Sherry Chandler

Not only is Leatha Kendrick conducting her Eclectic Living Room, but also Billy Collins is reading at Centre:

DANVILLE, KY—Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate and Centre College Humana visiting professor, will read from his work on Nov. 2 at 8 p.m. in Newlin Hall at Centre’s Norton Center for the Arts. The event is free, and the public is encouraged to attend.

And, if neither of those events is to your liking, tonight Ashley Judd delivers the Blazer Lecture at the University of Kentucky.

Kentucky native and UK alumna Ashley Judd will be the speaker for the 2006 installment of the Paul G. Blazer Lecture Series in the Humanities, hosted by the UK College of Arts and Sciences. She will deliver a lecture titled “At the Root of My Longing: Social Justice, Feminism and Spirituality,” at 7:30 p.m., Nov. 2, in the Concert Hall of the UK Singletary Center for the Arts.

I’ve heard rumors there’s a basketball game too but surely no one would want to watch basketball with all these wonderful choices.

from Nicholas Wade in the NYTimes:

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all, red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan.

Their report, published electronically today in Nature, implies that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of obesity in the United States and elsewhere, should people respond to the drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the puzzling fact that people in France tend to enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer less heart disease than Americans.

So — apparently you can get this resveratrol as a dietary supplement. Or I guess you could eat a lot of fresh grapes. But what would be the fun in that?

I like this advice:

Several experts said that people wondering if they should take resveratrol should wait until more results were in, particularly safety tests in humans. “It’s a pretty exciting area but these are early days,” said Dr. Ronald Kahn, president of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. Information about resveratrol’s effects on human metabolism should be available in a year or so, he said, adding, “Have another glass of pinot noir — that’s as far as I’d take it right now.”

And alas, I’ve been in research long enough to know that what looks good in mice doesn’t always look so good in humans. So don’t buy stock in reservatol yet. It’s still a good idea to reduce fat and calorie intake and treat yourself to a glass or two of red with dinner.

See also Reed Hundt on this subject.

The Eclectic Living Room
Thursday, Nov. 2, 5:30 pm
The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning
251 West Second Street, Lexington

Led by poet and project coordinator Leatha Kendrick in conjunction with the New Books by Great Writers series, this hands-on discussion will focus on the work of featured artist Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems and editor of The Private I: Privacy in a Public World. The Eclectic Living Room is a place to bring questions, opinions, curiosity, and a pen and paper for exploration of the style at work in Peacock’s poetry and nonfiction essays. FREE. Copies of both books, provided by Joseph-Beth Booksellers, will be available for purchase.