Salon.com > Paul Tullis

Living the dream, with goats

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:25:00 +0000

Brad Kessler was living in a rent-controlled apartment in New York's East Village, writing fiction and teaching creative writing at the New School, when he decided to say goodbye to all that and move to rural Vermont.

There he and his wife, the photographer Dona Ann McAdams, began to raise goats. What was initially a brood of four and a lighthearted hobby has since expanded to 17 animals and a licensed operation that sells goat cheese to a few of New York's most cheese-famous restaurants. Kessler's memoir "Goat Song" is the story of this transformation.

It would be facile to stumble into convenient, "country mouse/city mouse" clichés about the urbane urbanite who on a whim sheds his sportcoat, loafers and book parties for work boots, shit-shoveling and irony-free trucker hats. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting: Kessler and McAdams were never at home in Manhattan, and longed for the feeling of remove they'd once cultivated at a rented farmhouse in West Virginia that burned to the ground. They'd been looking for a place in Vermont for five years before they found what they wanted: 75 acres of mostly wooded valley with an 18th-century white farmhouse the realtor described as basically a tear-down. It was a full decade between moving there and beginning their foray into animal husbandry.

Recent Writings from the Golden State

Wed, 02 Oct 1996 19:00:00 +0000

It's more than a little tendentious to subtitle an anthology "Recent Writings from the Golden State" when 92 percent of its authors are from L.A. and the surrounding metroplex. And it's a little suspect that the editor of this volume -- a teacher at the California Institute for the Arts -- includes four writers who are students, teachers or recent graduates of said institution.

So, as a San Franciscan, I was primed to hate this book, and I sniffed audibly at every mention of the Northridge quake and Dennis The Menace. That said, there are more than a few pieces in this scattershot collection that manage to rise well above Angeleno clichis about models and screenwriters.

Notable among them is Bob Flanagan's "Pain Journal," a piece written from the perspective of a performance artist dying of cystic fibrosis that relates the problems of his pain medications and of his decaying sexuality. I found it all a bit overwrought -- until I read his bio and learned that Flanagan was indeed a performance artist dying of cystic fibrosis who had problems with his pain medications and his decaying sexuality, and who died early this year, and that "Pain Journal" is not fiction. Gulp.

Imagineering Atlanta

Fri, 05 Jul 1996 19:00:00 +0000

In his ambitious and influential "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles" (1990), the journalist and urban planner Mike Davis combined social science, geography, architecture, anthropology and urban planning to create not only a vivid recapitulation of L.A.'s history, but also to hypothesize its future. It was the kind of wildly original book that spawns imitators, and in Charles Rutheiser's "Imagineering Atlanta," we have what looks to be the first of many. (Similar books about Miami and San Francisco are forthcoming.) Rutheiser's book doesn't cover as much intellectual ground as Davis's did, but this Georgia State anthropology professor builds his tale into a precise look at the politicking behind preparations for this summer's Olympics.