Beautiful short video made for RadioLab’s series on death and dying.
I’ve been reading and thinking about food politics for about the last 18 months, since I first came across Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was a bit late coming to the party, I know, but before reading these books, I really had little idea of what’s wrong in the world of food.
I became vegetarian a short while before my 15th birthday. My girlfriend at the time was the first vegetarian I had met, and she inspired me to follow the visceral response I’d even then long felt to eating meat. (Some meat, that is: I grew up in South Africa, and I loved eating biltong, and missed it when I became vegetarian.) Anyway, that teenage sweetheart made contact recently through Facebook, and when I mentioned that she had inspired me to make this huge change in my life, all of 25 years ago, she remembered, ‘Oh, yes, I remember, I was once vegetarian for a few months…’ The right person, in the right place, at the right time, can make a huge difference in another person’s life…
I had various periods of veganism over the years — when I met with my sister-in-law recently, she reminded me that I was vegan when I stayed with her around my 18th birthday; and when I first moved to England, 13 years ago, I lived in a couple of Buddhist communities that were mostly vegan. But it had been a good few years since I had followed a vegan diet of my own choosing.
Earlier this year, having read several more books on food and animal welfare, I started to feel increasingly uncomfortable and upset — I lived on an edge of tears for a few weeks, as I learned more and more about the conditions in which dairy animals and poultry live their lives. I decided on what seemed to some a counter-intuitive plan: I would be vegan away from home, where I knew least about the conditions which any animal products I consumed might have been subject to; and at home I would eat only free-range, organic eggs and cheese, and drink only free-range, organic milk. We’ve subscribed to an organic vegetable box for several years — each Thursday morning, a box of beautiful, earth-covered, local organic fruit and veg appears at our front door. They started offering organic milk and eggs from nearby smallholdings and farms, and for a few weeks I continued to eat and drink these products.
But as I read on, and visited a few more blogs and websites — especially Compassion in World Farming and Mercy for Animals — I came to feel that I wanted out of all animal products. I didn’t want to be part anymore of the system that keeps animals enslaved — I know that’s very emotive language, but that’s more and more how I came to see the situation of animals held in captivity and exploited for their flesh, eggs, and secretions. Even on the most careful, organic, free-rangey farms, there’s the problem of boy-chicks and boy-cows, and there’s the problem of cows no longer being so productive after 7 or 8 years…
The Vegan Society does some good work — and they’re the prototypical Vegan organisation. I visited their website and saw that they run a ‘vegan pledge,’ which newcomers can use as a support in trying out veganism for a particular period. I decided to sign up for the month-long, ‘Gold’ pledge. They provide some excellent, friendly support, and can put you in touch with a mentor if you want that (I knew enough vegans to ask when I needed help, but really appreciated hearing from the Society’s Information Officer a few times during the pledge).
So, my month passed without incident. I found it quite easy being vegan. Like many new vegans, I found it hard doing without cheese — and so far my experience is that vegan cheese substitutes are really not very good (except for Tofutti’s ‘cream cheese,’ which I quite like…). I expected to miss milk in my coffee, but have found that I actually prefer it black after a few days getting used to it that way. I expected to find eating out more difficult, and although there aren’t many vegan options here in Birmingham, I really had no problems at all.
Being vegan does, though, call for a bit more creativity in cooking, and has stretched me to baking cookies and muffins — if I wanted vegan treats, I realised that I would need to make most of them myself. And that’s been fun, though I’d never baked before. I found a number of good recipe websites, and bought a copy of Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero’s excellent Veganomicon cookbook.
During my pledge month, I happened to hear a talk by Urgyen Sangharakshita in which he revisited some of his earlier thoughts on Buddhist ethics. He emphasised ‘imaginative identification,’ the process basically of putting oneself in another’s place, expessed well by Shelley’s affirmation that:
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his own species must become his own.
His own and every species…
I realised, after hearing the talk, that having once made that identification — or perhaps just made it more deeply than I have before — it would require some loss of awareness to let it go again in the future. After I’d heard of cows trapped in what the dairy industry refers to as ‘rape racks’ so that they could once again be inseminated so that they would be kept constantly pregnant to keep the milk coming, it would be very hard for me to drink another glass of milk.
And that loss of awareness, that forgetting of a new imaginative identification, I believe would be corrosive to my ethics and to my sense of self. And so I decided to extend my vegan experiment… I think now I know too much to blithely return to a vegetarian diet, and I think I’m in this for the long haul — happily, healthily. I’m still calling it an experiment, four months later, and probably will for the first year — but I have no plan to change from my vegan diet.
I found this video produced by Mercy for Animals very inspiring — maybe you’ll enjoy it too:
I spend too much time in front of computers. On the average day, I have seven hours at work, followed by anything from two to five hours at home in the evening. Most of this time is unproductive — it’s oh, so easy, to get sucked into playing around with this or that new application, or following links from Twitter, or, well, just clicking about here and there. The truth is that at the end of any given day I might be hard-pressed to even account for what I’ve done for the twelve online hours that have just passed. Ah, Eliot, ‘tis of I you speak: ‘Distracted from distraction by distraction.’ (‘Burnt Norton’)
I’ve tried a few different ways of tracking my time and my attention. I’ve used online services like Slife, which catalogue the sites you visit and applications you run on your computer, and then present you with summaries and charts so that you can be horrified by how you spend your time. And I’ve used a couple of very good time-tracking programs (I’ve settled on Billings3) to keep track of my freelance work.
I’ve come to think that I actually have a problem, and that I need to go to source if I’m going to work it out. The problem is that my time is ticking away, and I’m not applying myself to the things I truly care about because I’m caught up in mildly interesting, attention-grabbing things. I returned ten days ago from a week up a mountain in rural Wales. I wasn’t entirely disconnected up there — I watched a couple of movies on my iPod, I listened to music and a few podcasts, I even checked my email a few times. I wasn’t about to go completely cold turkey.
But now I have decided that I am. At least for short periods of time. For one day per week I’m going to unplug completely. I’ve borrowed as my name for this new habit Mark Bittman’s phrase, ‘digital sabbath.’ Bittman wrote about his own practice of unplugging in an article in the New York Times — I read that while I was away in Wales, and it made a whole lot of sense to me. I had read about Ariel Meadow Stallings’s ‘52 Nights Unplugged’ at some point last year (of course, I’ve no idea where I came across it, as it was probably in the middle of an evening’s frenzied site-hopping!), and thought it sounded like a good idea. But I didn’t manage to do anything with that good idea.
Now I have. For the past two weeks, I’ve implemented my own ‘digital sabbath’: at bed-time on Saturday, I’ve switched off the computer and the TV and my iPod and my phone, and I’ve kept them off until Monday morning. Well, let’s be honest… The first week I did actually manage to keep to it that strictly, but there’s not much point to me doing it too dogmatically — I know me: I’ll just swing to the opposite extreme if I push it too hard. So, yesterday, I read two articles I’d saved to Instapaper on my iPod — if I’d remembered on Saturday night, I might have printed them, but as it was, I felt fine about reading them as I did (saving a few printed pages along the way). And in the evening, my wife and I watched an episode of ‘Criminal Minds’ with our supper. But after that we turned off the TV, and I returned to reading the book I’d started earlier in the day — I felt little impulse to carry on watching anything else.
And, most importantly, the computer was still switched off. You see, that’s the screen I’m really concerned about, because that’s my greatest attention-suck — it’s where the hours of my day, and my life, can quietly drain away without me noticing.
So what did I do these two Sundays past? On both days I got to spend a few hours with good friends, which was great. And most of the rest of the day I spent reading (this week the wonderful and fascinating Michael Pollan, last week an interesting book on psychotherapy and Buddhism). I’ve been finding it really difficult to settle down with a book for the last long while, so these two days of reading most of a book have been real changes from that pattern, and minor triumphs in their way.
And I noticed this morning that there’s a corollary to all this: when I turned on my laptop, I had 13 email messages, 154 Tweets and Facebook updates, and 145 unread RSS articles. It took me about 10 minutes to zip through all this — of course I saved a few emails to respond to later, sent a couple of articles to Instapaper, and added some others to NetNewsWire’s clippings. But I was done with the top-level processing in 10 minutes. And that shows me that I could very likely spend less time on the computer just by processing things more effectively. For one thing, if I stuck to checking email and RSS only every couple of hours, rather than in the real-time, knee-jerk, ‘Oh my gosh, the dock icon says I have an unread feed in NetNewsWire, better switch over right away…’ kind of distraction-frenzy I usually operate with, I would, overall, waste a whole lot less time staring at this screen.
And now I’m off to read more of Michael Pollan.
I first came across Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
I discovered, in the few days that I waited for my copy to arrive, that the book has been reviewed very positively in all kinds of places (including Time magazine calling it the best book of 2006).
The story is woven around a telling of Bechdel’s father’s story — his aestheticism, his misadventures with young men, his death (likely suicide) in a collision with a bread delivery truck. Although Bechdel’s own life is told — especially aspects of her sexuality — really, the fundamental aspect of the book is her relationship with her father.
It’s a wonderfully allusive, intelligent book, a very good example of how words and images can work together, and work intelligently against one other, each medium subtly reinforcing or undermining the other. I love Bechdel’s attention to etymology, her several returns to words’ and phrases’ origins and history to draw out precise meanings and allusions. And her various references to great books and writers — Proust, Camus, Joyce, Fitzgerald — are interesting and add to the depth of her text.
Which makes it sound like a heady read… Which it is. But it’s also a deeply moving story — above all, it is this. It’s great to find a book that tells its story so intelligently and so movingly at once. And especially so when the story loops back into the unexplainable bond between daughter and father, the deep truth that ‘he was there to catch me when I leapt,’ despite everything else that he was and wasn’t within the family.
Bechdel’s drawings are sensitive — there’s a clear sense of a particular person being represented, especially in the case of her father — but also now and then extremely comic. In the portraits of her father, I have a sense of him being quite lovingly evoked, as if she recalled him as she drew him — in the sense that she called him back from the dead. Throughout, the drawings are coloured in pale blue-green washes — at one point, she describes the exact moment at which she abandoned colour in her artwork.
‘Fun Home’ is a shortening of Funeral Home, the setting for much of the story. There is fun in the book, but above all I found it to be deeply touching. Bechdel is a great storyteller, and this is a great book.
Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit
I am so looking forward to this film! His last documentary, on the typeface Helvetica, was brilliant.
Books still rule for me, but I am interested in some of the ebook readers that are now available, and when Amazon’s Kindle appears in the UK, I will certainly check it out. I’ve downloaded a few iPod applications for reading ebooks, and even bought a few books for them, but I still find it an unsatisfactory way to read. I prefer the feel of a book in my hands.
However, since so much of my reading’s been comics in the last month, I’ve been really happy with an application called Comiczeal. This allows you to arrange your digital comics in collections, and with a new update released recently, you can even view the books in your collections on virtual shelves.
Turn the iPod/iPhone on its side, and the image rotates to fill the screen, which in most instances gives a really clear view. You can also double-tap to zoom in on a detail, or use any of the other multi-touch gestures.
To move up and down the page, you just swipe your finger in the direction you need, and to move from page to page you swipe right to left to advance, left to right to go back a page.
Comiczeal’s a really elegant little app, and works excellently for reading comics. It’s the first time that I’ve felt fully satisfied by reading digitally.
Has anybody else noticed how often a villain is tracked and caught these days by signals from his or her mobile phone? In the last week I’ve seen at least three episodes of US crime drama shows — NCIS, Numbers, and CSI — where this was the main factor in catching the bad guy. (To put this in perspective: I don’t watch much TV, so this is almost every programme I’ve watched in the week.) Makes you want to switch off your phone before robbing a bank! Or, er, well, you know what I mean…
For the past month or so, I’ve been reading a lot of comics. I’ve always read comics, since I was wee. I grew up on Asterix and Tintin — my Dad loves comics too, and he gave me them to read when I was very young. He tells me that he thought it was important I was reading, whatever it was I was reading…
I’ve never really been into heroic comics, though — no Superman or Batman or that lot. And since I first read Art Spiegelman’s Maus
In the last month, I’ve read all of the Bone Series
The last of these really took me by surprise. I’ve seen it around for years, but never been tempted to read it. I assumed it was a superhero-type story… And it is, but with a difference. It’s about a retired group of masked men and women, upholders of good in the everlasting fight against evil. But they’re all pretty ambiguous figures, flawed and human in all kinds of interesting ways. It’s a great read.
Eisner is the Daddy. It was funny reading this book, and remembering seeing most of it before. My Dad owned a copy, and although I have no memory of reading it — and it anyway would have been far beyond my understanding at that age — as soon as I saw some of the images, I remembered them. I could remember where I was when I read them. (I had a similar feeling the first time I heard Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue as an adult…)
Well, now I’m onto another comic. This time it’s Joe Sacco’s Palestine
I’m not sure why I’ve turned so to comics, and I can’t remember what was the first impulse to look back into them. Ah, wait: I do remember… Last time I was in London, I wandered into Foyles, and they had a wall of serious comics on display. I picked up a book and leafed through it, and wondered if I should buy it, because I liked the drawing so much, and the emotional tone of it touched me. I didn’t make a note of author or title, but somehow the images stayed with me. A few weeks later, I came across that book again. It was Exit Wounds.
I guess there’s something nostalgic for me in reading comics again… A line to my distant past, via my more recent past (in my art history training — which itself now is fast becoming distant past). But also, I read them, and I love them, because I believe there’s considerable and fundamental power in the combination of words and images. I’m not quite like Alice, it’s not that I don’t see the point of books without pictures, but I certainly feel that the written word’s power is amplified by artful images.
