Feng Shui, a control freak way of knowledge

I’ve been reading Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, by Karen Kingston, and it’s a slow read, although there are some useful clutter-taming techniques in it, somewhat marred by the author’s bossiness.

Feng Shui, when marketed as a nifty thing for Westerners to do, is similar to Zen in that we know so little about it that you can mix it up with whatever you want and it will seem legitimate. Eastern philosophies in general are slippery to the Western mind. Even if we read the texts these methods are based on, they don’t always make sense to us, so we have only common sense to measure them against.

I knew before picking up Kingston’s book that the author had at least a minor case of the Dieters Disease because I first heard of it through flylady.com. It was pretty clear that Ms. Flylady (I’m forgetting her name, halfway on purpose) got her “body clutter” phrase that snapped her into full-scale (pun optional) diet dementia and diet book profiteering. So I was prepared to just skip any of Kingston’s Feng Shui material that pushed diets.

Kingston’s mild diet obsession, however, pales before some of her other rule-making. She tells the reader how often to change his/her sheets and not to store dirty laundry in the bedroom (perhaps those in small apartments should be keeping it out in the hallway, or dangle their laundry bag out the window)? I found myself frequently exclaiming “What b.s.!” aloud. That’s when I reached the chapter on Colon Clutter—complete with diagrams and instructions. Yes, folks, the author is telling readers when to poop, providing graphic descriptions of how to analyzing said poop, and suggestions for “Feng Shui-ing” one’s end product. Not your usual home decorating/reorganizing book.

It may sound like I’m dissing this book, I’m really exercising the famous “take what you want and leave the rest” method here.

Now a few words in defense of clutter. My favorite room is Henry Higgins’ library in the movie My Fair Lady—I want to live there--so much easier to maintain order with a full domestic staff too. My cats don't do more than cover the occasional hairball on the carpet with whatever they can find nearby such as slippers. But next to that library I like Merlyn’s cottage in T.H. White’sThe Sword in the Stone:

It was the most marvelous room that he had ever been in.

There was a real corkindrill hanging from the rafters, very life-like and horrible with glass eyes and scaly tail stretched out behind it. When its master came into the room it winked one eye in salutation, although it was stuffed. There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure. Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays and maggotpies and kingfishers and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon. It could not have been a real phoenix, because there is only one of these at a time. Over by the mantelpiece there was a fox’s mask, with GRAFTON, BUCKINHAM TO DAVENTRY, 2 HRS 20 MINS written under it, and also a forty-pound salmon, with AWE, 43 MIN., BULLDOG written under it, and a very life-like basilisk with CROWHURST OTTER HOUNDS in Roman print. There were several boars’ tusks and the claws of tigers and libbards mounted in symmetrical patterns, and a big head of Orvis Poli, six live grass snakes in a kind of aquarium, some nests of the solitary wasp nicely set up an a glass cylinder, an ordinary beehive whose inhabitants went in and out of the window unmolested, two young hedgehogs in cotton wool, a pair of badgers which immediately began to cry Yik-Yik-Yik in loud voices as soon as the magician appeared, twenty boxes which contained stick caterpillars and sixths of the puss-moth, and even an oleander that was worth sixpence—all feeding on the appropriate leaves—a guncase with all sorts of weapons which would not be invented for half a thousand years, a rod-box ditto, a chest of drawers full of salmon flies which had been tied by Merlyn himself, another chest whose drawers were labeled Mandragora, Mandrake, and Old Man’s Beard, etc., a bunch of turkey feathers and goose-quills for making pens, an astrolabe, twelve pairs of boots, a dozen purse-nets, three dozen rabbit wires, twelve corkscrews, some ants’ nests between two glass plates, ink bottles of every possible colour from red to violet, darning-needles, a gold medal for being the best scholar at Winchester, four or five recorders, a nest of field mice all alive-o, two skulls, plenty of cut glass, Venetian glass, Bristol glass and a bottle of Mastic varnish, some Satsuma china and some cloisonné, the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (marred as it was by the sensationalism of the popular plates), two paint-boxes (one oil, one water colour), three globes of the known geographical world, a few fossils, the stuffed head of a cameleopard, six pismires, some glass retorts with cauldrons, Bunsen burners, etc., and a complete set of cigarette cards depicting water fowl by Peter Scott.,
The Once and Future King The Sword in the Stone, p. 30-31

My other favorite book by White is
The Goshawk, but I digress.


May 29 to June 6, 1977, I read:

Paddy Chaefsky, John M. Clum
Note: read most
When I moved to LA from SF for a few years in 1977, the first little mom and pop store I went to in Culver City had a sign by the cash register, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” I hadn’t heard about much less seen Network at that point, so I thought, “Wow, people really are on edge here.” What they actually were was very tuned in to the latest movie in-thing—before people in other places, and with more enthusiasm.Chaefsky

Bittersweet, Teri Schultz
Note: surviving and growing from loneliness

Science Fiction Handbook, de Camp
Note: both ’53 and ’75 editions

Heartland, Mort Sahl
Note: poor man. Don't remember why that was my reaction.

Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut


The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach, Peter Schickele
Note: Nice
A more aesthetic friend took me to task for preferring the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and PDQ Bach, to the Royal Ballet and J.S. Bach. I like a lot of serious culture and a lot of parody/satire. But I love to laugh more than anything, so I will always seek out something that might make that happen

Calling Dr. Horowitz, Steve Horowitz, M.D., and Neil Offen

To Abolish Children and Other Essays, Karl Shapiro
I like Karl Shapiro’s poems, but evidently his essays didn’t do it for me. My note was: read most, rather tedious


May 29 to June 6, 2007, I read:

Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui, Karen Kingston

Resolute words

Happy New Year to All!

People really do ask what your resolutions are. I don't much like the term "resolutions." I have goals, but they are intensely personal and I think of them all through the year, although a little more on New Year's Day. One thing that brings extra pain to this process of sharing resolutions for the next year is when I run into people who are throwing themselves into the not-so-harmless idea of solving all their problems by losing weight. (Few people call it a diet any more, but most of the resolutions involve restricted eating, and those who get to hear about them often have to suffer through hearing sample menus. Then there's the unavoidable postscript about how unhappy they are with their bodies and how the new "eating plan" will solve all that.)

Lara Frater at Fat Chicks Rule talks about how difficult it is not to resist the fantasy world when everyone around you is buying in big time to the madness and deprivation, and pressuring you to do likewise.

Lara quotes Marilyn Wann’s response last summer to a woman drowning in an ocean of Weight Watchers fanatics swimming in the high tide of "shrink-yourself-to-fit-the-bathing suit" season:

I totally appreciate the constant, pervasive pressure to buy the hate. This is the second-biggest time of year for people to go crazy hoping to be thin. There's January 1 and then there's bathing-suit season. So it's not about you. Fat hatred is just at high tide.

Diets are hate rituals. Any practice that involves a goal of weight loss is a hate ritual. I don't care whether it's "sensible" or extreme. I don't care whether Weight Watchers advises exactly the same food that I choose for myself because it's tasty and nutritious on any given day. They are selling hate. I won't give them a dollar or a minute of attention. As an ethical person, I could never advise another human being to undertake such dangerous, harmful, deceitful scams.

Marilyn's article is in the Summer 2006 NAAFA newsletter.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled reading “retro” book action.


December 24, 1976 to January 2, 1977

The Final Days, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
There's even been a book written about how Woodward and Bernstein's spectacular early success overshadowed later life... Woodward and Bernstein book page.

Ah, well, as they say in the Midwest, thank heaven for small favors. Being a late-blooming, non-spectacular achiever has at least rescued this writer from THAT trauma.


The Once and Future King, T.H. White

This was the second or third time I read this book, which I discovered when I was 14. It was one of those books where you remember the first time you picked it up, where you were and what it looked like. A family friend stored some books and games with us and said I could play with any of the games--which I did, a little--and read any of the books. Wow. This one was a much-read hardcover, but I remember being careful with the dust cover. It’s still a book I make sure to have a copy of at all times.

The Wind Chill Factor, Thomas Gifford

Oddly enough all I remember about this book was that at some point the hero was driving through a blizzard in a Lincoln Continental.

The Middle Mist, Mary Renault

This was one of her modern novels. The Charioteer was my favorite of those, but it is her novels set in ancient Greece—The Last of the Wine, etc.--that I remember with most fondness.

The Samurai, George MacBeth
No recollection of this book


December 24, 2006 to January 2, 2007

The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers, Diggers, and Wings, Terry Pratchett
This is not a Discworld book, but Pratchett is always entertaining and these three books about 4-inch Nomes looking for a home is charming, suspenseful and oddly heartening. Pratchett’s theme in this book (as in most of his works) is how learning and growing, and how it gets done in ways you never could plan. A good book to start the new year.


Big Fat Lies, Glenn Gaesser, Ph.D.

This book has been reissued (updated by the author) by Gurze Books, which does a tremendous service in keeping available books on body positive issues, eating disorders and size prejudice. As a baby boomer, I was nine when I ran into my first doctor waving a diet sheet and an amphetamine prescription the late 1950s. The one thing that struck me about this book was how every aspect of the anti-fat obsession affected my life as the national hysteria took root.

Big Fat Lies traces the life insurance industry’s meaningless charts (fervently embraced by the American Medical Association in 1951) and the drive to turn weight into the single measure of health, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.