Goodbye Without Leaving

Best goodbye gathering ever (I really, adamantly didn't want a big party, because the idea of it depressed me, but a little May of Teck gathering was just the thing!). Hopkins read funny poems and Stearns recited the end of "Little Gidding," which made me cry (I think that's my first time crying in public; I might as well be a grandmother now and carry a box of tissues around). And Sr. Margarita Aloysius gave a wonderful toast. And Sidecar said that he'd miss me even though he didn't know me that well, which was endearing. And Gold was there (we missed you Frankincense and Myrrh!)--symmetry is important.

Quotes:

"The second one is Quantum Leap." --Hopkins on James Bond movies

"There's nothing wrong with big noses!" --Gold

"I thought your last name was Myrna." --Stearns to Myrna (it is not her last name)

One of my favorite fashion bloggers at academichic used book covers as fashion inspiration (which I mentioned the other day). So I tried it with Elizabeth Bishop's poems.


Really, all I did was add a belt to a (green!) dress, but it was a belt I never wear, and it did mean that the dress now has two belts, which is sort of fashion forward, and I liked the look at the end of the day.

A hymn by George Herbert:

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
such a way as gives us breath,
such a truth as ends all strife,
such a life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
such a light as shows a feast,
such a feast as mends in length,
such a strength as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
such a joy as none can move,
such a love as none can part,
such a heart as joys in love.

Natural Gas.7 Or What to Do While You're Packing

Because I know that you care as much about natural gas drilling as I do: Here is a link to a great roundtable that AEI put on on "Hydraulic Fracturing: Beneficent Breakthrough or Environmental Endangerment?"

Jay's

"Voted 1 of 14 Great Dive Bars in DC!!"

A) Since when do dive bars care about rankings? B) 1 of 14 seems more descriptive than praiseworthy--"Jay's is a dive bar!"

Also, when Stearns ordered, she (grammatically correct, as always) said, "May we have the nachos and a quesadilla?"

Congratulations to Fr. O.P.!

I heartily approve of the picture he chose (above) for his prayer card. Hopkins and I figured that it must be Adam and Eve on either side of Jesus, although Adam is pretty hairy and looks like something between a man and an animal.

This is the first ordination I've attended. I was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't see the ordinatees when they were lying down on the ground, although in retrospect, I could've anticipated that that would be hard to see. The first blessings of the priests afterward were super special.


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The Life of the World to Come

I love The Mountain Goats. I was immediately intrigued by their The Life of the World to Come: each of the 12 songs on the album? record?--I can't remember the music terms--is named after a scripture verse, on which the song is more or less loosely based.

This album seems like one long poem in 12 parts, set to music. There are themes that weave through the whole thing: John Darnielle often (not just here) refers to cities and states and concrete places ("House in Clearlake / Where I used to live"; "I flew in from Pennsylvania / When I heard the hour was coming fast / And I docked in Santa Barbara"; "Maybe make Culiacan by sunset"). There is lots of rain throughout the CD, and lots of transportation (cars and planes and travel in general), and lots of sickness (hospitals and dying and insanity).

The songs are full of shocking juxtapositions of biblical or medieval things and modern things: "The path to the palace of wisdom that the mystics walk / Is lined with neuroleptics and electric shock." There are also smoke alarms, a fentanyl drip, etc.

Occasionally, the songs feel like they're in the tradition of great Christian poetry. For instance:

"Each morning new
Each day shot through
With all the sharp small shards of shrapnel
That seem to burst of me and you"

This section reminds me of the sentiments of Donne's "Batter my heart..." or of Eliot's "The sharp compassion of the healer's art / Resolving the enigma of the fever chart." The third line could be straight out of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

There are some wonderfully catchy refrains on this album (although "catchy" seems like the wrong word): "I won't get better, but some day I'll be free / I am not this body that imprisons me" (this reminds me of the sentiments of old gospel songs [well, and just in general of Christianity]); "I used to live here"; "I will do what you ask me to do / Because of how I feel about you"; "I know you're thinking of me 'cause it's just about to rain." The songs are pretty simple and rely a lot on the refrains, which he plays on, sort of like a villanelle.


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I love this. (Hopkins has California, so I need Pennsylvania!)

HT: Hong Kong Housewife. From this Etsy.

Serendipity and the Internet

(An ongoing series.)

dissertation mad men--I think that Mad Men would be a great dissertation topic. Also, I speak from personal experience when I say that often dissertations create mad men (and women).

native fairies--Native fairies must be distinguished from fairies who emigrate. The United States only allows certain numbers of immigrant fairies, and the paperwork is very complicated.

www.socalleopa?rds.com--The question mark is key here.

green dresses for men--I don't know what to say about this. I applaud your enthusiasm for green dresses. But maybe stick to green shirts.

comparison of political theories and a cow--Political theories and a cow are similar in many ways. Political theories are often slow and not very energetic, like cows. Possible exceptions include Marx. Political theories are often reflective and ruminating, like cows.

Neitzsche writes, in the preface to A Genealogy of Morals: "Certainly one quality which nowadays had been best forgotten--and that is why it will take some time yet for my writings to become readable--is essential in order to practice reading as an art--a quality for the exercise of which it is necessary to be a cow, and under no circumstances a modern man!--rumination."


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Today I received my TA evaluations. They were the evaluations that I gave on Georgetown day. I'm going to blame these evals on the class's drunkenness (the handwriting on many of the evals was approximately at the level of a kindergartener). Here is a smattering of the comments that I received (comments that will not go in any job application packet): "Nice, but a very hard grader. Happy Georgetown day!"; "Yeeeeeeeeeeeeh"; "She was the shit!"

Abortion and The Onion

I was at Peregrine in Eastern Market the other day avoiding my work with a copy of The Onion. On the front page was an article, "Planned Parenthood Opens $8 Billion Abortionplex." The point of the sarcasm is, I think, that no one really likes abortions (this was the point of last week's Private Practice, too--no one likes abortions, but they are women's right, guaranteed by the Supreme Court, so we'd better make sure that people are around to give them what is their right when they want it). I think that the other point that this article is attempting to make is that abortion is a small part of what Planned Parenthood does (as if the fact that Planned Parenthood does things other than provide abortions impacts the reprehensibility of abortion). Perhaps the article was also making fun of perceived parallels between Nazi death camps and abortion with its blueprint of the "abortionplex," which has "Abortion Suites: Rooms where the actual abortion procedures are performed and where women may enjoy a complimentary pedicure and flute of champagne," as well as "Noiseless, Large-Capacity Incinerator: Apparatus capable of cremating more than 4o tons of fetuses at a time." This makes me ill; I don't remotely understand how it's funny. Clearly, what the Nazis did was different from abortion--they're both horrible things and both things I'm just not comfortable joking about. I think that often what The Onion does is good--it calms the anger of political debates by allowing people to laugh at themselves (30 Rock is very good at this, too--equal opportunity mocking of liberals and conservatives). In this case, however, it's far, far too much--there are still some things that are too serious to laugh at.


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Poetry and Beauty in a Fallen World

"When you write poetry, you write for God."

Dana Gioia spoke last week at the University Club on poetry. I'd always wanted to see the University Club (nothing special) and Dana Gioia is my hero, more or less--I forgot how crazy I am about him. The speech was in question and answer format (oh how I would have loved to be the questioner!), and he punctuated the Q & A with little poetry recitations. He's an excellent speaker, although he made far too many jokes for my taste (what he was saying was so fascinating and well-presented that he certainly didn't need to say funny things to make people listen).

I found Gioia's definition of poetry to be far too vague--"a special way of speaking that rewards a special way of listening." "Poetry uses words evocatively, in the fullness of their meaning, ... to discover the hidden secrets of words, their friends" [words that go well together]. Gioia talked about poetry as something that is unified, speaking to you spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, physically (through sound), etc., all at once.

In addition to its role as a unifier, Gioia talked about other aspects of art that are important to us as humans--imagination helps us realize that others have complex inner lives and, as a result, helps us develop our own inner life. Imagination shows us that life has a multiplicity of plot twists--this knowledge helps us weather those twists (which prevents us from succumbing to depression).

Gioia repeatedly critiqued the tendency (which he attributed to New Criticism, which he claims made poetry all about interpretation) to intellectualize poetry. For one thing, Gioia emphasized the mystery of the poem as something that's crucial to it--some things can only be told in stories; some things can only be told in riddles. In response to the intellectualization of poetry, Gioia advocates reading poetry out loud and encouraging people to memorize and perform it. When asked if there's any poetry in rock music, Gioia said that historically song and poetry were one art, and that in a healthy culture, they'll never entirely separate.I found this to be an intriguing part of his talk--it seems to me that very often contemporary poetry isn't written to be performed, but rather to be read off of the page of a book. I wonder how this changes poetry from it's exclusively oral incarnation.

When asked if there was one correct interpretation that the author intended or whether the interpretation rests with the reader, Gioia offered a great via media: he said that while there are wrong interpretations, there may be multiple correct interpretations.

Also: he said that a big problem with contemporary poems is that they're too long. I whole-heartedly agree--I love short poems. Of course, I also love the Four Quartets.


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Quote

"A “man of colossal genius”, according to G B Shaw, he sometimes seemed to have several other writers nested inside him like Russian dolls. "

--from a review of a new Chesterton biography

The Death of Ivan Ilych

I haven't read a lot of Tolstoy, and did only in this instance because one of my students wanted to discuss this book within the context of Marx (whom we had read together for class) and because it was short; I can often be convinced to read short things.

This novella follows the death of Ivan Ilych, which you might gather from the title. Ivan Ilych is a public servant, married with children, mostly concerned about getting enough money to have a comfortable life. The novella begins with Ivan's colleagues' remarkably selfish response to his death, thinking mostly how it impacts their own job situation and even how it impacts that evening's game of cards. On the one hand, I think there's something true about this--when a disaster strikes, we think first about how it will affect us. On the other hand, while Tolstoy might find this to be a common response to death, he does not find it to be the only possible response. We see this with Ivan's own ability to make peace with death moments before he dies.

Ivan and his wife's level of happiness with each other depends almost entirely on external circumstances. If things were going well, he could be nice; if not, he was a terror. This clearly isn't virtue in Aristotle's sense of the word, which is independent of external circumstances (this was what Ivan asked for forgiveness for, too, on his deathbed--for torturing his family). It is when he asks for forgiveness that his fear of death ceases and he dies. Presumably his very attempt to apologize to his family meant that it would be possible to treat them well, regardless of external circumstances.

There was also something going on in Tolstoy's treatment of medicine and law, although I'm not quite sure what it was. He portrays Ivan as advancing a new form of law in which law acts as a science rather than as an art. Ivan's form of law attempts to remove judgment and individuality from the equation and seeks impersonality. Similarly, Tolstoy critiques medicine for its impersonality--Ivan seeks understanding and humane treatment, while the doctors attempt to simply treat his body. In the end, this fails--the doctors cannot agree nor diagnose his ailment, and Ivan moves from one course of treatment to another. It seems that Tolstoy is seeking more individual treatment and care and justice than what was offered in either law or medicine.


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Quote

I have shared some of Mama Leopard's almost always amusing emails on this blog in the past. Here's another (maybe this one is most amusing in what it says about me):

"Hi Dearest,

...I hate to ask you this, but could you write in that little book of yours to remind Stearns to get Wives and Daughters from Hopkins so she can send it home with you. I will try to remind you both again.

Thanks oh Efficient One,
m"

Yes, I'll be moving most of my life in my little car up to Williamsport next week, but I'm the appropriate person to remember to bring this dvd home!

Days 4 and 5 of Little House on the Prairie Comes to DC

Yesterday, the family went to the zoo and back to the natural history museum. The two-year-old entertained us in the evening with his impressions of the monkeys (his favorite animals at the zoo and mine, too), as well as his reenactment of the new King Kong, which I guess has something about a conflict between a dinosaur and a monkey (the night before was a turkey hunting skit--the kid specializes in sound affects, I'm telling you).

This morning I slept through most of the packing up, but aside from one towel and three shirts and a couple of playing cards (which we know are lost, but haven't yet found) and twenty minutes of looking for the GPS, is seems like everything's back to normal. DC, though, may never be quite the same.

New York City.2

The real point of the New York City trip, though (okay, okay, one of the points!), was to visit the Neue Galerie, which has a wonderful exhibit: "Vienna 1900: Style and Identity."

The Neue Galerie (which means "new gallery") is housed in a lovely old house. It's one of those reasonably sized museums in which the content and the form complement each other (the wonderful staircase and the intricately ornamented wood paneling are a much more suitable frame for the art than the plain, neutral colored walls of most museums).

The Neue Galerie focuses on Austrian and German art in the early 20th century. This exhibit was remarkable in the way that it integrated painting and drawing, furniture, fashion and wallpaper and carpet and jewelry and even stationery! (I definitely wanted the stationery and a couple of the dressers.) The exhibit considered psychology and medicine and it's overlap with art, with particular attention to Freud. It also considered changing attitudes toward women and sexuality (who knew that changing attitudes toward sexuality is a euphemism for drawings of masturbation??). I'm not really at all familiar with this aspect of the woman's movement. There was an incredibly interesting early moving picture in which a couple of people took of about half of their many clothes off and crawled into bed together. It was about as erotic as a Charlie Chaplain film. It was still sort of awkward, though, to be watching it with a small crowd in a museum.

The artist I liked the most was Gustav Klimt. One of his most famous pictures is there, as are lots of other ones. I was struck by the diversity of his work--in addition to his trademark gold pictures with swirls and bright colors, there was one that looked Pre-Raphaelite, another that looked like pointillism, and some roughly drawn sketches, as well (the picture to the left is called "Hope"--there are women's heads at the bottom of the picture that blend into the woman at the top's skirt, as if they've emerged from her).

After the Neue and some time in Central Park, we found a special Halal truck on 53rd and 6th. There are countless other Halal trucks on other corners, but you can tell you've found the right one because the line goes halfway up the block!


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New York City

Despite growing up four hours away from New York City, I've visited there vastly fewer times than other cities that distance from my house (and all of them are: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington DC). I went up for a really lovely (and crazy!) day visit on Sunday. First, Francisco and I visited the High Line.


The High Line is a park that's just being built right now on an old railroad line that's elevated over New York City. It's a lovely park--nicely landscaped with fountains and benches everywhere.


I can't imagine it, though, with crowds of people--it's rather narrow at points. It was lightly raining when we visited, so there weren't too many people there.


Next, we popped into the Guggenheim for a minute to see the building, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (and purportedly allowed cars to drive up the circular ramps in the early days!). It slightly had the feel of the Pantheon to it from inside.

Day 3 of Little House on the Prairie Comes to DC

Today was the Holocaust Museum and the Natural History Museum and the Old Post Office Tower. We went to Georgetown together for a walk in the evening so that I could show off my university. At Georgetown, we saw Madeleine Albright drive by.

At the Natural History Museum, our two-year-old cousin was evidently imitating the other languages that some of the tourists from other countries were speaking.

The cousins are fascinated by the under-the-bridge dwelling places of some of the homeless people in DC. I think that they think it's an adventure to live under a bridge: "Look! There are pots and pans!" (I've never seen pots and pans under any bridges, for the record.)

When the seven-year-old cousin saw a car, she calmly instructed Stearns that when cars come, you should "stop, drop and roll."

Quote

Because I am fascinated with the cupcake fad:

"The scaled-down cupcake—minuscule, inconsequential, silly—is a Carter-era bagatelle. It is frou-frou. It lacks muscle, sinew, cojones. ... A society that would roll over and play dead for Machiavellian cupcake merchants is a society capable of anything." --WSJ

Confession: I have no idea what a bagatelle is, even post-googling it.

HT: Hopkins

Harold Camping and May 21st

From a Huffington Post article:

"He and his fringe group of churchless followers believe that at 6 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, a massive earthquake will make its way around the earth, beginning in Fiji and New Zealand. Graves will open and two hundred million 'saved' individuals will float up to heaven. The doomed remainder will live on an unruly earth for five months before God annihilates it five months later."

I like how specific the prediction is. I also like the "floating up to heaven" description.

They've really launched quite an impressive advertising campaign! (I don't know if "advertising" is the right word.) I also like that this is something we're debating ("Why May 21 2011 isn't the end of the world"; "May 21, 2011: Not the end of the world").

Philly

I spent this past weekend in Philly checking out the place that I'm probably going to live (among various plentiful other activities). I did get to stay with Sayers and Mr. Sayers, which was delightful, as always, and I did get to walk across the city at a leisurely pace and with my camera, which always makes me happy.



This stonework reminds me of braids.






The contrast between the content and architecture of this building is striking.

Day 2 of Little House on the Prarie Comes to DC

Me. A suburban. DC rush hour.: I am definitely the coolest person you know.

Also:

Little cousin: "Dad, there's a deer dead on the side of the road."
The Dad: "Oh!"
Little cousin: "It looks fresh!"
(If you know my family, you know why this is very funny. No, we did not actually have fresh venison for supper.)

The two-year-old cousin speaks a lot, but it's almost entirely incomprehensible (although his family can translate). He declared that we had a great kitchen, for instance, and that he liked our tea set.

Today they covered: The Capitol, The Library of Congress, The Air and Space Museum, The Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials. And now: An Apartment for Peggy!

Social Media and Relationships

I went to a debate between the ever charming Roger Scruton and Tyler Cowen over the question: "Does Social Media Destroy the Human Relationship?" The debate began with a moment of irony: Cowen's microphone was off and when he started talking, people called for him to turn it on. He looked a little confused, so anti-technology Scruton calmly instructed him to "push the button."

The debate came out as a debate between social science (in economist Tyler Cowen's repeated statements that he was giving us facts, real empirical facts, which can't be argued with). It seemed to me that his citation of many studies was markedly lacking any theory.

Scruton repeatedly compared social networking's effect on friendship to that of pornography on sex: "Sex without transition costs is the end of the erotic." He emphasized the beginning of friendship as an important aspect to the friendship itself. Drawing out this metaphor further, Scruton cautioned against an addiction to friends.

My critiques: First, I thought they were conflating love and friendship. Evidently Cowen met his wife online, while Scruton met his while falling off of a horse. I didn't find this discussion of online dating particularly insightful into social networks--I don't think that too many people go online as their primary way of making friends (which is to say, facebook primarily keeps you technologically connected with people you met in real life, while online dating puts you into real life contact with people you might otherwise not have met).

Also, Scruton accepted Cowen's definition of friendship, which made no reference to what is central in Aristotle's conception of frienship: shared activity. Also, Scruton found only the friendship of virtue in Aristotle worth defending; at one point he said that the other two forms of friendship are valueless (this is not Aristotle's position).

What Scruton did say about friendship, which was insightful, is that the end of friendship is itself, while the function of friendship is help in times of need, as well as people to celebrate with. In order to be useful, Scruton said of friendship, it must be useless.


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Little House on the Prarie Comes to DC

Day 1: Arlington Cemetery and the Iwo Jima Memorial. I'd never seen the changing of the guard before today (the two-year-old cousin was clicking his heals together, just like the soldiers do, when he was walking afterward). Nor had I ever driven an enormous suburban.

Quote

"May has been a month for visiting all of my past lives." --PLO (Ah, our wonderful modern condition)

Twitter

I love this idea, from one of my favorite fashion bloggers, of dressing like a book cover. Going to look through my library now...

Francisco stopped tonight for a little piece of pizza.

"Men in the Lump Cannot Govern Themselves"

George Bernard Shaw's The Apple Cart: A Political Extravaganza is an insightful and witty play. Written in 1928, the play is set in the future (this is shown shockingly on stage by the presence of a brain, suspended in bubbling liquid [like a fish tank], that talks). In the first act, the ministers debate with the king, bringing up the debate between monarchy and republicanism. Shaw questions the benefits of democratic rule, maintaining that the people can be manipulated to vote for anyone; this manipulation looks just like rule by elites.

But I'll let Shaw describe it himself, as he does in the preface to the play: "What was all this pother about? I had written a comedy in which a King defeats an attempt by his popularly elected Prime Minister to deprive him of the right to influence public opinion through the press and the platform: in short, to reduce him to a cipher. The King's reply is that rather than be a cipher he will abandon his throne and take his obviously very rosy chance of becoming a popularly elected Prime Minister himself. To those who believe that our system of votes for everybody produces parliaments which represent the people it should seem that this solution of the difficulty is completely democratic, and that the Prime Minister must at once accept it joyfully as such. He knows better. The change would rally the anti-democratic royalist vote against him, and impose on him a rival in the person of the only public man whose ability he has to fear. The comedic paradox of the situation is that the King wins, not by exercising his royal authority, but by threatening to resign it and go to the democratic poll."

In the interlude, we see the King's mistress arguing that she should be his queen. Here we see him putting passion firmly in the private sphere--his current queen better suits the manners and order needed for his job (in the play, the same woman played his mistress and his queen). Great line in an otherwise unremarkable WaPo review: "[The play] even has sex appeal when Peggy Yates, playing Orinthia the Beloved, slithers all over a stuffed eggplant-colored couch as well as Herring’s all-but-defenseless Magnus." I don't know that I'd call it sex appeal, although she does throw herself at him; however, the couch is certainly eggplant (well, actually, or maybe an eggplant/plum blend).

In the second and final act, America decides to nullify the Declaration of Independence and join back up with England. This is a delightful and hilarious idea--America has really already colonized England economically and with her "unique and universal culture." As the American Ambassador tells the Queen, "The United States, ma'am, have absorbed all the great national traditions, and blended them with their own glorious tradition of Freedom into something that is unique and universal." England has, in fact, exported her tradition to America: Ely Cathedral, for instance, has been moved to New Jersey. (This reminded me of something that I dreamed after one of my first trips to Europe and a subsequent drive to Texas with Stearns: there was a touring cathedral on wheels that you had to pay to enter. I was so disappointed in American capitalism, which seems to hit its climax in the ubiquitous Texas strip malls, set a little back from the highway and the only thing with any decoration at all down there.)

The play really was set in the future--two of the cabinet ministers are women--there's Amanda, the Postmistress General, and Lysistrata, the Powermistress General (nothing heavy handed here!). Amanda is flirty and silly, singing songs all the time and giggling. Lizzie, as she's called, is much more serious. It is Lizzie who best articulates one of the biggest themes of the play--its critique of capitalism in the form of Breakages, Limited, the company that actually wields the power in England. Breakages, Limited suppresses inventions in fact, relying on things breaking down for their continued power. As Lizzie says, "Every breakdown, every accident, every smash and crash, is a job for them."

The women in the play are extremes--Amanda is girly, while Lizzie is the hard schoolmistress type: "When will you learn, Nicobar, that it is no use trying to browbeat me. I began life as a schoolmistress; and I can browbeat any man in this Cabinet or out of it if he is fool enough to try to compete with me in that department." Orinthia, the King's mistress is all lust and passion; the King's wife, on the other hand, is all manners and order, with not a drop of passion. The play likens one to a rose and the other to a cabbage. This division between the public and private is never clearer than when the King says to his mistress, "We cannot talk to one another in public: we have nothing to say that could be said before other people. Yet we find enough to say to one another when we are alone together." Their relationship is only one of the private realm, and the private realm is divorced from the public (as can be seen by the way that Shaw squeezes it in in the interlude between two acts).

I think, although I'm not sure, that the beginning of the play is a dig at our own dear TSE:

"PAMPHILIUS. What was your father?

SEMPRONIUS [startled] Eh?

PAMPHILIUS. What was your father?

SEMPRONIUS. My father?

PAMPHILIUS. Yes. What was he?

SEMPRONIUS. A Ritualist.

PAMPHILIUS. I don't mean his religion. I mean his profession. And his politics.

SEMPRONIUS. He was a Ritualist by profession, a Ritualist in politics, a Ritualist in religion: a raging emotional Die Hard Ritualist right down to his boots."

This was published in, I think, the same year that TSE wrote his famous line about being an Anglo-catholic in religion, classicist in literature, and conservative in politics in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes.


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Quote

"All her girlfriends are in there, every old boyfriend, a lot of old employers who come off badly. Laurie was a big believer in revenge."

--Juris Jurjevics, Laurie Colwin's husband, in "With Passion and Affect" for Gourmet

Also from that article: "Of all the words associated with Laurie Colwin, ennui would be last on the list. She had wild enthusiasms for everything from Korean pickles to old doilies to brown and white patterned china..."

Awesome Mannequin Edition

The top two are from Eastern Market; the bottom one is the great mannequin near Little Gidding.

Shine On, Bright & Dangerous Object

I was prepared to hate this book since Hopkins does (okay, maybe "hate" is too strong, but what's life without exaggeration?) and, let's be honest, she's a pretty good barometer of these things. I convinced her to lend me the book since I'm on a Colwin kick and I was out. I didn't hate this book at all. I think this is one of my (many) faults: when I like an author I insist on liking anything he's ever written. I'm just not that discriminating, when it comes down to it. I love Laurie Colwin. Laurie Colwin makes me feel like Lauryn Hill--"I felt [s]he found my letters and read each one outloud."

In this novel/ella, she addresses the process of dealing with grief, although, as always, within the context of love. Love is just constantly central for Colwin. It's hard for me to imagine a story of hers that doesn't deal with love. It's more shocking to write about love in the context of a recently widowed 27-year-old, Elizabeth "Olly" Olive Bax. Olly deals with losing her husband, Sam, and with falling in love with his brother, Patrick. (Now, half of me hates this on principle, but the feminist half of me thinks it's great that a woman finally wrote the reverse of a man and two sisters.)

Olly thinks through her loves and lusts, past and present. She sorts through them in her mind, sharing them with the reader. I think that this is the way that I work--I want to make sense of everything, so I just tell myself different narratives about it, searching for the narrative in which everything fits together.

Some quotes, as usual, for no reason:

"Tears in public cost, and even a group of two is public. ... Eddie splattered his trust like fingerpaint in kindergarten, and when I went off with Sam I knew I was right. Sam never cried, which was probably as bad, except that it had more dignity to it."
...
A man whose wife buys him crazy ties: "'She started buying these horrors for me when we were young,' he said. 'She said I was the oldest person in the world and that she had always wanted to be married to a visible eccentric.'"

Two little little critiques: 1) It's shocking how little Olly regrets from her marriage. I guess it's just not quite believable--relationships are complicated and no one does them perfectly. But Olly, who is incredibly reflective about her romantic life, finds almost nothing that she wishes she would have done differently. 2) Perhaps Colwin overdoes the love aspect of her novels--in this novel there are really no relationships besides romantic one--Olly knows her parents and her in-laws, but barely interacts with them. There are also a couple of older men who are friends of the family and help take care of Olly; once again, however, their role is very small. Reducing life to romance (albeit not a romance divorced entirely from friendship) diminishes it. Plus, romance occurs within social contexts--it isn't something that's entirely private. She had the potential for real friendship with Charlie, but had to include (illicit) romance there, too.

Colwin gets that love is messy, and that some romances help us understand others. She takes this point a little far with Charlie, though--her romance with Charlie helps her understand her romance with Patrick: "If I hadn't met up with you, there are things about him I never would have known, or things about myself. Being with you doesn't shake my ties to him. It affirms them. I'm right to love him, and I'm right to love you. You've been a great friend to me. I'm glad this happened." I think that Colwin's problem at the end of the day is that she doesn't have a very good notion of friendship. Colwin's friendship always includes love (possible exception here). This means that she can't really understand love as something that excludes others. On the one hand, sure, loves broaden your understanding. On the other hand, you can't just go around falling in love with people. She sort of takes love to a silly extreme.


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E-Cigarettes

I have been perpetually intrigued by these electronic cigarettes ever since Myrrh pointed out to me their existence. One maker of electronic cigarettes has evidently equipped them with a social networking feature:

"The new 'smart packs,' which will go on sale next month for $80 for five e-cigarettes, are equipped with devices that emit and search for the radio signals of other packs. When they get within 50 feet of one another, the packs vibrate and flash a blue light.

The reusable packs, which serve as a charger for the cigarettes, can be set to exchange information about their owners, like contact information on social networking sites, that can be downloaded onto personal computers."

...

"Think of it as social smoking for the social networking era"

...

"Marketers think people want more devices to link to each other."

Can you imagine? It sounds to me slightly like those vibrating disks that chain restaurants give you to hold while you wait for your table.

Mitchell's Tocqueville would roll over in his grave: all of these de-linked democrats turn to technology to re-link them together.

What a silly technology, though--it serves almost no purpose except to let you blow smoke and help placate oral fixations (gum, anyone?).

Not a Compliment

"It was the most educational first date ever." --AM

Not the Least Lash Lost

I hear from Stearns and Ilana and basically all of my blog readers that no one actually reads the long posts, especially the ones about poetry, but because I believe in giving people not what they want, but what's good for them, I give you a wonderful and less commonly known poem of Gerard Manly Hopkins' (recommended to me by Bro. OP, who is soon to become Fr. OP [holy goodness!!]):


The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

(Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)


THE LEADEN ECHO

How to kéep—is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there ’s none, there ’s none, O no there ’s none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
O there ’s none; no no no there ’s none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.


THE GOLDEN ECHO

Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
Oné. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that ’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets móre, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an everlastingness of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace—
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver.
See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
Is, hair of the head, numbered.
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept.—Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.—
Yonder.—What high as that! We follow, now we follow.—Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
Yonder.


Bro. OP passed this poem on to me at just the right moment--I've found some hoar hairs of my own lately, and am faced with the challenge of living up to my big talk of white hair being strikingly lovely at any age and white hair being a gift or something like that (it's in the Psalms). Of course, my friend PAL amusingly questioned the wisdom of not dyeing: he suggested that I might want to be aware of any evolutionary messages that that might convey.


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I Hate Change

Last all-members-present May of Teck Club meeting (due to Carrot's early morning departure) (I almost cried when we toasted our rose [with an accent mark]).

Things that may well not be fun in the morning, but are darn funny right now:

Hopkins: "He conquered Poland. That's not true."

Hopkins (as if she was asking a casual question): "Are there any cotton linens with woodblock prints of persimmons [in Morocco]?"

Okay, I guess Hopkins said all of the funny things.

Quote

"To change the metaphor, if one tries to shake hands with the Kantian, one can easily find one has lost an arm."

--Raymond Geuss, Politics and the Imagination, p. 60

Obama on Immigration

By and large, I really liked and Obama's speech about immigration (this is about the text, not delivery--I read it, not watched it).

However, his vague and shifting use of "politics" annoyed me: "We have to put the politics aside." I think that there he means we need to stop taking ideological entrenched position and engage in politics together? And on The Dream Act not passing in the Senate: "It was a tremendous disappointment to get so close and then see politics get in the way." I'm not sure why The Dream Act didn't pass, but I'm pretty sure politics would have been the cause of either it passing or not passing. Politics is sort of the whole business of what they do in the government (or at least part of it). How is he just using this as a disparaging word?

Also, it interests me that Obama addresses the family and keeping families together as a big concern of immigration policy: "Our laws should respect families following the rules – reuniting them more quickly instead of splitting them apart. Today, the immigration system not only tolerates those who break the rules, it punishes the folks who follow the rules. While applicants wait for approval, for example, they're often forbidden from visiting the United States. Even husbands and wives may have to spend years apart. Parents can't see their children. I don't believe the United States of America should be in the business of separating families. That's not right. That's not who we are. " I don't read all of Obama's speeches, by any means, but this isn't something that I've heard him bring up much in the past. It's clever because conservatives can't complain about pro-family moves. When I read this section of the speech, though, it brought to my mind is contemporary shifts in immigration policy away from enforcing deportation of spouses in homosexual couples. Obama certainly doesn't mention that and perhaps it wasn't in his mind at all.

Facebook and Bad News

I've been thinking lately about facebook and death. It seems to me that while facebook works well for happy news--new relationships, engagement, marriage, babies--it just doesn't work to well for sad news--no one wants to announce a breakup on facebook, and while people do seem to grieve together over death on facebook, it seems to me to be a particularly ill-suited medium for that. Bad news isn't the sort of news that you want to stumble across--I want to be told bad news directly and to be able to comfort my friends if I can. On facebook, you just trip over it, mixed in thoroughly with silly trivialities.

Pope Benedict XVI on Tradition

The Pope mentioned tradition in a recent address and it's a beautiful idea, but all too vaguely expressed for my taste. I would really like hear more:

"Not infrequently tradition and progress are clumsily opposed. In reality, the two concepts are integrated: tradition is a living reality, which because of this includes in itself the principle of development, of progress. It is as if saying that the river of tradition has its source in itself and flows toward the outlet."

Is this Newman-esque? It's been too long since I've read Newman.


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Twitter

When I'm rich enough, I'm going to throw away all of my clothes in tan, grey and black. Haste the day!

Advance Georgetown Nostalgia

I took a walk around Georgetown because I had to return a pair of pants to H&M for a friend (I convinced her to buy them, but they scandalized her husband).

I came across the motor scooter I would get if I ever got one of these (and I would only ever get one of these if I lived in a place like California that had fine weather all the time, and even in that case, I would probably just get my bike brakes fixed):


I love that bank with the gold top--especially when it shines in the sunlight.


I was so overwhelmed by nostalgia for DC that I almost bought myself a Washington DC snow globe. I'm actually too cheap to pay $5.99 for a silly plastic thing with only 20 percent of the glitter that still moves at all, but now you know what I want for Christmas, Stearns! There was one snow globe that plays the Star Spangled Banner!


I like flower murals!


And new red paint!



And green doors!


And, oh my goodness, wreaths made with pheasant feathers! It reminds me of my pheasant feather hat! And of Pennsylvania! (Our state bird is the ruffed grouse.)