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A couple of months ago the Manly Men’s Book Group^TM read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This is quite possibly the best non-fiction book we have read. Pollen examines four different approaches to food in the U.S. — conventional corn and soybean based industrial, industrialized organic, local “slow food” organic, and hunter/gatherer.

While Pollan has clearly come to some conclusions regarding the relative merits of each, he is able to acknowledge the attractions of the other approaches. Less a polemic and more a nuanced exploration of what we tend to take for granted, this book is a must-read.

If you’re pressed for time (aren’t we all?), and are wondering whether reading the book is worth the time commitment (or loved his book so much that you google “Pollan” regularly), check out his essay Unhappy Meals in last week’s New York Times Magazine. While not a summary of Omnivore’s Dilemma, it’s a variation on a theme and an excellent read.

And if you’re really really short on time, yet have somehow managed to get this far in this post, here’s the thesis — and opening sentences — of his essay:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I have tickets to hear him talk at City Arts and Lectures in May. I can hardly wait.

I received Alice Munro’s collection of short stories Carried Away for Christmas this year.  The first story I read was the last story in the book, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” published in consecutive issues of The New Yorker in late 1999 and early 2000.  Powerful story, very well-told.  If you’re short on time, skip the rest of this posting…heck, skip reading any more of anything…until you’ve read this short story.

If this story is a fair representation of Alice Munro’s writing, I’m embarrassed that it has taken me until now to discover her writing.  The story is featured in a wonderful review (published in New York Times in 2004) of Runaway.

This story would make a great movie.  So upon returning home from vacation I start looking up Alice Munro to find out more about her (and whether she might be amenable to optioning her stories for film)…only to discover that the story has just been made into a film (Away from Her, starring Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, and Michael Murphy and directed by Sarah Polley).  It will be released in the U.S. in May 2007.  Too bad for me. 

Silver lining: It will be interesting to see how the story has been translated to the screen, compared with how I envisioned it.

2/2/2007 Update: A friend returned recently from Sundance, where he saw and liked Away from Her. “Great performances, moving film,” says he.

I have always believed that borderlands — of ecosystems, of civilizations, of art — foster creativity and innovation. Having finished the first chapter of Bernard Bailyn’s short — 150 page — To Begin the World Anew, I am struck by the similarity of this belief with Bailyn’s description of the creative tension between provincialism and sophistication that formed the the fertile soil from which grew the revolutionary ideas of American political thought.

Particularly intriguing is the sense that this creativity arose out of the colonists’ uneasyness with having one foot planted in the Old World and one in the New:

For many — the ablest, best informed, and most ambitious — the result was a degree of rootlessness, of alienation either from the higher sources of culture or from the familiar local environment

Quite a contrast with the current state of affairs. The United States is now comfortably established as the predominant world power. Popular culture takes its lead from the United States. Students from across the world seek out a U.S. education. Wealth and class discrepancies at home have never been greater. Narrow specialization rules the day. Culturally, we are no longer living on — nor stimulated by — the frontier.

Which leads to the inevitable questions: Where is the frontier today? Where can fertile circumstances such as those existing in pre-revolutionary America be found today?

From today’s reading of Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks:

December 3

Clear and cool.

I have been sitting here resting
after my morning stroll, and the sun
in its soft yellow work gloves
has come in through the window
and is feeling around on the opposite wall,
looking for me, having seen me
cheerfully walking along the road
just as it rose, having followed me home
to see what I have to be happy about.

Just returned from a brief trip to visit Celia and Gary on the Saltmarsh. While waiting for Celia’s homemade bean soup to simmer, savoring Gary’s smoked salmon caught earlier this month just off their land in the Hood Canal, talk turned to Ted Kooser, this year’s Poet Laureate of the United States. Celia showed me a photocopy of a short interview from the New York Times Magazine.

Jean and I loved his book of essays Local Wonders, which we read over the months following our last visit with Gary and Celia, but I haven’t read any of his poetry. Celia loaned us two of his books of poetry. I started reading Winter Morning Walks out loud to Jean the night I returned. Already I love it. So quiet. So in-tune with the land, the seasons, and the humanity around him. Here’s the opening poem:

The quarry road tumbles toward me
out of the early morning darkness,
lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt
of softly glowing fabric, interwoven
with tiny glass beads on silver thread,
the cloth spilled out and then lovingly
smoothed by my father’s hand
as he stands behind his wooden counter
(dark as these fields) at Tilden’s Store
so many years ago. “Here,” he says smiling,
“you can make somoething special with this.”