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I live in a freezing house. My father's response to my complaints: "Dress warm and rev up your metabolism!" (Have I mentioned that my father is Chris Traeger from Parks and Recreation?)

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#1tomatolover (who is teaching English this year in China): "I just got back from a kindergarten Halloween party. now of course I am eating all my candy"
...
Ilana: "I think I'm going to England next year"
#1tomatolover: "really?!
that would be awesome
and then you could learn English!"
...
#1tomatolover: "sometimes just making small talk with people when I'm shopping and stuff.
I need to get a girlfriend though
I think that would be the best way [to learn Chinese]."
...
#1tomatolover: "Tell any cute girls I said hello."

(as recorded by Ilana)

Twitter

Clearly I pay a lot of attention to the homily: the priest mentioned today that he would be handing out cheese curls to trick or treaters tomorrow and that put them so firmly in my mind that I promptly had to go out and get some cheese curls.

The Philadelphia Club

I went to an alumni meeting of one of the places across the pond at the Philadelphia Club the other night. Boy, that was an experience in social observation at so many levels.

First of all, the Philadelphia Club itself. No women members are aloud. Supposedly in the first 119 years of the clubs existence, women were only even allowed inside on three occasions. Frankly, I'm surprised that there was even a woman's restroom. Also, I'm not 100 percent sure how I feel about being part of an event held at a place like that. Although, Stearns will be happy to know, there was a huge globe on a stand in one corner of the library (she's obsessed with globes on stands).

When I first came in and met one of the club's members, upon telling him where I live in Philadelphia (it's quite a swanky part), he preceded to tell me about his Quaker ancestors who were from that part of town as if I'd heard of the names of his Quaker ancestors.

Also when I first came in, one of the women who greeted us allowed me to not wear my nametag, which I was happy about (since I hate them). She joked that I could even tell everyone that I'm Kate Middleton if I liked, since there's some resemblance. Well, that could not have made me happier (since I love her). Anyway, I was thrilled for much of the evening until Francisco brought me back to earth by pointing out that the woman who said that was in development.

The evening's speaker was David Starkey, who, as I understand it, is a British popular historian. He spoke about Henry VIII and was repeatedly shocking. He maintained that Henry VIII got divorced so much because he really believed in love and marriage (he didn't just want to have mistresses on the side). I know very little about history, but I thought it was all about getting heirs on the throne. Starkey did little more than assert the opposite. He maintained that Henry III was actually showing his wives to be independent people by executing them (previously women hadn't been executed for treason). All that to say, I was unpersuaded by his argument.

In addition, he was overflowing with (I hope hyperbolic) praise for the place across the pond. Starkey maintained that everything important happened at that university, that the Reformation happened at that university.


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Some Little Political Videos

First, Herman Cain's smoking ad. What I really loved about this was Herman Cain's unending smirk at the end.




Next, Huntsman's three daughters riff on Cain's ad. (Hmm ... I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to share three videos in one blog post, but I see I've messed this up. I'm not sure how.) It's too bad there's no concluding smirk in this version.




Finally, Herman Cain sings about pizza.

Eastern State Penitentiary

I finally took a pilgrimage Eastern State Penitentiary, following a hundred and fifty years later in the steps of Tocqueville and Charles Dickens. (The outside looks like a castle, as you can see.)


Eastern State, which opened in 1829, was conceived by a committee that included Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush and lots of Quakers. The point was to cause criminals to be penitent and change through isolation and silence. It was influenced by Quaker ideas of solitude and Enlightenment ideas of surveillance (although, frankly, I'm not sure why you needed all that much surveillance at the beginning when the prisoners didn't leave their cells except to be outside in their own private yard for 1 hour a day).



The building was state of the art, including indoor plumbing at a time when the White House didn't even have it. The design was a radial plan--originally seven long spokes radiated from a center wheel; the prisoners had individual cells in each of the spokes. From the middle of the round center room, you can see down all seven spokes. More than 300 prisons across the world were built on the plan of Eastern State. Of course now I need to read Bentham and Foucault on the panopticon, which is what this prison is.


The original rooms had natural light from a skylight in the ceiling; later rooms sometimes had windows in the walls (all the plans changed after 1913 because of overcrowding--isolation was eliminated and two prisoners were placed in each cell).


In addition to skylights in the rooms, there were skylights in the halls and barrel vaulting in both the halls and the rooms.


The penitentiary is in an amazing state of disrepair for the fact that it was only closed in 1971. The tour guide called it a state of "preserved ruin." He regaled us with stories of escape and attempted escape (only one prisoner was never recovered). It's like The Great Escape--there's something irresistible about stories that involve such ingenuity and dedication. Of course, it was one of these escape attempts that led to a prison-wide riot that made the surrounding residential areas so uncomfortable that the prison was shut down.



One of the most famous parts of the penitentiary is Al Capone's cell, which is furnished as he had furnished it--and boy it is lovely--I would be happy to have that room. There is a nice little secretary, a fancy Persian rug, and a comfortable chair in the corner.


This is the 30-foot wall that surrounds the whole place. There's a little bit of extra fence here because this is the field the inmates used for baseball (later, when the original prison plan was abandoned).

Whether the Eastern State model was humane or inhumane was debated, even in the 1830s and 40s. Tocqueville wrote:

Thrown into solitude... [the prisoner] reflects. Placed alone, in view of his crime, he learns to hate it; and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.... Can there be a combination more powerful for reformation than that of a prison which hands over the prisoner to all the trials of solitude, leads him through reflection to remorse, through religion to hope; makes him industrious by the burden of idleness..?

Dickens, on the other hand, wrote:

In its intention I am well convinced that it is kind, humane, and meant for reformation; but I am persuaded that those who designed this system of Prison Discipline, and those benevolent gentleman who carry it into execution, do not know what it is that they are doing....I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye, ... and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment in which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

These days, the Eastern State Penitentiary houses one of the top haunted houses in the country.

Assorted Literary Links

Emily Dickinson, the baker. Is there a literary cookbook? There clearly needs to be one. My goal for whenever I have my own kitchen again is to cook my way through Laurie Colwin's.

Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe and more: poet Halloween costume ideas. I don't like or celebrate Halloween (I'm sure this came from my childhood in which it was prohibited), but if I had to be something, I would definitely start here. I especially like William Carlos Williams with the bowl of plums and the red wheelbarrow.

Sylvia Plath, the draw-er. (I'm always interested in poets who draw.)

Raymond Geuss, interviewed in a graveyard! This is one scholar with whom I fundamentally disagree, but the disagreement is always fruitful (I mean it's fruitful to me; I'm sure not sure our disagreement is particularly fruitful to him).

(See my first "Assorted" post here.)


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"Left-handers especially demonstrate the exertion of writing, curling their entire bodies round their pens as they write, smearing their words as they go."

--from an essay on handwriting by Ann Wroe (via Diana)

Habermas

I went to hear Habermas speak at Georgetown last week on myth and ritual. The breadth of the man's work is incredible, as is his age. He's something like 82 and traveling and speaking. Just imagine how smart you could be by 82! He used words I'd never heard of: "deictic" and "phylogenetic," for instance. Clearly, when I'm 82, I will know those words, too. His lecture was printed out and distributed at the event, which was immensely helpful as his English really is difficult to understand (he is German). Even following along on the paper, I sometimes got lost (I know, I know: I'm one to talk since I have so much trouble with other languages.). At one moment, he very cutely asked the audience how to pronounce "rites."

Because his lecture was so interdisciplinary, he relied heavily on the accepted work in other disciplines and then built off of that. I have a lot of trouble doing this myself--it requires a lot of trust that the disciplines that you're bridging are fundamentally going in the right direction.

Habermas offered his own take on what precisely makes man different from animals (or on what sort of language man has and animals don't): "What sets linguistic communication apart is a specific socio-cognitive achievement that enables participants to communicate with one another about something."

He concludes his speech: "Religious communities, in performing their cult, have preserved the access to an archaic experience--and to a source of solidarity--from which the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity are excluded. The enduring presence of religion as a contemporary formation of mind, culture and society raises not only questions for sociology or anthropology but for philosophy as well." I know it's a bit of a stretch, but I found this Hegelian in the sense that Habermas saw religion as a crucial part of human development in the past, but that he was surprised that it remains at all.

The other quibble I have with him if I understand him correctly is that he implied that rites do not point to the objective world. He writes, "Whereas the rythmic movements and gestures in the group express shared intentions, spur the participants on to mutual perspective-taking and trigger an intersubjectively shared experience, the third arrow of the triadic structure points into the void--not into the world." I would say that in contemporary religion, which is the one of the best, albeit modified, articulations of ritual that we have, some liturgical elements point toward the void and some point toward the world. I'm thinking here of things like the biblical Jewish practices of establishing memorials and remembering the exodus and Christian rituals of baptism and confirmation, themselves initiation rites into a community both in the world and in the void, as Habermas puts it.


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Friday Night Lights.3

A word on the ending of Friday Night Lights (and I must brag here: I already have made one Friday Night Lights convert!): My Friday Night Lights convert asked me if the show ends well and if she'll be satisfied at the end. The fact of the matter is, yes, it ends well. I mean really well. Conservative feminist me couldn't be more satisfied with the ending--it praises family, shows how to make decisions in marriage, and the right person wins.

Also: I've been thinking about being a guidance counselor when I grow up, due to Tami Taylor.


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Twitter

These days I eat mostly cheerios. Everyone raves about how important food is, but my grandfather is a super wise man (a combination of Joe Paterno and Bill Cosby) and, as he says of food, "It's all 87 octane," which, incidentally, is how I remember which kind of gas to put in my car.

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake tells the story of the Ganguli's, a Bengali couple who emigrate from India and have two children. Their son, Gogol, is named for the novelist, and the book is named for him. Lahiri, herself born in London and raised in America to Bengali parents, insightfully treats the experience of moving to a new country, as well as the experience of being the child of immigrants. She is persuasive in her portrayal of family relations that are not those of the democratic age. She makes the Bengali traditions comprehensible and brings to life the complicated position of their children, born in America, to both their American and Bengali identities. Lahiri's writing is straightforward and without flourish; it is absorbing and socially observant.

While Lahiri lets Gogol's mother and father tell their stories at the beginning and the end, the novel focuses on Gogol. We see him as a child, we see him going through college for architecture, we see his relationships with women. His relationships originate in rebellion against Bengali culture and expectations. This rebellion is articulated in Gogol's own struggle with his name, which his father gave to him. Gogol resents the strangeness of his name and so changes it to Nikhil. It isn't till much later that he understands why his father has chosen this name and begins to read Gogol himself. At the end of the novel, Lahiri switches from calling him Nikhil, as he wishes, and begins to call him Gogol again as he finds his role in his family.

This book is incredibly important--what is more American and more democratic than mobility? Gogol's situation both gives the reader another perspective and resonates with the reader's own experience in struggling among different identities.


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Quote

On the Declaration of Independence's idea that all men are born free and equal:

"Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with 'all men are born,' which is utterly untrue. Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born 'free and equal.' which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom."

--John Calhoun

John Calhoun is, of course, problematic on the "equality" part, so I left that part out of the excerpt here. This was, though, one of the funniest parts of the reading for the conference that I was at last weekend. It wasn't even the funniest part--we also read a back-and-forth over the Declaration between Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford (At one point Bradford mentions "Straussian rationalists").

The Tree of Life

I'm not sure what to say about this movie exactly. I didn't like it, but I was left, at the end, with the strong impression that I had just seen an important and innovative work of art, and I sort of wanted to see it again. It didn't feel like a movie, though.

The Tree of Life doesn't have very many words in it. It presents what story it does contain through impressions. This brings the viewer back to childhood (or at least how childhood feels when you're an adult remembering childhood), where you take things in as if you're in a dream or under water. The impressions are very well done, capturing even the way that a child might remember something that never happened, such as the mother jumping on the bed.

There is no consistent, orderly, chronological narrative. The film jumps in and out of different times, showing the characters at different ages. In addition, there's a lengthy creation story, complete with computer-generated dinosaurs. And then there's heaven, when characters at different ages are reunited. That part blew my mind a little--can you get to that heaven at two different ages simultaneously?

A couple of things to note: parts of The Tree of Life were filmed in Waco, Texas; the mother in the film wears loads of green dresses; the film, true to its title, focuses many shots of a live oak--I love live oaks, even the name is wonderful, perhaps especially when pronounced with a southern accent.

What I didn't like about the film was it's meditative quality--the whole film was filled with voice over prayers to God from the mother and from the little boy. The prayers were psalm-like in their heart-felt pleading. Somehow, though, I thought this all came out as fairly creepy. I think it was the combination of prayers with film footage of the sublime and the grand--of waterfalls and deserts and creation. It reminded me of the juxtaposition presented on the front of Our Daily Bread--the devotional booklet is filled with nice anecdotes from everyday life, but the front always has some grand, dramatic picture. It's as if the best illustration of God is in the sublime, which just doesn't fit very well together with our quiet lives in places like Waco, Texas.

The film reminded me a lot of Augustine's Confessions: it was an adult tracing out for others God's work in his life from his childhood. It shows his experience as a child with sin and death and deformity and redemption (although redemption is implied more than explained).


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Lost wallet, lost prayer book, and my car randomly won't start. This day: Not so hot.

Grand Rapids

What I'm Going to Look Like When I Grow Up

Via Francisco.

Traveling

Grand Rapids. Why is it that I always end up visiting this city?


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Midtown III Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge

Once again, it's great to be back in Pennsylvania. Midtown III Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge is just the right sort of place--an unpretentious diner with decorations that must be decades old. I'm not sure if there was actually wood paneling on the walls, but wood paneling would have fit. The fact that Cocktail Lounge is in the title of this place didn't make any sense--I think that the Cocktail Lounge half must have been next door.

There was lots of corned beef and rye bread on the menu (they make a darned good Reuben), and the waitress kept telling me that she'd refill my "wooter." When I was living in DC, it never occurred to me to miss some of these things--like the strange meat and pronunciation--but now that I'm back, I don't ever want to leave.


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Twitter

I'm vastly disappointed by Dunkin Donuts' caramel apple donut--should have gone with chocolate glazed. Also: Did their donuts get super little lately?

Also: I hate traveling. But, boy, I hate traveling in the rain. (By traveling I of course don't mean being in different places; I mean getting to different places.)

The Hedgehog

The Hedgehog is very French--it's very angsty and existential, full of ennui. All of the French things stuck together.

An 11-year-old girl, 150 odd-days away from turning 12, decides that on her 12th birthday she will kill herself in order to avoid the fish-bowl life that she sees as inevitable, given her upper class family: for instance, her mother is on champagne and anti-depressants and talks to plants. Until then, Paloma (the precocious 11-year-old girl) is filming a movie, her masterpiece. She films her family and her neighbors--there's the superintendent of the building (something like a janitor), an unattractive widow with a secret room full of books, and there's the chic Japanese man who moves in upstairs. The three of them become friends and the friendship and love changes all of their lives.

The movie is quite unusual from an American perspective--it's both much happier and much more shocking than most movies. Paloma is charming: she's artistic and full of life and insight. It is she who calls the superintendent a hedgehog: "She’s prickly on the outside, a real fortress, but I feel that on the inside, she’s as refined as that falsely lethargic, staunchly private, and terribly elegant creature."

The film is all about hiding and revealing--both Paloma and the superintendent are always looking to hide, the superintendent in her secret room and in her dowdy appearance. Death is the ultimate hiding place for Paloma. In the course of the film, they both learn that life is about being open.


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Philadelphia.5

I need to knock off the taking pictures of Amish people thing.


Francisco: "That looks like a shoe, like an elf shoe, kicking up in the air."

The View From My Window

Actually, it's the view from my office. (Previous view here. Inspired by Andrew Sullivan.)

Quote

Me: "My favorite movie, Margie ..."
Francisco: "... Oh! Margie and Mr. Chicken!"

I like the idea of that movie--silly, idealistic high school girl meets silly, romantic typesetter at local paper; together they ice skate, dance, and solve mysteries...












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Friday Night Lights.2

Goal for the year: To be more like Tami Taylor (Mrs. Coach from Friday Night Lights). Tami Taylor is just as friendly as can be, and her southern accent makes her sound even friendlier. But at the same time, boy, she's a stubborn lady. But the friendly part is what I want to work on at the moment. I bet she's even friendly to people she's never been introduced to. She's definitely even friendly, at least on the surface, to people who annoy her.

I had lunch this weekend with a couple of friends from Texas and they love Friday Night Lights--one proudly said that the show is just like her town and childhood (this explains a lot, actually: she was the first person I was friends with who was a high school cheerleader). Her pride struck me as slightly strange, since the show describes lots of good and lots of bad in Dillon, Texas.

I suppose I'd better tell you about where we ate, since it was very fancy and good: Tria Cafe in the middle of Philadelphia (near Rittenhouse Square) specializes in wine, beer and cheese, none of which we had. I did eat their smoked duck salad with strawberries, pistachios, grana padano (I think that's the cheese), spinach and citrus-mint vinaigrette. It was very good, although a little small (it's one of those square-plate places, as they say--or perhaps only people I know say that).

Afterward, we went shopping at anthropologie, which was housed in a gorgeous building, with a lovely stained glass window on the ceiling.



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Clear Your Calendars!

The Arlington Library Book Sale is October 20th-23rd. Drop everything and go. Thursday night is for members only (which is to say you pay about $5 at the door to get in). Friday and Saturday are the general sale. Sunday it's half price. I typically go on Thursday and Sunday or early Friday morning and Sunday. But this year I'll be traveling, so I don't know if I'll make it. I would probably recommend traveling up to three or four hours to attend this sale, as long as you have friends in DC to catch up with (and who doesn't?).


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Twitter

I dreamed about tornadoes last night. That's right: plural. The other week it was a flood. Boy, my anxiety sure comes out when I'm asleep. I mean, it also comes out when I'm awake...

LRB Personals

I'm reading one of my birthday presents at the moment: They Call Me Naughty Lola: Personal Ads from the London Review of Books. Because I love the LRB personals.

This of course leads me to the question, what would I write for an LRB personal? (which of course I would never do, because I'm too cheap--also not from London, but I'm not sure if that's relevant or not)

"Anne of Green Gables meets Laurie Colwin WLTM a corduroy and elbow-patches academic who likes to cook and write letters and explore."

Okay, so that's no where near sarcastic and self-deprecating enough.

"First-born, bossy, obsessively neat, inflexible, categorizing woman WLTM a man who is none of those things, but not exactly not those things, either."

Hmm ... that wasn't sufficiently jaded about love.

"I'm only happy when it rains, so we should break up occasionally. Dramatic woman for tempestuous man to 36."

Some favorites from the book:

"Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth. Box no. 7654."

"Box no. 0408. I missed my period. Box no. 7546."

"Don't reply to this ad -- I'll only end up confessing that the thing about having a second book deal was a lie and there is no author tour in the pipeline. Man, 39, just secured second book deal and about to embark on author tour. Box no. 8676."

"How can I follow that? Man, 47. Gives up easily. Box no. 9547."

The book benefits from the editor's footnotes, which are fairly sarcastic themselves. For instance:

"... [Looking for] easily impressed woman to forty who knows when not to question a man's Latin and knowledge of sea-bass mating seasons.*"

*Spring (UK, offshore).

"With Oxford bi-plane modeller (M, 51), patience and innovation are a daily experience.So too, however, is gluing my head to my shoulder. Cyanoacrylate,* and a whole lot of lovin', please, to box no. 7990."

*Major component of substances such as methyl-2-cyanoacrylate, also known as superglue, and the surgical glue 2-octyl cyanoacrylate. Can be softened by liberal applications of acetone, which is found in nail-polish remover.

The other amazing thing about this collection is how many old people are in it--I mean, we're talking about 81 year-olds who write from and about their nursing homes.'

These ads are witty and charming and also confusing: the writers are clearly depressed about love, and it's unclear whether or not they'd really like responses to their ads. Above all, they're honest. The volume ends with an extended footnote that is a chronology of Evel Knievel's falls and jumps over the years, implicitly noting that though love beats us up, we keep coming back for more.


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Last night, I skyped with #1 tomatolover, who is teaching English in China. My 6'4", 210 brother got a kitten to keep him company in his dorm room. Adorable, no?

He hasn't named it yet, and he doesn't know if it's a girl or a boy.

Berlin Guide

I have heard great things about Berlin in the past couple of years. Unfortunately, Stearns did not put that in our stop in Germany a couple of summers ago. Diana and her husband lately visited and I'm eager to read about it on her blog. (Welcome home, Diana! If it makes any sense for me to say that, since I'm not in the Cayman Islands.)

Anyway, I've been looking at this blog-like collection of pictures in Berlin, called Berlin Guide. I don't know a thing about the photographer, but I'm trying to pick up some composition tips, so I've started following this blog, as well as Joe's NYC.

There are some charming people pictures. This reminds me of the fact that I love Christmas and I'm dying to go to a Christmas market.

The photographer is also very Elizabeth Bishop with the trees:


Some examples here and here. The photographer is also fascinated by lampposts (actually--I'm not 100 percent sure that that one is a lamppost, but there are tons of others, I promise). The lamppost is like the trees--it makes you question whether it's an obstacle in the way of the picture's main subject, or whether it is itself the main subject.


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Quote

"[He] sometimes button his shirt all the way to the top, presumably from cold, which results in him looking like Chairman Mao. ... [P]articularly when it's a light gray shirt."

--a friend on a co-worker




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Quote

"The riotous and wasteful liver, whose craving appetites make him constantly needy, is and must be subject to many masters..."

--a little John Witherspoon for the late afternoon ("The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men")

From Sr. Margarita Aloysius

"I suggested to a priest friend (you don't know him) that he use bullet points for a marketing piece he's putting together. With respect to bullet points, he said:

'I admit I don't like them, even if sometimes I like to read them. They remind me of Fox News.'"

Entering Contests

You guys should know that I am a contest-enterer. I'm sure this was inherited from my mother who, for as long as I can remember, would fill out every entry form in every department store and put the piece of paper in the box. Often our whole family would huddle around, each person filling out a form. As far as I can remember, this resulted once in a box full of VHS's, most of which we weren't allowed to watch (an exception being Heaven Can Wait, which is why my siblings and I have all memorized that movie). On another occasion, my mother won a huge flat-screen TV. This was certainly ironic since we aren't big technology people and have never had cable. But now we do have an enormous TV in the basement. Which means the family can watch Lord of the Rings in near-life size on a regular basis.

I just entered a contest to win a million dollars through my credit card company. (Wow, no one should tell Mama Leopard about the existence of online contests!) Entering it felt slightly like giving in and admitting I'm not crazy about my life and would rather have something different, like a million dollars. Also, these online contests I've found impossible to win--there are simply so many entrants! This is nothing like sticking a slip of paper in a box in a department store. Of course, even if I had a million dollars, chances are I would do predominantly practical things with it.

Birthday Card

... From my Grandma:

"... Sorry to be late but I had to find your address first; you've had more addresses than 'Carter has liver pills' (old saying!) ... In October we're going to a 'Something the Faith' series with Geo. Weigel--I can't think of the word! ..."


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The Help (Spoilers)

Great Saturday: Brunch and catching up and a movie with a college friend. For brunch we went to a mainline diner, Minella's, where I ordered the usual for me these days, chipped beef on toast (remember when you thought I'd never stop ordering eggs benedict?). I realized lately that they don't offer sausage and biscuits as often in the north. This is one little thing that the south does have on us (and one way in which DC is certainly the south). Well, that and more sun.

So, since there are no sausage and biscuits here, I eat chipped beef on toast. It isn't quite as good--I mean, who thinks toast is better than a biscuit? Okay, so toast is certainly better than many of the biscuits I've ever made, because I have trouble making them rise. Chipped beef is, according to Wikipedia, "thinly sliced or pressed salted and dried beef." It is often served in a white sauce, like sausage gravy, except without all that grease. So it's less delicious, but quite likely better for you. Anyway, Minella's is a plain old diner, except that it has a Cheesecake Factory-esque menu. Choices tend to make me a little dizzy, but otherwise, it was nice.


Then my friend, who was an English major in college with me, and I went to see The Help, which we both enjoyed. I was called to service since her husband wouldn't go with her. She, in better English major fashion than me, had already read the book, which she said was far better than the movie. She said it was much funnier. The movie had funny parts, but they were too quick to give people time to laugh. I mean, that, and the fact that we were almost certainly the two youngest people in the audience and the two who were laughing most loudly. There were a lot of older people there, which makes sense, given that we went to a matinee.

Mostly, though, the movie was serious--it was set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's. An aspiring writer--a curly haired Anne of Green Gables--is frustrated by the treatment of the black maids who worked for the wealthy white people in the town. She convinces several of the maids in the town to tell her their story, at great risk to themselves.

I thought that the film was a little naive--it resolved fairly happily, which seemed to me to be improbable in that social and political climate. One of the maids was fired for her role in the book at the end, but she happily walks off thinking of how she's going to be a writer. And our Anne of Green Gables writer leaves her mother, who has cancer, and the racial mess of Jackson to go off to New York to write professionally. This is not to say that the film was happy throughout--it shows the incredible mistreatment of maids by their purportedly Christian employers.

The Help has several similarities to Mad Men--from the time period and the pretty dresses to the poor treatment of black people and women to the really atrocious mothering (theory: since women had few options other than to become mothers, they did it simply because it was expected and not because they wanted to, and so they sometimes resented it and did a terrible job at it). These are all things that are difficult to watch.


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Hypochondriac

If there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I'm slightly a hypochondriac. I take my temperature often (not quite daily). I once made a friend because I thought I had a brain tumor in Waco (it was a small bump on the back of my head that went away). I primarily like to whine when I'm sick. However, my Pentecostal upbringing, which doesn't push medicine, but rather faith, means that the only medicine I ever own is Ibuprofen. Okay, okay, so that's an overstatement--perhaps it's just my family, and even my family takes medicine occasionally. But I would argue that the ethos of our family is quite similar to Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science: all sickness is in your head and if your will is strong enough, you can will it away.

This past weekend, I was feeling some cold symptoms and, as usual, complaining loudly about them. This is not a good time for me to get sick, just too much work to do. Anyway, my housemates were so, so sweet--one gave me a little bag of vitamin C, another alkaseltzer (boy I like that!), and another a hug (claiming that it causes the liver to release stuff that heals you). This morning, the kind man who runs the program sent his little daughter to my office with Emergen-C (she appeared in a fairy costume, because she's nine, and very into fairies). Housemates and neighbors are delightful! But don't worry, Mom and Dad, I prayed, too!

Assorted Pennsylvania

Stealing shamelessly from Hopkins' regular feature, Clippings (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!):

~ The pictures, above, are Pennsylvania Dutch drawings from the Philadelphia Museum of art.
The explanation on the wall maintains that the Adam and Eve subject was "particularly popular among Pennsylvania Germans both as an explanation of original sin and as a means of emphasizing the importance of marriage."

~ The Paris Review has a piece about Centralia, the Pennsylvania town that is on fire underground, and has been for decades. The piece focuses on the places that Centralia shows up in fiction. Homeschooling in Pennsylvania requires a certain amount of credit hours in Pennsylvania history (good, localist state that we are). As a result of that and my mother's love for history, we took a field trip to a coal mine near Centralia, where we road a train underground. Passing Centralia itself, though, we saw the smoke coming up from the ground in random spots. My mother told us about the people who refused to leave their homes, even though the government tried to make them (liberty-loving people that we are).

~ Weird!: Amish men with beards are being attacked by men with scissors:

"The Millers said they were the fifth Amish family in the last several weeks to be terrorized by what the Millers believe is a group that once was Amish but is now believed to have formed a cult in nearby Bergholz, Jefferson County." More here.

Philadelphia.4

Yes, I'm living in the city with the most beautiful building.