"Immersion in the life of the world, a willingness to be inhabited by and to speak for others, including those beyond the realm of the human, these are the practices not just of the bodhisattva but of the writer." --Jane Hirshfield

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Impact of Low Impact

Colin Beavan chronicles his year of no electricity, no toilet paper and a ninth-floor walkup, in "No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25). New Yorker review.

Colbert raves: “like ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ only completely implausible.”

Not bad for a man "whose environmental activism began over lunch with his agent."

There might be a category for these experiments -- stunt publishing? Julie Powell's interest in Julia Child began simultaneously with the thought that it might make a commercially viable book if she blogged about trying all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We at least got a good movie out of that. And Julia got a bestseller, finally.

Somehow the movie concept of a year with a lot of stairs and no Kleenex doesn't sound as interesting.

No comments: