In readers' paradise

Yesterday was lovely, but the weekend was  overcast. Today we are finally going to look at Cherie's strawberry farm in Mountain View. She grows wonderful sweet strawberries year round and sells them for five dollars a quart at the farmers' market in Hilo. We always show up early so we can get two boxes before she sells out.

We had planned a project, which we will defer to next weekend, weather permitting, to put up a wire trellis to grow beans.  My yoga teacher, Christina, who just got back from a trip to Germany to see her family, brought back packets of seeds for us. I got some kohlrabi seeds, and I hope they will do well here. I am a wreck from doing yoga yesterday after a long break! Ouch!

Luckily, there are all these reads on my Kindle! I subscribe to The Nation (of course), The Progressive, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement. These are not costly in this format, and I get them on the day of publication. Furthermore, all of these magazines, with the exception of The New Yorker, are readable on the Kindle Fire. The Progressive, The Atlantic and The Nation are even  in facsimile form, so I can look at all the ads and pix if I want to. The New Yorker gives me the written content and the cartoons, which are perfectly OK on the Kindle 3, because they are in black and white and I can enlarge them.  I also usually download The New York Times.

 

The New Yorker  had a really good article on Macau, which it describes as "a cesspool of financial crimes."  People who believe we should have gambling legalized in this state should think twice about bringing that kind of atmosphere to Hawaii.   Read about the antics of Sheldon Adelson, whom "Forbes  ranks as the seventh-richest man in the United States." He is  the man who contributed all but 5% of Newt Gingrich's campaign money. I often reflect on the millions upon millions of people who have to live in noisy, crowded polluted  dumps like Macau and truly count my blessings.  China could pull the plug on all  this at any time, if they decide that too much money is leaving the country via Macau.When we were there in 1999, we saw some pretty (as opposed to glitzy) sights there of ruins from the  Portuguese colonial days. My travel journal on Hong Kong and Macau is on the sidebar, and these are two of the photos I took then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the Progressive, there is this article, Banned in Tucson.   It's about how the schools have banned books about "Hispanic" history.  Vigilantes have come right into the classrooms and removed books in front of the eyes of the stunned students.  This piece is  full of snark, such as, "delighted to find tasty tacos and enchiladas in front of them, ...they don't see any faces--only the hands that made them." And "What Arizona loves about itself comes from a heritage that has no people, as if the Anglos walked into a well-maintained ghost town." That's the way California is, too.  The original people are still around, but the latecomers act as if these people don't exist, except in a service capacity. 

And in the same issue Kate Clinton  is hilarious on the subject of the "Gay Old Party." You can just imagine. She mentions that Mormons are not popular in spite of attempts to normalize the religion as an all-American faith.  And I can't resist quoting this, "...I wish Gail Collins would take my pledge always to mention man-on-dog sex when writing about Rick Santorum."

I was delighted to see a feature article in the Sunday Times on Van Jones, whom they describe in the title as a "lefty dreamboat."  Well, I guess since he is black we don't need to take him or his ideas seriously. I heard him speak on the last Nation Cruise, and what impressed me about him were his skills as an orator and the strength of his ideas. Yes, he is physically attractive, but he could be a total nerd and still be compelling.  His major project  is Rebuild the Dream.

And for a treat, I re-read Katha Polliitt's book, Learning to Drive, and some of her poetry from her collection, The Mind Body Problem.  She gets some really rich hostile appraisals  from the right, such as these gems that I found on her Wikipedia entry:

Pollitt was criticized by Bernard Goldberg, who named her number 74 in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, because of her essay "Put Out No Flags," in which she says: "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." Goldberg criticized what he perceived to be her lack of patriotism in the time shortly after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Pollitt's response, in the Introduction to Virginity or Death!, was "(Memo to self: must try harder.)"

Feminist author Camille Paglia described Pollitt as a "whiny troll, an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine...She's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously intertwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment."^[19]

I could almost say, with enemies like this, who needs friends?

There's more, but this post  is already way too long.   Hasta mañana.

 

Comments

[gigi-hawaii]

I agree that legalized gambling has brought in more crime than anyone imagined. But, the average tourist in Vegas and Macau (both of which I visited) does not really see the criminal element. At least, I didn't. We just read about it in the media now and then. That may explain why gambling as a cure-all for the economy is always pushed in the legislature every year. People just don't see anything wrong with it.

[Hattie]

Gigi: And of course pressure groups pay politicians money to tout the idea of legalizing gambling here. League of Women Voters is always working to keep legalized gambling out of Hawaii, one of only two states that bans it. (The other state is Utah.)

[Brandon]

If you go to your Facebook page, I sent, or "shared" in FB lingo, a link from the MIT Press about The Baffler, which can also be read on the Kindle.

[Hattie]

Brandon: Thanks.

[barbara]

I am a bit confused by your post's Van Jones comment, "Well, I guess since he is black we don't need to take him or his ideas seriously." -- barbara

[Hattie]

Barbara: I just think that article in The Times trivializes Van Jones. Black men can get that "sexy stud" treatment.