Excellent Women

Laurie Colwin let out that Barbara Pym is one of her favorite writers in one of her food essays. I'd never heard of her before that. But, as I was, at the time, approaching the end of Colwin's corpus, I wrote down Barbara Pym's name, hoping she might be some sort of replacement when I needed her. Well, I stumbled across one of her books for less than the price of Amazon shipping at a used book store in Philly. In that case, books are basically always worth buying.

Guys, I have a secret theory. I think that Barbara Pym died and was reincarnated as Laurie Colwin, who died and was reincarnated as ME! (to borrow from PAL) I know, I know--this doesn't work as all of our lifetimes overlapped with each other, but this is the only explanation that I've got. Plus, I'm not a writer. But my mother thinks I will be someday. I just got this email from her the other day:

Hi,

I had the thought today while reading your blog that you will probably write a novel someday. Just make sure it's readable and not too deep or heavy! m

She clarified when I asked her that this doesn't mean that she thinks that this blog is too heavy or deep. Anyway, Barbara Pym: the narrator in Excellent Women falls in love and starts wearing green dresses! (Okay, that's an overstatement, but she does mention green dresses, a switch from normal brown ones.) Another example: she writes, "No sink has ever been built high enough for a reasonably tall person and my back was soon aching with the effort of washing up." Gosh--I feel like no one has ever understood me before Barbara Pym. It's so true: sinks are built too low, and when you're tall, this hurts your back.

I mean, with a title like Excellent Women, who could go wrong? Excellent women refers to the unmarried women who help out with church events. Many of our narrator's (Miss Mildred Lathbury's) friends are church people. She also becomes friend with her neighbors. The wife is an anthropologist. The irony of the book is that while the wife is portrayed with this intelligent scientist and our narrator is a frumpy woman at the edge of society, our narrator ends up astutely observing even the anthropologists. Plus, the novel is full of sarcastic digs at men for not helping more in the kitchen; this is something of which I have been painfully aware, and somewhat resentful, since I was a young child. Fr. OP will call me a liberated woman here.

I suppose a novel of manners means that nothing really happens. This book isn't an exception, although it doesn't seem to bother me. Don't get me wrong: I love books with plot--with such a daze of events that sweeps you up and you can't put the book down. But I also like the ones where nothing happens, as long as the narrator is a witty woman.

(Spoilers in this paragraph; spoilers is a bit of an overstatement, because, as I said before, nothing really happens in the novel.) "Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing." This is one of the lines in the novel, and one that sums it up pretty well. Our narrator is one of the excellent women who help men--she helps out the church, she helps out her neighbors, she helps out her friends, and she helps out three or four single men who come and go from her life. And she gets pretty sick and tired of helping them out. She believes in love, but none of the men in her life love her; they simply look to her as a help-mate. They would marry her if she let them, but she is uninterested in settling for that. So the book is somewhat depressing and tragic: She hopes that men will want her, quite apart from her functionality. And yet, her alternative to settling down in a functional marriage is for her to keep on helping everyone as she was before. She's the one who always ends up making tea and doing the dishes.

Religion is one of the ways that the book deals with manners; food and tea are another. Pym's narrator is an Anglo-Catholic, at the time when there conversion to Roman Catholicism or extreme dislike of Roman Catholicism seemed to be the things (our narrator hovers, as always, in the middle). Our narrator also sees a sharp distinction between church-going people and non-church going people.

Pym writes about an interaction between an Anglican and a Roman Catholic at the church jumble sale:

"'Well, really, that woman has a nerve, inviting me over to their jumble sale next week and telling me that their new priest, Father Bogart, is a lovely man! As if that would attract me!'
"Oh, but think how it does and how it has done, that kind of thing. Where would the Church be if it hadn't been for a 'lovely man' here and there? It's rather nice to think of churches being united through jumble sales,' I suggested. 'I wonder if the Methodists are having one too?'"

Pym also writes about the conversion to Anglicanism of a not very sympathetic character (Everard, who Miss Lathbury is discussing with her two neighbors, Helena and Rocky; Miss Lathbury is a regular church attender; Helena and Rocky are not):

"'You mean you don't expect anthropologists to go to church, Miss Lathbury,' said Helena. 'But Everard is a convert, quite ardent, you know.'

'I thought converts always were ardent,' said Rocky. 'Surely that's the point about them? The whole set-up is new and interesting to them.'
...
'Of course it is more of an intellectual thing with him,' said Helena. 'He knows all the answers.'
'We certainly want people like that,' I said. 'The Church needs intelligent people.'
'I should think so,' said Helena scornfully. 'All those old women swooning over a good-looking curate won't get it anywhere.'
'But our curate isn't good-looking,' I said indignantly, visualising Father Greatorex's short stocky figure in its untidy clothes. 'He isn't even young.'
'And anyway, why should the Church want to get anywhere?' said Rocky. 'I think it's much more comforting to think of it staying just where it is.'
'Wherever that may be,' Helena added.
...
'I'm afraid we aren't all very intelligent about our religion,' I said, slightly on the defensive, 'we probably don't know many of the answers and can't argue cleverly. And yet I suppose there's room for the stupid as well,' I added. ... Though obviously He must be very pleased to have somebody as clever as Everard Bone."

P.S. Could it be?! And, at the same time, doesn't it all make sense?: A couple of days ago, while I was reading Excellent Women, Hopkins was blogging about Pym's No Fond Return of Love. Kindred spirits are wonderful! Hopkins sees her Pym novel as a satire, but not one that goes all the way. Excellent Women was certainly satiric--Pym was questioning the order of society. She, through our narrator, questioned why tea had to be drunk all the time. And yet our narrator realizes if she questions the social order in that way, everything will crumble. So she quickly backs off of her critique. Like the furniture of one of her neighbors, which is damaged by worms, society is fragile, and this alarms our narrator. Conversion is also a threat to society, but one that our narrator keeps alive as a possibility.


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Back to Brunch--June's Breakfast

After mass this Sunday, three of the Catholic fellows and I headed to a brunch place just down the street from the church in Overbrook, which is a part of Philadelphia. I'm pretty sure it was called "June's Breakfast," although the awning out front said, "J's."

The place was very unassuming, especially for the number of mansions (you can't even count them) in that neighborhood. There were down-home booths, wood paneling, and green curtains with pink flowers. You know the sort of place I'm talking about.

I ordered the very Pennsylvania special--chipped beef on toast. I'm not an expert on chipped beef on toast, as I'm a sausage gravy and biscuits girl, myself, but I thought it was pretty good. The other meals were not so spectacular; it is possible that their inexpensive price made up for that (I think that one or two of the fellows ordered egg sandwiches for $1.75). My meal came with home fries--potato pieces smashed and fried sort of like plantains, with onions and green peppers. I'll tell you: this was nothing too special, but it was obvious that they made them there, and didn't order pre-perfectly cut potatoes, which beats out many of the other brunch places I've been to, including more expensive ones.

But actually, I have a huge complaint: they were out of coffee and they did not make more. What sort of brunch place runs out of coffee?! In their defense, I think that they'd just closed when we walked in (2 p.m.), so it was actually nice of them to stay open to feed us. But what is brunch without coffee?

Why in the world, you might ask, were we looking for brunch at 2 p.m.? We were surprised, too. We chose to attend the 12:15 mass, but it happened to be the one celebrating the pastor's 25th anniversary of his vows to his order, so it went rather long. Plus, we partook in the lemonade and cupcakes afterward in the church basement.

The pastor of the church is a member of the Mercedarians, an order that I'd never heard of before. Evidently, they were founded in 1218 to minister to and ransom Christians who had been caught by the Muslims. As far as I understand it, they sometimes also offered themselves in the place of those Christians.

Applications

I love this message that my document delivery service sends via email to confirm that it received my order:

"Having second thoughts?
To cancel your delivery, please run like the wind to your computer and click the Cancel link on your delivery detail screen. That link will display for 10 minutes after you complete your transaction (sometimes more, depending on your delivery method and destination). If the cancel link is not showing anymore, that means we can't stop your delivery from going out."

The Neighborhood.4

I love these berries--they remind me of those chocolate malt Easter egg candies!

Pre-Birthday Contemplation of Mortality.2 Or Be Careful What You Get Famous For

"Arch West, Frito-Lay exec who created first national tortilla chip brand, dead at 97":

"Daughter Jana Hacker of Allen tells The Dallas Morning News the family plans on 'tossing Doritos chips in before they put the dirt over the urn.'"

Pre-Birthday Contemplation of Mortality

"First discovered in the Mediterranean in the late 19th century, Turritopsis dohrnii is believed to be the only species capable of aging backwards—reverting, in dire circumstances, from a mature adult medusa to an infant polyp. Theoretically, it can do so over and over again, effectively rendering itself biologically immortal. Unfortunately, no evidence has been found, in the laboratory or in the wild, to prove T. dohrnii has ever managed that trick."

(From "Difference Engine: Facebook for the dead")

The Neighborhood.3

(Because this blog has been shamefully lacking in pictures lately)

Twitter

I love coffee any day of the week (although I've been drinking tea lately for it's convenience and to try to get me un-addicted to caffeine because I don't care for the headaches). But I will tell you what--I especially love drinking coffee on Sundays. On Sundays I want several cups. So today I've ordered a large at Starbucks (I refuse to call it a venti as we are in America). A large on any other day would just be gluttonous (it's the size of a small thermos full of coffee). But on Sunday, I think it's okay.

A Far Cry from Kensington

Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington is narrated by a very sympathetic woman. Mrs. Hawkins is a heavy woman who, as we learn from the beginning, loses half her weight over the course of the novel. She is a widow who is considered to be a great listener, but whose real self is an advice-giver. It's a coming of age novel of a woman in her late twenties (in this respect, it's not unlike The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). To mark this change, at the end of the novel, Mrs. Hawkins starts to go by Nancy.

The novel follows Mrs. Hawkins' work at two very different publishing firms. She loses her job at both due to her hate for a man whom she calls pisseur de copie--one who urinates prose--who is, unfortunately, well connected. She denounces him repeatedly. In fact, the book itself is Mrs. Hawkins' denunciation of him.

The pisseur de copie is into radionics. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems that that was really a thing--it's a pseudo-science that purports to heal people based on samples of a person's hair and a strange box. Throughout the novel, we see Sparks treating characters who are obsessive and mentally unstable; using radionics is part of this. Something that I love about Spark is her comments about religion. She's Catholic, but she's also sarcastic about it. And profound at the same time, I think. She writes:

"That it is a totally irrational method of healing is not to discount it and certainly the claims of 'radionics' (the word is not in the dictionary) are no more a subject for mockery than the claims of all our religions. ... And I daresay from the point of view of a visitor from outer space the Box is no more ridiculous than a Catholic catechism or the Mass."

She just sprinkles a little bit of religion into the novel. And doesn't take herself too seriously. But while Mrs. Hawkins does not espouse radionics herself, she takes seriously, by the end, its affect on the novel's other characters.

Sparks' writing/Hawkins' narration is very frank. It is sympathetic, because she's a sympathetic character, but she's also a little dry, a little reticent with personal information (even when she gives personal information to us, it's very unemotionally told), a little even and plodding. For instance, Sparks writes:

"'Hate can turn to love,' [Emma] said.
I gave this a moment's thought. 'Maybe on the Continent,' I said, 'Or in Latin America. But you know very well, Miss Loy, that here in England love and hate are two entirely different things. They are not even opposites. According to my outlook, love comes in the first place from the heart and hate arises basically from principle.'
'You're being very insular,' she said. ... no doubt I was insular, not surprising since I had been born and brought up on an island."

It is the plot that Sparks does really well here--all the pieces tying together with a great, unexpected turn at the end. The narrator has lots of information that she lets out in spurts throughout the novel, like all of her novels that I've ever read. I think that this is the most unique characteristic of Sparks' writing--her narrators talk from the future and from the past; time is very fluid. Regardless of all of the future sneaking into the present, however, Sparks manages in this book to surprise you with what happens.


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Wrongful Birth

This 2006 article,"A Wrongful Birth," discusses the cases of individual families (as well as of the author herself) in which, due to the existence or possibility of disabilities, the families wished to abort their child. Because their pre-natal medical care did not (and, they claim, should have) identified the possibility or existence of these disabilities, they sued the doctor/hospital for wrongful birth:

"At present, courts in about half the states recognize wrongful birth as a subset of medical negligence or allow lawsuits under the more general malpractice umbrella if a doctor's poor care leads to the delivery of a child the parents claim they would have chosen to terminate in utero had they known in time of its impaired health."

The essay as a whole is very thoughtful, and takes into account different perspectives, although it comes down on a side with which I disagree. The ending is frustrating:

"The Brancas love the son they wish they hadn't had. My family continues to mourn the child we don't regret terminating. 'Anything you might say about the wrongfulness or the rightness of a birth,' Laurie Zoloth, the bioethicist, says, 'the particularity of that choice is only, and always, experienced by a particular set of parents in a particular family with certain grandparents, certain aunts and uncles, in a certain religion on a certain block in a certain neighborhood. These are circumstances that as professionals, and certainly as bioethicists, it's nearly impossible to fully understand. And then, of course, we have the luxury of walking away.'"

Certainly the bioethicist quoted here is right--these decisions are made in a particular context and the context heavily influences the situation. However, the ending implies two things: 1) that the ethical issues finally cannot be spoken to outside of the particular situation; 2) any universal ethical pronouncements on this topic would be hard-hearted because ethicists can't fully understand what the parents are facing. Therefore, whatever choice the parents make is the right one, so we shouldn't judge.

This annoys me because in some areas, we clearly need to be able to make universal ethical judgments. Just one example is murder--granted, many other considerations come into play with regard to murder. Some people might have persuasive reasons for doing it. But we can (and must!) still judge at the end of the day.

Rant, Again

I was talking to a Slovak friend the other day who asked me why Americans don't like French people, which reminded me of something that had happened the day before. I was sitting at a bus stop in downtown Philadelphia. Actually, I had just been to confession, which is a great time to judge/get upset with other people. This woman started talking to me. I do not like it when people start talking to me in a public place without having been introduced. She told me that she was French. She started talking to me with the question, "Why are Americans so fat? It is impossible to get fat without eating a lot, isn't it?"

Well, this rubbed me exactly the wrong way. I had just watched Precious, so at the moment, I was particularly aware of other things that could lead to weight gain, such as abuse. Plus, I happen to think that eating disorders that result in skinniness are a super serious problem that no French person sits on the street corner complaining about.

This interaction, though, helped me enjoy all of the irony tied up in this article: "The No. 1 Reason Americans Are Getting Fatter: We're Not Smoking."

Rant

I don't know if it's just me, but I've noticed significant driving differences from DC to Philadelphia. In DC, the driving isn't too complicated--people stay inside the lines, no matter what speed they're going. Everything is fairly orderly and safe.

In Philadelphia it's just the opposite--many people don't use their turn signals, they drive down the bike lane often, they go somewhere in between slow and fast when they're looking for parking, which means that you can't pass them but it's also painful to stay behind them, and they weave in and out of everything. It isn't as bad as, but in the style of New York. Worst of all: they beep at me all the time! Granted, I drive somewhat like a grandmother, as the cliche goes. However, I still find it very rude. There's also the problem of the really bad roads here--they just aren't fit to go very fast on.

I also frequently read about deadly hit and runs in the paper. I can't tell exactly--Philly's big newspaper strikes me as slightly tabloid-y (a photo gallery of the 2011 "Naked Bike Ride" has been up for several weeks and they're constantly advertising their "Daily New Sexy Singles"--so much that the paper seems to be a mix between newspaper and singles site). I mean, the newspaper also frequently has articles about how many people are shot in a given day. The Washington Post infrequently if ever posts articles like this. I can't tell if it's a difference in crime rates or a difference in focus of the papers--the WaPo focuses on political, national news.

Thoughts from those who have driven (or read newspapers) in both places?

Pennsylvania Politics

Pennsylvania is considering changes to its way of collecting its electoral vote. This would move the state closer (although not all the way) to reflecting the individual votes of its citizens, rather than the state as a whole (which opponents of the electoral college should like). It seems to me, though, that proponents of federalism and supporters of state government (aren't Tea Partiers into this?) should seek to keep Pennsylvania's vote together. Pennsylvania's Senate Majority leader, who is pushing for this changed allocation of electoral votes, said:

“The goal is to have the votes in the Electoral College more closely reflect the popular vote ... This is one way to do that.”

I'm not sure that this is a clever goal to have--it's one that will certainly result in reduced relevance of the state.

I'm also wary about making any institutional changes just for the sake of the short term.

Puffed Sleeves

Anne of Green Gables would be so happy:

"'Well, your recitations just brought down the house, Anne. That sad one was simply splendid.'

'Oh, I was so nervous, Diana. When Mr. Allan called out my name I really cannot tell how I ever got up on that platform. I felt as if a million eyes were looking at me and through me, and for one dreadful moment I was sure I couldn't begin at all. Then I thought of my lovely puffed sleeves and took courage. I knew that I must live up to those sleeves, Diana.'"


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The Weekend in Pictures

Also: a few words: Had cheesesteaks at Jim's, where Wilt Chamberlain used to get his; was chased by a somewhat crazy, limping Canadian goose.

Passion and Affect

I guess I don't have too much to say about this, Laurie Colwin's first published work, which is my final Laurie Colwin to read, at least for the first time. Passion and Affect is a collection of short stories. Of all her short stories, I think these are the most normal, and the least typically Laurie Colwin of her works. The topics are more diverse. The collection includes one of her most political works--a short story about a girl whose family hires a servant and the girls difficulty in relating to this woman. It also includes two short stories about the two couples in Family Happiness, for those who love that book and must have more.

My favorite story in this collection is called "Children, Dogs, and Desperate Men." It is a compelling rant of a woman confused and dissatisfied by men and love--it recognizes, as Colwin always does, that love is this incomprehensible thing that just doesn't make much sense.

I thoroughly enjoyed it when one of Colwin's characters complains about nametags! "'This tag embarrasses me,' Mary Leibnitz said. 'Everyone knows my name before I'm introduced.'" (See my own take on nametags here.)


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Precious

I've wanted to see this film for a long time--ever since I listened to an NPR segment about it on a road trip forever ago.

Precious was really well done. The actress who plays Precious has to play wildly different roles in the actual Precious and the Precious of her imagination. The dramatization of her imagination was very effective and well-acted. Although I will say, the film's use of fading was super weird--I suppose it was effective at blurring the lines between truth and fiction as I got pretty confused at one point whether the hot male nurse (of Grey's Anatomy fame--this is the third thing I've seen him play a nurse in) was real or a fantasy.

The story itself is incredibly moving--the abuse that Precious faces is unfathomable. She forms a close relationship with a teacher in an alternative school. When she gets pregnant with her second child, her teacher, not totally unreasonably, suggests that she put her child up for adoption so that she can keep learning to read and write. Precious decides that she wants to take care of her child while continuing to learn. It is remarkable, in the face of massive, debilitating abuse by her mother and father, that Precious is so committed to taking care of her own children. In fact, she gets back her firstborn back, who has Down Syndrome, so that she can take care of her as well.

I met a girl once who is a nurse in Philadelphia. She works with mothers who need help raising their children. She does everything that she can so that the children can stay with their mothers. I never really thought about this before--adoption is clearly a better option than abortion, but this girl argued that it is best for children to be with their birth mothers, if those birth mothers can, with help, raise them.


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Red Shoes

These shoes remind me of a coat with the collar popped. And I love them.


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On Disability

Oh my goodness! Pat Robertson's comments about Alzheimer's being like "a walking death" are really horrible. He says that a husband of a woman with Alzheimer's might divorce her before seeing other people, but should first make sure that she has custodial care.

Not only does this violate the Christian view of marriage, but this expresses a very narrow view of what it means to be a person and of what it means to be alive. It conveys the idea that being alive requires a high level of rationality. As the ABC video I linked to points out, feelings and the ability to connect often continue in Alzheimer's patients, even when memory is gone.

I have no experience with Alzheimer's, but when I was young, I knew my great-grandmother, who suffered numerous trans ischemic attacks--small strokes that have a similar result to that of Alzheimer's. My grandmother cared for her mother-in-law through these attacks. In addition to the fact that even with heavy dementia, my great-grandmother continued to be a person and to have a personality, the care that she received from my grandmother was an incredibly important act. I don't know just yet the words to express this, but this isn't the point at which you detach yourself from your relationship to someone, whether it be marriage or otherwise. Watching my grandmother care for her mother-in-law was incredibly influential for me.

By the way, the video that I linked to was strange in suggesting that couples discuss now what they would want if one of them got Alzheimer's. What a horrible idea! And I say that as a person who is always thinking about the worst case scenario. It's as if anything decided between two people in the marriage is the right thing for them. Then again, that seems to be the only way that we can conceive of people these days--as rational actors.

Oscar Does it Again

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Review of a Review

This review of Eliot's first two volumes of poems, "Visions and Revisions: On T.S. Eliot" has been circling for a little while. I am unimpressed. First: What is new in this? Second: I think there's something false. The author focuses on the contrast between what he calls "The Eliot Way," tying Eliot's own hesitation of action to his ancestors and even to Boston, and "a moment of awful daring," which is what his marriage to Vivienne was. I think that what the author gets wrong is the connection between hesitation and action for Eliot. These weren't disconnected. It all goes back to "Tradition and the Individual Talent," I think: these aren't two things that oppose each other; rather, action emerges from the tradition and involves something new. Tradition is nothing if not reinterpreted in the present through new actions. Perhaps Eliot's hesitation came from his respect for the past. Yet he clearly, however hard it was for him, also asserted himself with the creation of the new--from his poetry, to his moving to a new country, to his two marriages (although, granted, he didn't marry Emily Hale). These actions weren't a rejection of "The Eliot Way," but were, rather, inextricably connected to it.

The Neighborhood

Old and fancy, but with whimsy.

Flooding in Lycoming County

The videos of Knoebels flooding are crazy, too. I sort of love the (sparse) descriptions.

More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

Since Laurie Colwin typically writes about where she is in life, this volume of essays and recipes is all about family friendly food appropriate for the busy working woman. It addresses how to cook with kids and the return of home cooking for busy people. She articulates a sane position on food--it isn't fuel, it's nutrition. You should like the process of getting and making and eating food and your kids probably will, too.

The feminist in me loves the gender equality she articulates with regard to food: "I do not believe that delicious food is a frill. I do not believe that putting dinner on the table should be the job of a usually very tired woman who has worked all day. We have to get our sons into the kitchen with us and teach them how to cook so that as adults out daughters do not end up working to a frazzle while our sons sit around reading the newspaper. If we don't know how to cook--I mean men and women--we should learn how. Real men may not eat quiche, but there is nothing more attractive than a man who knows his way around the kitchen without making a huge production of it."

Her essays contain a good bit of reflection on tradition. She writes about children and tradition: "As every parent knows, children are great traditionalists. All you need do is set is something in motion and you will find yourself doing it the same way, year after year after year. Psychologists say this is good for us. The things that keep mankind going--ritual, stability, routine--are beginning to fray, and we are all the worse for it."

She writes about the dark side of tradition: On peoples' dislike of turkey: "In my opinion the poor turkey is a mere scapegoat for the mire of conflicted feelings flooding our psyches at holiday time." ..."Although turkey is delicious in itself, it is burdened with context, as they say in the literary criticism racket." And later, "The real emotional issue is the stuffing. People feel about stuffing the way they feel about their childhood toys. They do not like change or surprises. What they are after is comfort and stability."

She sees tradition as involving change: "This menu is now my tradition, but I know that in not too long a time my daughter will grow up and decide that it is her turn, and we will travel to her household for Thanksgiving. And there I will find the traditional meal, totally renovated and redesigned: the beginning--for that is the way these things go--of a new tradition." (This passage is pretty sad in light of her early death.)

Colwin includes an essay about food appropriate after flying. She expresses some firm opinions about what to serve jet-lagged people. This crops up in the short story, "Passion and Affect," in the collection of that same name: "Doria had uttered one entire sentence, at dinner, over the quiche, which Holly felt was a meal appropriate for people who had been on planes. Doria said: 'Jet lag is the true disease of the late twentieth century.'"

The essays, much like Fr. Schall's books, includes recommendations for loads of other books--both cookbooks and literature. Colwin recommends Mary Poppins or the early novels of Iris Murdoch for how to throw a tea; Anna Karenina for a novel filled with food; Barbara Pym's novels in general; Farmer Boy for descriptions of American food; and Randall Jarrell's only novel, Pictures from an Institution, which I didn't know existed.

Her writing is, as always, wonderful. So I'll leave you with some straight Laurie Colwin. First, on chicken in the midst of vegetables: "You set the seasoned chicken in their midst like an ocean liner amongst tugs, and the result gives you a main course and vegetables."

She's always using hyperbole, which I love: "A chicken sandwich is a mood elevator. If they were served in prisons, people would commit felonies to get in. A proper chicken sandwich makes a person feel like an indulged child and a sophisticated adult at the same time."

On Butter: "After you have been a very good person for a very long time and are as thin as a bean, you may decide to fall briefly into sin." After which she provides a shortbread recipe.

Love always sneaks in: "It always seems to me that cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food. You do not have to be a genius."


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Philadelphia's Chinatown

This weekend my cousin and his wife and their two children came to visit Philadelphia. I got to hang out with them a good bit. Because my cousin's wife is from China, we spent a good bit of time in Chinatown, where I got to learn a lot more about China.


It was the mid-autumn festival, so there was lots going on. Plus, we explored the markets and grocery stores. I've been eating Chinese sweets since then.


Since everyone I know is going gluten-free, it amused me that there was fried gluten for sale.


This is a clever way to kill two birds with one stone.


There were live frogs for sale! And turtles! And eels! And all sorts of fish, obviously.



There were more different kinds of sea shells to eat than I'd ever seen. For lunch, we went to a place that sells delicious hand made noodles--some about the size of spaghetti that were hand stretched! And mine, which I thought would comport better with my inability to use chopsticks, were hand-shaved off of a big block of dough.

Since I had a less than thrilling experience with scary food in Seattle, I passed up the various kinds of animal feet and ox tail that were offered with the noodles. Instead, I thought I'd go with something simple--roast duck. What I didn't realize is that the roast duck was simply chopped up, bones and all, and tossed into the soup. I don't love animal skin, and I definitely ate a bunch of it. My cousin-in-law's beef soup, which I tasted, was really good, but even that was different from the beef I normally eat--she pointed out that the tendons were left in the beef.

Some other Philly pictures, while I'm at it:


Plus, I forgot to tell you: I found fermented black beans, something that Laurie Colwin swears by!

The Art of Travel

I read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel on my recent trip to Seattle, mostly while in airplanes. I find airplanes to be fairly miserable places, so it helped to be a little philosophical about it. Well, that and Francisco's noise cancelling headphones, which blocked out those annoying every-five-seconds airport announcements that are particularly fatiguing.

Overall, Botton's position on travel is that while it doesn't change you (he notes that he had the exact same stresses in the Bahamas that he had before he left), traveling is better than looking at pictures of a place because it fills in all of the gaps in what you might be able to imagine without actually going there. In addition, he writes, "If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, our ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture."

Botton is obviously very learned--he writes about Charles Baudelaire and Edward Hopper and Gustave Flaubert, among others. He writes about their personal lives and their thoughts about travel. Botton's writing is a little serious and philosophical and spare, even when it is intimate. There is a formalism as if he is saying, "You are only my readers--I will share this much and no more." For instance, he mentions a lover in passing, but only identifies her as "M." Botton's writing is also poetic in its own way. First, it includes his own photographs from time to time (along with paintings and other pictures). In addition, Botton's use of details is poetic--he mentions a tape recorder in the Lake District that was playing Peruvian music; he mentions the size of men's feet in Spain; he analyzes the lettering on an airport sign in Schipol.

In one chapter, he writes about how Van Gogh helped him really see Provence (which he was otherwise unimpressed by). I like to read poetry or novels from the places I'm traveling in for just this reason: for instance, The Red and the Black in France, Fateless in Budapest, the Brownings in England and Italy, Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt on my travels on summer with Stearns (where we read all of the books that we brought with us and then switched).

Botton writes about encountering the sublime in travel. I wonder why the sublime refers to the sense of being small or weak in front of large natural wonders. Botton describes it as the experience of dangerous things that are impersonal (not after us), which show us our own limitations. I always use sublime to refer to the almost transcendent experience of seeing a work of genius. On the point of the sublime, when I was on my Seattle flight, we passed a dozen or so thunderstorms. Since it was night, you could see the lightning flickering in the distance, and sometimes very close: there was a whole circle of clouds beside us that would light up every few seconds. Typically I'm scared to death of lightning, but I guess not being able to hear the thunder helped. It seems like lightning can't hit you while you're in an airplane, since it isn't connected to the ground (not that I really believe that: if a cloud can hit another cloud with lightning, I don't know why it can't hit an airplane).


(picture, picture)

Food and politics. I love it (true or not)!

Rant

I was a discussant at the conference the other week for a paper on Vertigo. The paper was incredibly interesting and insightful; however, I also had serious substantive disagreement with the author, which I articulated in my comments. Afterward, the author and I had a discussion of his paper in which he claimed that he did not care about the meaning of the film (or implicitly, whether I'd better captured the film's meaning or whether he had). He said he did not care about the film's meaning because he was doing critical theory (I think the literary kind as opposed to the political theory kind, although I'm not sure). I was baffled, I mean really baffled by this. As someone who studies the history of political thought, I work with texts. There are debates over which sorts of texts one should consider and how you relate those texts to contemporary issues. However, we all agree (as far as I know) that there are texts and that those texts have meanings and that we're concerned, first, with correctly understanding the meanings of those texts. Now, of course, this is complicated by a film, which is a production that involves lots of different people. But still!: there's a director and a screenplay. There's a starting point that appears to me to have a meaning. And so I was incredibly baffled by this idea that that meaning doesn't matter. If that is the case, then I'm confused as to why critical theory wants to work with texts at all. Why not discard them entirely?

Drama at APSA

I wasn't at the panel where this happened, but I did hear about it right afterward. Who says being a political scientist isn't exciting?

I want to recommend to you #1tomatolover's new blog, Here We Go--he's hands-down the funniest member of the family and will be having quite an adventure over the next year. I love the idea of him teaching kindergarten students.

I clearly need one of these! Especially for traveling! I suppose I also need a tree to stick it on, and a yard in which to stick the tree, but one thing at a time...

HT: Myrrh.

Green Wedding Dress, French Edition

Found for me in Montmartre by my friends who are spending this year in France. (Need I add that you, too, dear reader, are more than welcome to send me pictures of green dresses from around the world!)

SAM

Thankfully, not only was the Seattle Art Museum super close to the conference center, but it also stayed open wicked late--it is regularly open till 9 p.m. I don't know why DC museums all close at 5:30 every evening. I think that they could get many more visitors if they adopted the late-night model.


This depicts Eve stepping out of Adam's side. (I had always previously pictured God taking a rib out of Adam and then magically transforming it into a woman.)


Evidently viewers attacked the attackers of Jesus in this picture in the past--one of them has a cut on his leg; the other's eyes are gouged.


Incredibly unusual perspective for a Last Supper painting.


In some ways, it seemed strange to see ancient and medieval and early American art in Seattle. But the museum also included art from the Pacific Northwest (I love the profile above).



I love stained glass (but you knew that). This stained glass had texture--the petals were varying thicknesses.


I also love tea pots, which you also knew. These ones were designed to look like the islands that they were intended to be used on. Talk about local tea service!


Cars hanging from the ceiling are the first thing you see in the lobby. It's sort of horrible--it looks like a car crash.