Sunday, January 31, 2010

Two of my favorite fashion blogs are dating--Garance Dore and the Sartorialist. Here is a recent conversation (which reminds me of something I would say):

"'You want to wear a grandpa cardigan like this? Could you do that for me? I love a young guy in a grandpa cardigan*****!!!'

He says, 'Is it ok my darling if I say NO ? They don’t work on me.'

I tell him, 'Okay well, we’ll make a deal: I’ll buy one for you and you can wear it only around the house?'"

Dinner Party. 12

Last night we had one of the smaller dinner parties that Little Gidding has yet seen--it was only Stearns, Lawrence, Lawrence's friend and me. Still, we managed to be within the extreme upper and lower limits of dinner parties (attributed to Varro)--no fewer than the Graces (3) and no more than the Muses (9). We ate a family staple from our childhood--chicken and rice (it had never occurred to me before how un-creatively named that is), with homemade garlic bread (Stearns') and salad, and Stearns' widely acclaimed pumpkin roll for dessert.



In my tradition of amusing mistakes (such as serving eggplant parmesan and chicken parmesan at the same dinner), my first attempt at a cheese plate (it can't really be called that, since there were only two cheeses) was entirely comprised of two soft cheese--brie and goat cheese. And if I've learned one thing from Hopkins' blog, it's that you should vary flavor and texture (on the plus side, there were cashews in addition to two types of crackers).

Friday, January 29, 2010

What Makes Man Different from Animals.11





















John Gray on John Stuart Mill:

"[M]an is to be conceived as a reflective and self-critical agent, actively engaged in the open-ended venture of exploring his own powers and the world that he has created for himself. What distinguishes man from the inhabitants of the animal kingdom, and gives him a special relationship with nature, is only his capacity for reflective thought and deliberate choice; but this is of capital importance. For, unlike that of an animal, the shape of a man's life is not ordained in advance by a repertoire of unalterable instincts, but is never less than the permanently revisable product of his own past thought and action. Man, unlike the animals, is a progressive being. But Mill never unreservedly took this to mean that moral improvement or social progress are inevitable features of the human prospect. Being a progressive being means that man's life is not bound by any fixed, unalterable natural endowment, but is rather the unforseeable product of men's choices and experiments upon themselves."

Thursday, January 28, 2010















Congrats, Ilana--we're indescribably proud of you!

Dinner Party.11 (A Potluck)

In honor of Sister Margarita Aloysius's brief return to the Washington, DC area, Little Gidding hosted a little dinner party, which, due to the culinary skill of the invitees, ended up being more of a potluck: JBL and his wife brought a salad, Stearns baked bread and made garlic-herb butter, I made my favorite meal--Thai curry (although with chicken instead of beef), and Hopkins brought a cheesecake with blood oranges and golden raisins on top. What a delightful evening, with James Poulos on Jeopardy for entertainment during the appetizers (which really hadn't been planned, so we had to improvise with Safeway cheddar cheese and wheat thins and green grapes). Of course, we did spend most of the evening missing Brother O.P., but other than that, it was lovely, with Little Gidding happy to have Frankincense back for the evening.

Monday, January 25, 2010

An email from a friend who is working on Montesquieu and consequently going to Bordeaux this summer:

"Yes, I picked my dissertation topic based on wine quality of the thinker's native region. Good luck with those British wines."
There are a dizzying number of age groups in this quotation:

"[I]t was more alarming to NBC that Mr. O’Brien was not consistently beating Mr. Letterman in several important advertising-sales demographic groups — viewers 18 to 49 and 25 to 54. (He did beat Mr. Letterman virtually all the time in the 18-to-34 group.)" (from the NYTimes)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

American History




























Today my friend Erika and I went to the American History museum for the first time. Of course, the highlight for me was the first lady exhibit, which was delightful. I also enjoyed the war encouragement to women, including "Out of the frying pan; into the machine gun" (and the poster pictured above).

In addition, I enjoyed the sponsorships: the National Association of Realtors sponsored an exhibit about the history of one house and the families who had lived in it (a clever idea that didn't work out so well); and the Star Spangled Banner exhibit was sponsored by Ralph Lauren. Oh my.

William, My Busdriver

Today was my first day to have sections--I also had class and had to deal with a handful of registrar problems (such as kids wanting to sign in and the fact that there weren't enough chairs for all of the students and forgetting which century it was and wondering out loud what was going on in Boston today).

But riding the shuttle today, I saw William, the bus driver. William is a middle aged man who is particularly kind. I'm fairly certain that he's some sort of Christian, and I'm fairly certain he somehow figured out I am, too. At least that's my suspicion. Because for no apparent reason, he's particularly kind to me. I mean, he's particularly kind to a lot of people. We once had a discussion about something, I'm not sure what, but the next time I road the shuttle, he pulled out several pages from Wikipedia about Malthuse so that I could learn about him. Today one of the other passengers thanked him for recommending the play "The Screwtape Letters." He later talked to another passenger about how he's only read three Shakespeare plays, but he tries to go see all of them performed.

All that to say, I don't think I've ever been particularly nice to William, because, definitionally, when I'm riding the Georgetown shuttle, I'm not in a good mood (a. I hate public transportation and b. it's either far too early in the morning or at the end of a long day). Regardless, he always smiles kindly and more meaningfully than other people smile.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

In this blog post, the author writes (on the feministing website) about her friend, who is pro-life. She writes about working with this pro-life woman and seeing her compassionate, humanitarian action, and about their respectful discussion of their differences. While I'm not sure that I would go as far as they do in their understanding of their similarities (they describe it as joined at the root), it's really wonderful to see this level of civility. It also shows the work that friendship is able to do.

Friday, January 15, 2010


MAGISTRATE
May I die a thousand deaths ere I obey one who wears a veil!

LYSISTRATA
If that's all that troubles you, here, take my veil, wrap it round your head, and hold your tongue.

--Aristophanes' Lysistrata


Thursday, January 14, 2010

Dissertation Proposal.4 (approximately)

Wystan told me that the skills needed at this point in graduate school are (this is a paraphrase) doggedness and persistence--you have to convince your committee to read and respond to your work in a timely fashion in order to move forward. But this feels like an impossible situation--committees are filled with famous people who have reached their dreams already (more or less) and are accountable to very few people (and certainly not to me). You have to flatter and cajole them into wanting what you want, so that they'll do it. Just like a cat.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Politics and Beauty


In her essay, "Political Women: Ancient Comedies and Modern Discourse," Arlene Saxonhouse writes about the need for difference--difference between the public and private spheres (indicated in the past through the difference between men and women). One of the Aristophanic comedies she discusses, Ecclesiazusae, also shows beauty and ugliness as a dichotomy that an elimination of difference would downplay or eliminate. She writes:


"The equation of the ugly and the beautiful is the final expression of the boundaries that were overcome during the previous action of the play. It poses for us a world in which dichotomies are subject to question: the dichotomy between male and female, between public and private, and now between ugly and beautiful. ... This final scene, though, forces us to question whether we can live in such a boundary-free, indeed evaluation-free world; whether, on the contrary, we do make divisions, see differences, and indeed require those differences as the basis of our lives in the community insofar as we are individuals able to make choices. ... The abandonment of all natural delight in the beautiful (and therewith the good) is the more weighty consequence of the law attempting to obscure distinctions between the attractive and the repulsive."

Heroes in the Democratic Age





















Tocqueville would be proud:

"In our most recent century, which has almost died away now, people worked more and more on the paysage intime—they wanted to tell the story of the nameless individuals. Someone finally seemed to notice that battles don’t only take place at Thermopylae or Hastings or Austerlitz, sometimes the battlefield is called Fear or Desire or Ingratitude; that not every discovery is of America; that not every invention has to arrive at gunpowder or the steam engine or the airship in order to be meaningful and, in a certain sense, fruitful. And so it has become the norm to present not true, authenticated heroes, but plausible, authentic-seeming heroes. To this end they have spent the last few decades ripping apart the heroes of the past and the usable contemporaries and putting together new, ever new possibilities from the unrecognizable pieces."

--Rainer Maria Rilke

(HT: Wystan)

Another thought: My blog is like my commonplace book, only interactive.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

My Latest Obsession




















Since the Veronica Mars dvd's that I'm addicted to (halfway through season 2) are far, far away (Durham, NC), I'm handling my withdrawal with a new addiction: Chuck. Recommended by Whigwham, this show pokes fun at action films, while still being an action TV show--the main character's name is Chuck Bartowski (Parker once observed in college that no one who is famous has a last name ending with -ski). The girls are shown countless times in their sexy undergarments strapping weapons on their oh-too-sexy bodies. This is hilarious--it makes me laugh at men every time. And Bartowski's brother-in-law, Captain Awesome. The delights of this show go on.

Sunday, January 10, 2010


















Stearns
and I tried out a new workout video tonight (Jillian or something?). Anyway, there is only one set of weights at Little Gidding, so we had to take turns with those, while the other one of us used two jars of pasta sauce.

Saturday, January 9, 2010


Congrats today to Bro. O.P. who was ordained to the diaconate!

Ararat.2

















Ararat does a masterful job at tying together several themes that deal with both the national level and the personal level. It's also incredibly meta.

Basically, the film is about a director who is making a film about Armenia, in order to remember what happened there and communicate that memory to others. The introduces the question of truth and fiction, as the director takes poetic license. He also interacts with one of the actors, who is Turkish, and denies the genocide. The director's interaction with this actor is one of forgiveness--he buys him a bottle of champagne for his work in the film. The director intimates that hating back the people who hated you is not an appropriate solution. Religion is a theme that recurs quietly in the film--how do religious differences affect conflict?

An art historian who is a consultant on the making of the film has written a book about Gorky, the Armenian painter. Her complicated relationship with her son, his girlfriend (who is her step-daughter) and her two dead husbands mirrors Gorky's relationship to his mother and father. Her son goes to Armenia to tell his own story--to make sense of his father's death. When he returns, he is stopped in customs. He tells his story in many iterations to the customs officer. It is in this process of story telling and retelling that the truth comes out of layers of fiction.

Ararat deals with complex, but interrelated, themes. (Stearns called it "ambitious," which is fair.) Through the story of the Armenian genocide, it deals with the need for memory, as well as forgiveness, both personally and as a nation. It also points to the way in which fiction can carry truth, sometimes more accurately than the truth can.

For Ilana


















I was Christmas shopping at a used bookstore with Whigwham in December when I stumbled upon a cheap paperback biography of Grace Kelly. Both Stearns and Ilana love Grace Kelly, and so I picked it up. Then, yesterday, I stumbled upon the recent New Yorker article about Grace Kelly (which notably, although I'm not sure how suitably, turnes to Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful for a definition of grace). Halfway through the article, I got to thinking about what other celebrities Grace Kelly might have known which led me to these two pictures (shown here). Of course, it is these two pictures (and I think only these two) that the author describes in his article:

"the albino squid that appeared to have landed on Princess Grace’s scalp, in lieu of a hat, when she visited President and Mrs. Kennedy in 1962"
...

Friday, January 8, 2010

On Architecture and Beauty

Sorry for the surfeit of quotations lately, but I'm not sure that it's going to let up at the moment. Here is Roger Scruton in his article, "The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty": (with my own parenthetical responses following)


"Aesthetic judgements may look subjective when you are wandering in the aesthetic desert of Waco or Las Vegas." (I appreciate this, because I was with him in Waco, and during my year there, I certainly had a sense that it was an aesthetic desert. When I was seeking advise about graduate schools after college, one man advised me almost solely on the beauty of the location, which, in retrospect, wasn't a terrible criterion.)
...
"Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives—seeing it as a way of affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves." (This made me think of Zadie Smith's article, "Fail Better," which, I think, advocates an aesthetic standard the praises true self-expression, in opposition to T.S. Eliot's aesthetic standard that praises true expression of one's tradition in his essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." For the record, I'm not certain that I agree with either: I think that they may be doing exactly the same thing, only at different levels.)
...
"When it comes to beauty, our view of its status is radically affected by whether we see it as a form of self-expression, or as a form of self-denial. If we see it in this second way, then the assumption that it is merely subjective begins to fall away. Instead beauty begins to take on another character, as one of the instruments in our consensus-building strategies, one of the values through which we construct and belong to a shared and mutually consoling world. In short, it is part of building a home." (While I think that beauty certainly must be simultaneously an expression of one's self and of one's community and tradition, I don't think that this, either, is all that there is to beauty. I don't think that making beauty an expression of one's tradition avoids subjectivity completely [neither do I think that beauty ought to be completely subjective]. I am a strong defender of art's role in forming and influencing political and social life, which is something that Scruton points to here. On the other hand, I don't think that art is solely social and political.)
...
"In that case, however, there has to be a place for aesthetic judgement in the planning and building of cities. In a celebrated work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that cities should develop spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended results of the consensual transactions between their residents. Only then will they facilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life. A true city is built by its residents, in that every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many residents have wanted, rather than something that a few self-appointed experts have planned. And that is the aspect of old Rome, Siena, or Istanbul that most appeals to the modern traveller. Some urbanists interpret Jacobs’s argument as showing that aesthetic values can be left to look after themselves; others, on the contrary, have insisted that her examples really derive their force from the aesthetic values that she smuggles in as side-constraints." (Scruton's summary of Jacobs encapsulates my question regarding "conservative" attempts to create new cities influenced by new urbanism--is it conservative for a few self-appointed experts to plan and implement a city? And yet, as Scruton shows, aesthetic values don't always flourish when they are left to look after themselves [this, incidentally, reminds me of the title of Eric Gill's, Beauty Looks after Herself, a significant portion of which is written in aphoristic outline].)
...
"Perhaps the wisest response to Jacobs’s argument therefore is to point to the distinction between plans and side-constraints. Although a free economy is needed if we are to solve the problem of economic coordination, freedom must be contained, and it is contained by law. Legal side-constraints ensure that cheats will not prosper. Likewise with the city: there must be planning, but it should be envisaged negatively, as a system of side-constraints, rather than positively, as a way of “taking charge” of what happens and where."
...
"The failure of modernism, in my view, lies not in the fact that it has produced no great or beautiful buildings—the Chapel at Ronchamp, and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright abundantly prove the opposite. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or types." (I am skeptical of anyone who denigrates Frank Lloyd Wright; Scruton gets points from me here by praising him.)

On Tradition.2













(As an aside, I just realized that if I have any hope of becoming an academic, I ought to get some practice at being photographed in front of bookshelves, preferably while smoking.)

"Imagination, directly or indirectly, is the great modifier of traditions."
...
"The capacity to exercise the function of reason is one of the best qualities with which human beings are endowed. The tradition which forms, praises, and encourages this capacity is among the best of the traditions of civilization." --Edward Shils, Tradition

Thursday, January 7, 2010

On Tradition


"The strength of this tradition, its hold in Western man's thought, has never depended on his consciousness of it. Indeed, only twice in our history do we encounter periods in which men are conscious and over-conscious of the fact of tradition, identifying age as such with authority. This happened, first, when the Romans adopted classical Greek thought and culture as their own spiritual tradition and thereby decided historically that tradition was to have a permanent formative influence on European civilization. Before the Romans such a thing as tradition was unknown; with them it because and after them it remained the guiding thread through the past and the chain to which each new generation knowingly or unknowingly was bound in its understanding of the world and its own experience. Not until the Romantic period do we again encounter an exalted consciousness and glorification of tradition. (The discovery of antiquity in the Renaissance was a first attempt to break the fetters of tradition, and by going to the sources themselves to establish a past over which tradition would have no hold.) Today tradition is sometimes considered to essentially romantic concept, but Romanticism did no more than place the discussion of tradition on the agenda of the nineteenth century; its glorification of the past only served to mark the moment when the modern age was about to change our world and general circumstances to such an extent that a matter-of-course reliance on tradition was no longer possible. " --Hannah Arendt, "Tradition and the Modern Age," Between Past and Future

Dinner Party.9 and .10






















First, New Year's Eve: We had a small dinner party of Elizabeth Bennett, her boyfriend, Wystan and me. Elizabeth made Slovak foods: brinza halushky (more or less--since we don't have brinza in America, we substitute goat cheese mixed with sour cream), halushky with cabbage (it was my first time to taste this, and I loved it), and, for an appetizer, a goat cheese spread, with garlic and onions and spices. I made pate, spinach gnocchi, and tiramisu. The evening was slightly marred by Bennett's boyfriend getting ill (which he claims was from the Slovak food, but I deny that this is possible, since none of the rest of us got ill). But cooking with Elizabeth was lovely. As was starting in the new year with champagne (somehow I missed that this is a tradition). Of course, we don't have champagne flutes, so we drank it out of tumblers.

Second, last night: We held a full-participation dinner party: Whigwham, Stearns and I all collaborated to make home-made raviolis. Since I don't have a pasta maker, the dough was a little thick, although good. We stuffed them with a butternut squash/cheese mixture and topped them with almonds roasted in butter, mixed with pesto. The nuts provided a really nice contrast to the soft squash inside. The recipe called for not almonds, but hazelnuts, which of course I didn't have. I also made up adding the pesto, which worked out swimmingly, I thought. For dessert, we had Godiva truffles, a Christmas gift from Dillard. Picking out which ones you want makes truffles a fitting conclusion to a full-participation dinner party.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Epiphany
























Looking forward to Hopkins' this friday night (she asked me to read
Eliot's "Journey of the Magi"), I was rereading the poem. And,
since it is appropriate for this day, I give it to you here, followed
by my reflections, as well as by Wystan's:

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the
terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and
grumbling
And running away, and wanting their
liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the
lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high
prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a
temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of
vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped
away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with
vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for
pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so
we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment
too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say)
satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I
remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their
gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Emily:

In this poem, as in much of Eliot's work, I see the dark night of the
soul--the journey that the magi take is one of deprivation and
darkness (they traveled all night) and death. Death is all tied up in
life--it is in the town in which Christ is crucified that there are vine
leaves over the lintel. This is reminiscent of the refrain in "East
Coker
": "In my beginning is my end." The Magi's journey is outside
of time--as part of their journey, they see the whole of Christ's life,
not only his birth, but also his death. This reminds me of what Eliot
writes in "The Dry Salvages":

"...to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint--
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

The last three lines of the poem are particularly poignant: the Magi
narrating is no longer comfortable in his kingdom, in the old
dispensation. Here Eliot is pointing to the parallel between the
Magi's
discomfort in their kingdoms after their encounter with
Christ, and the way in which Christianity makes people fit
uncomfortably in their own political and cultural time. There are
strong Augustinian influences in this insight.

Wystan:

The poem is, itself, remarkable within Eliot's work as the one place
in which he really grapples with what it means to be human, which
is to say, with what it means to have a body. The first two stanzas
are almost entirely sensual, concerned with a litany of ailments,
with strange, foreign and unhelpful bodies, with the memories of
pleasure. Its most remarkable moment is the final stanza.

For those attached to the endless cycles of the liturgical year, it is
commonplace to note that each moment on the calendar looks
back on the past and anticipates what is yet to come. The first
notes of Easter come on Good Friday, and Easter points on to the
Ascension and Pentecost. It is a happy coincidence when, for
those who celebrate both, the Annunciation falls in Holy Week,
and in Christmas there is always at least a note of the Good
Friday sacrifice to come.

Eliot here smashes this concept to pieces. The Birth, always
capitalized, upsets the order of all things: the Birth means the
Death. It is not easy and happy, but "hard and bitter agony."
The Magi come for reasons they do not even understand, and in
their journey are teased by the memories of what they left, what
they would call home. By the time they leave, they have been
altered completely: no longer at ease, with an alien people
clutching to 'their' gods.

Perhaps here we have a view of Eliot different than our view of
him as paradigmatic High Church Anglican. The Incarnation
means everything is different. No one should dare to remain
unchanged, if that were even possible. To encounter Christ, for
Eliot, is to see what Paul saw: He is the first one to go down to
death, and His death must be ours. The visit of the Magi is not
the triumphant recognition of Christ as King, but the
recognition that all knowledge and wisdom fails in His
presence.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

On Art and Politics

"Art does not save us, but in our time art preserves for us a space in which we can be reminded of the story that is told by human beings in search of their humanity and the truth of their existence. It reminds us that the search is crucial to the love of life and that love of life is crucial to our search for the truth of our existence." --Charles Embry, The Philosopher and the Storyteller

Saturday, January 2, 2010

Craft post.2!

After losing my black and white paisley gloves last winter, I needed a new pair. Everything at Target I didn't care for. So I bought this pair, which had tacky gold colored buttons. I replaced the buttons with some from my mother's jar of buttons. Another project of which I am inordinately proud.