The Cocktail Party

When Hopkins, Stearns and I went to New York to see The Cocktail Party performed, we immediately hatched a plan to read it together. We picked out our parts--Hopkins loved Julia Shuttlewaithe, Stearns loved Celia, and somehow I got stuck with Lavinia, the one person in the play who has really no sense of humor! So, recently, we found some guys to read the boy parts (and Carrot obligingly read one of them! And made an amazing, amazing lemon cake.) and had a reading, complete with cocktails (and absinthe--that's sort of like a cocktail, right? Of course, lighting it on fire is just a blast).

The play is really very funny, in addition to being profound. One of my favorite lines is when Edward says (and this makes only slightly more sense in context than it does out of it):

"Oh my God, what have I done? The python. The octopus.
Must I become after all what you would make me?"

The python. The octopus.

Dissertation.1, A Dissertation Blessing from my Uncle

(May your writing flow like the Autumn winds)

I didn't actually think anyone would buy one (this isn't fiction!): "He put down his electric cigarette (it glowed red when he inhaled, producing steam instead of smoke) and rose slowly from his futon couch."

I am the Coolest Person You Know.4

(Previously reasons here.)

Today I pumped up my previously flat bike tires all by myself! (Okay, this doesn't actually sound like too much of an accomplishment, but I've never done it before and the bf went home yesterday [I meant to make him do it], and I was just a little nervous. Now I'm just hoping that they will hold the air!)

Real Research

Since political theorists rarely have the need/opportunity to do archival research (or at least the ones I know), since I'm right at the end of my chapter on Hannah Arendt (!), I decided to go down to the Library of Congress to have a look at the digital archives last week. The funny thing is, much of the digital archives are available online, but the particular things that I wanted to see aren't, so I had to go down there to get on a computer to see it. Which of course is no problem, since the Library of Congress is so close. Oh what a nerd I am that I would get a kick out of this! I also looked up, just for fun, some of her correspondence with W.H. Auden and some of the notes she took on reading Oakeshott.

Weddinging

My apologies for the lack of posting this weekend: I went back down south with Wystan for a wedding. The wedding was Orthodox, and it was the first Orthodox wedding I'd attended. The ceremony was lovely. It was full of Old Testament references, such as the priest's prayer reciting a genealogy of rings:

"For Thou, O Lord, hast declared that a pledge should be given and confirmed in all things. By a ring power was given to Joseph in Egypt; by a ring Daniel was glorified in the land of Babylon; by a ring the uprightness of Tamar was revealed; by a ring our heavenly Father showed His bounty upon His Son, for He said: Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry. By Thine own right hand, O Lord, Thou didst arm Moses in the Red Sea; by Thy true word the heavens were established, and the foundations of the earth were made firm; and the right hands of Thy servants also shall be blessed by Thy mighty word and by Thine upraised arm. Therefore, O Master, bless now this putting-on of rings with Thy heavenly blessing, and let Thine angel go before them all the days of their life."

There are liberal prayers for fruitfulness, which is delightful at a wedding, and for faithfulness and holiness in their marriage. There are also frequent requests for fair children, as if ugly children would really just be too much to bear. Here is another great line from the service: "[L]et that gladness come upon them which the blessed Helen had when she found the precious cross." I don't know anything about Helen and the cross, but I want to!

And, of course, you have to love the crowns!

Poetry and Feminism.1

Unfolded Out of the Folds
by Walt Whitman





Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded, and is
always to come unfolded,
Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come the
superbest man of the earth,
Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man,
Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be
form'd of perfect body,
Unfolded only out of the inimitable poems of woman can come the
poems of man, (only thence have my poems come;)
Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only thence
can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,
Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman
love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,
Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain come all the folds
of the man's brain, duly obedient,
Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded,
Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;
A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but
every of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman;
First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.

I'm happy to be teaching again--I definitely get a high from teaching (as well as a crash afterward, but probably that's from staying up all night preparing). I'm also happy to be incorporating poetry again into my classroom, this time in a course on feminist political thought.

This week we read Walt Whitman's "Unfolded Out of the Folds." Whitman is amazingly sane when it comes to women (in his prose he argues for women to have a role in politics). As you can see in this poem, he still preserves gender difference.

The kids loved this poem. They thought it respected women (in a way that they didn't think Tocqueville and Rousseau really did--they were always skeptical of both of those authors). They did a good job of seeing relationships between Whitman's poem and Rousseau, Tocqueville and Mill (all of the authors we've read so far). They saw hints of Rousseau's argument that women should be educated so that they would educate men. They also saw parallels with Mill and his argument that all be free to participate in public life, with Whitman's reference to justice being unfolded out of women.

Yeah Williamsport! (okay--the writer really didn't have to be that snarky)

HT: Ilana.

Twitter

Witty, witty woman:
Mary McCarthy: Where do you stand on capitalism?
Arendt: I do not share Marx's great enthusiasm about capitalism.

It's catching! Hopkins on green dresses.

Acknowledgments

Here's a lovely one (from Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision):

My intellectual debts are many, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge them. To Professors John D. Lewis and Frederick B. Artz of Oberlin College more is owed than can ever be repaid. Beginning in my undergraduate days and continuing to the present, they have combined the roles of teacher, scholar, and friend and provided the encouragement for undertaking a work of this kind. ...

Oh. my. goodness. I love Oscar de la Renta. If I were first lady, I would wear all Oscar de la Renta! (Is he American? Could I even do that?)

HT: Hopkins, once again (and can you tell I just learned how to print screen? She taught me that, too!).

I love the left two pictures, randomly beside each other, on the New York Times site--mohawk day!

Notes

1. Gosh, I thought I was so clever to call my chapter on Arendt, "Women in Dark Times" (after her book, Men in Dark Times). Alas, I'm never the first one to think of anything...

2. I have begun signing my emails to my students with my initials to avoid the problem of what they should call me (and to avoid the stuffiness of signing them, "Professor Hale").

3. Biking home yesterday over the key bridge, a kind man passing me on his bike said, "You have a flat tire, huh?," probably because he knew I had no idea. Of course I responded, "Huh? Oh, yeah." But of course, I did have no idea. Both of them are flat. I had just assumed that I was terrifically out of shape since riding that bike had been getting harder and harder...

4. Amusingly, when I'm getting ready to teach, I find myself picking the most boring, neutral, non-descript clothes that I own. I really like flowers prints and pink and big earrings, but I'm cutting all of those things out for teaching. Probably I am going to end up in pantsuits and a crew cut as one of my professor friends imagined. This is what I get for teaching feminism.

That's 30.

P.S. I am so incredibly curious about where the journalist habit of ending their pieces with "that's 30" or "#30#" comes from and what it means.

The Most Beautiful Dress in the World

I hope this makes your day. It should. Heck, for 8000 dollars, it should more or less make your life. (Oscar de la Renta)

HT: Hopkins.

The Wire

The Wire is quite a show; it's Stearns and my treat in the evening (we're borrowing the first season from Myrrh and Frankincense's brother, who also owns the third season, but I'm not sure what we're going to do about finding the second, the fourth and the fifth!).

What is most remarkable to me so far (as early in the experience as it is for me) is the way in which the bad guys are not all bad and the good guys are very far from good much of the time.

There is Bubbles, a drug addict/bum who would do anything for his friend. Even while he's teaching his friend to make counterfeit money in order to feed their addiction, there's something very pure and loving in Bubbles. You can see his desire to shake his drug addiction, and yet the way in which it has power over him.

There is Wallace, 16-year-old drug dealer who dropped out of school in eighth grade. He takes care of his (countless!) little siblings and is obviously intelligent (he tells one of other drug dealers that Alexander Hamilton was not a president when he makes a comment about "dead white guys on money"). When a tip Wallace passes up the chain of command leads to someone being killed, he begins to be very troubled by what he's involved in.

There are policemen who are idiots and horrible men and who drunkenly and unlawfully injure the drug dealers. And there's always politics--the [good?] man in charge of the whole operation hides the bad stuff that the cops who work for him do, while disciplining them privately. McNulty himself is a terrible father--he uses his kids to help him with the case in ways that put them in danger. (McNulty is an interesting variant on the single detective--he's divorced and so single, but with complicated family relationships that he attempts to negotiate.)

Here are experts from an interview with David Simon, who seems like quite a character (in the second quotation, he goes into the relationship of The Wire to Greek tragedy and the role of modern institutions in the show):

"...So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester."
...

"We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. ... But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason."

Fabulous Things I Heard on the Radio.13

Okay, so I heard it on a Pandora advertisement, but that's just like the radio, right?:

"Browse, flirt, or find your soulmate..."

As if finding your soulmate were as easy as flirting! Or, for that matter, as looking at people's profiles. Goodness gracious, it sounds like as if one morning you can wake up and say, "Yesterday, I was a tease, but today I'll find my soulmate."

A Perfect Saturday

Yesterday was the perfect Saturday. First of all, September is perfect--a little cool, but not cold; the tourists have (mostly) gone home.

I met my two best girlfriends from Baylor for brunch in Eastern Market--they were both in DC on the same weekend. We went to Le Pain Quotidien, where we just ordered baguette and smothered it with all of the spreads they had (including chocolate hazelnut, praline, and loads of jams). And then I was quickly off to a second brunch at The Market Lunch (who knew The Market Lunch had breakfast??), where there are evidently two things to get: "The Brick"--a sandwich with eggs, potatoes, and sausage, and Blue and Buck (or Buck and Blue, I forget)--Buckwheat and blueberry pancakes. I chose the latter, and they were quite good.

Of course, walking around Eastern Market itself is delightful:



For some reason I was into taking pictures of eggplants today.



And I guess multi-colored coxcombs are the new thing.



These beets were variegated!



I like that being Amish tomatoes makes them real tomatoes! I also like that just because Amish people grew them, they become "Amish tomatoes." As if tomatoes can have cultural identifications...

I of course stopped by Jim Tam Map Man, who is my Dante prints dealer. He found me something special...

And I never miss Capitol Hill books, with it's precarious piles threatening to fall at every moment.



And its charming signs... (the proprietor has quite a sense of humor, and I think that perhaps he might have recognized me after dozens of visits--he gave me a little discount on my purchase).


And then--the serendipitous part of my morning--I ran into a library book sale! And came out with an armful of books.

For You Departed

Alan Paton's For You Departed is probably my favorite book in the whole world (here's where I've mentioned it before).

It Paton's tribute to his wife after she died, and his attempt to cope with his grief, in the tradition of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed. What I love about this book is how absolutely honest it is (something that is, understandably, rarely present after someone dies). Paton spells out the good and bad parts of his wife--she was a character, it seems--a really strong personality, proud and moody (he also writes about the good and bad parts of himself and the trials of their relationship). Through all of Paton's telling of their marriage, however, a strong love is present--but not a love of a woman he built up and idealized in his head; rather, the love of a women with all of her faults and idiosyncrasies, the love and admiration and respect for a real women.

The theme that resonates throughout the book is "To love and to be loved, they make up for it all" (not too different from my mother's theory of child raising, "Love covers a multitude of sins"). In the process of his telling about his wife, Paton's work--political, literary, and as the principle of a reformatory--is constantly recounted, showing the way in which she participated in his work.

Twitter

Places I study: sitting on a couch or sitting on the floor. Writing my dissertation takes me back to my homeschooling days of spending most of the day studying, sitting on the floor.

Also: an aside: Proposition: text messages are modern day telegrams. Debate.

The May of Teck Club

The May of Teck Club (our neighborhood) is really better than Anne of Green Gables's Patty's Place for two reasons:

1) It is like a neighborhood of Patty's Places! Not only is there Little Gidding, but there's also Littlemore and Cranford (I'm not sure if the name changed since then).
2) It has a history to it--there have been many other Little Gidding inhabitants in the past, and the place includes all of them, too (they're sorely missed).

A small downside:

We have no Gog and Magog on opposite sides of the fireplace (well, actually, we have no fireplace...).

If I Were First Lady.2

(Second in an occasional series [here's the first]...)

If I were first lady, I wouldn't invite dancers to the White House, I would invite poets. Just imagine, a private poetry reading series!

Also, I would probably get a rug made just like Laura's (pictured on the left), because everyone seems to have liked it. Scratch that, it would have flowers. And it would probably be green.

Announcing: The first Three White Leopards blog baby (no, neither I nor my sisters had a baby)--she belongs to Gypsy! Welcome to Emmaline!

On the APSA Panel that Stressed Me Out

First, there was a remarkable talk by a feminist who works on disability. This strikes me as an incredibly important and under-theorized area. In fact, it seems to me that this is a new angle that could be really important for the abortion debate--unborn babies are members of the community who aren't able to take a role in the community and so need to be represented by others. Plus, there is the whole issue of testing for disabilities while infants are still in the womb, and then aborting based on the results of these tests. It seems to me that while abortion for any reason is terrible, this is particularly terrible. In America we abort 80 percent of babies prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome; this means that a whole group of people is being killed for something that they had no control over.

The other papers, however, stressed me out. It is evidently called "infusion" when a parent teaches a child something; "infusion" is always least somewhat problematic because children can't voluntarily choose what they'll be infused with. Granted, all sorts of things that parents teach children (or ways in which the parents act on the child's behalf) can be wrong--I'm thinking here of Jehovah's Witnesses not allowing their children to receive blood transfusions or certain religious sects that don't believe in medical care (embracing some sort of faith healing instead). Indeed, probably the government is right to intervene in these circumstances. On the other hand, I think that the first and primary place of children's education is the family, and that, consequently, even when the parent's teach something wrong (within reason) this right ought to be protected.

One of the audience members asked a question as a Catholic who wouldn't think of passing her religion on to her children. What are we freaking raising? Blank slates that are not taught a thing until they're 21?! For crying out loud, you have to start somewhere. The things that parents teach their children are the starting point from which they approach the world (and often the things that they rebel against later).

This is not to say that society and communities shouldn't exert some influence on the families with it. Probably society is a check against the extremism of some parents. On the other hand, if society is not a local and personal place for discussion and exchange of ideas, but rather advocates a (universal and abstract) ideology itself (for these panelists freedom and equality were the primary virtues), then I'm not sure how it could offer a beneficial corrective. One panelist, for instance, argued for the need to normalize lesbian marriage (interestingly, not homosexual marriage--just lesbian marriage) as an outworking of her affirmation of equality (someone raised a very insightful question on this point--why not do away with marriage recognized by the state, since recognition of marriage itself is a form of equality?). Poor Tocqueville--he would be dismayed by the way in which people continually seek to eliminate difference.

At least one of the panelists suggested something called "parental licensing," which means that the state could determine who could and who couldn't become a parent. I've never heard of "parental licensing" before, but this is incredibly scary to me.

Another panelist suggested that it is our responsibility to ensure that the values of the public sphere (namely freedom and equality) are infused in the private sphere, breaking down the differences between the two realms. As an Arendtian, I have so many problems with this.

Chloe

Really, Atom Egoyan's Ararat is one of my favorite movies. Which is (part of) why his new film, Chloe, was so incredibly disappointing:

A) It was a terrible, terrible, distressing film. B) Ararat was so good.

This film had two psychotic women in it, and was sort of a horror film (my least favorite genre, not that I've ever seen an actually horror film, but if I had, I know I would hate it). It's just so weird. Really, I am scarred.

Not quite as scarred as I was from the APSA feminism panel I attended the other day, but it's close.

Rant: Student Emails.1

To quote a friend, "I am totally swamped at the moment, with all the new students arriving with all their neuroses." Okay, okay, I don't get to complain--me and my eight students, but I really don't understand why a student emails the professor to find out where the class is--use the campus map! I have to find that on the internet and email it to you?! Really! I don't know where in the world the classroom is, either, but I'll find the map all by myself.

Some Green Dresses to Improve Your Day!

Here are some green dress pictures:


I would like to twirl in this dress.




Okay, so her skin sort of looks like it's popping out of her dress everywhere, but what I love about this dress is the gemstones--I love the idea of sewing brooches into your clothes--my favorite new scarf (from Munich) has little stones sewn into it.


I suppose that this dress is a little bit bridesmaid-y, which is just about the worst thing you can say about a dress, but I do love short dresses.



This girl looks orange, but I'm certain it's not the dress's fault--it's her fake tan. If she were a little fairer, it would be perfect.



And, the best for last!

A Little Domestic Travel.3, Portland, ME

I have heard such good things about Portland's food that I made up a whole desire to visit Emily Dickinson's house in Amherst and go to Portland, so that Wystan and I could compromise and just stop in Portland for a Sunday brunch (he's not as in to taking scenic stops as I am on long trips...).



The place we went for brunch was almost scary--it was on a dingy, smelly wharf, and from the outside, I wasn't even sure it was a restaurant. Inside, however, was lovely. And lobster eggs benedict!

A Little Domestic Travel.2 or Maine Wedding Weekend Extravaganza

Lawrence got married! He married an amazing woman; we will call her Spring. They shot off a canon at their wedding (just after the vows).

Since I'm from the north, I've only ever seen a couple of groom's cakes. This is unqualifiedly the most amazing groom's cake I've ever seen. And it was a surprise from Spring!




The wedding was on a small island in Maine called Bailey's Island, which Spring's family has summered on for generations.







There is even a lighthouse on the bag of chips!

Twitter

It's APSA: I'm tired beyond any telling of it, and have realized how much of a nerd I am, since I like all of this socializing and all of these panels (okay, most of these panels).

A Little Domestic Travel.1

Here are a couple of pictures of Wystan's new academic home (for the year), and the place where we met (aww!). (The last one is the movie theater.)

William Stafford.2 (On Aristotle)

Humanities Lecture

by William Stafford

Aristotle was a little man with

eyes like a lizard, and he found a streak

down the midst of things, a smooth place for his feet

much more important than the carved handles

on the coffins of the great.

He said you should put your hand out

at the time and place of need:

strength matters little, he said,

nor even speed.

His pupil, a king's son, died

at an early age. That Aristotle spoke of him

it is impossible to find—the youth was

notorious, a conqueror, a kid with a gang,

but even this Aristotle didn't ever say.

Around the farthest forest and along

all the bed of the sea, Aristotle studied

immediate, local ways. Many of which

were wrong. So he studied poetry.

There, in pity and fear, he found Man.

Many thinkers today, who stand low and grin,

have little use for anger or power, its palace

or its prison—

but quite a bit for that little man

with eyes like a lizard.

You know, if there's one thing that I'm okay with winning out over local custom and tradition, it's poetry. In fact, if poetry and art are the more universal elements of a society that balance out the particularity of tradition, I would be as pleased as punch (I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I would be it).

I am a Nerdy Professor

So I went back and took some pictures (actually, it was rather embarrassing--there were students all around and I'm sure I was the only person in the bookstore taking pictures of books on the shelf today! That, incidentally is why the pictures are blurry--I didn't want to use a flash and draw attention to myself...Oh well, it's for posterity).

Rant

And the student emails have begun. Class doesn't even meet for the first time until next Wednesday. I hate student emails. I look forward to the day when I have a TA who can deal with all of this.

Also: my (little bitty) class just doubled, basically overnight. This is not going to help with decreasing the number of student emails.

Serendipity and the Internet

Here are some of the search words that have landed unexpecting internet surfers recently on Three White Leopards:



remembrance for leopards--I think that this query is something like, "Do all dogs go to heaven?" I would say that there have to be animals in heaven--the lion lays down with the lamb, right? (Or is it lies down with the lamb??) I'm not sure, however, who would have a strong attachment to a leopard. Unless it was Baby.



emily hale candy--I don't think it's been made yet, but I'm sure it's possible. Goodness gracious, they make lighthouse gummy bears. And candy legos. And Winnie the Pooh lollipops. Obviously Emily Hale candy is next.

there's always a possibility--This sounds like an all-occasion cliche to make you feel better, one that is in the category of "This too shall pass" or "All shall be well." Or maybe Shirley Temple should start singing, "There's always a possibility..." (I know, I know--too many syllables...)

single poem of leopards--It sounds like there is a national poem of leopards and this person is curious about what it is. However, if this person is looking for a poem about leopards, I would give them Ogden Nash's "The Panther," which isn't really about leopards, but, as Nash tells us, "The panther is like a leopard":

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.