked, "Why? Is that where you eat your dinner?"

She huffed out of the area, and I felt a bit smug, but also furious that anyone could view such an activity as "disgusting"--as if I had bared my breasts and gone prancing around the arena. Come to think of it, that might have brought on some applause (I was rather a babe in those days).

Remembering this incident also got me to thinking about the fact that because I nursed the kids for so long, they were each a bit difficult to wean. They were no longer nursing for nutrition but for comfort and security, and it was an easy way to get them to sleep. But when it came time, we literally weaned them on books: substituting reading time with Dad for nursing time with Mom.

If only it were that easy to wean ourselves from the comforts and conveniences of modern life: the fast food, the fast cars, the chemically laced products that permeate our daily lives.

My dear friend and former student, Jen, has essentially told me I'm nuts (see her comment on my last post) for suggesting that we wean ourselves from sugar--and so I'm here to defend myself, and to argue not for abstention but for moderation: To wean ourselves from the satisfying (but calorie-laden and nutritionally bankrupt) bowl of Tiramisù, toward a more moderate means of taking care of the culturally-induced cravings for sugar that we've all become prey to.

Every now and then, when I'm feeling my exile more deeply than usual (I need a mountain fix every couple of years, and it's getting near that limit again), I crave something to make me feel better. Usually, it's pie. I love pie: Key lime, lemon meringue, chocolate, strawberry, cherry, pecan--almost any kind of pie. I've been known to call my husband and ask him to pick up pie on the way home. Of course, this becomes more and more difficult as one becomes aware of all the crap that goes into commercially produced pies--the ones available in the freezer case at the supermarket (their in-house bakery versions are usually awful). So the poor, dear, man is confronted with the problem of locating the least environmentally and nutritionally problematic version of pie. Loaded with trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup (usually only one of several sugars), the ingredient list alone usually dissuades me if I'm the one on the pie hunt. But he's more tolerant than I am, and wants to help me out, so he comes home with the most inoffensive choice available.

Lately, however, we've discovered the wonders of nuts. And dried fruit mixed with nuts. Or a square of really good chocolate (preferably with nuts, and even better with a bit of dried fruit). A handful of Nature's Best "Nantucket Blend" from Costco (here's a recipe from the Paleo Recipes blog) will usually do the trick now, but I'm also going to try something else the next time I'm confronted with waves of desert-longing and nostalgia. I'm going to make Gram's Applesauce Cake. This is a spice cake my grandmother used to make, filled with raisins and occasionally walnuts. It calls for an indeterminate amount of powdered chocolate, and uses applesauce instead of fat. Except for the white flour, it's actually a nutritional godsend, full of fiber and wholesome nutrients, and now I make it with a blend of whole wheat and unbleached white flour, and add a bit of ground flaxseed to bump it up even more. I haven't made it in a while, though, so this week, in the cool of the morning, I'm going to make a double batch and freeze segments of it so that whenever I want to feed what's left of my sugar addiction, I can just pull a chunk out of the freezer and save my husband from the frustrating--and ultimately unsatisfying--pie hunt.

The other weaning issue that keeps coming up is this: How do we change our lives so that we depend less on gasoline and other petroleum-based products? Sunday's Dallas Morning News ran a story about how gas prices affect just about everything we buy--and it turns out that it's really hard to find stuff in the average supermarket that isn't in some way dependent on the industry. So the way to wean ourselves from this unhealthful dependence is to become aware not only ingredients (check labels for chemical information), but origins: where products come from, and how far they have to travel. Since everything from shampoo to toothpaste can contain petrochemicals, take a look at Ecology Center's Body Map: The True Cost of Petroleum to discover not only how pervasive these chemicals are, but how they affect our health as well as our economy.

Solutions don't have to involve buying pricey substitutes for fancy cosmetics at Whole Foods. It's fairly easy to make natural cosmetics (especially lotions and creams) from simple ingredients. Same with household cleansers. A few standbys like baking soda, vinegar, witch hazel, aloe gel, and olive oil, are cheap and easy to obtain and can be used to make everything from drain cleaner to night cream. If you need help getting started, Earth Easy has some great information on home-made cleaning products and non-toxic house care.

Since soap-making isn't one of those things we can do all that easily by ourselves (although some folks do it as a hobby), a jug of Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap in your flavor of choice (I was once told that the Peppermint version is "better than sex," and although I don't think that's quite true, the soap's still a treat in the shower). By the way, forget any rumors you've heard about Dr. Bronner's containing a date-rape drug--any true soap will test positive for it as the company's president Michael Bronner shows on this video. Toothpaste isn't particularly easy to make, either, but you can get by with baking soda if you have to. We substituted Tom's Natural toothpaste for Arm & Hammer a few years ago, and our teeth are actually in better shape than they were with the commercially-hyped versions. The toothpaste is a bit more expensive, but Dr. Bronner's is cheaper than most fancy soaps, and is just plain nice to use.

Many of the suggestions I make on this blog are based on the notion of the thought experiment. So no, Jennifer, I do not think you really have to give up sugar--no more than I really think that people have to give up electricity, even though the folks in More News From Nowhere do so. But imagining a different life is a step toward making a different life. We are, after all, metaphor makers. It's one of the things we do that makes us human; we can see things differently and, if necessarily, act accordingly.

Around this house we've made a considerable number of changes over the last few years. The place is becoming a kind of laboratory for working through alternatives to our own personal status quo. We are finding that old dogs, in fact, can learn new tricks. And while I don't insist that everyone make the same changes, I do hope that the blog has begun to inspire folks to deal with the current economic situation with imagination and mindfulness--rather than despair.

Image credit: Stanisław Wyspiański Macierzynstwo, 1905. Wikimedia Commons.

Ned Ludd's Bad Rap

Back when I was seriously formulating a dissertation, before I got tired (finally, at about 45 years of age) of being a graduate student, I was trying very hard to be a philosopher of technology. This, to me, provided a focus that made sense of the enormous variety of courses I'd taken (in both the social and natural sciences, as well as in the humanities) over some (then) 25 years of higher education.

It made sense to me that if one of the things that helped us define ourselves was our use of tools (for everything from hunting and preparing our food to expressing ourselves in art and music), then we ought to be able to examine critically the uses we make of these tools, and to assess their impact not only on ourselves, but on our fellow beings--animal, vegetable, and even mineral. When I first started looking around at the developing fields of technology assessment, environmental ethics (now more broadly characterized as environmental philosophy), and other branches of philosophy (mostly pragmatism and the Continental tradition), I wondered why there wasn't a more coordinated effort to study questions that seemed to be on everyone's minds: what are we doing to ourselves?

Some folks were, in fact, writing about this very question, and I discovered them when I started thinking seriously about what human beings were up to. Continental philosophy had, in fact, produced one of the most enduring critiques in 1954, when Martin Heidegger published his essay "The Question Concerning Technology." Even earlier, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Lewis Mumford, and William Morris (among many others) had written about technology in philosophical terms. The idea of questioning technology, I discovered, had been around since the Greeks. I wasn't exactly on to something new.

Nonetheless, pursuing the subject led me deeply into Morris and his work on the technologies of art and design, and on the social and political aspects of active critique. Some folks, it seemed, hadn't just written about this stuff--they went out and tried to whack people on the side of the head to try to get them to think about where all these new machines (steam engines, power looms) were leading us. Hence the notion of sabotage (and the rather odd choice of image to illustrate this post), perhaps related to the development of the Luddite movement during the Industrial Revolution.

Of course, terms like "sabotage" and "Luddite" carry primarily negative connotations these days, but their origins lay in the act of criticizing technologies--not in terrorism or the refusal to immediately adopt every damned toy that comes on the market. My question is this: How much different might the world be today if we actually stopped to think about new tools, and took a bit of time to imagine where they might lead?

I'm absolutely convinced that the manifold problems associated with the internet, for example, would not have arisen if we hadn't all jumped higgeldy piggeldy onto the bandwagon, brandishing our cherished American gospel of individualism and waving our technical superiority, trying to convince the rest of the world that if it wants to join the future, it had better become like us. Only it's not just us--it's the entire West (trying to be like us--or perhaps trying to convince themselves that they were like us before we were). The impact of computer technology alone, from manufacture to use, on the rest of the world has created such rapid and rampant change that nobody has a choice about it any more. Traditional tribal peoples all over the globe are (thanks to Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child initiative) being introduced to the internet, and their children are being seduced by technology in the name of "progress" and "modernity" and the inevitability of globalization. The real crime here is that nobody asked them if they wanted it. We in the West are all for freedom of choice (walk down the supermarket cereal aisle to see where that's led us), but only when it comes to "choosing" which brand of computer to buy--not choosing whether or not to buy them in the first place.

The irony of the market, of course, is that choice exists only in the beginning. The "winning" technology eventually takes over (VHS beats out Betamax; DVDs beat out VHS; Blue Ray beats out HD DVD), and then those of us who bought into the "wrong" technology are left with stacks of obsolete, expensive crap that the conscientious person has to agonize over what to do with, and those who don't give a damn simply dump into the landfill.

I held out on using a cellular telephone for much longer than most (although I did own one briefly, about ten years ago, while my mother was still alive and under my care). It was only my daughter's emergency surgery a couple of months ago, and the ensuing difficulty of trying to contact me, that I finally acquiesced. And I didn't just buy a little pay-as-you-go model as I had originally planned. I bought an iPhone, because this way I could convince myself that I wasn't buying a phone--I was buying a little tiny laptop. In fact, most of what I use it for is checking e-mail, so it doesn't seem quite so much like selling out.

But of course I have sold out. I became a techno-whore when I bought that Commodore 64 back in the eighties and stopped writing my essays out by hand and then typing them on an electric typewriter. I was convinced, like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, and the rest of the Whole Earth crowd on The Well (which I never did join, however) that the internet was going to bind people together and make the world a better place. Our optimism was a bit over-frought, as Lee Siegel has rather succinctly pointed out in his new book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. If only we had thought it through a bit more carefully.

Now, I have to admit that there are things about the internet that I love. I truly enjoy writing this blog, and doing so actually forces me to think more carefully about the world and what's going on in it. It allowed me to publish my book without having to sell myself or pander to the whims of the book trade. I've also made some good friends that I'd never have even come in contact with without the rapid development of internet communication devices and programs. Best of all, I enjoyed a long and lively correspondence with my father in the years before he died, which would certainly never have happened otherwise because I'm so lousy with the phone and so bad at getting around to writing letters.

But this is only one technology, really, as all-encompassing and pervasive as it is. We don't tend to think seriously about the consequences of anything we do: cloning, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, nuclear power (well, that does cause some contemplation, thanks to Chernobyl). Unless we endure some whacking great disaster related to one or all of the above, we're not even likely to discuss potential problems before they're already out of our hands entirely. Anyone who does ask questions is an alarmist, or worse: a Luddite.

In her sort-of utopian novel, Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Leguin describes technology as "morally dangerous." The computers are all located somewhere in a city, most people live in low-impact rural enclaves, and even solar-powered electricity is looked upon with suspicion. As she explains in an appendix on practices, the "arts of the uses of the energies of sun, wind, water, electricity, and the combinations of things to make other things are all practices of exchange. They want vigilance and clarity of mind, a bright imagination, modesty, attention to detail and to implication, strength, and courage" (479). Imagine how different the world would be if we became equally mindful about the technologies we now so thoughtlessly pursue, oblivious as we are to the varieties of potential--not just the prophesied advantages.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I'm still alive and able to wallow in my low-fi Luddism. I'm fully aware that were I to move to the valley in my own utopia, I'd last a couple of years at best, because I'm so dependent on the drugs that mitigate my unfortunate combination of genes (and my sedentary way of life, pounding away at a computer keyboard rather than charging around the garden as I should be doing). But that doesn't mean that it's a useless exercise, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing much more thinking about technological consequences, much more frequently.

To some extent, we are. The back-to-the-land movement that came out of the sixties has become more sophisticated and has begun to focus on permaculture and sustainability. "Green" blogs and websites abound (some are noted in my sidebar entries). People are more interested in the quality of their food, and the market is responding, at least on a small scale. But I did discover, while conducting a bit of background research for this blog, one ominous sign. The U. S. Government office of technology assessment has closed. I'm not sure whether it ever accomplished anything anyway, but if we're officially closing up shop in this regard, it makes one wonder whether Our Guys in Washington have permanently given up thinking about consequences, or whether it's just a temporary blip. It'll be interesting to see what happens after November.

We should not, however, need a government agency to do our thinking for us. We really need to be asking questions ourselves, every time we make a purchase, especially of the latest high-tech gadget. What went into its making? Did any being or environment suffer or die as a result of its manufacture? Will this object (or complex of objects) truly enhance my life? How will it affect my relationships with my family and friends? My ecological footprint? How long will it last? Does it have the potential to cause social or environmental harm? Do I really need it? It wouldn't hurt to treat any technology we adopt as if it were potentially dangerous not only to our physical selves, but to our moral being.

Heidegger himself put it best, at the end of "The Question Concerning Technology": "The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thought."

Photo: Panthouse's own clogs (modified), from Wikimedia Commons.
Citation: Ursula K. Leguin, Always Coming Home. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Happiness is Bliss?

I once helped run a campaign for student government president at UC Riverside on behalf of a guy named Larry Bliss. Clever person and half-assed artist that I am, I ripped off Charles Shulz’s dancing Snoopy and under it drew (in cute ‘60s-style balloon letters) the slogan that I’m using to (sort-of) title this post. I don’t even remember if Bliss won the election, but I’m assured by the alumni magazine that he’s alive and well.

As usual, the urge-to-post is prompted by a confluence of newspaper articles and NPR broadcasts, together with latent notions brought to mind by snow and the realization that we’re not going to be able to escape north Texas after all, at least until summer.

I spent the entire day yesterday calculating a route, distances, and time for our proposed trip to California in a couple of weeks. I had made it only to Cathedral Gorge in eastern Nevada by suppertime, when my husband discovered that because of a mix-up in dates, we wouldn’t be able to go after all. It turns out that his spring break and mine do not overlap as we had originally thought, and he would miss two important tennis tournaments. So, instead of letting the players and the other coach down, we decided to postpone the trip, and I was plunged into a fit of melancholy that lasted only until snow started falling a couple of hours later.

This morning there is a six-inch deep layer in some parts of the yard (actual snowdrifts!), and the puppies—who haven’t seen snow since they were infants—are ecstatic. That last time, on Valentine’s Day four years ago, coincided with my last trip to see my father before he died, so that memory is rather bittersweet. I thought of him when I looked out and saw the ancient metate that has been in our family for nearly a hundred years, now ensconced in my back yard, and looking a bit like a caldera, with its rim covered with snow; he would have loved the picture I took with my new iPhone (yes, I know; another Luddite bites the dust).

As I settled into the Comfy Chair and began to read the paper, I came across mention of Eric Wilson’s new book, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. I’d heard a brief bit of it on All Things Considered last month, but (because I have yet to start carrying a note pad in the car) had forgotten about it. I also remembered hearing about Eric Weiner's travelogue, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World, on Weekend Edition, and although I've yet to read either book, I was pleased to note that the world may not be as full of happiness-addicts as I had feared. Wilson's book, especially, seems to have garnered some interesting responses, from a blog for Moms to Book Forum, so it's got my interest piqued. Now I'm going to have to read both of them.

I have long been intrigued by the attractions of melancholy and the improbability of a sovereign nation’s having been founded on some foggy idea of insuring “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—none of which it could actually guarantee. Utopian literature often focuses on an equally fuzzy notion that everyone should be “happy,” and this is one of the stumbling blocks to writing about any kind of “ideal” society. I have also long been disturbed by the often vapid expressions of people who claim to have completed their lives by having found Jesus (or Buddha, or the Way), as if all the struggle involved in actually living (including its pains as well as its joys) were something to be done away with. Perhaps our collective reluctance to embrace the “down” along with the “up” is what has prompted pharmaceutical companies to keep inventing drugs to “cure” every minor ache and pain, as if to numb us from reality like Soma did in Brave New World. (As an aside, there actually is a drug called Soma, and it looks familiar to those of us who have read Huxley’s quintessentially dystopian novel.)

If, as I also read this morning (in a review of the new Fox series, New Amsterdam), death is what makes life meaningful (the protagonist calls it “God’s joke”), surely the absence of happiness is what makes happiness mean anything at all. Philosophical happiness, in fact, seldom has anything to do with the feel-good sensibilities of self-help books. It’s about being intellectually fulfilled—recognizing the good, even if one can’t actually attain it (Plato). Rather than seeking to forget about death (The Ultimate Sad Thing), philosophers tend to find in it a reason for living. Martin Heidegger’s term Sein zum Tode (being-toward-death), for example, actually describes what it means to be human: the human being is the only one aware of its own mortality.

In my utopia, happiness does not describe a blissful state of existence. I’m not sure I’ve even used the word in the story. What my characters try to build is a world in which people can exist without all of the artificial angst-makers the modern world presents: pollution, inequality, terror, greed, environmental degradation, violence, racism, and the like. Their freedom lies in the ability to do what people need to do, and to live meaningful, creative, fulfilling lives that center on be-ing, and not on the denial of death.

Happiness is a slippery notion, and I welcome books that buck the trend of trying to guide people out of “negativity” by urging them not to be “cynical” or “pessimistic,” or by developing step-by-step programs that earn their authors untold wealth by fleecing people who’d rather not think. Thinking is difficult and frequently uncomfortable, but it keeps the mind alive. Certainty is unattainable (and probably not any more desirable than blissful happiness), but the search for understanding is boundlessly rewarding. All the “definitions” of happiness promoted by popular culture seem to suggest that one should choose to be a contented fool, rather than a discontented Socrates.

And so I go forth to wallow in my uncertainty (Clinton or Obama?), and to mull over my delayed escape from Texas. I can, however, assuage my melancholy by planning to spend the time re-glazing needy windows and planting my new garden. And I can go out and watch the puppies, contented fools that they are, and ignorant of death and destruction, while they romp in the snow—which is, sad to say, melting as I type.

Photos: Chinaberries laden with snow; my grandmother's metate.

Of Comfy Chairs and Soft Cushions

I have many things for which I am grateful, not the least of which is the fact that I can spend my mornings tucked into a comfortable, if not beautiful, chair, with a couple of pillows to support my aging lumbar region. Here I read the paper, and then, if there’s time, I read another chapter in one of the books I keep on the stand next to me, under the stained glass lamp we got on sale not long after we moved in. The chair is set in front of the living room windows, three double-hung jobs badly in need of re-glazing and painting, that face east: the best orientation for the house, according to my Asian-influenced upbringing. Artifacts from our stints in Japan and Taiwan lie around the room, and many of the aforementioned soft cushions are covered in fabrics from China—probably woven in some sweatshop or other for the export trade. I am always torn between my love for the colors and patterns of the East, and the ethical questions that arise from purchasing them so far away from their origins. I have no way of knowing how the people who made them are faring; so I can only hope that some portion of their cost makes it back to the weavers, fullers, and tailors responsible for their manufacture.

In fact, a good deal of the time I spend in my chair each morning is devoted to thinking about utopia—or reflecting on these dystopian times. The pile of books from which I glean ideas and which provide the fodder for most of my blog posts, almost always focus on what human beings have done to the world that makes it necessary for thoughtful people to wonder about the environmental and cultural impact of everything we buy, eat, wear, or otherwise consume. It’s not that I mind being mindful; it’s just that it would be better for us as a species, and better for the world as a whole, if we were more able to “spend” that time living in the world rather than worrying about it.

Writing and thinking occupy almost all of my “off” (i.e. non-teaching/grading/prep) time during the winter. I often spend Saturdays ensconced in my chair with my laptop, working on the “Farm” or on my latest literary effort (a science fiction novel about an older woman on an archaeological adventure), at least until the sun has risen enough to suggest the possibility of working in other parts of the house. The study is, unfortunately, the coldest and darkest room in the house, even though it faces south, because of the deep eaves that shade the windows. These conditions make it pleasant in the summer, but in winter I often have to sit at my desk with a comforter around my knees and a shawl over my sweater. It’s a bit like writing in a garret in a tenement somewhere, but not terribly romantic. On sunny mornings, though, the Comfy Chair is the venue of choice, especially when there’s a fire going, and one of the puppies is napping on my feet.

Come spring, when the morning temperatures are above 60°F and the weather fine, we move into the garden for our morning read. This year, since we’ll be rearranging things a bit, we’ll be able to sit at a table, with the coffee carafe and the newspapers, and perhaps even the laptop (I’ve recently discovered that the wireless connection reaches out there), which should make for some pleasant writing-mornings. The seasonal migrations through and around the house are something I’ve become much more aware of since I began working on the “Farm” in the first place. As I was writing More News From Nowhere, I spent much of my time “living” there—thinking about alternatives to “civilization.” But I have since begun to think more about the quality of life in my immediate vicinity, and how what I imagined in the book could in any way be implemented in “real life” (or the “RW” as they call it on my forum).

One of the few ways to escape the constant, intrusive, nagging, and mounting problems in the world has always been to become a hermit, and I can certainly understand the impulse. If I did not find myself regularly in the company of young adults who are inheriting what those of my generation have bequeathed them, I’d be very tempted to simply enclose myself in my little domain and lose myself in the works of Morris and the other utopians I’ve spent the last twenty years reading, or in the ancient world, or some other place not here, not now. But the kids I teach—creative, funny, sardonic, frustrating, but sometimes quite wise and much more optimistic than I—draw me back into the world at least four days a week, and make me want to fix things for them. I can’t, of course. And I’m too old and too tired to do much other than help them know some of what I know, so that maybe they can do something to fix it for themselves. Maybe our job now is to help them keep wanting to figure out a way to keep the world going.

Meanwhile, I need to get out of the chair and into the garden. I picked up herb seedlings and lettuces at Whole Foods yesterday, and need to get them in the ground—or at least into pots where they can be protected if another freeze sneaks in on us. Planting a garden is always a sign of hope, so perhaps I’m actually more sanguine than I pretend. And I now have to go make entries in a new garden journal, which gives me something else to look forward to doing in the Comfy Chair—at least until the puppies start poking me with their soft noses and luring me out to get some actual work done. Perhaps we should have named them after Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, in honor of their antics in the Python sketch that suggested the title of this post. After all, as long as we live in a world that can remember its past well enough to make fun of it, perhaps we really do have a future.