Saturday, June 30, 2012

Twitter

I hate tank tops for men. I don't care how hot it is.

St. Thomas More




Friday, June 29, 2012

Thursday, June 28, 2012

A Random Assortment

 
~ I recently discovered Advanced Style, a style blog that focuses on the style of women of a certain age. I love it--it makes me excited about getting older and dressing crazier.

~ It seems like The Atlantic has to put out some article about elite women every couple of months. This time it's, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." What annoys me about this is that the point isn't just that women can't have it all, but that no one can have it all: the author writes about the difficulties of pursuing a career with no reservations when she has teenage boys.Mothers don't necessarily have to do a whole lot more for teenage boys than fathers do--I mean, mothers might make dinner for them, but so might fathers. Goodness gracious, by that point, the teenage boys could cook the dinner for the family. So the problem that the author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, is discussing is not necessarily gendered--fathers, too, oughtn't spend infinite time on their careers, to the detriment of their families. She admits this near the end of the article: "Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all."

Sr. Margarita Aloysius responds:

This Atlantic story hasn't really changed (or even challenged) my opinions on women, work, and family in any way.  Basically, she has the nerve to say what everyone with a lick of common sense already knows. ... I think it's her facile presumption of the malleability of gender roles that got her into this in the first place. ...
The cover photo, however, does make me want to carry a baby around in a briefcase.  How cute is that?"


~ I always love the Modern Love column of the NYTimes. This one, "Missing the Love Boat: A Case for Marriage," is interesting--it's a repudiation of the author's former, "I Don't: The Case Against Marriage," although it's not an argument, just her story.

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

A Thought or Two about UVA

Happily, UVA's president, Teresa Sullivan, has been reinstated.

The thing is, the whole situation has left me saddened about the state of higher education and its businessification. It seems like the reversal of the UVA debacle is not some great victory, but rather a small victory in a much larger war, one that faculty are unlikely to win. 

On the one hand, clearly something has to be done about higher education: costs can't simply continue to rise at the rate of $1000 a year forever. It's a higher education bubble and it's got to pop.

On the other hand, higher education, or at least political theory, is not about making a list of outcomes nor about moving toward online education. Certainly there's a place for some of that, but it's not academia's main point. And some things can be taught online better than others.

I wonder if the problem isn't that vocational certification and liberal arts education are so closely tied together. When everyone gets a liberal education, then what it is can get watered down and lost in the rush to get a degree in mechanical engineering or nursing. Liberal arts education is, of course, useful, but when you focus on what it can be used for, you have to be careful or else you might lose it.

It's wonderful that Harvard is making some of its classes, including Michael Sandel's class on justice, available online; I think it could benefit really people around the world. However, political theory and college aren't just about viewing a set of lectures. If it were, then if you found the best professor to give the best political theory lectures ever, we would never need another political theory lecture again. We would just need a big screen and some headphones. (Of course, with that logic, couldn't we all just read Arisotle and pretend we were watching him on tv?)

Alexandria


There's nothing like a Saturday stroll in Old Town. The architecture is great and so are the shops. 


Hopkins working at Grape and Bean is always a good reason to visit.


I ran into some great doors and wreaths there.






Tuesday, June 26, 2012

A Ramble

Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera with me while walking around Georgetown today. It's unfortunate because I came across a picture-perfect young girl and lemonade stand. She was selling the lemonade for 50 cents a glass to raise money to help rebuild the National Cathedral (which sustained significant damage in the earthquake last year). I'm pretty impressed: when I was little and had a lemonade stand, which did pretty well, by the way, it was just to make the money for myself.

Also, after lunch with a friend, we went to Pie Sisters, a pie shop on M Street, for dessert. Of course, this reminded me of Pushing Daisies and the Pie Hole, Ned's pie shop. Anyway, the Pie Sisters sell tiny individual pies that are called cuppies, tying them in, of course, to the really strange cupcake fad that seems to have swallowed Georgetown whole. The Pie Sisters are "three tall sisters," according to the website. Tall is an odd adjective to throw in there. I do have a weakness for sets of three sisters, though--that's the conceit behind the blog, although Ilana and Stearns don't post as often as I do. However, these sisters' names are Alli, Cat and Bear, which is fairly strange. So I can't quite make up my mind about whether I approve or not, but the little pie was delicious.

Bob and Edith's


Bob and Edith's diner is a great place, when you can get in. It's small and popular, so there's almost never a parking space and you have to wait a bit for a booth.


The place is full of windows--from the outside looking in, it reminds me of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.


Monday, June 25, 2012


#1tomatolover is back from his year in China! And he came bearing (tons of) gifts. Boy, I think that my love language is presents. I've loved cranes since reading a Thousand Cranes in college. And he brought Mama Leopard and Ilana and Stearns and I beautiful scarves--I can't get enough scarves. And some paper money, which you burn for your ancestors--I think it buys them out of hell. And a snuff holder and a little bowl (not pictured). His return was like Christmas!

Sunday, June 24, 2012

Dial M for Murder

Since I loved Vertigo, I figured that I ought to see more of Alfred Hitchcock's movies. Dial M for Murder was great--just scary enough for me (which is to say, not all that scary for a normal person) and over-the-top dramatic. Some of the shots were just gorgeous.

I must be the ideal viewer--I am utterly surprised by everything that happens next. Like a good detective story, Hitchcock in one way gives everything away (he zooms dramatically in on the relevant clues), and in another way doesn't--nothing works out the way it's supposed to. As Margot Wendice's (Gracy Kelly) illicit lover, detective writer, Mark Halliday says, the perfect murder is possible in a book, but in life things don't go the way that they're supposed to. So I was surprised when Tony Wendice decided to attempt to kill his wife, and I was surprised when the murder didn't work out, and I was surprised when he tried to frame his wife, and I was surprised when they caught him. But this is just what's so delightful about detective fiction, isn't it?--the author or director has control over what you know, so they can intentionally mislead you repeatedly. It's like a roller coaster. The best part of the movie was when Mark Halliday inadvertently solved the mystery--he just thought he was creating a fiction in order to save the woman that he loved, but he was actually figuring out what Tony had done.

Almost the entire movie was set in the Wendice's small apartment--and most of it was in their living room. It was a very chatty movie--they were always talking through their various plans. Actually, aside from the attempted murder, not all that much happens. What with the lighting and music, though, it feels like the most profound things in the world happen.

It's interesting to think about this film alongside Auden's essay on detective fiction. His central idea is that detective stories reveal an escapist longing for a return to innocence through the punishment and expulsion of sin. This theory doesn't work with Dial M for Murder at all: the attempted murder does not occur in the context of innocence, but rather in the context of an affair. In fact, it is the affair itself that makes Tony worry that Margot will leave him, taking her fortune with him. He would then be a penniless ex-tennis pro with fine taste. He decides to arrange for her murder so that he can ensure that he'll have plenty of money. Dial M for Murder differs from the detective stories that Auden describes in another important way--it isn't the case that there are finite number of people who have attempted the murder, and as readers we don't know who it is. Rather, we know exactly who it is who did it and how and why. What we don't know is if he will be discovered, nor all the missteps that might lead to his discovery.

I must also say something about Trader Joe's lemon and ginger snap ice cream: it's incredible. Run and buy some as fast as you can. This is relevant because that's what we were eating while we were watching the movie.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Guest Post: June in Pennsylvania

My favorite month is June. Maybe because it's my birthday month, but maybe because it's the best month. First the strawberries arrive and then the lightning bugs come out and the daylight keeps lasting longer and then the day lilies bloom. And, best of all and toward the end of the month, the black raspberry bushes turn up in the same spots as last year.

I ate all the black raspberries:


I went blueberry picking with my mom (blueberries came early here). I'm catching up to her--this year, she picked 6 and 3/4 pounds and I picked 6 and 1/4 pounds (I still have trouble abiding by the "two in the bucket, one in the mouth" rule). But my bucket still had significantly more green berries and stems in it than hers did.





Also, June includes many family picnics (in honor of Father's Day, birthdays, Flag Day). And family picnics include cousins. This cousin is at the Best Age. It occurs after walking and before talking (and he still lets you hold him if he's in a contemplative mood!).


If you're still not convinced that June is the best month: they say ice cream tastes best in June. And I agree.

The View from My Window


I'm back at Little Gidding with my Slovak lace curtains.


(1.2.3.4.5.)

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Poppop

I found out two weeks ago that my Poppop is dying. It wasn't much of a surprise. Since January he's been unwell. He's been in a lot of pain. We thought maybe it was his shoulder from a fall that he had, because he wasn't able to describe very well where it was, except by rubbing his shoulder. So there were a lot of doctor's appointments, which didn't do much. In the midst of this, I remembered the grandmother of a friend of mine who had been in the hospital for her hip for quite a while, but was complaining of stomach pain. They discovered only a week before she died quite a lot of cancer in her abdominal cavity. I kept thinking of this with my grandfather--he seemed to be uncomfortable in a way that didn't just point to his shoulder.

He's had a bit of (increasing) dementia. It's been hard to tell how much he has, since he's pretty quiet normally. I noticed it first last year when we arrived at the beach. On the first day he wandered the house confusedly. I've never seen him so disoriented and unsure of what was happening. Traveling and being out of their normal routine is incredibly unsettling to people with dementia.

To go back even further, I should explain that the beach is an important family tradition--my grandfather has been taking his children and grandchildren to the beach since 1988. We always go to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Poppop organizes everything, shopping for good deals on food throughout the year and freezing it to take down in a trailer. This year he was the first year that he couldn't come. And it was on the first day that we arrived at the beach that we received the news from the doctor that there was a rapidly growing tumor on his lung, and that, given his age (87--he turns 88 this month), there would only be treatments for the pain. It felt really wrong to be enjoying a family vacation at the beach without Poppop, particularly given that the beach was his thing and that we now knew that he was dying.

The diagnosis is such a good thing--it enabled the doctor to prescribe things for the pain that have made him really comfortable in a way that he hasn't been for months.

But boy, death is hard. You can know that God holds all of time; you can know that we will rise again with Christ in the last day; you can know that from God's perspective, it is good, it is all good, and that's why He let's it happen. But it's still hard. Someone so dear to you is going through such a hard struggle--death, like birth, is a process that is and ought to be outside of our control. And it's a trial. And I pray for him as he goes through it.

My Poppop has lived a good life, and he said last week that he doesn't have regrets. He's facing death with as much joy and humor and good nature as he always shows. I know people who become cranky from dementia, and my Poppop is not one of those. He barely complains, and always struggles to rise to greet me, happy, as always, that his granddaughter has returned. Because the main thing that he cares for, by a long stretch, is his family.

Which is why he enjoys the beach so much--he isn't particularly attached to the sand or sun or water: he likes having his family all together. He likes seeing them enjoy one another. And he is unrelentingly proud of them, even when he doesn't quite understand what they're up to, like Stearns and me. (She once said to me, "What would Poppop and Grandma do if we worked at Walmart?" And I replied, "Be just as proud of us and understand more clearly what we do.") He thanks God constantly for how his family turned out--big and close and Christian.

At the beach, we always gather for a prayer time on Sunday morning. Even thought we don't know many of the same worship songs as our Methodist grandparents, Poppop and Grandma are always touched by the worship and sharing. And we always sing together one song that my grandparents know--"Majesty":

"Majesty, worship His Majesty.
Unto Jesus, be all glory,
Power and praise"

It is at church that I cry about Poppop. At church, death and the afterlife always come up. It's where the timeless breaks into time and in light of my Poppop's illness, when the timeless breaks into time I break down. It reminds me that very soon, we're going to be separated for a while--that what's in time now won't be in time anymore. And that separation is quite painful. He's old and he's ill and it's quite apparent that it's his time, but none of that makes it easy. He's still someone I love very much, and I prefer to be able to stop by his house and have a chat on my way into town. I prefer family gatherings with him present, as he was at the Father's Day celebration at his house earlier this week.


One tangential point: my mother is caring for my grandfather. I watched my mother's mother care for my ailing great-grandmothers some fifteen years ago, and now I'm seeing my mother follow in her mother's footsteps. My mother is incredibly selfless and committed, and I hope I can be as selfless and committed to others someday.

Brooch


This brooch is an old standby and exemplifies well something that I always do when buying brooches--I look for ones that are just slightly below perfect so that they're cheaper (the gold on this one is slightly rubbed off in a couple of places). I'm not bothered by imperfections, and, as Myrrh told me when we met many years ago, no one notices when a couple of rhinestones are missing. I just bought the scarf at the vintage dress store around the corner, which was having a moving sale (it's moving in with the antique store on the corner--the antique store is run by the mother of the owner of the dress store).

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Twitter

"Your family is one of nature's masterpieces." --fortune in a fortune cookie on the way home from a week at the beach with my family, after a dinner with my aunt and uncle and three cousins. Ain't that the truth!

Memento Mori

In my recent break from Muriel Spark, I forgot how much I love her. She's funny and an insightful observer and the characters in her novels are such characters. Memento Mori is full of characters, and almost all of them are elderly, flirting with the line between sanity and lack of it. Plus, they all think that the minds of the others are weakening.

"Remember, you must die" is the anonymous recurring phone call that troubles the elderly characters in the novel. At the beginning, the novel purports to follow the mystery, so you think it's going to be a detective novel. But in the course of the book, you find that the mystery isn't solvable--that in fact it may be death itself that forces the elderly people to remember that it is coming. Different characters respond in different ways to death's promise. For some, it is a threat--they want the perpetrators to be discovered and punished. For others, they accept it as a truth without fear or hesitation. They know that death will come. And it does come--the epilogue recounts the deaths of the main characters.

Memento Mori is grotesque, but not in any of the ways you expect. Spark's humor makes the actual deaths almost lighthearted. On the other hand, Alec Warner's obsession with studying older people is pretty creepy. He studies them scientifically, noting their temperature and pulse as much as he can. And then there's Godfrey, who, at his advanced age, likes women to lift their skirts for him so that he can see where their stockings end. There are old women in a public nursing home who are constantly changing their wills based on whether the nurses are nice to them that day.

I think the way that Spark draws Catholic characters is excellent--they are pretty messed up, like her other characters, but they offer a little religious insight. Charmain, a novelist and Godfrey's wife, is a Catholic convert who has lost a good bit of her mind, but is delightfully sane in the midst of it. Her maid, Taylor, also converted with Charmain and is incredibly loyal to her former employer. Both are peaceful about aging and are oriented to helping others.


(Others: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Bachelors, The Finishing School, Curriculum Vitae, The Girls of Slender Means; Also: Memento Mori is the reason that I read Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, because there was some blurb on the back of the book that compared them.)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Quote

“The truth in modern feminism came into history with some help from the errors of an inorganic and libertarian conception of the family and of an abstract rationalism which defied the facts of nature. The mother is biologically more intimately related to the child than the father. This fact limits the vocational freedom of women; for it makes motherhood a more exclusive vocation than fatherhood, which is indeed no more than an avocation. The wider rights of women have been achieved in the modern period, partly by defying this limitation which nature places upon womanhood. But it is also a fact that human personality rises in indeterminate freedom over biological function. The right of women to explore and develop their capacities beyond their family function, was unduly restricted in all previous societies. It was finally acknowledged in our society, partly because the bourgeois community had lost some of its appreciation of the organic integrity of the family. Had this error been prematurely suppressed, the new freedom of women would have been suppressed also. It must be added that the wisdom of the past which recognized the hazard of family life in the freedom of women, was not devoid of the taint of male “ideology.” The male oligarchy used fixed principles of natural law to preserve its privileges and powers against a new emergent in history. 

The freedom of society is thus made necessary by the fact that human vitalities have no simply definable limits. The restrains which all human communities place upon human impulses and ambitions are made necessary by the fact that all man’s vitalities tend to defy any defined limits. But since the community may as easily become inordinate in its passion for order, as may the various forces in the community in their passion for freedom, it is necessary to preserve a proper balance between both principles, and to be as ready to champion the individual against the community as the community against the individual.” 

                                     --Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Bloom

I've mentioned Kelle Hampton's Enjoying the Small Things here lots of times before. I was visiting Gypsy when I noticed that she has a copy of Kelle's new book, Bloom, which Gypsy is saving for after she's finished with school (hopefully soon!). Knowing that I, too, love Kelle Hampton, she insisted that I enjoy her brand new book for beach reading. What a good friend!--to let someone else read your book first!

Kelle Hampton's writing is lively and delightful and happy. It's also vulnerable and open. Bloom is the story of the birth of her second daughter, Nella, and the discovery of Nella's Down Syndrome. Hampton is honest about her struggle with the discovery, but her loving embrace of the world, and especially of her daughters, triumphs. She shares her process of loving her daughter, Nella: what's wonderful is that when it comes to love, Down Syndrome isn't different from anything else--you just love the person and deal with everything else as it comes. What an excellent model for life.

I've been reading Kelle's blog for years now, but there are many things that she doesn't mention too much on the blog, and about which I was curious--Kelle's parents, her husband, her step-sons, her upbringing. While the focus of Bloom is Nella, Kelle fills in the gaps with these other details. It's embarrassing to say, but I'm happy to know more about her life (secretly, I feel like we're friends, since I've been reading about every detail of her and her daughter's lives for a while). Okay, okay, I admit it: I'm just a stalker and the internet makes it all too easily. What would I have done if I had been born twenty years earlier?

Monday, June 18, 2012

Twitter

These cockroaches are going to die, darn-it, even if I go with them.

OBX.2


Because where we stay at the Outer Banks is all the way to the north, just before you hit Virginia, where the roads are all made of sand, it attracts a curious crowd of locals.


The ones we've met have been mostly a libertarian sort, with No Trespassing signs prominently displayed on their properties. And really intriguing yard decor--the yard above is lined with enormous conch shells! And those are buoys hanging in the tree.


The yard above is lined with glass bottles (the blue ones on the edge of the deck are gorgeous). And note the design in tree branches under the porch. 



There are lots of trailer homes propped up on stilts.


Nancy's Cottage.


I didn't get too close to get the nicest pictures of these houses, but what with the ubiquitous No Trespassing signs, I figured I'd better stick to the road. 

Sunday, June 17, 2012

A Random Assortment


~ Sweden's official twitter is democratic--control of the twitter account changes from person to person each week (this of course runs into a lot of trouble, given people's complete lack of tact and eagerness to bring up controversial subjects).

~ Salvador Dali's illustrations of the Divine Comedy (also above).

~ Okay, so, as a conservative, I'm a hundred percent sure that I shouldn't be saying this, but: "Machine translation software may become so advanced as to render second-language learning useless." That day can't come quickly enough for me. Of course, I don't really believe that will happen, either.

~ Homesteading is still alive and well in Nebraska (via Mr. Sayers). Well, alive, not well. I'm thinking about doing it:

"'Everything is right here that we need,' said Ms. Warner, listing the town's amenities including a water park, a skate park and a speedway that offers deep-fried gizzards and a popular annual 'Eve of Destruction,' with demolition-derby-style races." 
~ House Hunters is this planned. Still looking forward to seeing Diana and Fred on TV, though!

~ From W.H. Auden's "The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict":

I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. From the point of view of ethics, desires and acts are good or bad, and I must choose the good and reject the bad, but the I which makes this choice is ethically neutral; it only becomes good or bad in its choice. To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I may become, remains unchanged. As St. Paul says: “Except I had known the law, I had not known sin.”
...
The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt. (The detective story subscribes, in fact, to the Socratic daydream: “Sin is ignorance.”)

If one thinks of a work of art which deals with murder, Crime and Punishment for example, its effect on the reader is to compel an identification with the murderer which he would prefer not to recognize. The identification of phantasy is always an attempt to avoid one’s own suffering: the identification of art is a compelled sharing in the suffering of another.
Kafka’s The Trial is another instructive example of the difference between a work of art and the detective story. In the latter it is certain that a crime has been committed and, temporarily, uncertain to whom the guilt should be attached; as soon as this is known, the innocence of everyone else is certain. (Should it turn out that after all no crime has been committed, then all would be innocent.) In The Trial, on the other hand, it is the guilt that is certain and the crime that is uncertain; the aim of the hero’s investigation is, not to prove his innocence (which would be impossible for he knows he is guilty), but to discover what, if anything, he has done to make himself guilty. K, the hero, is, in fact, a portrait of the kind of person who reads detective stories for escape.

The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law. The driving force behind this daydream is the feeling of guilt, the cause of which is unknown to the dreamer. The phantasy of escape is the same, whether one explains the guilt in Christian, Freudian, or any other terms. One’s way of trying to face the reality, on the other hand, will, of course, depend very much on one’s creed.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Twitter

Small point that I find delightfully nonsensical:

In the Leopard family, when you're talking about tuna straight out of the can, it's called "tuna." When you're talking about tuna salad (tuna mixed with hard boiled eggs and relish and mayonnaise), it's called "tunafish."

Not So Good at Math

Cousin: "Do you know how to divide polynomials?"

Me: "Like, into syllables?"

OBX


Sadly, in just over one week, I both found these amazing sunglasses (like, my favorite ever) washed up on the beach in Florida, and broke them on the beach in North Carolina. Well, I actually bet those two occurrences were connected: they probably weren't in the best shape ever after being beaten up by the waves. I'm going to try to glue them back together. (Photo by Ilana.)


Little House on the Prairie goes to the beach!


Our family vacations on a beach in North Carolina accessible only by roads made out of sand and cars big enough to drive on them (see the cars in the picture below). This means that there's also a good deal more wildlife, including wild horses. I've never been especially impressed with the Assateague horses--they're aggressive about going after food like squirrels and they never seem that clean nor spirited. But the horses up here are pretty lively. (Below: A picture of my family watching the wild horse.)


And family, what it's all about:

Friday, June 15, 2012

Jockey's Ridge


It's tradition in the Leopard family to stop at Jockey's Ridge on the way to the beach, climb some sand dunes, and race down them.


There are always hang-gliders learning off the smaller dunes, but this year there was also a kite-flying exposition. The kites were amazing--there was a butterfly kite and a soccer player kicking a soccer ball and my favorite, these three whales.


There were also men performing on trick kites to music!

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Jazz in the Garden


While I've been to Jazz in the Garden tons of times, I've rarely taken any pictures. I'm always too busy enjoying the company and the sangria and the crackers and cheese.


But this time I made an exception.


Jazz in the Garden is a DC institution: on Friday afternoon, hordes of people gather after work for a picnic at the Sculpture Garden next to the National Gallery of Art. It used to be you could sneak a bottle of wine in with your food, but now they search your bag so that you have to buy the sangria they sell. And there's nothing wrong with their sangria.


Jazz in the Garden surrounds the fountain and, as its name implies, includes jazz. The jazz is mostly just for background noise, unless you accidentally sit near one of the giant speakers, in which case it's super loud (I once saw two men who had had a bit too much sangria almost fist fight over the way the the speakers were turned).


People start dancing to the jazz around half-way into the evening. And after that, they start dancing in the fountain. It starts close to the edge of the fountain at first; then, people get more daring and move to the middle of the fountain. That's when the security guards get unhappy. It's funny to see the security guards chase the people dancing in the fountain--it's like Whack-A-Mole--once they convince one person to get out of the water, some more people enter it.


This past Friday I joined the fountain dancers for the first time.


As long as you don't mind insane crowds (and preferably get there early to stake out a spot with your blanket), then Jazz in the Gardens is the place to begin your summer Friday night in DC. There's great people-watching there: that place is loaded with preps and hipsters.

Jazz in the Garden is wonderful not only for the people watching opportunities, but also for the way that it encourages people to enjoy the sculptures while relaxing. It's not a museum environment--it's more like a giant cocktail party that happens to have art scattered around.


The giant typewriter eraser is one of my favorite sculptures (I also love the giant silver tree).