Summer of Steinbeck

     We have an extremely small, local library that we've gone to every week this summer, which inhabits a very tiny building that is run entirely by volunteers and donations.  They have a wonderful kids' section, but the adult section looks eerily like your 80-year-old grandmother cleared out all the books she bought in the 1980s and hadn't read.  The "Literature" section in the kids' department is pretty good, and is also about 90% John Steinbeck.  Since living in California, I've realized that everyone raised here became inundated in Steinbeck from school, and yet I can't remember reading one of his books.  At some point in my life I'd read multiple good quotes from Travels with Charley, so I thought I would give it a try, and it was excellent!  I followed that up with a collection of his short stories in The Long Valley, and finally decided to go for the plunge and read Grapes of Wrath.
      To paraphrase another author: "It was the best of books, it was the worst of books."  I've entirely fallen in love with Steinbeck's ability to describe characters and tell a good story.  He really likes his characters, and it shows.  The one-eyed junkyard supervisor is one of my personal favorites.  However, there is definitely some heavy-handed political statements he's trying to make with the story that get oppressive and trite with repetition.  There is no way that one Okie family could encounter every possible event of the Dust Bowl, and the sentimentalism of it is too much for such a good writer.
       Steinbeck's genius can be found in how many times he's been copied over the last 80 years.  It seemed that writers as far apart as Tom Wolfe and Wallace Stegner have copied aspects of his style.  In fact, Stegner is extremely similar, but has even less hope for his characters' unhappy endings than Steinbeck does.
       Steinbeck certainly wasn't a happy character himself--he drank and partied his way through college (which he didn't finish), his first wife was an active Communist who had an abortion because Steinbeck thought being a father would inhibit his writing career.  He neglected his second wife and children, and was possibly happiest with his third wife.  It sounds as though he enjoyed the company of the characters on the page more than those that inhabited his house.  However, his skill is amazing, and I'm looking forward to a visit to the National Steinbeck Center, which is about 20 minutes from my house.

The Government Should Stay Out of My Safeway

I recently finished reading the book The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I know this is a bit out of date, as the book came out several years ago, but that's just because I'm slow. I finally decided to read this one for two reasons: first, I had seen Pollan interviewed several times on different food documentaries. Most of these documentaries were full of fire-breathing organic-ists, but Pollan always sounded surprisingly sane. Secondly, I know some people who became fire-breathing organic-ists after reading this book, so I wanted to be able to find out how that happened.

Here is where I was coming from. "Organic" is a word that certainly doesn't mean what it really means anymore. I used to ask my students what organic meant, in my biology class, and they would answer "without chemicals," or "no pesticides." They never believed me when I told them it just meant "life" and consequently they did pretty poorly on their tests. It also makes ridiculous the idea of "inorganic food." This was probably the first thing to bias me against the organic movement. Also, although I love the way good food tastes--and usually the more local, the better--I despise the elitism that goes with words like "organic," "free-range," or "natural." Most of the elitists show disdain for the poor and lack of gratitude for the food God made.

Pollan divides his book into 4 different meals, and describes how those meals arrive at our table. His first meal is one made fully from industrial agriculture (and he visits McDonalds for dinner at the end). His second meal is what he calls "Big Organic." For this meal he buys everything from Whole Foods. His third meal is a pure, free market meal, which he calls, "Greetings from the Non-Barcode People." In this chapter he visits the farm of Joel Salatin, a well-educated, multigenerational, Baptist-preacher/farmer, and eats with his family. His last meal is the Hunter/Gatherer meal, where he hunts his own wild boar and makes the meal with things he finds in the woods or grows himself (lettuce, wild mushrooms, sourdough bread, etc.).

He actually does a wonderful job, whether he intends to or not, of demonstrating that our entire "industrial" food system is the result of government subsidies. Our government subsidizes the growing of corn. As a result, thousands of local farmers have gone out of business because they haven't been allowed to sell their product for what it is worth. Also, this has led to a surplus of corn that we need to use; which has created the feedlot-style system of raising farm animals.

God made cows to eat grass, but we feed them corn. Because their guts don't digest corn well, we need to give them antibiotics to help them fight infection. We also have to fatten them quickly, so they can be butchered before they die at a young age. Also, corn doesn't contain the correct fatty acids for their bodies, so we grind up other cattle bones and fat for them to eat--turning our cows into cannibals. This also necessitates the need for more antibiotics to guard against mad-cow disease (what happens to cows when they eat other cows). The same system is in place for feeding chickens (and yes, they feed dead chicken parts back to the chickens also).

Pollan was also surprisingly moderate on the organic movement. He does a wonderful job of attacking what he calls "Big Organic," such as the Whole Foods empire and organic regulatory groups. He does a wonderful job of describing the quaint farm picture of the free-range chickens at Whole Foods, and then he actually goes and visits that farm. It turns out that free-range chickens are no different from regular chickens--as California law only forces them to "have access to the outdoors." This means that the free-range chickens are raised in the same massive silos as the other chickens, but there is a small slit door in the bottom corner of the silo that leads out to a narrow strip of grass that runs part-way down the edge of the silo. Since these are also "organic" chickens, the chicks don't receive any antibiotics, so they are not actually allowed to even use this outside option until they're old enough to ignore it. In his visit to this particular organic, free-range chicken farm he never saw even one chicken get close to using their free-range option.

The most entertaining farmer he visited was, without a doubt, Joel Salatin. Besides the fact that I enjoyed seeing Pollan, who is a Berkley professor and liberal Jew, loving his time with this fundamentalist Baptist (he graduated from Bob Jones University), who even has a fish sign on his front door; Salatin is a really fun guy. He inherited his farm from his father, who worked on the farm over weekends and holidays, all with the goal in mind of passing it on to his son who could hopefully support his family solely by farming. He describes himself as a "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-Farmer," and he sees the root of all farming problems and food-price problems in our country as a result of government regulation. He does not consider himself an "organic" farmer, per se, but insists that if you understand the growth and behavior of animals and plants you don't need much pesticides, fertilizers, or other chemicals. His prices are affordable and reasonable (his chickens sell for $1.99/lb.). He also lives in West Virginia and refuses to ship his food farther than 150 miles from his home--but he insists that if the government got out of the farming business, there would be many more farmers just like him. I'm interested in reading his book called Everything I Want to do is Illegal.

Good food is a good thing. Sometimes, I believe, Christians give up the realm of tasty food to liberals, and it's not because we like food too much; it's usually because we like food too little. The Lord's Supper is bread and wine, two of the most developed tastes imaginable. The organic elitists are truly nauseating, but the realization that most of their food complaints are the results of government regulation was truly eye-opening. God gave us taste buds and a world that is edible, and the difference between a tomato we grew in our backyard and one that came on an airplane from South America a week ago (and was picked a week before that) is certainly noticeable. However, even though I was impressed at how much Pollan connected food problems in our country to government regulation, I have actually seen him in documentaries calling for more regulation as a solution. Hopefully more guys like Salatin will be able to make a living at farming, as there is certainly plenty of farmland out there (if only the government would leave it alone and let people use it)!

The Big, Bad Wolf

There is a reason why we named our daughter after a fairy tale hero, mostly because we love fairy tales. We love the ancient-ness of fairy tales and the Christian stories of fairy tales, which includes lots of witch-burning and troll killing.

I was raised knowing all the famous fairy tales, and as soon as I had children, I knew that they needed to know them too. It was part of their culture to know who the big, bad wolf is and why you should always listen to your mother's instructions. We got a beautiful copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales when my oldest was still a newborn, and began to read the stories as soon as the kids were old enough to listen.

As I started reading them aloud, though, I realized that many parts of the stories ruffled my adult comfort feathers. There were some gruesome parts, some seemingly ignorant parts, and some violent parts. Sometimes I hesitated to read these stories--like the fact that Hansel and Gretel's mother wanted to abandon them in the woods and let them starve to death. But I also realized that if I cleaned up these stories, I would be guilty of the same crime the Disney Corporation has been committing for years!

But what really taught me to love the fairy tales--in all their bawdiness and gruesomeness--was that I want my children to love the Bible in the same way. Our family standard of "appropriate" is anything you can find in the Bible, and fairy tales fit neatly into that category. The Bible is certainly not G-rated (despite what this may lead you to believe), but we still want our kids to know and love all of it. That doesn't mean that they need to know in detail what some of the racier sections mean (like my personal favorite, Leviticus 15), but they shouldn't be shocked when an unbeliever tries to discredit God's Word by surprising them with the Book of Judges.

I also realized that all of those same elements that bothered me in fairy tales as an adult, were still in those stories when I was a kid, and didn't bother me at all. Most of these stories, at least those written in the medieval days, were entirely Christian. They spoke the truth about the gospel in a way that was written specifically for children to understand.

In elementary school I remember begging my own mother to tell me a Bible story that I'd never heard before. She opened up Judges and read the story of Ehud killing Eglon. It was the first time I can remember being fascinated and grossed out by something simultaneously. Children everywhere seem to be fascinated by the grotesque, and nearly nothing we can do as parents will make them fall in love with perfectionism. This is why toddlers stare at odd people in a way that makes their parents want to melt into the carpet. And why those same toddlers create chaos anywhere they find order. The Bible and fairy tales are one way to direct that fascination the way God intended it: to show mercy to those who are beaten down, and what to with those who are doing the beating.

The Underground

Right now I'm reading this and loving it. Dostoevsky has an amazing talent for irony and sarcasm (which seem to be the theme of all my favorite writers). The first story in the collection is a striking satire on romance, which is hilarious. However, my favorite "short" story in the collection (really the longest one) has to be Notes from the Underground. The very epitome of irony, malice, and man's sinful heart. I'm also starting to notice lots of similarities between Dostoevsky and Chesterton; including their love of irony, irrationalism, and the common peasant of their own countries.

Here's a bit of fun from Notes from the Underground on free will:

"For man is stupid, phenomenally stupid.....I would not be at all surprised, for instance, if suddenly and without the slightest possible reason a gentleman of an ignoble or rather a reactionary and sardonic countenance were to arise amid all that future reign of universal common sense....and say to us all, 'Well, gentlemen, what about giving all this common sense a mighty kick and letting it scatter in the dust before our feet simply to send all those logarithms to the devil so that we can again live according to our foolish will?' That wouldn't matter, either, but for the regrettable fact that he would certainly find followers: for man is made like that."

Keeping Up With Thor

I have always wanted to read Snorri Sturluson's masterpiece of Norse mythology, the Prose Edda. I recently started a copy and am loving it. By far the most enjoyable mythology I've ever read. There is something about the Norse gods that they never take themselves very seriously--unlike the Greek ones that always seem to believe they are terribly important. My husband believes this is because Sturluson, as the first to compile all the Norse myths, was a Christian, he had a different view of his own cultural mythology then the pagan Greeks did (such as Ovid or Plutarch).

It's a shame most of those Norse gods were pagans, since they would have been fun to have a beer with someday.

And Because They Really Do Exist

Just started this middle school read...



So far it's fun, we'll see how it goes.

A Very Good Book (But, yes, it IS scary)

Not too long ago I read Coraline by Neil Gaiman. I read a lot of children's (young adult) novels, and this one ranks among the very best. In fact, if I have my way, my kids will hopefully enjoy it as much as they do Narnia.

The story is about Coraline, a little girl who wants to live in a fantasy world, because she hates the world in which she lives. She is frustrated and upset with her mildly-neglectful parents who won't entertain her all day long, and she's an ungrateful whiner. She goes on to discover a real-life fantasy world, that gives her everything she wants, until she realizes that it's actually a curse.

Like all good little-girl heroines, she ends up slaying a witch, and her methods are not unlike those of Jael in the Old Testament book of Judges (by destroying her enemy through hospitality). She repents and learns gratitude, and in so doing, discovers that the real world is infinitely more magical then her escapist fantasies. In fact, in Coraline, Gaiman quotes directly from G.K. Chesterton and his chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" in Orthodoxy. This is where Chesterton explains the value of fairy tales because they open our eyes to the very every-day magic we are surrounded with (and ignore, because of our own dullness).

Just for two pre-warnings, the book is definitely creepy (and the illustrations more so), but by middle school age it would likely qualify as creepy and fun (not scary, as it may for some younger children). Also, there was a movie based on the book which came out several years ago. Do yourself a favor and avoid it completely. It changes the end of the book (no more Jael scene), and displays some pretty bad taste for something aimed at a G-rated audience.