Ravelstein

It seems funny to write this about a book that is about death, but this book is delightful mind candy for the political theorist (the comments about esotericism and footnotes and Athens and Jerusalem are just too much fun and oh so nerdy). And the book isn't all about death: it's mainly a memoir or biography of Allan Bloom. And it's more complicated than that--it's also an exploration of love and friendship.

The veiled name dropping in this roman a clef (yes, I'm using a word that I just learned) is remarkable: Strauss, obviously; Edward Shils is discussed; Mircea Eliade is given a very hard time. It almost makes you wonder why Bellow decided to change the names of the characters at all.

Of course, the question of whether or not Bellow's descriptions are accurate is far from settled (and I can't say a word about it, as I have no knowledge of Allan Bloom outside of this book). This issue is treated (with no real conclusion) in the article, "With Friends Like Saul Bellow." The article considers the most controversial aspect of Bellows' treatment of Bloom--his. outing of Bloom and his claim that Bloom died of AIDS. Throughout the novel, as this article points out, the narrator claims that Ravelstein asked him to write about him and not hold back. Whether it is true that Bloom died of AIDS is unclear; it seems that Bellow believed that he had. The narrator of Ravelstein claims that Bloom did not seek to keep his sexuality a secret. I think that conservatives in particular were shocked by this outing as conservatives loved Allan Bloom's best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind.

Saul Bellow writes Ravelstein about his friendship with Allan Bloom, about Allan Bloom's death, and about his own close-to-death experience before fulfilling his promise to write Bloom's biography. Saul Bellow's descriptions are delightful--he reveals the good parts and the bad parts of Bloom, but sympathetically (with no outside frame of reference, my impression was that his treatment of Allan Bloom was kind, while not holding back from mentioning Bloom's foibles). For instance, Bloom (as Chick, the narrator) describes Allan Bloom (Ravelstein), when he writes (and I had to include this quotation because it mentions TSE [why didn't TSE get his own secret name?!]):

"He was a curious man to watch at the table. His feeding habits needed getting used to. Mrs. Glyph, the wife of the founder of his department, told him once that he must never again expect her to ask him to dinner. She was in her own right a very rich lady, big on high culture and an entertainer of visiting celebrities. She had had R. H. Tawney at her dinner table, and Bertrand Russell, and some big-shot French Thomist whose name escapes me (Maritain?), and lots of literati, especially the French. Abe Ravelstein, then a junior faculty member, was invited to a luncheon to honor T. S. Eliot. Marla Glyph said to Abe Ravelstein as he was leaving, 'You drank from your Coke bottle, and T. S. Eliot was watching--with horror.'"

Bellow highlights Ravelstein's yearning for love and beauty (and arguably even truth) above all things, and his whole-hearted pursuit of these things. While of course I'm not crazy about his searching for these things in fine clothes and food and sex, Bellow's articulation of Ravelstein's appetites in this way is, I think, the best possible portrayal of them.

The book is so casually and comfortably told that even in the form, it conveys the joys of intellectual friendship. It brings you into Chick and Ravelstein's friendship. Their friendship was that of a writer and a political theorist. While I have lots of intellectual friendships with people in my own field, I think that intellectual friendships across disciplines are perhaps particularly rewarding: the fact that they are outside of disciplinary boundaries means that you spend less time fussing about the particular idiosyncrasies of your discipline and more time talking about the truths that stand outside of disciplines. Instead of shop talk (however fascinating and necessary shop talk is--and it is! We always need the chance for good gossip), it can be the real discussion of ideas, and can draw you outside of your own areas of specialization. Chick and Ravelstein are able to exchange real ideas and respect each other deeply (although Chick always writes about himself as the student and Ravelstein as the teacher, even though Chick was older, and they co-taught classes together). Ravelstein asking Chick to write his biography is a request that expresses the deepest respect. And, as a reader, my impression is that Ravelstein chose well in asking Chick to write about him. Chick offers wonderful literary insights, at times turning the Straussian method on its head in his fascination with pictures and images: "...[I]n the surface of things you saw the heart of things."

In a way, the book is a love triangle: the devoted friendship of Chick and Ravelstein is explored, as is the love between Chick and Rosalind (his wife at the moment, whom Chick claims saved him from his own brush with death [although, and I just have to say it--she's also the reason that he almost died by insisting that they go to the Caribbean together]). I'm not sure if love or friendship wins out in the end. Ravelstein notes all the time that most people don't experience grand love, and so have to settle for the erotic in their sexual encounters. Intellectual friendship is higher than erotic sexual encounters in Ravelstein's understanding (I think). Bellow's position may be different--he praises Rosalind (the character portraying his real-life fifth wife, Janis, who was a student of Bloom's--weird, huh?) to high heaven. He may be arguing at the end of the day that a romance of both sexual love and intellectual friendship is the highest of all.

What death (or almost death) does to Ravelstein and Chick is interesting: Ravelstein becomes more and more focused on the Jewish people and with the atrocities committed against them toward the end of his life. Chick becomes obsessed with a story about cannibals. Both consider the problems with suicide (Chick in the context of a hallucination of a previous wife asking him to have himself frozen--he sees this as a problem both in its avoidance of what is inevitable, and as a sort of suicide).

Finally, here are a couple of quotations from Ravelstein on women. First, Chick is describing the Eliade character and his treatment of women to Ravelstein: [Chick:] "The considerate man, the only right kind, remembers birthdays, honeymoons, and other tender anniversaries. You have to kiss the ladies' hands, send them roses; you cringe, move back the chairs, you rush to open doors and make arrangements with the maitre d'. In that set, the women expect to be petted, idolized, deferred to, or romanced." Ravelstein: "... Of course it's just a game. But the women get a kick out of it."

Second, Chick communicates Ravelstein's take on women: "Nature, furthermore, gave them a longing for children, and therefore for marriage, for the stability requisite for family life. And this, together with a mass of other things, disabled them for philosophy."


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Green Dresses.12, Anna Friel Edition

I loved and miss Pushing Daisies. Chuck's dresses were always cute. They didn't have her wear enough green on the show, but she remedied that in real life.







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Tocqueville Everywhere!

Edge passed on to me this intriguing short story, "Great Experiment," by Jeffrey Eugenides. Kendall, the main character, is reading Tocqueville's Democracy in America to abridge it for a publishing house that is not very flatteringly portrayed (honestly, it seemed to be reminiscent of the Liberty Fund--it was run by a libertarian who wanted to distribute classic texts regarding the Founding in the Midwest). Ultimately, Kendall is inspired by his middle class anxiety and Tocqueville to do a little bit of embezzling. Tocqueville as a motivation to steal seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, but the short story does capture what Tocqueville observes in Americans--their commitment to commerce (and pragmatism). In addition, Eugenides insightfully touches on gender relations in a democracy:

"Nowadays, if Kendall wanted to live as his own father had lived, he was going to have to hire a cleaning lady and a seamstress and a social secretary. He was going to have to hire a wife. Wouldn’t that be great? Stephanie could use one, too. Everybody needed a wife, and no one had one anymore.

But to hire a wife Kendall needed to make more money. The alternative was to live as he did, in middle-class squalor, in married bachelorhood."

Concrete Stencils!

My First Concert

This weekend I went to hear the Goats (I think that that's what the people who are full-fledged fans call them--I'm referring to The Mountain Goats) at the 9:30 Club.

It was my very first concert: in my young adult days when all of my friends were going to contemporary Christian music concerts, my parents weren't okay with it. Since then, I don't know: I just haven't ended up at any. Except for one we stumbled across in Krakow outside late at night, but I didn't know that band.

I mentioned to a particularly, shall we say not-pop-culturally-sensitive colleague of mine, that I was going to my first concert, and he was happy to tease me about the fact that even he had been to the 9:30 Club before.

I went with my friend, Judith. I told her it was my first concert and that she shouldn't call me homeschooled. She replied that she wouldn't call me homeschooled unless I wore overalls.

Judith brought the wrong ticket to the show--which is to say, she brought the receipt, which looked like the ticket. So she had to cab home and back, leaving me standing awkwardly with a mass of hipsters waiting for the opening band to come on. It was a desperately uncomfortable situation (and I don't even believe in awkwardness, so you know it was bad!)--I didn't think that I knew a soul in the place, and I really wasn't dressed like they were. So when I caught a glimpse of one of my students, I hustled over and said hello. Which was probably weirder than hiding in the corner, but, hey. They kept me entertained with stories of hiking the Appalachian trail (folky hipsters!) until Judith returned.

The opening band was called something like Megafon (I don't know how it was spelled). No one had ever heard of them, but I liked them--they made you feel like you should take your shoes off, and dance on a dirt floor, swirling your skirt around. It fed nicely into my recent obsession with folk music.

Once Judith returned, we pushed ourselves to the middle front of the crowd, since I wanted to have the real concert experience. As we were (rudely) making our way through the crowd, Judith kept yelling over the noise of the music, "Do you see them? Do you see them?" I kept yelling back, "Who, Judith, who?! We aren't looking for anyone." This exchange repeated itself several times, until I realized that she was just pretending so we wouldn't look quite so rude crowding everyone else.

So The Mountain Goats: John Darnielle is the main guy--he sings and writes the songs. His voice is distinctively slightly squeaky and nasal. That sounds like it would be annoying, but I promise, it's charming (and, interestingly, his talking voice is not distinctive in any of these ways--it's just super normal until he sings). His songs are in the middle of talking/whispering and singing; he was an English major, so the lyrics are somewhere in between a poem and a short paragraph. And his songs are riddled with religious references.

When Judith gave me a bunch of The Mountain Goats music to listen to, she particularly recommended the record, "Get Lonely." Which is beautiful, but also infinitely sad: when John Darnielle sings a melancholy song, I want to cry. The funny thing is that John Darnielle is incredibly good natured, and when he's performing, he smiles a lot. Even during the sad songs.

John Darnielle was particularly charming during the encores. He said that he never decides what songs to do for encores, because he thinks that that is very presumptive. (As an aside: how great are encores?! You just clap long enough and the performers come back and play more! I love it. I think that encores should be integrated into more aspects of our lives, like restaurants. If the food is so good that you just start clapping, they will bring you out more food. Or books--if the book is really wonderful and you just want it to keep going, then you start clapping loudly at the end and a couple more chapters appear. Etc.) John Darnielle, during one of the encores, also complained about people from the audience asking for some particular song that he only likes to play when he feels like it. He said perhaps that person is standing next to us (capturing fairly well the frustration of being stuck in a closely packed crowd of annoying people), and perhaps we've even wondered, "Would anyone notice if I put my chisel in his back?"

The rest of the band besides John Darnielle were some keyboardist I didn't pay attention to, a guitar player (Peter Hughes) who slightly reminded me of Jim on The Office, and Jon Wurster, the drummer from Superchunk (who is also something like a comedy writer!).

The music at the concert was more rocky than The Mountain Goats stuff I'd heard before--hearing it was a great experience. It reminded me of going with my uncle to see fireworks at home when I was little: we'd get so close to the fireworks that you could feel the vibrations in your chest.


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Turtle Soup

This weekend Hopkins hosted the D-House Gala, which was really lovely (it combined a celebration of local religious art and an opportunity to get to know the Dominicans better)! Bro. OP dished up beef wellington, which was very good, but the culinary highlight for me was the turtle soup. One of the brothers, who is from New Orleans, claimed that it's debated whether turtles are seafood of not! This question had never occurred to me before (although I did try to convince Carrot, who is a vegetarian, that turtles are vegetables). It was delicious; plus, I had never eaten turtle before, and I love trying new things (as Myrna specified, legal new things).

Native Son

Richard Wright's Native Son was in the category of books that I like more at the end than at any point in the middle (Crime and Punishment is another).

Native Son traces Bigger Thomas's murder of Mary Dalton, the daughter of his new employer, and his girlfriend, Bessie. Richard Wright examines race relations as Bigger Thomas (who is black) is apprehended and tried for his crime. Honestly, I find it to be very jarring to get inside the head of a murderer, especially when it's done well. I guess it must have been done well in this case. We see Bigger shove dead Mary Dalton in the furnace to get rid of her, for instance.

At two levels the novel was frustrating to me: a) The fact that Bigger Thomas' murder of Mary Dalton was an accident is never dealt with sufficiently. Not that this would necessarily have been an effective defense, but Bigger doesn't convey it to Max (his lawyer), and Max doesn't convey it to the jury. This accident aspect changes everything for me. b) At first, it seems like the novel is going to be something like The Stranger--a sort of existential novel in which the character discovers important truths about himself and the world by committing a murder. And it sort of is. On the other hand, Wright does not defend the murder itself, but rather gives a richer understanding of the background and the context of the murder (although it isn't clear to me from the end that Bigger Thomas agrees with Wright).

What Wright does best is both communicate the fear of the white people that resulted in their attempt to oppress black people, and communicate the way in which Bigger's violence was an attempt to escape that very oppression (without, as I said before, justifying murder itself). It was an attempt to create and accomplish something. Given the state of society at that time, Wright shows how it may have been one of the only ways for Bigger to express that aspect of himself. Wright points to the need to re-order society.

The Communists in the book come out as wonderful people: Jan, Mary's boyfriend on whom Bigger tries to blame her murder, forgives him and finds a lawyer to defend Bigger. Jan sees a commonality in the oppression of the Communists and the black people. On the other hand, the novel shows how it is precisely the Communists' attempt to eliminate injustice at the individual level that led to Bigger's crime. Here again, Wright points to the need for a restructuring of society as a whole--individual attempts to mitigate injustice may be counterproductive.

Mr. Dalton, Mary's father, is an example of the ineffectiveness of individual attempts to mitigate injustice: Mr. Dalton is a rich business owner (and renowned philanthropist) who both donates money to poor black people and is a force in their oppression (by, for instance, with other landowners, charging more for apartments for black people than for white people).


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Quote

"Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed." --from "How to Behave in an Art Museum"

Lilies of the Field

Lilies of the Field, along with Father Goose, Heaven Can Wait, Rent-A-Kid and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, was a pretty important part of my childhood--it was one of the limited number of movies that the library had and we were allowed to watch. And watch it we did--over and over.

This is a charming film about the answer to prayer of some German nuns who don't really speak English: a Baptist man, Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier).

The nuns are pretty persistent (to put it mildly) and manage to get their way in most things. They convince Smith that God sent him to them to build them a chapel so that they don't have to meet outside. In the process, Smith loosens the Mother up, and they both bridge (and appreciate) the immense gaps of language and culture between them (Smith teaches the nuns English and some spirituals [the music in the film is great]).


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Quote

From a gchat with a curmudgeonly colleague:

"no good things make money any more

good magazines, opera companies

what makes money is cupcake shops"

In the Time of the Butterflies

In the Time of the Butterflies traces the Mirabal sister's recognition of the cruelty of the Dominican Republic's dictator, Trujillo, and their consequent revolutionary work to inform people of his cruelty and to react against it.

In college, I read the novel by Julia Alvarez. Lately, I saw the movie version. I don't remember a lot from the novel, but what I do remember, the movie captures well, even in the dream-like way the novel tells it--the moment in which one of the Butterflies meets her future husband and knows it when she is washing his feel--the poignant end of the novel, in which their car is being followed and they realize that the end is immanent--the way in which the main character discovers her sexuality in the dictator's abuse of it.

The story is moving--the sisters are amazingly strong women who see a situation so serious that their commitment must be to remedy it, even at the expense of tearing their family apart and possibly never seeing their children again. Minerva is a particularly strong woman--she went to law school, although she was not granted her degree because she resisted Trujillo's advances.

A note about the actors: The film stars Salma Hayek. It has Marc Anthony in a supporting role! I thought it looked like him when I was watching it, but dismissed this idea, since all I know about him is that he's the husband of Jennifer Lopez, and what the Fug Girls tell me (which is mostly along the lines of he's a vampire or a "wiry string bean of mischief" or a "a tiny wee pixie but with hormones," etc.). Apparently he's also acted.


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May the Future's Happy Hours Bring You Rice & Beans & Flowers

Who knew? The poet Elizabeth Bishop also painted. Exchanging Hats is a collection of her paintings. I found her paintings to be very ironic: one is aptly titled, "Grave with Floral Wreaths" (which I appreciate, as I've always been intrigued by the practice of putting fake flowers on graves); others prominently feature downed power lines, or normal power lines cutting through the picture; another is "of" a building obscured by plants in the foreground. "Tombstones for Sale" is the name of another painting.

At the top of the picture above is written the charming blessing: "May the Future's Happy Hours Bring You Rice & Beans & Flowers."

William Benton, who edited the collection of paintings, doesn't add very much, although I find to be particularly insightful the observation that "The general rule of a Bishop picture is: If a table exists, put flowers on it."

The book also includes some excerpts from Bishop's letters about painting and a little discussion of how Bishop's writing is "painterly." But it's a shame that more of her poetry isn't included in the book. I think that that would make it much nicer (and more integrated into the rest of her work).


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Lauren on Paris (on Garance Dore's blog):

"For macaronis gratin, check out Hôtel Amour (rue Navarin), which is also the only place that I know where I can be a squatter all afternoon with my computer and drink only a diet coke when I really can’t get stuff down on paper."
...
"For ambiance that’s vintage/decadent, head to Chez Moune (rue Pigalle) the only club that I never resist spending the second part of my night at, as it’s two hops away from my bed."

A squatter? The second part of my night? Elsewhere she describes a museum as "human size"...

I've never been to Paris, and now I want to go and follow all of her recommendations, one by one (and, of course, add a mess of churches to that).

His Girl Friday

In which Walter Burns (Cary Grant) convinces Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to ditch her fiance and un-divorce him and the newspaper business.

There's loads of passionate, fast-talking, witty banter in this film (although the film is better when it sticks to witty banter between Walter and Hildy than when Cary Grant alone engages in physical comedy--he just doesn't quite pull it off):

"Hildy: I suppose I proposed to you?
Walter: Well, you practically did, making goo-goo eyes at me for two years until I broke down.
[impersonates Hildy, flutters his eyelashes]
'Oh, Walter.' And I still claim I was tight the night I proposed to you. If you had been a gentleman, you would have forgotten all about it. But not you!"

and

"Walter: Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband that didn't want to see his home broken up.
Hildy: What home?
Walter: 'What home?' Don't you remember the home I promised you?"

It's apparent from Walter and Hildy's lunch with her fiance that, although she claims to want to settle down with a nice man and have a family, she isn't quite cut out for it: both she and Walter order coffee with whiskey and light their cigarettes at the same time. Her fiance, on the other hand, orders a water. Walter knows her well and is quite confident in his ability to talk her into coming back to him and the paper. And he does.


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Green Dresses.11, Elizabeth Taylor Edition

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Baltimore

A friend and I went up to Baltimore this weekend to visit another friend of ours there.

We had a lovely time--lunch, where I tried bahn mi (a Vietnamese sandwich); lots of vintage clothes shopping, where we tried on hats, and I found a bargain of a Vera Neumann scarf; inspection of my friend's husband's collection of ephemera (he's an archivist and collects random things, including post cards and QSL cards [which people exchanged back in the day for amateur radio broadcasts], and he gave me a first day cover of a Chagall window when I raved about them!).

However, the highlight of the trip for me was our visit to The Book Thing--the free bookstore of Baltimore! My friend, I think not entirely jokingly, maintained that it was run by a bunch of Marxists who wanted to liberate books from the market. They stamp in the book:

"Not For Resale
THIS IS A FREE BOOK"

All I know is that I'm happy when people want to liberate books from the market into my care. It was slightly overwhelming to be there (the "shop" is neither huge, nor excellent--there were shelves and shelves with books I've never heard of on them)--there were so many books, and they were free, but I wasn't supposed to take them all. I kept telling myself that I needed to leave some for the other people.

My favorite find was To Catch an Angel by Robert Russell, a book that's now out of print. Robert Russell was the father of my father's friend, and we visited with him on several occasions. Russell was a remarkable man and an English professor who writes about his life and blindness. He married the woman who was hired to read to him his textbooks at Oxford.

Twitter

"Sounds of Silence" as a contemporary (and distopian) "Kubla Khan" (which was originally titled, "Kubla Khan: or a Vision in a Dream")?? Okay, okay--it's a stretch. But both claim to be visions within dreams.

Quotes

From the professor I TA for:

"I'm still writing 2010 on my checks. Or is it 2012 now and I'm still writing 2011?"

"The same diamond you could've bought like me from a clearinghouse in Israel." (Complaining about "brand name" diamonds, since diamonds are a generic commodity.)

Ararat

For some strange reason, when I bought this book and the whole time I was reading it, I thought is was written by D.H. Lawrence (despite the prominent placement of the actual author--DM Thomas--on the book cover and my ability to read...). I think that somehow the conflation of Dylan Thomas and D.H. Lawrence and DM Thomas was just too much for me. Anyway, thinking that D.H. Lawrence was the author really threw me because I was pretty convinced that Ararat is a post-modern novel (it is!), and the timing just doesn't work out with Lawrence as the author. Anyway, enough embarrassing admissions.

I'm fascinated with Armenia, which is why I picked this book up. Plus, the book, as the back cover tells us, deals with the theme of improvisation. And deal with that theme it does! Holy goodness--there are stories within stories within stories (at least three layers, possibly more). But combined with these intricate layerings (Inception, anyone?) is post-modern re-writings of the story in the middle of the novel--which is to say, at times, one of the narrators will say, "Oh no, I don't like that ending, I'll re-write it this way..." The book was incredibly difficult to follow--almost certainly this was intentional: many of the characters were similar to characters at other levels of the story, only slantedly similar. In addition, Thomas seemed to not want to identify too clearly the characters, leaving the reader to guess at their identity.

In addition to exploring the nature of inspiration (which is often sex with a woman, or many of them--most of the characters have a wife and a mistress), Thomas also explores the dark side of this treatment of women. The women are muses--they draw the stories out of the male poets and writers and improvisers. The women are very different from each other, but are all important in the story according to how they attract the men (fat, thin, blind; occasionally smart or artistic themselves, although these things seem to be an impediment to their attractiveness rather than an increase in it).

At many of its different levels, the novel, as the title indicates, deals with Ararat, the mountain that is so important to the Armenian people. One wonderful epigraph says, "And you, my mountain, / Will you never walk toward me?"


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The Serendipity of Gmail.5

Gmail has lately been repeatedly advertising this Ginger Spam Salad to me. A) What person who cares enough to use fresh ginger also eats spam? B) How funny is it to see a recipe that contains spam in your email (which also contains spam!)? C) Is that recipe a joke??

I've never known a person who has ever eaten spam, except my father, who claims his mother occasionally fed it to them when they were growing up (he told us this in the context of explaining why we should never complain about our mother's cooking).


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Pulp Fiction

My knowledge of Pulp Fiction up till this point had been quite slim: I think I saw figure skaters dance to a song from this movie a million years ago (Stearns and Ilana love figure skating). And I think that I'd heard it referred to as a cult classic. So when I was rooting through Mr. Sayers' extensive dvd collection to see what to borrow, I picked it out (incidentally, Mr. Sayers doesn't watch a ton of movies, but as a hobby started buying lots of cheap dvd's during his time studying abroad in China).

This film was shocking--the drugs, the violence, the sex (Needles! An almost overdose! I can't recommend this film at all--especially because my mother reads this blog). Most interesting was the story telling--the overlapping stories of six or so main characters would pick up at random points, sometimes way in the past, sometimes at a moment that we'd already seen from a different perspective in the film. And there was this perpetual feeling of pointlessness--that the director was giving us a small vignettes that would never make any sense--small chunks of life that were nothing more than that.

The most intriguing parts of the story to me were the hit man Jules's strange religion (which included misquoting a passage in Ezekiel before he killed people and being profoundly moved by what he perceived to be a miraculous escape from death) and the boxer, Butch Coolidge's, relationship with his girlfriend--she was annoying as all get out, but he really cared for her, even when he was in absurdly stressful situations (after he returned back from retrieving his watch, for example, which involved killing the man who had been sent to kill him, he asks her how her blueberry pancakes were).

Also: I really like Tim Roth, although he had a pretty small part.


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Rant: On Leaving Early

I am really not qualified to write this rant, because I've left my fair share of things early (although, in my defense, it was mostly in college, when I was so busy that my activities overlapped on top of each other). And there have been plenty of things that I've wanted to leave early from, even if I didn't.

But really! People leave everything early these days: church, sporting events, even musical performances! A little respect here--I was with someone who suggested leaving early from the last Georgetown game I was at--you know, I feel really badly for the basketball players. They play so hard the whole game, and then at the end, whether they're winning or losing (with only the exception of very close games), people start leaving to beat the crowds. This is so silly. Most crowds do not take that long to leave (certainly not the number of people who go to Georgetown games). Also! The orchestra concert I was at in Philly a couple of weeks ago shocked me! People started leaving during the ovation! I know it goes on and on and on, but even a long ovation only takes a whole 5 minutes--you'll live. Plus, it's the custom, so just go with it. And church! Don't even get me started. Sing the freaking songs--even if they're terrible, and then you won't feel a need to escape the church the second that the priest's back is turned. All of this seems to me to be connected to the mentality of the consumer: I bought a service and can terminate my participation at any point. I am entitled to your performance and will leave when I'm no longer interested. Kids leaving class early is another example of this--or taking 10 minute bathroom breaks in the middle of class.

Second Story

Last weekend I drove up to the boondocks of Rockville, MD for a dinner party. I drove up early to avoid the traffic, thinking I would find a coffee shop to study in. Of course, all of the coffee shops that I found (okay, it was just one) were packed: not a single seat for me! So I found my old fallback: McDonald's with free Wi-fi. I sat near a table packed with old men who were talking about social security.

Serendipitously, I was gchatting one of my friends, who mentioned that he had been up to Rockville that very day to visit Second Story Books, which has a bookstore in Dupont and a warehouse in Rockville. I'd never heard of this place, but decided to spend the rest of the time I had to kill there--it is enormous--I had to speed-browse my way through my sections, and didn't touch 75 percent of the store. They have a great selection of books, and they're reasonably priced! I found quite a random assortment: Eliade on myths, dreams and mysteries, The Cloud of Unknowing (sigh, which it turns out I already had), St. Theresa of Avila's Interior Castle, and a Graham Greene spy novel.

Quotation

From a NYTimes article about an old house and its inhabitants:

"The Post cereal heiress, who once owned a spate of mansions including Palm Beach’s Mar-a-Lago and Topridge in the Adirondacks, had almost as many husbands — four — as she had homes.

Like mother, like daughters. Orchestras played the wedding march a dozen times for the three Post girls. The eldest, Adelaide, had three husbands; Eleanor, the middle sister, had six; and Nedenia, best known as the actress Dina Merrill, three."

Quote

"As the Saint was deprived for some time of the accustomed visits of her Spouse, she ventured to inquire why the favour was withheld, though she neither fell into discouragement nor depression in consequence. 'When a person looks at any one who is close to them,' replied our Lord, 'the too great proximity often prevents them from seeing distinctly; as, for example, when a friend meets his friend and embraces him, this close union deprives him of the pleasure of looking at him.' St. Gertrude understood by these words, that we often merit more when deprived of sensible grace, provided that we do not become less fervent in the practice of good works.

In the early years of the Saint's spiritual life, our Lord often spoke to her in an audible voice; but later these communications assumed a different character. The Saint inquired the reason, and received this reply: 'In former years I oftener instructed you by giving you various answers that you might know, and that you might make known, the designs of My will to others; but now I only make Myself known to you in spirit, and I give you inspirations by lights which would be difficult to express in words. ... For when the Saint prayed for anything, even if she received no reply from our Lord, as she had done formerly, she nevertheless felt equal consolation, and a certain assurance that her prayer was heard."

--The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude

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Because I Can't Help But Copy Hopkins' Blog

Hopkins posting on stationery today reminded me of how much I love Crane's stationery. And since my favorite stationery store has a smaller and smaller selection (they were down to just navy-bordered and gold-bordered paper the last time I visited), I'm realizing that I may eventually be forced to buy it online. Isn't this one pretty?!

Also, I'm daydreaming about whether I'll ever be important enough to have monogrammed stationery without being pretentious...

Ode to Ray's

I really can't believe that I've never written about Ray's Hell Burger here before. This is one of my favorite places to eat in DC. Rumor has it that unused steaks from Ray's: the Steaks are ground up and served at Ray's Hell Burger. Rumor also has it that so many people were ordering burgers at Ray's: the Steaks that he had to open this burger joint.

Actually there are two Ray's stores in the same shopping plaza: the main one is McDonald's style service--order your burger and pay in cash at the front and then push people out of the way to try to get a table (okay, okay, so I've never actually had trouble getting a table at McDonald's). The other Ray's Burger place is a sit-down place where you can order. Plus: (and this is an enormous advantage) they offer a smaller size burger. Ray's Hell Burgers are so big. They're enormous. So usually you can't manage to eat a whole one and some sweet potato fries, and the sweet potato fries there are worth eating.

The burgers really are amazing--they are so juicy that once you commit to picking one up and taking the first bite, you usually don't put it down again until you're done (cutting the burger in half at the beginning can help--this allows you at least one break in the eating of the hamburger). The toppings are quite remarkable. This last time, I ordered "Soul Burger Number One"--applewood smoked bacon, swiss cheese, cognac and sherry sauteed mushrooms & grilled red onions. Often I get the B.I.G Poppa--a black pepper crusted burger, with Danish blue cheese, cognac and sherry sauteed mushrooms and grilled red onions. Ray's can get fancy: there's something to do with bone marrow on the menu (I've never looked very closely at that one); and brie is an option (brie on burgers feels and tastes a little strange, though, I think).


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Why I Love Ursula LeGuin

I just finished Ursula LeGuin's City of Illusions, which is a sort of trippy little book that moves between the Earth and other planets, and between various memories and minds that exist in one body, and, most significantly, between the truth and the lie. It examines the difficulty of knowing who to trust and of being able to tell when you are being lied to.

LeGuin's stories articulate a belief in order--that order exists and that we can (at least partially) know it. In City of Illusions, determining the truth amidst many different conflicting stories involves Falk, the main character, learning to know himself (it was a sort of coming of age novel, only the adolescent story was happening to an adult). The order that LeGuin's stories rely on involves a particular understanding of language and words--it is through words that both lies and the truth are told (and yet words are the only way we have to get to the truth): "The River Poet said a thousand years ago, 'In truth man lies. ...' Zove rolled the words out oratorically, then laughed. 'Double-tongued, like all poets."


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"Makin' Whoopee!"

It seems that this (surprisingly scandalous!) 1929 song was where the name, "Whoopie Pie" originated!

Cheers for Miss Bishop

Sigh. Feel-good old movies are supposed to make you feel good! This one didn't.

The problem was that until she was in her 70s Miss Bishop didn't realize that the love of her life, Sam, had been there the whole time. I think that we were supposed to feel happy because she more or less had had a husband in the form of a life-long companion--Sam. But I just ended up feeling sad--she more or less married her career (and was a darn-fine professor) and raised her niece (after Miss Bishop's sister had run off with Miss Bishop's fiance and then died in childbirth after he left her). So this just combined all of the things I hate in fiction: sisters interfering in each other's love lives and the protagonist not being aware of who it really is (and choosing him) who loves her. The film neither managed to be a defense of the single life, nor a tragedy of missed love: it just hovered somewhere in limbo in between.

I will say this, though, for the film: Edmund Gwenn was the president of the university, which is such a good role for him (quite similar to his role of older, inspiring professor friend in An Apartment for Peggy).


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A) These are awesome! (HT: Hopkins)
B) The hand they are on is not.
C) I think that we should all get a little more excited about the royal wedding!


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Because I Like Lists Lately

My favorite things to look for on Etsy:

1. (by a far margin) Broaches, especially flower broaches
2. Scarves
3. Lockets
4. Letter openers

Happy All the Time

Hopkins recommended Happy All the Time to me lately--oh my goodness, what a delightful book! Definitely my favorite that I've read in a while! It is both the lightest, most charming book imaginable, while still being thoughtful and intelligent (it's filled with digs at philosophers and academics). Colwin is an incredibly witty and colorful writer, and so I've included below a ton of quotations from the book: they show just how clever her writing is.

I'd never heard of Colwin until Hopkins recommended this book. So of course I looked her up and came across this wonderful article (written by a friend of Colwin's after her death), which turns out to be what introduced Hopkins to Colwin in the first place.

Happy all the Time is about two couples who are best friends: Guido and Holly and Vincent and Misty. At the beginning, you think that the book is going to be about Guido and Holly, and it sort of is, but when Misty enters the story (which doesn't happen until a quarter of the way through), you find that all the rest of them are pretty boring. Vincent is good and almost childlike in his incredulity about the happiness of the world; Misty, on the other hand, is incredibly cynical about the world. The novel offers a reading of the world that is somewhere in the middle: it is aware that love involves pain and vulnerability, but, in the relationships of Guido and Holly and Vincent and Misty, it offers a hope that love can work.

Guido and Holly's relationship makes less sense to me: Holly is this unflappably calm and orderly, organized woman. She is almost incapable of communicating. Guido, on the other hand, can't for the life of him make sense of Holly. He is forced to just accept her as she is and love her--to accept her profound otherness from him.

Because the book is choc full of perfect, sarcastic descriptions, I feel compelled to share loads of them with you, in the hope that you'll get addicted and read it yourself:

"Being sweet meant that she did not attack him outright and it occurred to Vincent that perhaps he and Misty might be friends. He had never had a woman friend before. Of course, their dealings had not been precisely friendly, but then Vincent had never had a lunch partner like Misty, or any other sort of partner like her."
...
"'If you weren't so polite, you wouldn't have had to go out of your way to take me to dinner to apologize for your random behavior.'
Vincent looked up. Misty was smiling.
'You should be more like me,' she said.
'I should?' said Vincent. 'In what way?'
'I am the scourge of God.'"
...
"The water ran pleasantly down her back. There was something wonderful about having someone love you. Rapture does not spring up out of nowhere. Misty figured that time was running out. A few more weeks of this and she would be a replica of Vincent, announcing her state of love to strangers on the subway. She turned off the water and wrapped herself in a towel. In the steamy mirror, she confronted herself. Love made fools of everyone. It was man's fate."
...
"'My, my,' said Maria Teresa. 'I do admire your distance. If someone loved me, I'd probably pay him. You know what St. Theresa of Avila said? She said: "It must be in my nature, for anyone who gave me so much as a sardine could obtain anything from me.' What a pillar of strength you are.'" (Misty's friend is Maria Teresa, and Irish-Catholic who continually quotes Theresa of Avila.)
...
"There are going to be thousands of dinners like this, thought Misty. This is my place at the dinner table. This is my intended husband's best friend whom I am going to spend the rest of my life getting to know. Across the table, Vincent looked seraphically happy. How wonderful everything tasted, Misty thought. Everything had a sheen on it. Was that what love did, or was it merely the wine? She decided that it was love.
It was just as she suspected: love turned you into perfect mush."
...
"Holly did not believe that marriage was valid without cake."
...
After getting pretty tipsy on their wedding night, Vincent and Misty return home:
"'I want to make a speech,' said Vincent. 'Don't flinch. I make lovely speeches, as you know. Here's my speech. I am entirely happy. I am a prince. I have just gotten married and I am in love. Life is a banquet. Do you have anything to say to that?'
'Yes,' said Misty dreamily. 'I have married a sap.'"
...
"'Vincent,' said Misty. 'Sometimes I think you don't have the sense that God gave a chicken. Your family has been sleeping peacefully in Petrie since the beginning of time. I come from a family that fled the Czar's army, got their head broken on picket lines, and has never slept peacefully anywhere."
...
On Holly going on a religious retreat to get used to the idea of being pregnant: "'You don't have one ounce of religious feeling,' said Guido.
'I may not have religious feelings, but I like a religious atmosphere,' Holly said. 'Besides, the thought of being pregnant makes me feel medieval.'"
...
"'Friendship is not possible between two women one of whom is very well dressed,' said Misty."

(As you can see, this book is something like reading a sarcastic version of Proverbs.)


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Equality Between Men and Women

Lex of the Financial Times writes: "The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU insurers must become gender-blind by the end of 2012. The judgment is philosophically ignorant and practically almost pointless. But it need not have serious ill effects.

To be fair to the ECJ, the philosophical weakness is not theirs, but enshrined in the EU treaty, which requires members “to promote equality between men and women” with no explanation of what this equality means. As far as auto insurers are concerned, the genders are not equal, as there is overwhelming evidence that women are safer drivers than men (especially the young, high testosterone variety). They therefore charge them lower premiums. Unisex rates may abstractly be good for sexual equality, but they are unfair to the safer sex."

I'm curious if (and doubt that) age is another distinction that the EU treaty seeks to equality away. We could avoid this problem entirely if we just had the government provide all forms of insurance...

Dissertation.6

My ranking of NSS coffees:

1) Bolivia
2) Peru
3) Burundi
4) Ethiopia

Edge, any adjustments you'd like to make?

Philadelphia.2

Philadelphia's outdoor art is wonderful. There are lots of mosaics on walls--this (I think it's called the Magic Garden) is an over-the-top collection of everything imaginable stuck into a wall. This first picture reminds me of a children's book or a dream.




I also love the playful colors that are everywhere.






Murals are the other form of outdoor art at which Philly excels. Murals seem to me to lend themselves so well to a depiction of the community. It can be an incredibly local form of art. Even a mural of Italy that I noticed in Philadelphia was there because the building that it adorns is an Italian restaurant.

Philadelphia.1

This weekend I went to Philadelphia to visit Sayers and Mr. Sayers. And had a ball--not in small part due to the fact that the visit was primarily comprised of a series of brunches.

Sayers takes her brunching seriously: immediately upon my arrival, we went to the #3 brunch spot in Philly: Honey's (full name: Honey's Sit-N-Eat), a Jewish/Southern restaurant. I had a Breakfast PoBoy Sandwich, for a couple of reasons: a) It is sort of like eggs benedict, without being eggs benedict exactly (it is bread with scrambled eggs and sausage and white sauce on top); and b) It is served with latke, which I'd never had before (plus, I was really needing to get away from home fries). The food was quite good, but I need to rave about the sausage: the sausage was amazing. I really need to start buying and eating good sausage. It makes all the difference. Of course, one of the people we were brunching with noticed the irony of all of the pig-based items on the menu; Mr. Sayers explained that that was the Southern part of the restaurant.


After we finished brunch (which ended up being quite late in the afternoon), we stopped in a building to check out a garden on top (that was closed for a wedding). In the process we passed a line of people and inquired about what the line was for. It was for rush tickets for the orchestra. Sayers and Mr. Sayers and I are none of us decision makers, so we ended up tossing a coin to decide what to do. It was heads and so we went to the orchestra. (Incidentally, Mr. Sayers mentioned that he picked out what college he went to based on a series of 200 coin tosses.)

The coin (actually it was a bus token) served us well. The orchestra was really lovely. It started with a piece by Ravel that I really liked (Sayers described it afterward as seeming like something from the Anne of Green Gables soundtrack, which explains why I liked it). Then there was some Vivaldi, which had been only recently discovered so this was the world premier. Next, there was a piece by a young composer who was from Philadelphia, Leshnoff. Usually I cringe through contemporary pieces, but this piece I liked. And it was commissioned by a couple for their children and grandchildren!

The last piece was by Strauss and it was autobiographical. According to the program notes, the composer described one section of the work: "'It's my wife I wanted to portray," Strauss wrote. 'She is very complex, very feminine, a little perverse, something of a flirt, never twice the same, every minute different from how she had been a minute before. At the beginning, the hero follows her, goes into the key in which she has just sung; but she always flies further away. Then at last he says: "No, I'm staying here." And she comes to him.'" It seemed a little self-absorbed to me and very German in its emphasis on the Hero. (The hall felt like the inside of a guitar [see picture above].)

Our Sunday brunch was at Morning Glory's, which, according to Sayers, is the #1 brunch spot in Philly. I'm happy to believe it. They boast homemade ketchup, for one thing (pictured to the left; it tasted like a mix between ketchup and pasta sauce, and since at one point in my life I ate pasta sauce straight out of the jar, well, let's just say, I wouldn't mind taking that ketchup home with me). In addition, there was a special of hipster waffles! (Whole-wheat waffles with granola and yogurt.) Sayers tried to order them, but they were out of granola, so they gave her a waffle on the side in addition to her meal. I think that this is the mark of a really good restaurant--when they are out of something, they really try to make it up to you. I also enjoy that this very hipster restaurant could make fun of itself and its customers by naming something, "hipster." (It seems to me to break the cardinal hipster rule--never admit that you are one.)

But wait till you hear what I ate: smoked bacon benedict! Yes, they did not sting-ily offer you only one interesting thing with your eggs benedict--there was bacon, there was asparagus and there was tomato. Plus the bread that it was built around was homemade bread with cheddar and chives, and it was quite easy to cut!

So basically it was a delicious weekend with unspeakably delightful company. And lots of walks. Perfect!


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