Paint is peeling off of the odd little building near the dumpster in back of the downtown Flying Star. I needed a grilled cheese and some coffee to fortify myself, so that I could get through the last bunch of the grading on Thursday afternoon. I finally finished yesterday, just in time to catch up on the five books I have to have read before next Wednesday.
Some links to other blogs and various things I like:
Crooked Timber looks at great first lines in academic books, as rare a phenomenon as I’ve come across lately. Very few of the books I’ve read over the last few years start off in a way that grabs the reader. Nevertheless, some books transcend the expectations of deadening prose. I’m now particularly interested in the book the discussion starts with — an author that gets right to the point will do that — time to go see if UNM has it (edit: they do!).
At New West, there’s an essay on the virtues of living in town. It addresses the advantages of living in compact, dense places (something I don’t have to be convinced of, as you probably know), and addresses some ideas peculiar to Westerners: namely, the idea that “real” Westerners live out in the boonies, near the elk, the cacti, or the redwoods, depending on the particular geographical and ecological region in question. This is a common idea, one that I encounter quite often, since I study the urban West, which in the minds of quite a few people I talk to, is not the West, despite any statistics or arguments to the contrary. [1]
I’ve lived in the West my entire life, save for a short sojourn in Illinois when I was very little. Yet, for a long time, I didn’t feel like much of a Westerner, since my favorite parts of the entire region are downtown Denver and San Francisco. I’d rather go on a walk through an interesting old neighborhood than hiking in a national park. I don’t have many particularly bad things to say about the East Coast. I don’t own any Western clothes, nor do I have any real interest in the following: pioneers, forts, gunfights, outlaws, Custer, or soiled doves. One of the reasons I decided to go back into Western history was I felt that there should be a place for people like myself, a place to study how people actually live in the West, instead of the myth of what the “West” is. (Fortunately, this is perfectly acceptable in academic discussions of the West — among other people, like the old guys who run the Western-book sections of used-book stores, not so much.)
Center of Gravitas looks at how academia is like high school. There are some disturbing similarities.
Getting away from school or thinking about school, you should go look at 101 Cookbooks. It’s a source of easy, delicious-sounding recipes (I say “sounding,” since I haven’t made any of the recipes yet). Yet, I trust these recipes because I have this book titled Cook 1.0: A Fresh Approach to the Vegetarian Kitchen. I’ve been selling off a lot of my cookbooks, yet I’ve kept this one, since it’s so useful. It contains a lot of information on how to improvise recipes — interesting flavor combinations that can apply to many different types of recipes, that sort of thing. Anyway, I thought the writing on the blog sounded familiar, and it turns out that the author of the book and the blog are one and the same.
I’ve also been enjoying the blog at Chez Shoes. Besides being an interesting writer, she has great taste in decorating and shoes and I love her apartment with the black-and-white linoleum (?) in the kitchen. However, her blog is potentially dangerous: how else would I know about the existence of these shoes? Or this source of awesome old-school British clothing?
[1] Like the oft-quoted statistic that the West is the most urbanized region of the country, when you look at where people actually live.
