Fun outing planned

Ok, so we've decided not to go to the Delano winery this fall. Instead, we're heading over to Elizabeth's house on Saturday, Nov. 5 for an organic Thanksgiving-style meal with organic wine. YUM!

We'll still be meeting Wednesday, Nov. 16 for our regular club meeting to discuss The Omnivore's Dilemma, but the meal at Elizabeth's house will be a nice example of what Michael Pollan is talking about in that book. No need to read the book early though.

We'll be carpooling up. Email me for details.

Michael Pollan on the Daily Show

Here is a link to a video of Michael Pollan on the Daily Show.

Click here.

The Daily Show, January 4, 2010

Michael Pollan wants Americans to recognize that cheap food comes with a high cost to their health and the environment.

November's Book

Elizabeth picked our November book:

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

ABOUT THE BOOK

A NATURAL HISTORY OF FOUR MEALS

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

October's Wine

Cindy brought cheesecake to compliment her wine choice for October: Raspberry Infusion by St. Croix Vineyards. I LOVE THIS WINE! It's been one of my favorites since I first tried it years ago on the Three Rivers Wine Tour. Yum.

For more on this local winery, go to: http://www.scvwines.com

We also had:
The Naked Grape, Cabernet Sauvignon - Becky's pick

Questions for discussion on Mary Karr

Questions for Discussion
1. The first sentence of Lit is "Any way I tell this story is a lie." What does Mary mean by this? Is she a reliable storyteller? Is there a story in your family famous for its different versions? Is there a story you can't tell without "feeling" like it's partially untrue?
2. Mary refers to her mother as "a shadow stitched" to her feet, and to herself and her mother as "dovetailing drunks" and as facing off "like a pair of mirrors". What does this say about Mary's relationship with her mother? Do all women feel this way about their moms? At what age is it most painful? At what age—if any—does it end?
3. Mary writes, "I sense the oppressive weight of my old self inside me pressing to run wild again. My old mother I'm trying to keep in." Have you ever found yourself wincing at how you resemble your mother?
4. How is Mary's trip to college with Mother the "hairpin", as she describes it, in her early life? This trip marks her introduction to real drinking, but it's also the point at which Mary would "start furnishing [Mother] with reading instead of the other way around." What does Mary mean by this, and what's the significance of this transition? Was there an "official" transition to adulthood in your life? Was it marked by college, marriage, parenthood, career success, or something else?
5. "Words shape our realities," Mary concludes when she registers the meaning of the Ernst Cassirer quote: "The same function which the image of God performs, the same tendency to permanent existence, may be ascribed to the uttered sound of language". How does this realization frame Mary's determination to become a poet? At what times do religion and poetry seem to do the same things for her?
6. Mary calls poetry "one of the sole spiritual acts in our mostly godless household" and poets "the gods I worshipped all my life" Has literature ever substituted for spirituality with you? In what ways has it done so?
7. Mary describes Daddy as a silent fixture of her adolescence. How does her father's silence emerge, later, as a threatening force? How does her father's silence compare to the silence of the Whitbread's, and to Warren's characteristic reserve? If Mary understood early on that "words would define me, govern and determine me", then in what way is "wordlessness" her enemy?
8. Why does Mary call her time in recovery a "nervous breakthrough"? Have the darker times in your own life preceded or manifested similar changes or moments of clarity?
9. Mary has "mysterious blanks" in her memory of fights with Warren. What are the glaring blanks in your own memory? Do you think these are genuine blanks of memories or memories that you have chosen to block out?
10. In what ways does Mary's son Dev save her? If she had lost custody of him in a divorce, would she still have gotten sober? How have your children made you better, at time, or ground you to a nub in others?

About the Author
Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of Lit, the long-awaited sequel to her critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling memoirs The Liars' Club and Cherry. A born raconteur, she brings to her lectures and talks the same wit, irreverence, joy, and sorrow found in her poetry and prose. A sought-after speaker, Karr has given distinguished talks at prestigious universities, libraries, and writers' festivals, including Harvard University, Oxford University, Princeton University, Brown University, Syracuse University ("On Salmon Rushdie" with Salmon Rushdie), the New York Public Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Folger Library (Poetry Society of America/Emily Dickinson Lecture), The New Yorker Literary Festival, PEN/Faulkner, and the Festival of Faith and Writing. Karr welcomes conversation with her audience and she is known for her spirited, lively, and engaging Q&A sessions.

From http://harpercollins.com/author/microsite/readingguide.aspx?authorID=27468&isbn13=9780060596996&displayType=readingGuide 

About Mary Karr

Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955 in Groves, Texas) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.

She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.

A third memoir, Lit: A Memoir, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic,"[3] came out in November 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism.


PERSONAL LIFE

Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in South East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner. Karr's sister, two years her elder, is a key figure in her memoirs. Karr developed an early interest in literature; she told a Publishers Weekly interviewer that, at the age of eleven, she wrote in a notebook that her ambition was “to write poetry and autobiography.” Upon graduation from Port Neches-Groves High School, she traveled with a group of friends to Los Angeles, where she immersed herself in the lifestyle of the California hippie and surfer counter-cultures. Later that year, she enrolled in Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but left school after two years to travel. Her political involvement in the anti-apartheid movement led her to meet African American poet Etheridge Knight who became an important influence on the development of her poetry. Karr eventually entered graduate school to study creative writing, and earned an M.F.A. from Goddard College in 1979. Among her mentors at Goddard was Tobias Wolff, whose memoir This Boy's Life served as a major influence on Karr's own writing. She also studied with noted poets Robert Bly and Robert Hass. Her first publication was a poem that appeared in Mother Jones magazine. Karr moved to Boston in 1980, where she held various jobs in the computer and telecommunications industries while continuing to write and publish poetry. In 1983 she married poet Michael Milburn, with whom she had a son, but the couple divorced in 1991. In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace. Karr has worked as an assistant professor at several colleges and universities, including Tufts University, Emerson College, Harvard University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She currently teaches in the department of English at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She has been featured on NPR radio and CSPAN's Book TV.

AWARDS
2004 Guggenheim Fellowship
Pushcart Prize
PEN/Martha Albrand Award
Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe College)
The Whiting Writer's Award
National Endowment for the Arts grant

VIDEO Mary on Mary