Pro Women’s Tennis (and Animals)

An explanation: Yesterday morning I finished reading JM Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello, the first book of his I’ve read. It’s extremely impressive and highly polemical. So last night in the spirit and somewhat under the spell of that book I ended up writing a polemic—I wrote “a brief polemic” first but maybe it didn’t seem that brief. I should add that I have no evidence for the part about the early absconders and their role in the latest crash and recession, only a strong feeling that it’s true.

I’m back to the What is Famepunk blog after a month of line by line revisions to the manuscript of the second part, Middlemarch. This week I should be sending out the files to CreateSpace over at Amazon and start the first proof copy going, for late September print publication. The Kindle version will be available sooner. I have a lot of work to do at the computer on all this file preparation but I’m very busy, instead, becoming a vegetarian and watching the US Open live streaming. This whole week, it’s been exactly like Wimbledon wasn’t: six courts simultaneously on-line, viewer’s choice, and free. At home my buffering isn’t the quickest but that’s not the end of the world, not when I can watch defending champion Samantha Stosur play a tough match on Armstrong while CBS showed men’s tennis, only, from noon to 5:50pm, at which point they showed one game from Stosur’s second set, cut to commercial, then showed part of another game but cut away in the middle to broadcast live shots of the grounds and some wrap-up commentary by a guy with a cartoon hairstyle.

C2

This close to football season on the Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, the networks are competing for the male gaze, obviously—it is also true (see above) that men don’t want their women to see Samantha Stosur’s body because it might cause lesbianism.

For dinner which was finished very late because I then watched my favorite player Petra Kvitova lose in three to the amazing Marion Bartoli of France, who was on fire tonight—en flammes!—I cooked a Turkish eggplant dish called Imam Bayidli (The Imam Swooned) and Bulghur Pilav, I’ve never made either dish before, both recipes from the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook; highly recommended.

Samantha Stosur (August 2012)

Am I really becoming a vegetarian? And why now? I’m not sure but I return to what I’ve been reading this week. The title character of JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello is a famous novelist who receives invitations to give talks all over the world. At some opportunities, she speaks against raising animals to kill and eat. Other characters in the book disagree with her and they strongly object to her comparison of the meat industry with the Nazi death camps. I have a friend who says, if they weren’t going to be eaten they wouldn’t have been born in the first place; she tries to buy only the best kinds of meat, from real butchers who stock heirloom breeds fed organically and raised humanely; she doesn’t hold with having meat every day, either. I really agree with her, on all of that. Then I think to myself, does meat matter so much to me that I’m willing to spend two or more hours each week away from my work on Famepunk making trips to artisanal butchers in Brooklyn’s most annoying neighborhoods? In other words, can I spare the same amount of time for meat each week that I’ll give to watching women’s tennis on a weekend once or twice a year? Unlike my friend, I have a full-time office job—I’d end up someday buying pre-formed beef patties at Whole Foods, I just know this, and I won’t do it. I refuse that future. I made quinoa for the first time two weeks ago, tonight I’ve tried bulgur, also delicious. Onward and upward.

LINK: This role model