January 2010
30 posts
She Uses Magazines
“Up For Renewal” loses me on page 2, when Cathy Alter mentions “Dave, [her] gay work boyfriend.” Oh, Cathy. Just call the guy your pet eunuch and be done with it.
We’ve started off on the wrong foot here, so let’s talk magazines.
I like them.
Forget palms, the most accurate sketch of a person comes from his magazine subscriptions. My current three are New...
A Quick Word About Oprah Winfrey
Oprah is many things (in fact, as I recently learned, she is everything- she is the very air we breathe) but she is not a journalist. I just sat through that excruciating Jay Leno interview, and have never had a stronger urge to sell my TV.
And it’s a great TV.
It’s not that I expect her to be Lois Lane, but sometimes you’re obligated to ask questions. Here’s how much...
My Head Hurts
“Eat, Pray, Love” gets so much right- about relationships, about meditation, about charity- that I almost want her to just tell me what God is. She can’t, because nobody can, but I prefer her open, curious approach to the self-serving certainty of the evangelicals. They don’t know a single thing that she or I don’t know, and as Pavement reminds us, “He’s...
My Year Of Everything: Eat, Pray, Love Week DOWN
I am armed with a bottle of Spanish rioja and the first Smashing Pumpkins album, collecting my thoughts about “Eat, Pray, Love”*. Life is good.
I could be cool and qualify this statement**, but I’m not going to: there’s a lot of wisdom in this book. I’ve been spending some online time with my e-chums from Saddleback.com lately, getting pat answers to the...
Real Talk
I really- really really- enjoyed “Eat, Pray, Love.” I honestly, literally laughed and cried. What is happening to me?
I’m in the “Pray” portion of “Eat, Pray, Love,” and Gilbert has just arrived at her Indian ashram. It’s apparently a rugged place with extreme weather and whatnot, the kind of place where “you will discover who you really are.”
What if you’re really just awful?
folkinz asked: How do you feel about Julia Roberts starring in the film adaptation of Eat, Pray, Love?
asezawesome asked: You're a font of music and pop culture knowledge. I feel I am too, I just don't get to go on TV sometimes to show that off. Do you ever feel, as I sometimes do, that you could have done something truly masterful for the world, like cure a disease or something, if you could have replaced each "fact" you know like "Madonna was born August 16, 1958 in Bay City, Michigan"...
bondfoolery asked: If you could recommend one book from your year so far, what would it be?
Eat, Pray, Ask Me Anything
Nowhere is the creeping brutishness of our language more evident than in internet comments sections, and that’s why I don’t have one here. Greg Behrendt says the internet should just be called “Haha faggot,” because that’s where every comment thread inevitably leads, and he’s right. Anonymity can bring out the worst in people. Many of you have emailed me with...
Alright.
We’re friends now, so I’m going to be honest: I am enjoying the shit out of “Eat, Pray, Love.”
It fuses my favorite elements of the strongest books in My Year Of Everything: the charming cultural confusion and hardcore food pornography of “A Year In Provence,” the spiritual curiosity of “The Unlikely Disciple,” the discipline and frankness of the...
Eat, Pray, Gym, Tan, Laundry.
In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert sets off on a world tour, exhausted from two failed relationships and hungry for “a lasting experience of God.”
Since I am reading this book in late January 2010, I have her pictured as a literary Snooki, traipsing up and down her spiritual boardwalk with a heavy heart and a blue drink in her hand, pausing only to dance alone.
...
Eat, Pray, Use The Word "Spazzy" Twice In The...
Elizabeth Gilbert might be my kind of writer. So far, so good.
One problem: in breezing through the dissolution of her marriage, the event that sets her book in motion, she spares the details. Not that I’m hungry for gossip about two people I don’t know (and not that one can’t keep some things private even in a memoir) but by glossing over the specifics, she makes her story...
My Year Of Everything: Living Oprah Week DOWN
It was very “A Room Of Jean’s Own.” I’ll estimate the number of times I read the word “shlumpadinka” at right around eleven zillion.
Robyn Okrant has a sweet, folksy style to her, and I’ll bet the blog was a fun read, but the book meanders. The tables at the end of each chapter tease what must have been some fun Oprahspired projects that we never get to...
NOW I Get It.
I might have known I’d get the most lucid statement on religious devotion yet from the Oprah book.
Let me back up a little. I’ve been talking with some of my new online Saddleback friends lately, and they echo what Kevin Roose’s Liberty University classmates tell him in “The Unlikely Disciple”: you need to give your life to Jesus to get to Heaven.
As a Catholic, I...
Rick Warren
His sermon is all about discipleship and commitment, and he’s making some good points. But I’m distracted: with his Façonnable shirt, jeans, goatee and girth, he’s such a central-casting schlubby everyman I can’t believe he’s not married to Josie Bissett on a CBS sitcom.
GodChat!
So I was going to drive down to Saddleback today, but when Google Maps says “57 minutes, up to 3 hours 45 minutes with traffic,” I get nervous. Plus, I have the NFL Playoffs to sort of occasionally pretend to pay attention to*. So I’m-a watch the service online. It’s the future!
To kill time before the service-stream begins, I entered a Saddleback Church chat room. (Chat...
You Can't Spell "Oh My God I'm Going To Kill...
Like most of what originates from the world of television, Robyn Okrant’s “Living Oprah” just wants to please everyone. Again and again, she veers close to something that might vaguely resemble criticism of Oprah if you squint really hard and you’ve had three beers, and then immediately corrects herself: “It is maybe a little interesting that Oprah urges her viewers...
Trembling Before God
It is a measure of the depth of Oprah Winfrey’s personal brand that Robyn Okrant can write, with no evident sarcasm, “Oprah is right: doing things for others makes me feel great.”
Remember that episode when Oprah invented altruism?
Self-Potato*
As surely as any sketch about Oprah will have her SCREAM A CELEBRITY’S NAAAAME, every one of these My Year Of books written by a woman with a boyfriend/husband will have this scene in the first 20 pages:
Boyfriend/Husband is dutifully drying a dish, when Author lays her plan on him. “How would you feel if I spent a year [cooking Julia Child’s recipes/following Oprah...
Oprah H. Christ.
I’m on page 6, and I’ve already come across a “buh-bye,” a “come a long way, baby” and a “cue the flashback music.” Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride (to 1992).
GodMonth Rolls On
What I admired about Roose’s and Jacobs’ books is that they go into their projects with open minds. It would be so, so easy to caricature the religious, but at a time when we’re asking them to open their minds, it’s good to see these guys taking the same advice.
I have some searching to do, and one more week left in My Year Of Everything’s GodMonth.
I shall end it...
Gimme That Old Time Religion
In “The Year of Living Biblically,” which is a long title I should truncate but TYoLB looks ridiculous, A.J. Jacobs tackles one of the questions I’ve always had with religion and the good works associated with it: Is doing a good deed in self-interest really doing a good deed?
Jacobs wonders whether he’s really becoming a more altruistic person, or whether he’s just...
Prayer
Like many Catholics, I grew up praying a lot. Before meals, before classes, before bed. On my knees, head resting on my clamped hands, mouthing the Our Father and the Hail Mary, only using my own words to ask God to “bless Mom and Dad and Dan and Steve and all my friends.” For a lot of religions, prayer is meditation; Catholic prayer is recitation.
Around the time of my first...
The Year Of Living Biblically
Now, I had planned on spreading my A.J. Jacobs a little more thinly, maybe checking in with him at the beginning of the year and at the end. But after “My Jesus Year,” my resolution was to get back on track, and I had to call in the big guns. Jacobs is the patron saint of My Year Of Everything, and I needed him to intercede on my behalf*.
“The Year Of Living Biblically” is...
My Jesus Year
Oh, we’re back to work now. I’ve kept up the reading, but I’ve been slack with the writing. I vow to pick up the pace. My new year’s resolution is “Assume rightful place in American literary pantheon,” so I have work to do*.
Part of the problem is that I wasn’t terribly inspired by Benyamin Cohen’s “My Jesus Year.” Some of these...