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A shocking amount of words and photos of food await you in this April edition of what I’m reading, writing, and eating. Consider upgrading to paid to read more!

Reading

Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo has become my nighttime read after I finished the biography of WWE’s Vince McMahon (she contains multitudes!) Also continuing Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” by Héctor Tobar. I speed-read two books that were due back at the library: Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America by Will Bardenwerper and Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America by Erik Baker. Homestand focuses on one of towns whose minor league baseball team was cut by MLB in recent years, and the college league that filled the empty stadium and place in the community. I read the introduction and closing and found it moving, but didn’t have time to read the whole thing. It struck me as a book that maybe could have been an essay – or at least I would rather read the shorter version. Make Your Own Job gets into the historical weeds of the history of work ethic in the US, ending with analysis of how the digital platform brand of entrepreneurship (while not new in some ways) has really fucked us up big time (to paraphrase lol.) I’m also skimming this book but am more likely to check it out again to read the whole thing. A long quote that I think is pertinent here:

“In recent years, a variety of analysts have critiqued this system by analo-gizing it to the land tenure system of feudalist Europe. Nonetheless, while the feudalism analogy is rhetorically piquant and often sketched out with in-genuity, the gig economy has considerably more recent antecedents. Twenty First-century platform capitalism should not be understood as a historical interruption - a reversion to the feudalist past - but rather as the perfection of nearly a century of experimentation with "entrepreneurial" schemes of labor organization. Its ancestors are less the fields of Norman England and more the kitchens of Ray Kroe's McDonald's, the "distributorships" of Away and other multi-level marketing schemes, and before them all the organizational schemes of early direct-selling companies like Avon. These firms all presented themselves as entrepreneurial initiatives that worked by creating new opportunities for entrepreneurship on a mass scale. All the platforms have done, ultimately, is to use the internet to lower barriers to entry even further, to intensify the atomization of their workforce, and to use algorithmic feedback to enhance firms' capacity to discipline workers without direct managerial supervision. It is sometimes difficult to resist the feeling that the entrepreneurial work ethic had been demanding a technology like the digital platform all along, the necessary infrastructure for its full expression. It just took a hundred years to develop.”

Writing

This month for the newsletter: 

• Beautiful Delicious - On falling in love with the PBS show Check, Please! Arizona and what enjoyment can mean in times of crisis

• Considering Food Scarcity’s Closeness - An introduction to the topic I want to write more about (food scarcity) by way of exploring my past shame about being on WIC

• Dinner, a Semi-Complete List: Part Five - Thinking about food, abundance, and lack on Good Friday.

In other writing, I’m working on finishing an author interview for Write or Die Magazine, finishing up some grant applications, and sent out two issues of the Wasted Ink Zine Distro newsletter on April 9 and April 23. 

I sent a micro-poem for his vomit-themed contest and am thrilled I was an honorable mention. I save the scrap paper I used to document my daughter’s illness in July and was gratified to put that bit of notetaking to creative use. Read it in Guts! 

and launched chlorophyll magazine and I have an adapted fairy tale and linocut print in the first issue! It’s a story about a woman who runs an oddity shop on a lake and whose dearest wish is to see a merrow (Irish term for mermaid.) Read it in chlorophyll!

Cooking & Eating

Bulgur and chickpea pilaf, which was the first time I cooked bulgur. Comment if you have a favorite recipe or preparation. My in-laws took the family out to a brewery and I had a good beer, fries, and wedge salad with an excessive (complimentary) amount of blue cheese. Rigatoni with asparagus following a recipe from Cook As You Are by Ruby Tandoh. A variety of Big Salads (Elaine voice) with a combination of the following: lentils, sweet potato, watermelon radish, cream cheese filled peppers, avocado, tomato, kimchi, tofu, and a pile of fresh fennel or cilantro. A big can of beer at a Dbacks game. No-Waste Whole Cauliflower and Macaroni Cheese from Cook as You Are – but I made it with a combo of cauliflower and sunchokes. Vegan brownies also from Cook as You Are, which I brought to a Wasted Ink Zine Distro team meeting and were given many compliments! Onion and Potato and Margarita focaccia pizza at the newly opened Barrio Bagel and Slice. I’ve written about Barrio Bread before and am very excited about this new spot (in an old Sonic Drive-Thru I used to frequent in high school!) that offers a streamlined breakfast/lunch menu of bagels and pizza along with their independently and locally grown / milled / baked sourdough by the loaf. Orange and lemon cheong following a few recipes recommended in the Tomato Tomato Discord – bring your surplus produce questions there! Sauteed kale and fennel root with a tomato and a bit of tomato paste stirred in, then an egg cooked in the middle, eaten with toast. A really delicious bubbly tea - hibiscus, jasmine, green - my friend picked up at Trader Joe’s. A cinnamon bun and a cardamom bun picked up at Mark Chacón’s new shop for Easter morning. The plate of marinated vegetables I made for Easter lunch. My plate at my mother-in-law’s with beans, rice, peppers, tortilla, salsa, and guacamole.

Some Personal News

I got bangs because I needed to change something! And I’m not sure what tattoo I want yet. Apoorva told me that I did it at a good time for me astrologically speaking and I’m grateful for any alignment I can muster. I also acquired a diffuser and my waves are thanking me. 

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