a neighborhood blog for Ditmas Park, Windsor Terrace, and people who live near the Parade Ground and Prospect Park
Our neighbor Megan Elias has produced at least two wonderful things this year: first, her new book:Stir it Up: Home Economics in American Culture. Second, with her collaborator, the urban planner Preston Johnson, their project Petra. Photo and more reporting to follow.
Bottlemania - How Water Went On Sale and How We Bought It - Elizabeth Royte
ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source—of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.
Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns. Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and—in a world of increasing drought and pollution—better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.
From the website Bottlemania.
More on this after we score a copy of the book. Disclosure: Liz Royte and I were classmates at Bard College, and are on speaking terms. That said, she can write, she’s not afraid of complexity and she’s good at making complexity explicable. (Unlike the previous sentence, which took a simple notion and made it unpronounceable).
An excerpt from Marcelle Manhattan’s lovely piece this week, There’s No Place Like Home:
I move at least once a year.
Since 2003, I’ve subjected myself to six rounds of searches on Craig’s List, six tedious packing rituals, and six tales of mishap with sundry scurrilous moving companies.
You might think me a carefree, irreverent type who treads with a conscience-light, exploratory flounce and lays my whistling head wherever it suits me. But actually, the opposite is true. I’m unsettled seeing my life in boxes. I don’t like spending first nights alone in new bedrooms. In general, I’m risibly bad at goodbyes.
That’s why the most soul-gutting feeling in the world is after the movers have finished, and you’re left standing small and swallowed in an empty apartment, where only months ago you ate and cried and fucked and perhaps fell in love and had your heart broken. But it’s over. So you learn to move on.
In fact, I wonder if I’ve learned too well. Each time I go through a move, I throw away a portion of what I had before-losing some detritus of my life’s misguided homing instincts, like Hansel and Gretel laying crumbs behind them on the way to the Gingerbread Witch. Each time, I shed a piece of my past I no longer care to carry; I’ve gotten the resettling down to a routine, hanging pictures in the same, rehearsed places and hooking up the wires to my electronics like a pro. Which is saying something, since I’m a moron when it comes to technology (don’t ask me why I started a blog).
Rinsing Feeling — not so bad
what you knew would happen
has only happened later
than you expected
the delay: a blip.
By Todd Colby - at Todd Colby’s GleeFarm.
Baylajo, a member of the ETSY collective - one piece from her collection
It’s really a steal, I think (although given my professional background,
I know more about the price of stolen and counterfeit goods than the real thing. (For the cynical among you: law-abiding, now a wiseguy, no veiled references here, former prosecutor, etc. etc.) but I know little about jewelry prices. Now all I have to to do is keep my dearest from reading this blog until her upcoming birthday.
Journalist Ashton Applewhite is working on her latest book, about people in their 80’s who are still working, called “So When Are You Going to Retire?” Applewhite has a history of deflating social tuisms, most recently demonstrating that, in fact, women often do better emotionally and financially after divorce - rather than the commonplace (but unsupported) observation that divorce is overwhelmingly likely to be bad for wives, and good for husbands. (Cui bono? Who benefits from this sort of factual misapprehension? Just asking).
Applewhite’s set up “So When Are You Going to Retire?” on-line as a sort of notebook/sandbox while she finishes her research.
By Todd Colby, poet, “Here’s The Rub:”
Here’s the Rub
Trees don’t look heavy
but they are heavy
and here’s the rub:
you have to cut them down
in order to weigh them
I envision you interpreting
this as a call to arms
the axe is ready
it is very shiny and there
is special grip stuff on the handle
a chain saw is full of fuel
and the souped-up
scale is ready too.
What’s remarkable is
is my head
which is just aching to be shaved
down the hall is a woman –
a little crazy but inspired –
go to her
she has a rubber stamp
alphabet set and she leaves
notes on the trees in the park
with their approximate weight
and degree of their ability
to have poems written about them
(for example: “THIS TREE WEIGHS
APPROXIMATELY 10,000 LBS
ACCORDING TO MY CALCULATIONS
WHICH I CAN EXPLAIN LATER. DEGREE
OF THIS TREE’S ABLITY TO HAVE A POEM
WRITTEN ABOUT IT: 32 %).
She shaved my head
while I was in bed.
More at his blog, Todd Colby’s Glee Farm.
Joel Johnson, the gadget czar at BoingBoing parallel Gadgets site - we’d assumed he was ine Bay area. But he lives up the hill - (in the lowest flood-risk zone - we’ll leave it at that), where he also has his own blog.
His most recent post announces that his sister Rachel has opened Lemons in the Kitchen, a gourmet raw food restaurant in Kansas City. We’ll try to keep track of what’s going on at all of these sites - especially if Lemons in the Kitchen starts a take-out service.
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