Older gen's Thanksgiving 2009

I just came back from eight hours at my sister's where brother Paul and I are still able to feast on dear departed mom's Thanksgiving dinner recipes, from home made full-berry cranberry sauce, creamed spinach, bourbon yams, stuffing and gravy, and the pièce de résistance, an excellent huge bone-in Diestel range-grown vegetarian diet-fed turkey breast, roasted to perfection.

Dessert consisted of mincemeat and pumpkin pies, with crusts now made with an excellent gluten-free pastry flour she has found (because of her dietary needs). And all of that from hours and hours of our sister's loving work in the kitchen! I made the hard sauce for the warm mincemeat pie (BTW, her filling uses minced meat, unlike many of the fruit-only mincemeat mixes. I brought Campari for Campari and sodas before the repast and a bottle of my Cactus Willie's Pinot Envy pinot noir with the meal.

Groan! We watched parts of two films noir after dinner from Paul's collection, both set in the San Francisco of our youth, "The Sniper" from 1952, and "The Lineup" from 1957, to continue the nostalgia theme....Sigh!

Old Missie

Thanks to my tribe.net friend ✪datpotter who revived my memories of those most precious memories I have of my own special canine companion, I am sharing these brief notes about my Missie with you. If you read "Young Missie" (which you should read first), you have some idea of how important this individual was in our lives as a family--not only my younger brother and me, but also our older sister and parents as well. That's one of the reasons I can't accept the "Christian" idea of humans being the only ones who have "souls." These compassionate beings--sometimes more compassionate and soulful than us--are definitely there, too. Either that or -none- of us have "souls" And that's fine with me. IMO, you can't have it both ways!

As you can see in this photo, older Missie spent some time at the heater vent, just as older relatives of mine did in their way. And even though I had been away from home for in some cases years she always remembered me and nuzzled her love to me. If there actually -is- a heaven I know we will see each other there. If not, and that's fine, too, I know that we have shared that heaven here on earth! What a ...can I say person? individual? loving soul says it best! It has been over 40 years since she passed on, and yet in some ways it's like yesterday for me!

Arrivederci, Missie!

Young Missie

When I was very young we had a dog and a cat who grew up together, Nippy and Tom, in the '40s. But this is about the canine companion who won my heart, from pre-teens to early twenties, after i had moved away from home, Missie. From when we first got her in the early '50s a beagle who more than took over from Nippy who had died, Tom the cat's companion. Unlike Nippy, she wasn't nippy at all but also got along even better with Tom.

Missie was such a loving and intelligent dog that she would find my younger brother when he had strayed from home. (This was the time when we didn't have to always leash dogs.) My dad lent her out to hunters who loved her keen nose, so sometimes she would be away for a couple weeks at a time. She loved to swim, and when we took her to our Russian River summer home she'd swim across the whole river to fetch a stick! Absolutely indefatigable! But she always had time for everyone who loved her! She was probably one of the best experiences in my brother's--nine years younger than me--life, and mine as well!

Looking for suggestions/additions/changes: Will's Winter Root Soup recipe for next week

Will's Winter Root Soup

Ingredients
4 carrots, peeled and chopped
3 parsnips, peeled and chopped
3 red potatoes, not peeled but chopped
3 red onions, peeled and chopped
1 celery root, peeled and chopped
8 cloves of garlic, chopped

I cup red wine
Olive oil to cover bottom of large fry pan
2 quarts vegetable broth (for stock pot)

Garam masala, generous shakes
Turmeric, generous shakes

Directions:
In a large fry pan, heat the olive oil until lightly smoking and add the garlic, onions, carrots, celery root, parsnips, and potatoes.

Cook the vegetables over high heat, until they are slightly golden, about 4 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Deglaze the pan with the red wine and reduce the liquid by half.

In large stock pot:
Add the most of the broth, bring to a simmer, add the rest, and cover the pan.

Cook at a high simmer, covered, for about 8 minutes, or until all the vegetables are fully tender; add more broth as necessary to keep the vegetables covered.

Simmer an hour or so before adding the garam masala and turmeric.

Can be on a low simmer or stand three or four hours on stove before serving.

Words to live by....

In Lewis Mumford's "The Pentagon of Power" (1970) he foresaw what the onrushing tsunami of information would do. Here he is on that: "Without... self-imposed restraints the over-production of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance."

In other words, there would be so much apparent richness of information that people would become progressively poorer in understanding. Sound familiar?

Join my new tribe: Italian Bitters

Italian Bitters public - created 11/14/09

This is a tribe for those who appreciate and want to share ideas about Italian bitters, including bitter vermouths, such as Fernet Branca, Branca Menta, Punt e mes, Cynar, Averna, other amaros such as Ramazzotti , etc. Let's hear from you!

Years ago when I was a mere tot, my Italian grandpa Agosto told us that he took a shot of Fernet Branca whenever his stomach felt "oogy"--somehow that American term was one that even in the late '40s he knew that his grandchildren would understand. And indeed it did, and we did.

Over much of my 72 years a shot of this classic bitters had cured any ooginess I felt down in those nether regions. There's more to this than this gloss, so I'll be sharing those with you, and hope you share with me, too!

Will Beat Hippie Raver

tribes.tribe.net/italianbitters

Soul Hunger: The reason of faith, according to Karen Armstrong

www.odemagazine.com

MICHAEL BRUNTON
Ode
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009 ISSUE

The reason of faith

Religion isn’t easy, Karen Armstrong says: “You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form.”

Modern science knows how to fix a hole in the heart. It can diagnose a hole in the ozone layer and prove the existence of black holes at the edge of the universe.

But when it comes to explaining what's often described as the "God-shaped hole" in our lives, neither quantum physicists nor geneticists nor neuropsychologists appear to quite have the measure of it.

If anything, the rate of scientific advance in recent decades has only served to polarize religious debate. At one extreme is a resurgent atheism—epitomized by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who've both written best-selling books denouncing religious belief—which trusts that this hole, like every hole, will be filled in time by knowledge. At the other extreme is religious fundamentalism—epitomized by political spats over headscarves and creationism—which believes this hole is brimful of scriptural truth. For most of us in between, the hole in the soul gnaws away at our subconscious, like a hunger. And all of us, believers and non-believers alike, rush to fill the void with words.

One way or another, according to Karen Armstrong, "We talk far too much about God these days." Which might sound a bit rich coming from the English author of almost 20 books on religion as well as two memoirs about her becoming—and then unbecoming—a Catholic nun, who has been decked with religious prizes and who regularly lectures the high and mighty of church and state around the world. What's more, according to her new book The Case for God, the things we say when we do talk about religious faith are often "facile," "stupid" or "primitive." Ammunition, perhaps, for Armstrong's critics, of whom she has had her share, ever since her breakthrough book, A History of God, in 1993.

In that and the books that followed, Armstrong has traced the tangled roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, liberally reinterpreted the lives of Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus, and dived headlong into the maelstrom of theological debate around fundamentalism, both before and after 9/11. Some have criticized her idealistic interpretation of the Koran; religious academics berate her for shortcomings of scholarly rigor; atheists dismiss her for refusing to engage in debate on their terms.

Yet Armstrong's consistently eloquent arguments for compassion and commonality as an antidote to Islamophobia and the "clash of civilizations" have struck a chord, particularly in the U.S., where she has addressed both houses of Congress. She's also increasingly in demand on the lecture circuit in countries like Pakistan and Egypt, and is to be found on book stalls in 40 languages around the world. Drawing together the main threads of her previous research, The Case for God is Armstrong's most concise and practical-minded book yet: a historical survey of how rather than what we believe, where we lost the "knack" of religion and what we need to do to get it back.

"A lot of the arguments about religion going on at the moment spring from a rather inept understanding of religious truth," says Armstrong, settling into her theme and a winged easy chair in her early-Georgian home in north London. The furnishings and decoration suggest Jane Austen may have just stepped out of the room. Like Austen, and in a polished English accent, Armstrong is sharp-witted, quick to ridicule nonsense, and a good storyteller. "Our notion changed during the early modern period when we became convinced that the only path to any kind of truth was reason. That works beautifully for science but doesn't work so well for the humanities. Religion is really an art form and a struggle to find value and meaning amid the ghastly tragedy of human life."

Armstrong's The Case for God begins with the cave paintings of Lascaux in the French Dordogne, made some 17,000 years ago—seemingly religious art works in which the hunter assuages his unease at killing his prey through shamanic rituals in honor of the Animal Master. Such myths were born because, Armstrong writes, "As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary."

From that point on, the religious impulse took the form of creation myths like Tao and Brahman from the East, on through the gods of ancient Greece and eventually the emergence of the world's three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—and their founding scriptures. But none of them, says Armstrong, were meant to be taken literally. "The cosmology of the ancient world was telling you about the nature of life here and now. Genesis is not about the origins of life. There were many other creation stories current in Israel at that time and no one was required to believe in that one."

Reason, science and logic—what the Greeks called "logos"—were also evolving as ways of understanding the world, but always in concert, not competition, with the stories—the mythos—they relied on to deal with the mysteries of the human psyche. Pythagoras, for example, a founding father of mathematics and astronomy, sought the geometric truth of the universe from within a religious community dedicated to Apollo and the Muses. He also called himself a philosopher and expected his students to lead an ascetic and monastic kind of life, undergoing rites of purification and silence "in a search," Armstrong writes, "for transcendence and a dedicated, practical lifestyle."

In conversation, Armstrong spins the threads of her research with agile, unhesitating precision, leaping across centuries of scripture, philosophy and theology. She dissects the writings of Denys the Areopagite, the pseudonymous 5th-to-6th-century Christian theologian; explains the roots of Greek words like pistis (faith); pauses to unpick the purpose of Socratic dialogue or the classical atheism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19th-century German philosopher and proto-Marxist.

But through all the twists and turns, the notion of transcendence is the one she returns to time and again as the beating heart of all pre-modern theology. "The idea was that when we spoke about God we were speaking of something that lies beyond words," says Armstrong. "People like Thomas Aquinas would say we can't talk about God as a creator because we can only have in our heads the idea of a human creator and that can't apply to God. We can't even say that God exists because our notion of existence is too limited to apply to God. People were instructed to think about this in those terms."

In Armstrong's scheme of things, it was with the dawning of the Age of Reason that the problems started. As philosophers and mathematicians both, Descartes and then Newton well understood that science and religion—logos and mythos—were discrete realms in the search for universal truth. But when the foundation for modern science was laid, the conceptual nature of truth itself began to blur.

"Newton and Descartes started to try and prove that God existed in the same way as they would try and prove something in the laboratory or with their mathematics," says Armstrong. "And when you try and mix science and religion you get bad science and bad religion. The two are doing two different things. ... Science can give you a diagnosis of cancer. It can even cure your disease, but it cannot touch your grief and disappointment, nor can it help you to die well."

Newton seeded not only the idea that God was reducible, says Armstrong, but also that understanding religion would be easy. So easy that by 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert could confidently assert that precisely 23 problems remained to be solved in order to complete the Newtonian view of the universe. More than a century later, few of us can even comprehend those problems, let alone calculate the answers or grasp the significance of all the things we've learned since. Worse, as our theories about the universe grow ever more abstract, a sense of bewilderment is replacing the sense of transcendence. "It's not easy to talk about transcendence, just as it's not easy to play or listen to a late Beethoven quartet," says Armstrong. "You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form. Religion is hard work."

And as with great art, the realization that God defies understanding can be a source of the profoundest joy. For Einstein that sense of the existence of something impenetrable was, as he wrote in a 1930 essay, "the sower of all true art and science" and "the centre of all true religiousness." Armstrong herself calls this experience "the stunned appreciation of an otherness"—a state she says she can occasionally glimpse in the long, silent and solitary hours of study that fuel her writing.

In her studies, Armstrong, at 64, now finds what countless hours of obligatory prayer as an unhappy Catholic nun in her teenage years had flatly failed to bring into focus. Suffering a lost vocation and physically frail, she considered her eventual departure from the convent in 1969 as a relief of sorts. But coming to terms with the world outside and the God she'd left behind triggered a profound spiritual trauma. After a diagnosis of epilepsy and disastrous spells teaching at a university, Armstrong's convalescence proper began in 1981—it's still underway, she says—when she poured her pain into a memoir of her convent days, Through the Narrow Gate. A second volume Beginning the World related her adjustment to the outside world, but Armstrong later recanted it because of the false heartiness she'd adopted to satisfy both her publisher and her own delusion of contentment.

In fact, Armstrong's adjustment wasn't going well, and a brief spell as an erudite but pungently skeptical presenter of religious TV programs in the U.K.—egged on by the producers, she claims, to say ever more outrageous things—did little to help matters. But in the course of that work, Armstrong found herself drawn back to the theological texts underpinning the monotheistic religions and to what they really mean. To do that, says Armstrong, "I had to put my clever, post-Enlightenment, Oxford-educated, aggressively logos self on the back burner, and enter into the mind of someone like Muhammad, who believed he'd been touched by God. Because if I didn't sympathetically and compassionately feel with him, I would miss the essence of it and just write another clever riposte."

A report by the Pew Forum, a U.S. research body on religion and public life, recently painted a startling picture of religious faith in America. About half the population appears to have changed religious affiliation at least once, while the number of believers unaffiliated with any particular faith is rising faster than those of any of religion. Yet more than half of those who grow up unaffiliated later choose to join one. Of the reasons people give for this restlessness, far more cite disenchantment with their religious institutions than a loss of faith per se.

Across Europe, in contrast, while many still identify with a religious denomination, Pew's Global Attitudes Project report last year showed that only a fraction value religion as "very important" in their lives, compared to America, where 55 percent consider it so. In secular-minded France, only 10 percent take that view. Even in traditionally Catholic Spain, the figure is only 19 percent. Among young Europeans, religion's importance appears to be still on the wane. That's somewhat true in America, although 49 percent of adults under 40 value it like their parents and grandparents do, while in places like Egypt (69 percent), Turkey (88 percent) and Pakistan (95 percent), many more young people are keeping the faith.

That longing for spiritual uplift and communion, along with the sense of being let down, have no doubt driven the popularity of New Age beliefs in the U.S. and elsewhere in recent decades. It may also have contributed to the rise in eco-consciousness and the emergence of a "Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability" (LOHAS) demographic, said to include some 40 million people in the U.S., socially responsible green consumers interested in spiritually tinged practices like alternative medicine and personal development.

Armstrong for one isn't surprised at these shifts. "We—the British and the northern Europeans—are beginning to look endearingly old-fashioned in our secularism. The rest of the world is becoming more religious." But while God-centered religion may not own the copyright on transcendence, she warns, "None of it is of any value unless you translate it into practical compassionate action for others. In Buddhism, yoga is properly about the dismantling of egotism; if you just do these things to lose weight or to get a warm glow, that's not religion."

For Armstrong, it's compassion that's the defining virtue of religion, the Golden Rule articulated by Confucius two and a half millennia ago as "Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you." Practicing compassion is, she says, a form of "ethical artistry" that requires the dethroning of ego—a virtue, Armstrong believes, that's alive and well for the majority of the faithful in all religions, but one often singularly lacking in the higher echelons of the various faiths she addresses.

Last year, that message earned Armstrong a prize from the TED Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering big ideas, allowing Armstrong to promote a Charter for Compassion that aims to get religious leaders to commit to a program of compassionate principles (see sidebar). For some religious commentators, like the U.S. rabbi Brad Hirschfield, the Charter amounts to little more than "a ‘Kumbaya' moment" for "a world filled with hate-driven faith." Armstrong disagrees, believing the abundant supply of compassion among religious communities the world over will win out. She does have a poor opinion of religious committees though, and admits she was nervous before the first meeting of the high-profile, multifaith, multinational body convened to draw up the Charter. Until, that is, the first speaker got up and said, "We must include a sentence saying that we, that religious people, have failed." Everyone agreed, nodding, says Armstrong with a grin. "As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘We're going to be all right.'"

Michael Brunton is a writer living in London who agrees with Voltaire on the necessity of god and gardening.

It was a bit more than 38 years ago today...

Photo and caption by my brother Paul: August 1971. A car that today you'd most likely see as a rusting hulk in a junkyard or vacant lot, and clothes in a Goodwill. My brother and sister-in-law pose with their 1967 Datsun Bluebird parked on my father's garage ramp on Walnut Avenue in Larkspur, California. All kidding aside, I think they're both pretty snappily dressed, and her expression is pricelessly inscrutable. My Kodachrome slide.

Will and Jack

Will wonders how other California friends are making it through this storm. As for me I'm curled up with Jack the Ripper, or more precisely a marvelous audio book of Patricia Cornwell's meticulously researched and grippingly told "Jack the Ripper: Portrait of a Killer Case Closed."

My summer reading: Late summer 2009

I found these three recently-published books of special interest, one because I've found meditation desirable but a difficult path to follow until I discovered Thich Nhat Hanh/s Walking Meditation many years ago, and this latest version with its CD and DVD recharged me; the second because while i959 was special to me because I graduated from college and did a year of graduate study in San Francisco, no one had examined that year's pivotal influence until Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed; and third, because even though I have lived in the Sonoma Valley for four years now, Jonah Raskin's Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California re-catalyzed not only my joy of living here but also my joy of being a Californian!

Walking Meditation, by Nguyen Anh-Huong and Thich Nhat Hanh (Sounds True, 2006)
Walking meditation is meditation while walking. We walk slowly, in a relaxed way, keeping a light smile on our lips. When we practice this way, we feel deeply at ease, and our steps are those of the most secure person on Earth. All our sorrows and anxieties drop away, and peace and joy fill our hearts. Anyone can do it. It takes only a little time, a little mindfulness, and the wish to be happy. –Thich Nhat Hanh

Here are two ways to practice walking meditation, by Thich Nhat Hanh:

We can practice walking meditation by counting steps or by using words. If the rhythm of our breathing is three steps for each in-breath and out-breath (3-3), for example, we can say, silently, “Lotus flower blooms. Lotus flower blooms,” or “The green planet. The green planet,” as we walk. If our breathing is two steps for each in-breath, and three steps for each out breath(2-3), we might say, “Lotus flower. Lotus flower blooms.” Or “Walking on the green planet. Walking on the green planet,” for 5-6.

We don’t just say the words. We really see flowers blooming under our feet. We really become one with our green planet. Feel free to use your own creativity and wisdom. Walking meditation is not hard labor. It is for your enjoyment.
–Thich Nhat Hanh

When you begin to practice walking meditation, you might feel unbalanced, like a baby learning to walk. Follow your breathing, dwell mindfully on your steps, and soon you will find your balance. Visualize a tiger walking slowly, and you will find that your steps become as majestic as the steps of a tiger.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan (Wiley, 2009)

There's something very off-putting about a hyperbolic title. The more the author trumpets the earth-shattering importance of his premise, the more the skeptical reader is likely to growl: sez who? But it would be wrong to let the title — or even the occasionally supercharged rhetoric — of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author Fred Kaplan's book put you off his fascinating, fact-filled look at this seething cauldron of a year:

"1959 was the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and also commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it — when the world as we now know it began to take form."

As we stand on the cusp of what will no doubt be 10 years of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Sixties, with countless commemorations of society-altering events and occasions, it is salutary to be reminded that even the most revolutionary decades don't begin crisply according to rigid calendar categories. We all know that the Beats of the 1950s paved the way for the Beatles and hippies of the 1960s, and Mr. Kaplan gives us a colorful and memorable account of their antics during 1959. But what makes his book especially interesting is the host of other truly pivotal events that he spotlights, running the gamut from art to politics, from literature to jazz.

The year certainly began with a bang: On just its second day, the Russian Lunik 1 rocket "sailed past the moon, and pushed free of Earth's orbit, becoming the first man-made object to revolve around the sun among the celestial bodies." In the next decade, the space race between the Americans and the Russians proved one of the most competitive aspects of the Cold War rivalry, but also undeniably the most fruitful, culminating only 10 years later with Neil Armstrong's moon landing in July 1969. Today, with the Cold War gone but not forgotten, Americans and Russians work together manning the International Space Station, something unimaginable 50 years ago.

All sorts of barriers were breached. Mr. Kaplan points to John Cassavetes' independent feature film "Shadows," first screened in New York on Nov. 11, 1959, as opening up American movie making beyond Hollywood's hegemony and unleashing countless quality independent homegrown films to compete with Europe's and Japan's. Landmark court cases involving D.H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and a film based on it effectively ended censorship of written and dramatic material, no matter how titillating. In movie house and publishing house, all bets were off henceforth. And not just there: Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were cavorting in nightclubs saying words that would have been unthinkable in public not long before. And if things were not quite that dramatic or groundbreaking in the world of art and music, Mr. Kaplan points to the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on October 21 and to the efforts of Jasper Johns, John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong and Berry Gordy in this year.

Undoubtedly, the most far-reaching innovations of 1959 were the development and clinical trials of the birth control pill and the introduction of "a new device that would change the world as profoundly as any invention of the 20th century — the solid integrated circuit, or as it also came to be called, the microchip." In the latter case, there is no question of hyperbole: How can one overstate the changes ushered in by this particular invention? But, as Mr. Kaplan writes, the ability of women to control their reproduction was scarcely less revolutionary: "The Pill freed women to control not only when to have children, and how many, but also what to do with their lives."

It is not necessary for us to accept Mr. Kaplan's thesis to appreciate, enjoy and be enlightened by all that he has packed into this volume. What seems beyond doubt is that much of what happened in 1959 had very far-reaching consequences, well beyond the decade of the 1960s which they ushered in:

"This dual tension between 'unknown opportunities and peril,' as [John F.] Kennedy put it, did much to spark the creative energy of the era. It marked the onset of a new era in modern history, when — for better and for worse — nothing seemed out of the question, no option definitely foreclosed. Life's hairpin curves could be avoided through various means — drugs, therapy, denial, or dropping out. But those who immersed themselves in the voyage experienced the thrill and vertigo that came from streaking across the edge of a tomorrow that might bring miracles or catastrophe in an instant — a tomorrow that still haunts us today."

In these words with which "1959: The Year Everything Changed" conclude, the exuberance of Mr. Kaplan's prose shows itself not to have been worn down in the process of writing his book. But undeniably the ripple effect of those innovations of 1959 is still disturbing our universe for better and for worse and show no signs of dying out anytime soon.

Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California, by Jonah Raskin (University of California Press, 2009)

Author Jonah Raskin labored on an organic farm in Sonoma, California, to write his new book Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California. He commingles his reporter's notes with personal memoir in this quest for "health, harmony, and a sense of place." The

journey transforms him into a slimmer, near-vegetarian locavore. He comes to understand that the key to sustainability is to eat food raised close to home and grown organically.

Raskin says, "I did not intend this book to be about politics or economics." That is a concept so quaint as to be humorous. The only thing more political than the issues of farming, organic food production and environmental sustainability is Karl Rove's Blackberry. No matter how delicately Raskin wants to tiptoe around politics or economics, he is discussing Mexican farm labor within 22 pages, California land value within 31 pages and soon thereafter, farm collectives, food co-ops, agribusiness, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), the Department of Homeland Security, labor raids, pesticides and other such socio-economic considerations. Raskin is no stranger to political topics. He reported extensively on California's marijuana cultivation business throughout the 1970s and he has written books on such incendiary figures as Abbie Hoffman and Alan Ginsberg. In spite of Raskin's non-political intent, he states (at least twice) throughout his book, "I believe that the hands on the hoes in the fields are connected to the hand on the knives and the forks at the dinner table." Not exactly destined for a bumper sticker, however it does capsulate a world view.

In Field Days, Raskin presents himself as a skilled note taker rather than a brilliant wordsmith. He knows his strengths and weaknesses. He displays no false modesty when he says, "I never do know how to use the terms that wine writers use, though I have written about wine and wineries for magazines since the 1980s." He demonstrates the point by rather feebly describing a boutique Zinfandel as "amazing" and moving on. Raskin's book reads like assiduous notes more or less randomly fleshed out. There is no unifying narrative thread to follow, no dramatic arc to travel. The many Somona residents who populate Field Days have personalities, but we learn too little about them to have an emotional stake in their outcome. We are still being introduced to new people on the fourth to last page. This is a bit of a ramble, but rambles can be enjoyable.

Raskin frequently is possessed to describe the clothing of his interview subjects and the impulse is entirely baffling, as the attire is never more remarkable than jeans, t-shirt and a baseball cap. Unless your subject is wearing leotards, a cape and a mask, it probably isn't worth mentioning. While this type of empty calorie detail is served, we are often left begging for more nourishing information at other passages in the book. For example, Raskin interviewed a farmer who "kept a record of the compost he added to the soil, and about compost he spoke rapturously. From the way he described its texture, color, smell, and weight, you might think compost was the food of the gods." And that's it. Nothing more about that rapturous description. Just nouns, the bare bones. No adjectives, no similes, no spice. How would we think compost was the food of the gods with nothing more to incite our imagination? Come on, give us something to develop that manna-like texture, color, smell and weight. We can take it.

On a substantive level, Raskin may be a bit light-headed and heavy-handed on the topic of locally grown and consumed produce. The most glaring example is his approach to the Whole Foods market chain. We are told that Whole Foods is an evil corporate giant to be shunned. However, we are never actually told why. From his interviews, the employees seem happy, the executives seem committed. Raskin is given access to all aspects of the Sonoma Whole Foods store with the exception of the kitchen for safety considerations, but for that hindrance Raskin insists Whole Foods is not to be trusted. He appears to have forgotten mentioning 200 pages earlier that Whole Foods loaned a Sonoma organic farmer $50,000, with which she installed an elaborate underground irrigation system, as part of the company's "program to rely less on distant suppliers and generate more produce from local farmers." This doesn't sound the least bit evil or corporate. In fact, it sounds quite compatable with Raskin's "hands on the hoes" sensibility. Yet, we are told absolutely nothing more about this sponsorship program. Remember, this is a personal quest and not investigative journalism. Field Days is best appreciated when held to this less demanding standard.

Raskin's personal quest is what is important here. "Going back to the soil--planting, harvesting, weeding, and cultivating--changed what I prepared in my kitchen and how I prepared it," he observes. "Farming changed my feelings about food any my rituals of eating, whether by myself or with friends." If it takes a ramble to reach this most admirable end, so be it. Enjoy the ramble.