Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Traveling


I've never been west of Texas (and before I went there half a dozen years ago, I'd never been further west than Ohio), so this should be an adventure for this East Coast girl!


(picture)

Monday, August 29, 2011

Twitter

This is beautiful, no? I really want one of these. Any kitchen fascination I have at the moment is due to Laurie Colwin, of course (for whose sake I ordered potato salad earlier today for all of the fellows, just because she writes about it--I'm not a big potato salad person myself, but I had two helpings at lunch).


(picture)

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Home Cooking

Home Cooking is not really a cookbook--it is essays on food, with some recipes at the end of each chapter. The essays contain Laurie Colwin's theories about technology, health and sociality. And it is impossible for Laurie Colwin to leave out love: she is always talking about what she cooked for various boyfriends and what they cooked for her.

Food, according to Colwin, connects you to others and to the past: "No one who cooks cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers." Colwin writes about how food connected her to social movements, such as the student protests of the 60s and how food was the way that she volunteered (at a soup kitchen and at her daughter's school).

On the other hand, she also recognizes that food is also great alone:
"Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they are alone. A salad, they tell you. But when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce, or spaghetti with butter and grape jam."
Being the one in the kitchen also allowed Colwin to be on the edge of the party, which she preferred. Food is the basis of social life, for Colwin, and it is a social life that she tolerates, but about which she is ambivalent: "It is a fact of life that people give dinner parties, and when they invite you, you have to turn around and invite them back. Often they retaliate by inviting you again, and you must then extend another invitation. Back and forth you go, like Ping-Pong balls, and what you end up with is called a social life."

Colwin rants about people's reliance on too many kitchen gadgets and describes her own low-tech lifestyle (how conservative of her!): She didn't have a food processor--rather, she had a grater: "As ever, next to the contraption is the box of Band-Aids, since it is impossible not to grate your knuckles as well." (Ain't that the truth! She doesn't mention the slices of fingernail that must end up in grated food.)

She also praises tag sales. I myself was raised on garage sales, so this indicates to me that she's a very sensible woman. Like anyone who finds something special at a garage sale, she wants to brag about her purchases: "Until, at another tag sale, I bought a hand-held electric beater for fifty cents (thirteen years ago--bought second-hand and still going strong)..." She isn't fussy and praises multiple-uses appliances--on her list of necessary kitchen items is "A decent pair of kitchen shears, which can also be used for sewing, cutting the flowers and opening parcels." I love people who aren't fussy.

Also on the list:
"A pair of cheap tongs--no kitchen is complete without them.For picking up asparagus or other vegetables, for pulling the stuck spaghetti from the bottom of the pot, for grabbing cookies that have fallen off the sheet in the oven. Tongs can easily be unbent to form one long arm with which to retrieve things that you have accidentally kicked under the stove, and then they can be bent back into tongs again."

This reminds me of Little Gidding, where there was a crack between the counter top and the stove, down which things always would fall when I was cooking. This used to stress me out unbelievably (I'm a bit of a neat freak all the time, including when I cook, which is what, incidentally makes me such a slow cook. Well, that and it's genetic, I think, on my father's side), until I decided that it was simply hilariously funny. After which I would laugh loudly and not worry about it when I dropped things down there. Especially spinach. For some reason, I found spinach the funniest thing to drop down that crack. My poor roommates!

In general, Colwin's essays praise openness and eschew snobbishness. She emphasizes home cooking over too-fancy of cooking. She complains about picky eaters and those who are always on diets. She holds herself up as a model dinner party guest: "I do not keep kosher and, therefore, I am a kind of universal recipient--the O Positive for hostesses. I can be fed in combination with anyone." There is one food, however, that she has an animosity towards--iceberg lettuce. In an essay called, "Feeding the Multitudes," she writes, "The way to get the core out of a head of iceberg lettuce, we were instructed, was to bonk it forcefully on a counter. The core would then pull right out, and that, in my opinion, is all anyone needs to know about iceberg lettuce, except that when a head of it falls to the floor, it bounces, ever so slightly."


(picture, picture)

Hurricane

That was pretty stressful--an old, gigantic house that leaks in a remarkable number of places, a tornado watch (and warning at one point when I wanted to go to sleep), my fear that one of these many old, large trees would fall smack on my car (they didn't). But: we're all okay and even have power so far this morning!

Friday, August 26, 2011


My pretty new room.


My room is in the second floor of the turret. My office is behind the window on the lower left.


The neighborhood is full of big old stone houses with nice yards and enormous trees.


Thursday, August 25, 2011

Vertigo

Hitchcock's Vertigo is one of the cleverest, most intriguing movies I've ever seen with really unanticipated reversals in the course of the film. The first half is supernatural thriller (I had to watch the movie in a small window on my laptop so that I wouldn't get too scared); I would say that the whole thing is a psychological thriller. Scottie (Jimmy Stewert) is a police detective who quits the force after he suddenly gets vertigo while chasing a criminal across some rooftops. An old friend, Gavin Elster, asks Scottie to follow his wife, as he maintains that she is being possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who killed herself at 26 years old, after her lover left her and took their child. Scottie applies his detective's mind to the supernatural mystery and tries to help Elster's wife, Madeleine, falling in love in with her in the process. He takes Madeleine to a mission that she describes, where she climbs up the steps to the tower and throws herself off. Because of his vertigo, he's unable to stop her.

In addition to Madeleine, Scottie's love interest, there's another woman in the film: Midge. Midge is Scottie's ex-fiance (Scottie says that Midge dumped him in college). Midge is very much the friend--she's a glasses-wearing career woman (when she draws herself as Carlotta in a big gown, her no nonsense haircut and glasses look entirely anachronistic). Her career drawing brassieres only draws more attention to her lack of sexuality--and the brassieres she draws are very modern--one works on the principle of cantilevers, as she tells Scottie. Here we see a contrast between modernity and an imagined romantic past, signified by Midge and Madeleine, by friendship and romantic love.

This sounds like the whole movie, but it's just the first half! In the second half, Scottie meets a woman, Judy, who reminds him of Madeleine. They begin to date, and he tries to reform her in Madeleine's image. The film ends back at the same mission where Madeleine died, with a nun startling Judy, who falls from the tower.

The film asks us to consider the relationship between play acting and reality. Judy plays Madeleine for Scottie. Scottie forces her to dress and dye her hair like Madeleine. Because Judy loves him, she does this. Instead of loving the woman in front of him, Scottie attempts to change Judy. Scottie is possessed by Madeleine in the same way that Madeleine was possessed by Carlotta. Not till the end of the film, is he free of Madeleine and Judy and Carlotta's power over him, and, at the same time, of his vertigo. He is ever the detective--continually compelled to seek the truth in the midst of myths. He seeks order. To help him find order, twice he attempts to recreate the past--and twice, this attempt to recreate the past at the mission leads to tragedy.

Scottie's search for order and truth is accompanied by a search for freedom, a search that we see from the beginning of the film when he looks forward to getting a corset off (which he needed due to his accident on the roof): "I shall be a free man. I shall wiggle my behind ... free and unconfined" (I am quoting from a draft of the screenplay found here).

At one point, Scottie says, "There's an answer for everything." This sums up his almost scientific approach to detective work. It's sort of ironic--there is an answer to Madeleine's problems; in fact, there's a non-supernatural answer. On the other hand, it is Scottie's drive to find an answer to absolutely everything that results in Judy's accidental death--there isn't an answer for that! Scottie's scientific approach is shown throughout the film--he wants to overcome his vertigo himself, step by step on a stepladder. He wills himself up the steps at the end of the film. Midge visits him when he's in the hospital after Madeleine's death--she tells the doctor that Mozart won't fix him. His first response to Gavin's story about his wife's possession is that she should be taken to a doctor and so should he for believing it. The question of the relationship of science to the supernatural is repeated throughout the movie. At one point Gavin calls Scottie a cold Scot. The fact of the matter is that Scottie softens to the possibility of supernatural involvement. And yet, it seems his desire for order doesn't soften enough.

The setting in San Francisco is also interesting. Both Gavin and Scottie long for a San Francisco that is now gone. Gavin describes Madeleine as fascinated by San Francisco--as exploring it with great wonder until it possessed her. Pop Leibel, who knows lots about San Francisco history, describes the myth of Carlotta, who was originally from a small mission settlement south of the city. A man, Ives, takes her and builds her a grand house, and they have a child:

He kept the child and threw her away. Men could do that in those days. They had the power ... and the freedom. And she became the Sad Carlotta.

Here we see commentary on the corrupting power of the city. Both Madeleine and Carlotta were previously innocent, but the evil of the city corrupted them. And it is the old San Francisco that attracts both Scottie and Elster.



Something that must be mentioned: Vertigo plays a lot with color. Red for Scottie; green for Madeleine/Judy. This translates into some pretty great green dresses/suits in the course of the film!


(picture, picture, picture, picture)

Wednesday, August 24, 2011


Moving today. (I know it's important to keep you all updated on my constantly shifting whereabouts.) I'm feeling strange about it--not too excited, not too nervous--mostly sort of matter-a-fact. I'm happy to live in the same town with Mr. and Mrs. Sayers and some other college friends. I'm super sad, with a sunken heart, to leave my DC peeps and my dear Little Gidding. I'm curious to see what life will be like there (I don't really have any idea at the moment). I'm mostly just interested in getting this dissertation hammered out and so the place doesn't matter too too much.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011


I recommend to you, dear readers, in the wake of our East Coast earthquake, this charming essay, "The Folklore of Earthquakes," written by someone in my own intellectual genealogy, Carey McWilliams, the father of Wilson Carey McWilliams.






(picture)
Just sat through an earthquake at Little Gidding (they're saying it was a 5.8, with a center in Virginia 90 miles from DC). That was horrible; I'm still shaking. I'm glad Stearns was here. I don't want to be near another one of those again.
I wrote about the reenactment of the Battle of Bull Run here. For a much more intelligent reflection on the reenactment, I recommend this.
Finally! If academia doesn't work out, a real-life career option!

More on Miss Jean Brodie

I recommend to you Miss Self-Important on Miss Jean Brodie:

And Miss Brodie is ... right to resist various efforts to send her to "the more progressive schools," sensing that the education she offers can only be effective against the backdrop of tradition, not in the absence of it.
...
And the Calvinist idea of secular vocation can't bear the weight of [Miss Brodie's] demands (even before she extricates it from its original relation to an omnipotent God).
...
[T]he first outcome we learn about is that of the hapless and stupid girl, Mary, whose hapless and stupid death in a fire is described in maudlin detail. Why does Miss Brodie so to speak "elect" such a pathetic girl to her set? What is the meaning of election if one must live and die like Mary?

Miss Self-Important's review is fascinating, perhaps particularly her insights into Calvinist ideas of vocation.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Fish Market, DC, Part 2


I went back to the fish market this weekend, this time with Stearns and #1tomatolover.

Stearns: "Look at this color (below)! These are the flowers of the sea..."


Stearns: "... And these are the stones of the sea! (Oysters, below)"



When the men picked crabs out of the pile to sell them to people, the crabs would grab on to each other, like those monkeys in a barrel of monkeys.






Sunday, August 21, 2011

Twitter

I'm glad there are precedents for suing over colors, because someday when I'm sufficiently rich and quirky and wearing green dresses is my trademark, I'm going to sue anyone else who tries to wear a green dress (except Hopkins, of course!).

3 Daschunds



My previous experience with daschunds was my mother's stories of having one as a little girl. This past week has made me all too familiar with them. I'm housesitting for a family of three: one is an old wire-haired one called Wheel; one is a medium sized, long-haired one called Roger; the third is a tiny little skittish, short-haired, spotted one called Freeman (names changed to protect their privacy).


They all have bladders the size of peanuts. Freeman won't even come outside with me--he does all of his business inside. In addition, they wake up and start barking at 6:30. Their early hours, combined with the hard bed, the phone that rings without stopping before 10 a.m. and a slew of bad dreams (especially about ghosts) means I'm rather sleep deprived and don't tolerate the 6 a.m. barking very well. Honestly, it feels like I have a baby (or what I imagine having a baby feels like--I'm sure it is even more work than I can imagine right now--although, at least babies wear diapers!).


These dogs are not just a pain, they are also cute (well, and gross--the love to lick me--my arms, my legs, even my clothes). They sleep for most of the day on the couch--Roger and Freeman cuddle, shifting to different positions across the couch, but always cuddling.


Saturday, August 20, 2011

Emily Dickinson Tattoo


An even more wonderful picture here.


(via Harriet, picture)

Babies


I am not a documentary person. My mother studied communications in college, plus the library let you check documentaries out for a week (movies with a plot you could only check out for two days), so I saw my fair share when I was growing up. The only moment of a documentary that I liked was when all of the Eskimos got out of a kayak--a whole big family of them were hidden in a little boat.



This baby documentary is a different story. I could watch babies for hours and hours. This film juxtaposed the first year of life of four babies--one each from Namibia, Tokyo, Mongolia and San Francisco. There's no narrative, just a little bit of baby talk from time to time. The filming is quite good; some of the settings (especially the one in Mongolia) are gorgeous. The differences in child-rearing are shocking--the couple from San Francisco take their child to baby yoga and sing songs to the Earth, the father of all things (in a shocking reversal, it is the sun who is the mother of all things). The mother in Namibia, on the other hand, wiped her baby's butt on her knee and then cleaned her knee off with an old corn cob; she also used a knife to shave her baby's head! The baby from Mongolia gets amazingly close, unprotected, to an unbelievable number of wild animals. I mean, the main point I took away from this documentary is that you can't really break a baby.



The film did an excellent job of emphasizing both the sameness and difference among babies of the world. We see different ways of cleaning babies that vary from a mother squirting water at the baby out of her mouth, to a mother cleaning a baby's face by squirting it with her breast milk, to the crunchy San Francisco parents bathing with the baby in the bathtub, or holding her in the shower. We see different babies interacting with cats and dogs (and then there's the goats, rooster, cows, etc. that the baby from Mongolia is surrounded with). The Namibian mother paints herself with orange paste before she gives birth; the mother from Mongolia does a sort of dance while in the hospital. All of the babies struggle to crawl and eventually, to stand--so tenuously at first that even the wind can blow them over.

Cultural differences shown from the vantage point of babies is a wonderful idea--the Tokyo and San Francisco babies get pushed through busy stores and shuttled off to various baby classes. The baby in Namibia teethes on a bone she picks up out of the dirt while crawling over the stony ground. The Mongolian baby gets tightly wrapped up just a few days after the birth to join his mother, father, and brother on a motorcycle ride home from the hospital.


(picture, picture, picture)

Friday, August 19, 2011

Deep Throat

Arlington is famous! (I know that parking garage--that's the one where my legs would always get tired while biking back from Georgetown [it's up a hill!] and I would sometimes stop for a little break.)

Quote

"The poor you will always have with you. Overlooked corollary: the rich too."

--Sr. Margarita Aloysius

12:08: East of Bucharest


This Romanian film was originally titled, "A fost sau n-a fost?" (roughly translated [which is to say, on Google translator] "Was or was not?"). A television show host decides to revisit on his show the Romanian revolution of 16 years earlier (1989), asking whether or not there was a revolution in their small town (or whether the people simply gathered in the square to celebrate after people revolted in Bucharest). Because he can't find anyone else, he invites a lonely old man and a high school teacher who is also a drunk.

The movie has a good bit of sadness in it (the drunkenness and loneliness and the school children, who are constantly setting off firecrackers to scare people and cause trouble). But there's also a good dose of unexpected humor: the two men chosen to be on the tv show are clearly unsuited--the old man sits there, folding paper into little paper boats, the drunkard brings along a bottle of alcohol to calm his nerves.

I'm sure my enjoyment of this film was encouraged by the fact that I like Eastern Europe a whole lot. But the film is also thoughtful--at the bottom, the question is whether or not it's helpful to remember and scientifically examine what went on during the revolution. It seems that the drunk, the high school teacher, is fabricating a story that he revolted first. People call in on the phone to object to his story. One supporter of the Romanian government seeks to downplay his support for the Romanian government of 16 years before. The tv show host wants to forget that he used to work in textiles. At the end of the film, in a somewhat overly poignant scene, the camera films the snow and sees its ability to cover over and hide everything to be the best approach to the past. It hints that asking too many questions might be a problem.

There is a sub-theme of friendship. The drunk repeatedly insults a Chinese businessman in the city when he's drunk. When he is sober, he apologizes and is forgiven. Toward the end, the Chinese man calls in to defend the drunk's character. The tv show host himself then attacks the Chinese man in an ugly rejection of the foreigner qua foreigner. The old man also looks for friendship. He poignantly recalls his relationship with his wife in his time on tv. He goes out of his way to serve as Santa Claus for the town. It is the tv show host who cannot understand friendship--he is obsessed with himself, mistreating his mother and his mistress, putting his silly, poorly produced tv show above everything else.

In addition to its overt question of whether or not the revolution happened in their town, the film implicitly asks whether the revolution in Romania changed anything. It asks whether people uniting in squares across Romania and coming together against their government fundamentally changed the way that the people in Romania related to one another. It seems like it didn't--the people are still isolated and lonely, with little bits of friendship occasionally surprising them. A New York Times reviewer writes about the political message of the film:

The desultory, deflated mood that pervades the film is also its main satirical point. As an ideology, Communism promised not only a better model of society, but also a whole new kind of person. The revolutions that punctured this fantasy thus represented, at least in part, a triumph of the same old thing, the revenge of a flawed, stumbling, anti-utopian conception of humanity against a totalitarian perfectionism.

In answer to Mr. Jderescu's question, then, Mr. Porumboiu's film suggests that there was no revolution because the dull, basic facts of human life, as incarnated by the deadpan Beckettian comedy of Jderescu, Piscoci and Manescu, resist dramatic change.

While this view may seem cynical, it also proves to be tolerant and generous. By the end of the day, as the streetlights flicker to life in Vaslui, the grandiose talk of heroism and cowardice fades into a quieter understanding, at once bleak and consoling. History is made, or at least endured, by the humble and the foolish as well as the brave.


One thing that I really liked about 12:08: everything ties together. At the beginning, the film traces the lives of three different characters. It seems like it might be one of those movies with a hundred different vignettes pasted together. But it isn't. The three characters connect and almost all of the pieces of the film fit together.


(picture)

Thursday, August 18, 2011

A Random Assortment of Windows



A limousine had been decaying on the side of Route 15 in Pennsylvania for as long as I can remember. I think that a picture from the side would be best, to catch the sagging arc in the middle, but, alas, a pretty busy highway stands between me and the perfect picture.




When I peeked inside, I noticed a tumbler, with a couple of fingers of a brownish liquid. Sort of fitting--old, watery scotch inside this old, decrepit limo.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Things Fall Apart

Must get to England to do my T.S. Eliot tour sooner, rather than later:

“Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/Are removed, destroyed, restored…” T.S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker,” a poem in his famed collection “Four Quartets.” Now a proposal to do the first — build a development with 3,750 houses and an industrial estate on the edge of East Coker, in Somerset — has prompted protests from Eliot devotees.

(via the NYTimes)

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Poster Presentations

Ever since I first heard of the existence of poster presentations at political science conference, I thought it was one of the silliest things ever--especially for political theorists. Basically, the conference asks some people to turn their paper into a poster (instead of presenting it out loud on a panel). This might make sense if you're running an experiment that has a conclusion. Or collecting some data that you can sum up in a chart. But for my work, it's like trying to turn a history(-ish) paper into a science fair project.

The realities of life (that is, getting travel funding) have necessitated, for the first time in my life, that I prepare a poster presentation. Alas. Here is an excerpt from instructions from the official instructions on how to create a poster presentation:

Divide the contents of your poster into whichever of the following are appropriate: title, author and affiliation, abstract, methodology, data, results, conclusion. For some areas, such as political theory, these categories will not fit very well; perhaps the best way to proceed in these cases is to think of your presentation as a set of overheads to outline your argument, attract visitors to your poster, and stimulate conversations with them about your paper.

Okay so the stuff about facilitating a conversation makes some sense. Except: what person will be crazy enough to walk around to have conversations about poster boards?

Monday, August 15, 2011

The Hour

I'm not sure where exactly I heard of this (TV show? mini-series? I'm not sure exactly what it is--just that the BBC makes it), but I was interested, particularly because it was being billed as Mad Men-esque. Not that I'm a big fan of Mad Men, personally, but I can tell it's well made and pretty. The Hour, not to be confused with the movie, The Hours, is even better, I think--it mixes Mad Men's dialogue and character development and period setting with a spy show! (Those of you who know that I watch Chuck and Covert Affairs know that I'm a sucker for a good spy show--or even a really bad one.) The Hours is, unlike Mad Men, rather dark (due to the whole spy plot). It is also scary! I mean, I'm easily scared by TV and movies, but I definitely screamed out loud at one point! Which has never happened to me before, although I may have wanted to during Monsters Inc.

The Hours may not be superior to Mad Men in its dialogue or subtlety, but it is superior in one very important way: the presence of Dominic West. Also: something that I would not have guessed from The Wire: Dominic West is British! And as attractive as ever.

The Hours is set in a journalism office. It's very meta, actually--it's a BBC show about a BBC news show. Since the focus is journalism, the show inevitably is all wrapped up in politics--it deals with Egypt's seizure of the Suez Canal and Britain's response. There are smaller comments in the show about the treatment of racism, sexism and homophobia. Certainly less subtle than Mad Men.


One of the best parts of this show is the friendship of Belle and Freddie. They are best friends; Freddie clearly has feelings for Belle that he doesn't even try to hide. There's a love triangle, though (I don't believe in affairs, but, boy, Dominic West would be hard to resist...). Anyway, romantic or not, their relationship and both Belle and Freddie themselves are utterly charming. Belle is quite a lovely and competent woman (and please notice the green dress in the pictures! This woman can dress--I guess in the 50s business professional still meant flattering and feminine). Freddie is intelligent and outside-the-lines. Attractive qualities, all.

The show is only 4/6th of the way out, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it. And sitting by my computer, waiting for the next installment to emerge.


(picture, picture, picture)

Friday, August 12, 2011

Family Happiness


When I started reading this novel, I had the strong feeling that I'd read it before--maybe that the plot was exactly the same as another of Colwin's novels only with characters with different names. And then I realized: this novel is an expansion of a short story in The Lone Pilgrim.

Ironically, given the title, this is the least happy of Corwin's novels. The main character, Polly, seems to be living the perfect life with the perfect family and the perfect husband. In reality, though, she's simply not being honest with herself and deeply resents being taken for granted in her hard work of mothering. The novel includes (surprise!) an affair, prompted by, although not reducible to, her absent husband.

Polly is so self-effacing, concerned only with serving her family, that she loses track of herself. Her family pretends everything is great, but in reality it is only a family that doesn't talk about its problems (nor about anything else of importance). Polly learns, in the course of the book, about friendship and about being honest about her troubles. This friendship happens with people, but also with God--in one scene, she, a secular Jew, goes into a Catholic church (and here I quote at length because it's the one time, as far as I can remember, that Colwin writes about religion as something other than an ethnic identity):

"In a synagogue there was no one to confess to, and if you could not forgive yourself you were lost. There was nothing to light a candle to, nothing that made you feel that a small wish might be granted or even asked for, only the stern, harsh law of the patriarchs, the hard, unrelenting law that did not give an inch."
...
"In the darkness of the church, Polly wished that she had been a little Catholic girl; that she might go into the confessional, tell everything to a person she could not see, and be forgiven."
"Jews do not kneel in prayer; they stand. But kneeling felt much more private, so Polly knelt. She had not prayed since she was a little girl. How thoughtful of the church to provide a padded knee rest, Polly thought. ... Her knees were stiff when she got up. At the shrine of Saint Jude she lit a cangle and hoped God would understand what she was doing in a Catholic church."
Some resolution comes at the end of the novel, but it's not the resolution that you'd expect. This novel's treatment of Polly's affair at the end is the least satisfactory of all of Colwin's affairs, I think. Once again, Colwin seems to be comfortable with people loving more than one person at a time.

But, once again, Colwin is a master of explaining, in brutally honest ways, life's complexity. Actually, Colwin gets so inside of me that I get angry, I get sad, I cry when I'm reading. I rant at the dinner table about absent husbands. This book just carries over into my real life.


Here are some of my favorite descriptions: First, Colwin describes Polly's friend, Martha: "She wore the sort of clothes a child might wear to a child's party--smocks and shifts. The rest of her garments were made in India, Guatemala, or Afghanistan. Martha felt solidarity with emerging nations. 'I am sort of an emerging nation myself,' she said."

The describes exactly how I feel about babies: I think that I really like babies because I can identify them--when they're hungry or need sleep they're difficult to be around and they're often driven to tears; the rest of time they are happy, and sometimes even smile. They have very primal desires and they're 100 percent honest about their feelings. And if you are very nice to them when they're tired and cranky, you might even be able to make them laugh. I'm a lot like this.

Second, Colwin describes how much Polly likes beds (again, I identify!): "Polly gravitated toward a bed. She liked breakfast in bed, reading or work in bed, and she liked to talk lying down. The Demarest family often shared horizantal evenings, in which Polly and Henry read or worked, and the children did their homework or some quiet project other than watercoloring, all spread out on Polly and Henry's big bed. The sight of her family lying around her gave Polly a deep sense of pleasure."


(picture, picture)

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Breaker Morant (Spoilers)

Breaker Morant is a film based on the true story of three Australians fighting the Dutch in one of South Africa's Boer Wars. The men are being court martialed for political reasons for crimes that they committed under orders from their superiors.

The film is tremendously interesting, raising loads of questions on the ethics of war. According to the film, the Boers were fighting a guerrilla war. Morant, the main character, who is also a poet, calls this a new sort of war for a new century. The film asks what should one side do when the other side deviates from the rules of war. Any of the Boers could be planning to attack, even a passing missionary, according to Morant. The Australians were picked to take the fall due to the stereotypes associated with their nationality when the British army decided to change its tack. The British government wants to prosecute some Australians in order to prove to the Boers that they want to negotiate. One higher-up officer says that the three Australians must be sacrificed.

This theme of sacrifice follows through the film, at times pushing up against religious imagery. Two of the three men are shot at the end of the film. In the voiced-over poem at the end, Morant uses "crucifixion" in his final rhyme; in addition, the two men fall, shot, with their arms extended. One of the soldiers suggests, at one point, that he would help Morant escape. Morant, however, doesn't jump on this opportunity. Instead, he remains resigned to his fate. He asks for Matthew 10:36 to be his epitaph: "And a man's foes shall be they of his own household."

What complicates this film is the personal motivations of the characters--Morant was revenging his friend Hunt's death. Hunt was his superior; Morant had been engaged to Hunt's sister. While not taking prisoners of the Boers that they encountered, but rather killing them, was following the orders of his superiors, it was also in accord with Morant's own desire for revenge. In fact, as one of the soldiers pointed out, Morant didn't follow orders when he disagreed with them. The overlapping of personal and professional ethics is of great interest here.

Justice is not upheld in the course of the court martial--the man who gave the orders that Morant was following denied it. In addition, the soldiers who would have testified in support of Morant's story were sent to India. Justice does not seem to be present, either, in the verdict: the soldiers who shot the convicted men did the same thing that those three men did during the war--they followed orders, no matter how politically motivated or evil those orders were.

There are two men being court martialed in addition to Morant. The youngest soldier is very idealistic--he believes in the idea of the British empire. His crime is the most obviously bogus as he killed a Boer either in self defense or accidentally. While the young boy is idealistic, Morant is sober about the empire and about the possibility of justice--toward the end he says, "Well, Peter, this is what comes of empire building."

The lawyer defending the three Australians does an admirable job--doing his best in the midst of a rigged situation. Their lawyer argues that "War changes men's natures. ... The tragedy of war is that these horrors are committed by normal men in abnormal situations. ... Soldiers and war are not to be judged by civilian rules." The film gives some evidence to back this up--Breaker Morant is really just a poet; he is shown in the flashbacks reciting poetry at fine parties. However, when his friend is apparently tortured and then killed, he snaps and is no longer even-handed and fair. The soldiers that he commands are surprised at his fury.

The film, which is directed by the director of Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies (which makes me want to see that movie even more), is somewhat similar to 12 Angry Men, although the court martial in Breaker Morant is more of a frame that is punctuated by flashbacks that take you out of the courtroom and introduce drama into the otherwise simple set.

This film was recommended to me by Arlene Saxonhouse, a political theorist. She said that she often uses this film in her classes, which seems fitting. It seems to me that one obvious way that this film speaks to current events is with regard to terrorism--how do you attack people who threaten you, but do not abide by any traditional rules of war? The film undermines any idealism with regard to the possibility of finding solutions to these questions, showing that corrupt political motivations abound.


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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Philip Levine


Me: "Mom, we got a new poet laureate today."
Mom: "What happened to the old one?"


Today, Philip Levine was appointed to be the U.S.'s new poet laureate. I hadn't read Philip Levine before, so I took this opportunity to read some of his poems.

The write-ups emphasize that he's 83, and from Detroit, the Whitman-esque writer of industrial America.

He has also lived in California, which works into lots of his poems. His poems are often unrhymed (if there's any rhyme [why is that such a hard word for me to spell?], it's internal), relying instead on the pressure from regular, short lines and on enjambment and on alliteration. Perhaps the lack of rhymes is what people mean by Whitman-esque? Perhaps it is in his focus on the common man. He ends up praising the immigrant--not in any particularly political way, but simply, it seems, because his experience included lots of people who were first- or second- generation Americans.

He isn't like Whitman, however, in his utter lack of pretension. In many of his pictures he's casually dressed. It really seems like he doesn't take himself too seriously at all.


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Assorted Williamsport