Three White Leopards

2012-02-20T12:30:00.000-05:00

The first crocuses! (or croci, as I'm sure Stearns would love to point out)

Secret Restaurant

2012-02-19T15:22:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I went with Francisco and some of his friends to a secret Mexican restaurant in Columbia Heights. It is a restaurant where you find the phone number from one of your friends (who has scrawled it on a piece of scrap paper that he shoved in his pocket). You show up outside the door to that apartment building and call the number if no one is coming out to let you in; they throw the keys down from a second floor apartment just beside the door ("Maria, la llave!"--gosh, I love that movie).

You go up a stairwell to the hall, which is blue on the bottom and green on the top, and then walk in a door with a prayer card with a picture of Mary on the outside (there's also a statue of Mary just inside the door). The restaurant is literally in a family's apartment--the woman sells Avon stuff, which lines three shelves on the left wall. There are cacti and other plants in the window in the back. There are family pictures on the walls (the waiter is on the wall in a green military uniform that didn't look like the American military). There is a huge flat screen tv that was playing some old black and white horror film (the little boy who was part of the group we joined at the big, communal rectangular table in the middle of the living room/dining room was glued to the tv--couldn't look away--it reminded me of #1tomatolover when he was little).

An older man and woman were cooking in the kitchen, which was open to the dining room. They were making the tortillas fresh, right in front of you. A younger man was serving. Francisco's friend encouraged me to go daring (it really never takes too much encouragement), so I had the lengua (beef tongue) taco and a taco with beef and cactus strips (which reminded me of green peppers). The beef tongue was good in the taco, but it looked exactly like tongue--you could see the taste buds on the little pieces of meat. Which is to say, I ate the whole taco, but didn't bother with the pieces that fell out of it. It reminded me of the time when I was a little girl and I walked into my great-grandmother's kitchen to find a cow tongue boiling in a little saucepan on the stove. The sauces on the table were amazing--there were some that were very hot and one that was green and made out of guacamole--they were spicy and interesting and wonderful.

Us, having ice cream in the square after lunch.

Tie Clips

2012-02-18T12:30:00.000-05:00

I'm super into tie clips at the moment. One of the fellows here wears them, and they look so Mad Men. They look so sharp and put together and remind me of our dear, sweet landlord from when I was growing up, since I'm pretty sure that he's the only person I've ever seen wear them. (I think he also used to sometimes wear those string ties.)

I think tie clips are like brooches for men. If I were a man, I would wear them as often as possible. Probably with a knit tie and a cardigan.

I wonder what girls could do with tie clips. Turn them into a pendant? Turn them into a hair clip?

Valentine's Day

2012-02-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

Last night, for the second time in as many weeks, someone asked me what was wrong and why was I walking like that. Note to self: must learn to walk like a model in high heels. (Brief aside: once, when I was walking down a Georgetown hall to lead a discussion section, a stranger accosted me from out of the blue and asked if I was a model. So this high-heel walking problem must not have always existed. Also, dear reader, in case you're thinking this was just a lame pick-up line, it wasn't--the person who asked me if I was a model was an older woman, not a young man.)

For Valentine's day, I went dancing with Fedora and Cardigan--we went back to the Barbary. I was convinced that while we went to the 90s hip hop bar part of the Barbary last time, the downstairs would be a regular old dancing place. Nope: the downstairs had an 80s prom-theme and was all hipsters. I'd never heard any of the songs before. Although during one of them, all the hipsters were singing along at the top of their lungs. It was so endearing to see hipsters not being ironic, but being utterly absorbed. Hegel would have been happy.

Hipster watching is pretty intriguing, although since it was Valentine's day, there were a lot of frisky hipsters. What I like best is that you never have to worry about matching--you just wear whatever clothes it occurs to you to wear. I wore an obviously summer dress with a yellow cardigan and was immediately complimented upon walking into the Barbary. Before the dancing, we went to Village Whiskey, where they make a mean hot brown and lots of fancy burgers.

A Random Assortment, Valentine's Edition

2012-02-16T12:30:00.000-05:00

~ Poet Marianne Moore was asked to help name a Ford back in the day. Here is a list of the names that she suggested. The car ended up being named "Edsel" (not a name that Moore suggested) and flopped. I wonder why. Here are my favorites from the list (but they're all awesome):

Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
The Impeccable
Symmechromatic
Thunderblender
The Resilient Bullet
Intelligent Bullet
The Intelligent Whale
Mongoose Civique
Anticipator
Magigravure
Pastelogram
Taper Racer
Utopian Turtletop

My favorites are the Thunderblender (which is almost as awesome as Moneypenny--my favorite name ever) and Utopian Turtletop (because of its obvious political resonances).

~ Dating advice at CPAC. This is really too good to be true. (I don't think "good" is really the word I mean right there.) Take her shooting?! So that you can show her what to do?! No wonder these guys need dating advice.

~ Oh my goodness. I love working in bed, too. Unlike Charles Simic, I don't keep it a secret. I've never really liked desks and I don't think that they're good for your back. My favorite working spot, though, is a couch, and they really are terrible for your back. Great line: "In New Hampshire, where I live, with five months of snow and foul weather, one has a choice of dying of boredom, watching television, or becoming a writer." What do you think, Percy? Are those the choices?

~ Elizabeth Bishop's brownie recipe! Best part: "Spread about <——————> this thick in square pan."

~ Baylor and Wellesley coordinated a Valentine's Day release of the letters between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese are one of my favorite things.) When I lived in Waco, I often visited the Armstrong-Browning library, which is almost certainly the prettiest building in Waco. I can't quite remember, but I'm pretty sure I spent an afternoon looking at the letters. But I might have made that up--my memory is just not so good.

Quote

2012-02-15T18:38:00.000-05:00

"'Now I know,' she said, 'the further cause of your sickness, and it is a very serious one. You have forgotten your own identity. So I have now fully elicited the cause of your illness, and the means of recovering your health. Forgetting who you are has made you confused, and this is why you are upset at being both exiled and stripped of your possessions." --Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy

My grandmother and Mama Leopard were quoting Boethius to me all those years and not even knowing it!

The Book Corner.2

2012-02-15T12:30:00.000-05:00

The Book Corner always has a good selection of Laurie Colwins. This cover, however, was quite surprising given that A) Laurie Colwin's novels are not romance novels! and B) there are no movies, as far as I know, made from Laurie Colwin's novels, although there clearly should be. Ah! I take it back--it seems like there's a made-for-tv movie of "An Old-Fashioned Story" called, Ask Me Again. But I cannot figure out where to find it and how to watch it, and that movie is not about this book. Anyway, what a scandalous cover! I didn't buy it--I just took a picture in the bookstore.

Philadelphia: Manayunk.4 and 30th Street Station

2012-02-14T12:30:00.000-05:00

Happy Valentine's Day!

2012-02-14T09:50:00.001-05:00

(Via Joe's NYC, which you can go to if you click on the picture)

I love Valentine's day, and I think I will wear red and pink to celebrate (thanks Frankincense!). I wish you all tons of lace paper doilies and shiny red stickers!

Quote

2012-02-13T13:35:00.000-05:00

From a letter from Mill to Tocqueville (my own translation, so I can't really tell if it's accurate):

"I expect it [the second volume of Democracy in America] with impatience, for the lights thatit will spread on the questions in my own spirit, for the good that itwill have for our century and for the time to come, and for the interest that I have in your glory."

I clearly need a Mill to write me letters like this; then, I would finish my dissertation in no time at all.

Matching Help Or My Blouse.2

2012-02-12T12:30:00.000-05:00

My roommates from over the years deserve every bit of thanking them that Mama Leopard did (and she did a good bit: starting with Salinger in college, my mother would sometimes send them snacks and thank you notes for being my friend. I mean, to this day she thinks that it's due to her prayers that Diana and I are friends. I mean, I'm sure it is due to her prayers, but I like to think that I'm also friendly and worth being friends with.)

Anyway, my roommates have had to help me a good bit with matching. Salinger once wasn't there and I decided that I would color block pink and purple and white. She was horrified and told me afterward that I could never do that again, because I looked like an Easter egg at the symphony. Another time Salinger wasn't there and our other roommate curled my hair into tiny ringlets and I wore it to a dance. It was really pretty bad. I learned then that I needed to be careful with who I trusted to tell me what looks good.

Myrrh and Frankincense and Gold did a lot of helping with various aspects of my outfit over the years, even down to helping me know if I needed a jacket or not. Of course, Stearns and Ilana have been invaluable--Ilana has skyped with me several times when there was no one around to help me plan outfits.

And last semester, Sequins and Cardigan not only offered fashion advice, but they also lent me clothing when I didn't have the right thing. So now I have a question for you, dear readers. I bought this new blouse, which I told you about, and which I love. But now I need to know what it matches. I think it's pretty obvious that it matches my gray pencil skirt (in the first picture). I really, really want it to match my green skirt, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it doesn't (although I'm pretty sure that my aunt told me when I was little that any two solid colors match--plus, wouldn't a hipster totally wear that even if it didn't match? Edge, what do you think?).

I'm pretty sure that it matches my brown skirt (third picture), but I could be wrong. I totally believe in wearing red and pink together, especially for Valentine's day, but what do you think? (Have I told you how I feel about paper doilies around Valentine's day? I get super excited. This year I found little red heart-shaped paper doilies!)

Okay. Matching comments welcome. I'm planning to wear it with a white skirt in the summer (not pictured), and I also have a pair of brown cropped pants that I think will be great with it in a couple of months, too.

Quote

2012-02-11T21:09:00.000-05:00

Sayers: "Look at us all with our Macs."

(She and Mr. Sayers and Francisco all have Macs. I have a PC with an apple sticker on the back.)

Philadelphia

2012-02-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

I took this picture out my car window when I was stopped at a red light. I'm super proud. (Okay, so, ideally I would have gotten closer to this awesome water tower.)

I love this door! Like, I want to buy a house just so I can have a door to do this to!

My Blouse

2012-02-10T12:30:00.000-05:00

Guys! Remember this post about this picture??:

Well! I found this shirt! (Okay, so not exactly--it has a high neck and it's pink and the polka-dots are small and white and of varying sizes and there's a ruffle-ish thing, but more or less this shirt!)

I'm super excited and fully intend to just re-wear the shirt over and over to class everyday and mix up the pencil skirts that I wear on the bottom...And I'll probably make my students call me Jeanne Crain.

Plus, it's shear, so I'll just wear it year round.

Update to this post: I wore this shirt to get my oil changed, and the otherwise chatty, nice mechanics tried to rip me off. I mean massively. They were talking about flushing fluids that never need to be flushed, like the breaks and the power steering. I blame it entirely on this shirt, in which I probably look especially feminine and maybe even rich. Next time I go see a mechanic, I'll be wearing all black and getting tattoos.

But really, then I took my car to my real mechanic, whom I trust. Only about half of the work that those first two guys fear-mongered needs to be done, but even still, it isn't cheap. The truth is, my real mechanic is super cute. I guess he sort of has the attractiveness of Elvis (who is the first man I ever fell for--I fell for him sitting there in my grandparent's kitchen watching all the Elvis movies on Sunday afternoons on their little tv). He's like a tan, partially Egyptian Elvis (I work with his uncle, so I happen to know his ethnicity). And he has these eyes. Okay, so I could go on, but I'll leave it there for the moment. All to say, if I have to pay a lot of money for something, I'd rather pay it to him.

The View from My Window

2012-02-09T22:24:00.000-05:00

(1.2.3.4.)

Brooches

2012-02-09T12:30:00.001-05:00

This is a brooch with a caveat: originally it was my great-grandmother's clip-on earring. I usually use it as a small brooch, but this time I hung it on a chain as a pendant. I thought it helped make my button-down shirt more feminine (I really just don't like plain old button down shirts, but I have a lot of trouble finding dressy long-sleeved blouses). I almost added a pearl necklace to the whole thing (my pearls are short and I wear them under the collar), but I chickened out and just stuck with the flower.

The View of My Window

2012-02-08T12:30:00.000-05:00

This is what I wake up to in the morning.

(1.2.3)

Brooches

2012-02-07T12:30:00.000-05:00

You guys may or may not have picked up that I like green. And green with pink is just sublime as far as I'm concerned.

Quote

2012-02-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

Mama Leopard on rolling out dough without a rolling pin: "If you don't have a rolling pin, then you can put the dough in the freezer, and put some flour down, and then the dough, and then some more flour and then some wax paper and then a cutting board, and then just kinda sit on it..."

(In her defense, I don't think she actually meant sit on it; I think she meant push down on it. The funny thing is, I wasn't even really asking her what to do if you don't have a rolling pin--my old fallback is a bottle of wine--but simply if she had any recipes to share with me.)

Serendipity and the Internet

2012-02-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

Ilana is the best at walking the delicate line between very kind and cuttingly sarcastic. From a recent email:

"Since you used my rant for your blog do I get to request a serendipity and internet? As long as it doesn't take away from your work, of course, or your stretching."

And so, here you go, Ilana (with the caveat that Site Meter has changed what I can see and I don't think I can see the search words anymore, so this may be the end of Serendipity and the Internet):

"morphing into letters" gym--I'm picturing an aerobics program based on the song, "YMCA," only you learn all the letters of the alphabet and spell funny phrases.

the effects of hair parting on social appraisal and personal development--I haven't done any official studies, but I'm pretty sure that the effects are significant. And I'm pretty sure that it's my hair parting that's holding me back in life. You see, I wanted to follow all of the famous movie stars and have a middle part and wavy hair. Which probably would have resulted in me becoming a movie star. Alas, I'm still a grad student. Mostly because Myrrh insists that side parts look better.

roger scruton lysistrata--Well, clearly Roger Scruton would want you to be familiar with all of your Western Tradition, including Lysistrata. And, presumably, he'd be happy for women to use their difference from men in wielding political power.

i can't remember the name of the cookbook with george rodirigue illustrations--I love when people who google things include the fact that they can't remember what it is they're looking for in the search.

www.friendsfor only girls ide from pakistan . com--This sounds super shady, and I have no idea how it brought someone to my blog.

magnolia tattos--Everyone knows that a tattos is a small tattoo. The problem with little tattoos, as Percy pointed out to me, is that they fade as you age and eventually look like a big mole.

any difference between democratic and political theories?--For some contemporary political theorists, no. (But really, democratic political thought is one type of political theorizing.)

Manayunk.3

2012-02-05T16:38:00.000-05:00

(Manayunk.1, Manayunk.2)

Quote

2012-02-04T22:42:00.000-05:00

"I admire your water drinking." --Francisco, trying to find something in my dietary habits to approve of

Class

2012-02-03T17:13:00.000-05:00

This semester, I'm adjuncting one class at a private school in the Philadelphia area. Today I showed up to class only to find several students congregated outside of a locked classroom door. Their immediate reaction was to all grab for their phones to call for security to come unlock the door. That was surprising to me--all of them have campus security's number programmed into their phones. But after we called security, one of the late-arriving girls offered to crawl through the window. She said that she has to do this regularly when looking for an on-campus room to study after hours. And, even stranger, I noticed that one of my students, who is intending to become a pastor, had pulled out his wallet-sized lock-picking kit and was attempting to pick the lock.

Quote

2012-02-02T15:30:00.000-05:00

"For God would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness He foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of the good He could turn him, thus embellishing the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antithesis. For what are called antitheses are among the most elegant of the ornaments of speech."

--Augustine, The City of God, Book 11.18

Iris DeMent

2012-02-02T11:49:00.000-05:00

Iris DeMent is one of my favorite musicians. Like Laurie Colwin, I've gotten to know her only very recently. And like Laurie Colwin, she's one of the people I look to to get me through life when it gets tricky.

I know her as a guitar player and folk singer. Her voice is really odd. A little twangy, a little fragile and shaky. Even a little grating at times.

I was first introduced to Iris DeMent with her song, "Sweet is the Melody," which is still my favorite (see the video below). It is poetry:

"The dance floor's for gliding and not jumping over ponies.
Where boots and gold bracelets come and meet as they should."

Pure synecdoche. I love the picture in the chorus of bending a note:

"Sweet is the melody, so hard to come by.
It's so hard to make every note bend just right.
You lay down the hours and leave not one trace,
But a tune for the dancing is there in it's place."

I love the idea of laying down the hours and those hours being replaced by a tune for dancing.

I love Iris DeMent's very cliche husband and wive as opposites duet, "In Spite of Ourselves."

I love her singing old gospel music. The theology of her songs reminds me a lot of my Pentecostal upbringing (it turns out that she, too, was raised Pentecostal). Most of them channel the old gospel theme of looking forward to heaven in the midst of this valley of tears. "Let the Mystery Be" says she doesn't want to dive too deep in doctrine (it also moves the focus from the next world to this one).

Her songs are incredibly localist--they're about her town and her family. They are incredibly melancholy. So many are about leaving, about love that's over. They're strong, but they're also vulnerable. And they have a healthy dose of nostalgia: in her song, "Childhood Memories," she sings about penny candy at the corner store, something that's also part of my childhood (having a quarter to spend on candy that cost two or three cents per piece was honestly probably a pretty big part of developing my renowned financial savvy).

I went to hear Iris DeMent perform last weekend in Annapolis. I knew her primarily as a guitar player, before, but evidently about seven years ago she switched to the piano. She didn't play the guitar at all when she performed--it was all singing and piano.

She performed primarily new music from the record she just made. I cried like a baby through "Easy's Gettin' Harder Everyday" (okay, okay, through a good many songs). And was uber-disappointed that they didn't play my favorites, "Hotter than Mojave in My Heart" and "Sweet is the Melody."

She was very private and self-deprecating. She said that she had the hardest time taking compliments until someone told her to just say thank you. Now she knows what to do, she said, no one compliments her anymore. She said, too, that she is leaving for a cruise with her husband next week and that she bought a lovely red bathing suit back in November, but didn't lose the last 10 pounds before the cruise. She didn't say much, specifically, about her family, though. She didn't mention the little girl that Wikipedia says she adopted with Greg from Russia.

She talked about musicians she admired, such as Tammy Wynette, and some not so famous ones, such as the cross-eyed preacher's wife with a terrible voice who sang with so much passion that Iris imitated her singing and her hairpiece and her crossed eyes.

Before she performed, her step-daughter, Pieta Brown, performed (they have quite a musical family--Pieta's [what a cool name, huh?] father, Iris's [also a very cool name] husband, is also a musician). They said that being on tour together they spend loads of time talking until their voices hurt. As the Fug Girls would say, they both seemed like exactly the sort of girls I would want to talk with until my voice hurt. Invite me to join the tour! I'm not really sure what I could contribute besides talking, though. I mean, I'm not really sure what I contribute in life besides talking, anyway.

Francisco and I were the youngest people in the entire crowd. You could tell it in the clapping to bring her back for an encore, which was just embarrassingly weak. It wasn't that people didn't like her; it was just that they were too old to clap really loudly. That is another thing that I could contribute to her tour--enthusiastic clapping. After just one encore, people grabbed their coats and left as fast as they could (I think she would've kept playing if people would have begged for more. I was personally ready to beg).

She performed in a small venue called Rams Head, which was incredibly comfortable--you sit down at a table, and there are waiters who serve you drinks. I had a wonderful Dreamweaver wheat beer, which I mention here so that I don't forget it and can find it again someday (I have only very rarely met a wheat beer that I didn't like). And of course, Annapolis is always lovely to walk around in.

(picture)

Twitter

2012-02-01T15:27:00.000-05:00

World! We don't need Groundhog's Day this year! Because there was no winter! #best"winter"ever

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

2012-02-01T10:51:00.001-05:00

My apologies to Mama Leopard, who is thrilled that I'm not reading as many novels at the moment (I never thought the day would come when I'd say those words--this from the woman who taught me to love reading!), but, in my defense, a girl's got to take a break from work occasionally. Plus, I primarily read when I'm stretching, which would make Papa Leopard proud. (My back hates it when I work all the time.)

I watched all of the Swedish films based on Larsson's books in a quick row sometime just before Christmas, so I wasn't sure if I wanted to read the third novel after I thought I'd spoiled it. While the films were quite good and had the same can't-put-them-down qualities as the books, the truth is that the third film leaves a ton of stuff out and is, consequently, a bit confusing. I mean, not Syriana levels of confusing (that's for you, Myrrh), but it could be clearer.

The film takes out a whole important theme of secrecy and tyranny, which is pretty interesting to a political theorist like me. Larsson makes up a super secret government agency that is outside of the law and accountable to no one. It was established to protect a man who could provide secrets to the state many years before. The members of the agency justify their work as necessary to the protection of their country, but they use extremely unethical means to get to that end. In the process of protecting this man, the state unspeakably abused one of its own citizens, Lisbeth Salander. This shows the danger of what is secretive and what is not accountable to anyone. Larsson ties this theme of secrecy within the government to what connects the entire trilogy together--the abuse of women. (In light of the series' treatment of the abuse of women, I have to give a disclaimer--both the books and the films deal with really serious and heavy issues and are quite graphic.)

The novel is written like a movie--it is full of action and cuts from one scene with a certain group of characters to another scene with another group. It's fast-paced and intriguing.

Dear readers, I admitted to you that I read One Day on a Kindle; well, I've gone even further this time: I read Larsson on an iPod! (Thanks, Ilana!) At least on an iPod, the direction you turn the page is the direction that it actually turns. They are really not so bad for reading books and you can easily carry them with you anywhere.

(The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire here)

Philadelphia

2012-01-31T18:58:00.000-05:00

When I stopped in West Philadelphia today to take pictures, I was passed by a group of 8 or 10 young guys on various forms of motorbike (no motorcycles, though--these were girlier versions). They glared with everything that they had in them as they passed by. What was really, really amusing was that two of them were on four wheelers going down a main street in Philadelphia. Four wheelers! I have used a four wheeler in the country, but I do not see the point in a city.

(I like this mural a lot--it reminds me of a quilt. Very Pennsylvania appropriate.)

Mama Leopard Email

2012-01-31T18:35:00.000-05:00

I receive mail at a variety of locations across Pennsylvania and Virginia. My mother emailed me to tell me about a rejection letter for a political theory position that I got in the mail at her house. She wrote,

"Also, you got a letter from X College saying that they hired someone already for the political theory position.

God knows the plans He has for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future. Jer 29:11

Love You, Mom"

I can't imagine a better rejection letter; I wish that they all came like that.

Guest Rant (By Ilana)

2012-01-30T22:36:00.000-05:00

I signed up for a Pilates class over winter break, thinking that it would be good to learn how to work out in a different way. Stupid, silly idea. I went today (wearing a t-shirt and shorts) and all the other girls were there, sitting in the middle of their mats wearing exercise shirts and yoga pants. Then the instructor, with a horrible voice who talked for 97% of the class and overpronounced all her K's, led us through the exercises. And I never even started to sweat. It was painful. I burned 10-15 calories.

Moral: I need to play team sports and do exercises where you don't stare at the ceiling the whole time.

Eastern Market

2012-01-29T15:34:00.000-05:00

(And Annapolis)

Brooches

2012-01-27T12:00:00.000-05:00

I bet you never in a thousand years thought this would turn into a fashion blog, huh? Well--I've decided it's no-holds-barred scarf- and brooch-wearing season. And I need more people to show them to.

That's right: we don't like the paint color on my walls; it's really the worst combination of brown and green and yellow.

Quote

2012-01-26T21:50:00.001-05:00

"The obstetrician who delivered me was named Dr. Maybe" --Francisco

Email

2012-01-26T15:03:00.002-05:00

Mama Leopard's getting sassy:

"Hi!

Please pass this on to Diana--I don't care if she has had multiple houseguests since she returned, or even that she traveled for a long weekend, it is WAY past time to post a blog (or whatever you say).

Thanks,

Mama Leopard"

(Editor's note: Diana blogs at offshore cpa)

Brooch

2012-01-26T14:59:00.001-05:00

I'm pretty sure that this was the brooch I brought in a Dillsburg thrift store for 50 cents. I never wore it before because I usually prefer color. But there's something about blue and silver on a cold, snowy winter day (okay, so, I wore it a couple of days ago, when it was still snowy).

Twitter

2012-01-25T17:11:00.002-05:00

This poem forest reminds me of me. Right now, though, I'm disillusioned. I'm disillusioned with poetry and romanticism and grad school and everything. But probably especially with just taking one line out of a poem and nailing it on a tree. (Okay, I'm sure he didn't actually nail it to the tree.) I doubt that the poets would really like one line of their poem taken out and nakedly set by itself.

Tiffany: What Makes Love True by Garance Doré & The Sartorialist

2012-01-24T17:37:00.001-05:00

Oh my goodness. This video made my day. I think you already know, dear readers, that I have an unabashed crush on Garance and Scott. Plus, I really like that blond girl from Covert Affairs! My favorite part is when Scott puts Garance's hood over his head.

Quote

2012-01-23T23:02:00.000-05:00

Mr. Sayers: "Oh man. Only one and a half months [until I'm 30]. I can feel it. I'm going to have a mid-life crisis."
Sayers: "Are you going to buy a convertible? I will not let you have an affair."
Mr. Sayers: "I don't want a convertible. I want to take the beekeeping class. [Pause] Is that better than an affair?"

A List

2012-01-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

Things I don't like:

1) Being awakened when I'm sleeping and it's not yet the very last minute possible for me to wake up or 8 hours after I went to sleep, whichever comes first
2) Being cold
3) Affected British accents
4) Being stuck with a free minute and without a book to read
5) Feeling static-y
6) Having the blinds open when it's dark outside

(Numbers three through five are actually a tie, I think)

Quote

2012-01-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

"That is really a wrong approach, but it's so much you." --Elizabeth Bennett

Twitter

2012-01-22T00:00:00.002-05:00

"Seriously, cone bras are the worst things ever." --Cardigan on That Thing You Do

Snow!

2012-01-21T14:22:00.001-05:00

Quote

2012-01-21T00:05:00.000-05:00

"Now in the Christian universe nothing ever happens save in the name of a rational order, nothing exists save as depending on it. In everyday conversation we may be permitted to speak of chance, but since the world is God's work and nothing it contains is withdrawn from His providence, it is impossible to regard anything as absolutely fortuitous. Nihil igitur casu fit in mundo; nothing happens by chance: that is the ultimate Christian attitude to the universal order."

-Etienne Gilson in "The Middle Ages and Nature" on how the Medieval conception of nature affirmed more determinism than the classical conception of nature did.

Stories

2012-01-20T18:12:00.001-05:00

Guys! Today I was frantically trying on teaching outfits because I have no suitemates at the moment (some new ones will arrive in a couple of days). Sequins and Cardigan left me alone in this giant house (the two of them had been my reliable fashion advise and extra closet, when needed). If there's one thing I've learned in life, it is that I need help picking out clothes. In college, I relied on Salinger. I don't remember what I wore in Waco (I think I blocked that time out of my memory). In DC, I relied on Myrrh and Gold and Frankincense. I have been known to skype Ilana when the going gets really tough. Today, after half of my dresser was scattered across my bed, I grabbed my yellow cardigan and headed out to teach a subject about which I know precious little, Medieval Philosophy.

There were two things that I noticed in the bathroom when I arrived on campus: a) I'd gotten some dollops of lotion on the front of my black shirt; b) there were large blue marbled stains all over my yellow cardigan. The only good thing about these stains is that they weren't too dark. But the fact that they were light just made it look like my cardigan was very, very dirty. But, as I do with everything that I think is awkward, I pretended that the spots weren't there. I put on my best I-known-exactly-what-I'm talking-about face and I taught Medieval Philosophy for an hour.

Mama Leopard, after I told her this story: "I bet the students had a good time laughing."

Also: I love bread. And I think it's super healthy because it's a very basic food and because Romanians eat a lot of bread and tomatoes and cheese and they seem healthy (can I hear an amen, Gypsy?). You know, bread isn't red meat; it isn't fried, it isn't a sweet. It's just bread, and it's good for you. Francisco and I have an ongoing debate over whether my analysis of bread's nutritional qualities is accurate (he says no). Hopkins recently brilliantly resolved our debate for us.

Hopkins: "He thinks bread is bad for you because he's from California. You think bread is good for you because you're German."

Twitter

2012-01-20T00:33:00.002-05:00

From a former student:

"I was watching Parks and Rec, and Leslie Knope quoted Alexis de Tocqueville."

Ah yes. I have finally made a difference in someone's life.

Twitter

2012-01-19T20:45:00.000-05:00

I love cheerios and eat massive amounts. Thankfully my dad got me some for Christmas.

Me: "Plus, they're healthy--they have that little heart symbol on the box."
Francisco: "That's government propaganda!"

(Small aside: I always feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder getting an orange for Christmas when I get food as a gift.)

Random Assortment: Many Stories

2012-01-19T18:14:00.001-05:00

~ "The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." --Chimamanda Adichie, "The Danger of a Single Story" (above, although you have to click through google reader to the blog to see the video for some strange reason). Her short speech is about the power of stories and the danger of only hearing one story. She concludes, "When we reject the single story, we regain a kind of paradise" (via Dillard).

~ Dostoevsky and Dickins: They are supposed to have met, and Dostoevsky is supposed to have written this about their meeting (I suppose this is silly to mention, since it probably is a farce, but it's a nice, made-up excerpt/letter nonetheless):

"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked."

"Only two people?" is a great line, especially given Bakhtin's observation of the real polyphony or many voices of Dostoevsky's novels (via Slate and everyone else).

~ There's so much wisdom in this letter from John Steinbeck to his son about falling in love. And so I will have to quote at length:

"There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.
...
Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.
...
And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away."

Paris Twitters

2012-01-19T01:13:00.000-05:00

(I know, I know...it's tweets.)

As you know, I have a strange and embarrassing fascination with Paris Hilton. She is amazingly detached from reality. I was looking through her twitter pictures and saw several in a row that, together, are remarkable:

"Love my brother @Barron Hilton so much! Excited to celebrate his birthday in Vegas this weekend!"

"The orphans in #Bali are so adorable. Loved being with them today. ♡"

"Love this @FarahKhanOnline dress. She is such a talented designer! Love her designs! So beautiful! :)"

Oh my. The Bali orphans stuck in between Vegas and a dress. Only Paris could be so nonchalant about orphans.

Speaking of nonchalance, she was clearly channeling Marie Antoinette's, "Let them eat cake!," when she twittered, "Saw a starving stray dog on the beach of the restaurant. Made me so sad. So we ordered him a filet mignon, he love." Clearly the world will be a better place if we all gushed over the orphans and gave filet mignon to the stray dogs.

Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009) - BBC documentary

2012-01-17T20:17:00.000-05:00

I give you this wonderful video without comment, because anything I say just sounds gushy, like I'm a Scruton groupy.

Shadows

2012-01-17T00:05:00.000-05:00

Also: loads of thanks to Hopkins for redoing my blog (and not changing it too much) so that I can post bigger pictures.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-16T14:37:00.000-05:00

This was the first film that I watched where I wasn't bugged that they made an actor look older than they were. Meryl Streep played a very convincing Margaret Thatcher over a wide range of ages--say 50 to 80. And the makeup and costume made her look actually old and not just strange.

I was surprised that the film makers made and released a film dealing with Margaret Thatcher's battle with dementia while she is alive. I don't know that this shows loads of tact. Given her fascinating and important life, I was initially surprised that the film's unifying frame was her struggle with dementia. However, you need a focus in a biopic, and the film shows Thatcher as an iron lady both in her politics and in her private life, even when she is elderly and dealing with her grief over her husband's death.

The frame wasn't perfect: It wasn't always clear why the film and her mind were flashing back to the times that they were. It was persuasive that watching contemporary bombings on television inspired Thatcher to remember her girlhood experience of World War II bombings and her hotel IRA bombing. It was persuasive that the death of her husband pushed her to remember her romance and early married life. But why was she remembering the Falkland war? Okay, so admittedly, I closed my eyes for several seconds toward the end of the film, so maybe I missed some connection there. I'm not exactly sure, too, why she was remembering being forced out of office. Perhaps remembering her grace during old adversities was helping Thatcher summon up strength to face the adversity of her husband's death?

Lemons!

2012-01-15T14:58:00.000-05:00

One problem with moving to Philadelphia is that I've missed hanging out with Hopkins while she is jamming. It's one of my favorite times to gab while following her around and occasionally stirring or chopping something.

This weekend, I've gotten to remedy that a bit. Hopkins was working on some lemons and limes for marmalade (did you know there there are yellow limes that look like lemons?!).

The Business of Being Born

2012-01-13T12:41:00.002-05:00

The Business of Being Born, a documentary about the problems with big business hospital births, is exactly the sort of thing that you should never watch: it reminds you how much of modern medicine is just doctors making things up. I've had suspicions that this was the case ever since reading The Death of Ivan Ilych. There are certain thing that doctors are pretty good at, like taking out appendixes or setting broken bones. And then there are other things that you read up on a little bit and you realize that there just isn't that much information available (for instance, the very controversial HPV vaccine).

This documentary unintentionally gives you the impression that you're in a catch-22: on the one hand, medicine has made loads of advances with regard to birthing that help keep mothers and babies alive; on the other hand, doctors, both in the past and in the present, have made a lot of bad medical choices, and we ought not unreflectively defer to them. The film emphasizes the decisions that hospitals make because they're businesses that don't want women in labor to fill up a bed for too long, such as inducing labor with pitocin, which often leads to further medical interventions in the birth. It claims that cesarean section rates sharply rise at 4 and 11 p.m., when doctors want to get home.

The answer that the film suggests is home births assisted by midwives who are prepared to take women to the hospital, should that be necessary. In fact, the woman who is filming the documentary (she's working with Ricki Lake on it) gets pregnant in the course of making the film and decides on a home birth. She goes into premature labor, however, and the baby's head is not down, and she has to have a cesarean section, without which it isn't clear that her baby would have survived. I'm not sure that home births are a financially feasible solution for everyone (the film mentioned that some insurance companies will not cover a home birth, even though it is often significantly cheaper than a hospital birth). In addition, this requires living close enough to a hospital to make it there quickly in case of an emergency.

The film was pretty persuasive in its feminist rhetoric. It claims that birth is empowering for women--it's something that women's bodies are capable of (in most cases). It claims that hospitals too often take the process of birthing away from women and turn it into a medical procedure. It claims that midwives have a practical knowledge of birthing experience that is being lost (and that many doctors have never observed a natural birth).

One really disturbing part of the film was its coverage of the "twilight births" of the 20s, where women were given a medication that did not dull the pain, but rather made them forget the pain. They were sometimes tied to their bed, then, to give birth. And sometimes men didn't know what was going on with their wives. There was a Mad Men episode in which Betty Draper has a similar birth. The Business of Being Born connected the twilight births and other unsound decisions (such as taking x-rays of pregnant mothers) to epidurals and cesarean sections. I think this is probably a stretch and a really anxiety-inducing stretch at that. However, it raises the really important point that technological progress should be always evaluated to make sure that it's really steps forward and not steps backward (as some of our technological "progress" has, in the past, proven to be).

One Day and The Kindle

2012-01-12T00:05:00.000-05:00

"Twenty years; two people," the front cover says it all. David Nicholls' One Day is the story of two people who hook up after graduating from the University of Edinburgh and follows their friendship and occasional romantic encounters through a recounting of the July 15th of each of the next 20 years.

I'm not going to lie: this wasn't a book that I would have picked out myself. A dear friend picked it out as the first installment of our newly founded book club, which is awesomely named, "Lalonda." One Day, which has since been made into an August movie, took me a while to get into, but once I fell, I fell hard. I couldn't put it down and definitely cried 10-ish tears during the last ten percent of the book (I read it on the Kindle so it goes by percents, not page numbers).

At the beginning of the book I was put off by how clearly the author and the characters put each other in categories: Emma and Nicholls put Dexter in the pretty boy, playboy category. Nicholls and Dexter, in turn, put Emma in the sort-of-smart, wanna-be full of original, independent political opinions category. Both of these categories are cliches. Of course, cliches are cliches for a reason, right? There's something in them that resonates. Plus, in the course of the novel, the characters are fleshed out a bit (to use a cliche).

Hmm...I was a little annoyed with the letters that Dexter and Emma send back and forth in the course of the book. They aren't very letter-like letters, I don't think. They're more like gchats or a casual phone call in letter form. I think it's pretty hard to use letters in fiction: it's hard to pull off that they're written by two different people to each other, and not just by one person. I actually can't think of fiction that includes persuasive correspondence. Any nominations for excellently executed fictional letters, dear readers?

I disagree with what I perceived to be one theme of the novel: that of women improving men. Emma is an admirable character; she improves her boyfriends. I think that the book swoops dangerously closely to idolizing women in their male-improving capacities. I don't think that women improve men; I think that men and women can help each other improve in the context of relationships.

I should say a word about the theme of friendship between a man and a woman in the novel. Emma and Dexter briefly hook up, then maintain a friendship over a number of years, punctuated by occasional fights and romantic rekindling. Clearly they are friends or they wouldn't still spend time together when they're seeing other people. Clearly, though, their romantic attraction, waxing and waning, is in the background the whole time. It seems that friendship is their back-up plan since their romantic timing is off. This book could be one giant (I think it's more than 400 pages, but I forget, since I read it on a Kindle) argument for people who say that men and women can't be friends when they aren't married to each other. But their friendship is a pretty objectively good thing, even apart from their romance.

For some reason, One Day reminds me of a book that our Mama Leopard bought us years ago that became Leopard legend, The Inklings. The Inklings is a novel of a girl who, as best I remember, spends a semester or year abroad from UVA at Oxford. She falls for two men--a rich minor nobility of her own age, who is, of course, slightly degenerate. And second, her poor, smart tutor. Guess which one she chooses? (Incidentally, the most legendary part of this legendary book is the repeated description of the minor nobility helping her on with her coat and sensually [or as sensually as a Christian romantic fiction can summon up, which is, for the record, a whole lot!] lifts her hair out of her coat for her. That scene is repeated so many times in the novel as to become comic.)

One Day reminds me of The Inklings for this reason: In one of his essays, C.S. Lewis describes the practice of imagination as "castle-building." He says that people who practice mental castle-building might be cut out to be writers. People who are always the star of their own story, however, are not. This makes me think I'm not, because, while like Anne of Green Gables, who was dreaming of rescuing her friend from a fever and left the cheese-cloth off of the pudding, which allowed a mouse to climb in and drown, I have an active imagination, my imagined stories are mostly about me (Or possibly it's the length of this run-on sentence that would prevent me from being a writer...). Both The Inklings and One Day strike me as being particular fantasies of the authors--imaginations that are really all about themselves. The author of The Inklings, as far as I remember, was a mother of nine who was homeschooling them. It seems that The Inklings was what she wished had happened to her. It seems to me that David Nicholls may also just be writing out his own fantasy, although I have the feeling that he's the girl, Emma, rather than the boy in this novel (it seems he's done a little theater, like Emma, and has written some screen plays, which as far as I remember, she tried to do, and then some novels, as she finally does).

Not to make this far too drawn out, but I went to see some improv while I was reading the part of the novel where Emma was dating a (not very funny) stand-up comedian. Well, real life meets fiction, because none of the improv comedians were very funny at all. I mean, seriously, I was barely even tempted to smile, not to mention laugh. It all made me feel like I was simply an uptight person. The first comedian reminded me a lot of Ian, the boy Emma dates. He seemed to be not very comfortable with himself. And it seemed like all of the things that he was saying, he'd already said many times before. The whole improv thing did get very funny, though, when they started riffing off the graduate student we were celebrating. Graduate students must be the easiest thing in the world to make fun of. They were asking our friend about her life and one of our colleagues shouted out, "When are you going to be done with your dissertation?" Oh my, just the humor that I need at this bleak spot in my life.

The Kindle: This is my first time using one for a sustained length of time. I'm glad it has the percentage of the book read at the bottom. I am obsessed with knowing how far along I am when I'm reading. I don't think that the face of it holds very much text--I find myself turning a lot of pages, more, I think, than a book, which makes it mildly more annoying if you need to go back and reread something. But I'm still getting used to navigating it. In its defense, it's very light, so pretty good for reading in bed (I always get tired arms from big, heavy book reading in bed). And it's easy to read. I can't imagine reading everything on it forever, though--it had no variation, which is to say any book would come to it in the same font size and font type as every other book. Any personality or character of the book will be lost. But that's all Francisco's critique; I'm just stealing it.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I can't get the buttons. There are two large buttons, one on each side of the rectangle. Both mean that you're turning the page forward. Now that is very convenient, because mostly when you're reading, you need to turn the page forward. It's convenient because you can hold the Kindle in either hand and turn the pages forward. But I just can't get it: in real life, one side of an open book let's you turn the page forward; the other side of the book lets you turn the page backward. Now on this rectangle, both big buttons mean forward; both small ones above the big ones mean backward.

(picture)

Cutest. Text. Ever.

2012-01-11T18:30:00.002-05:00

"Hi Emily! I'm in Florida at a conference working on my texting skills. Hope all is well. Love, Your Uncle"

The Ethics of Used Books

2012-01-11T00:05:00.000-05:00

We've finally gotten to the place where we realize that it's a contradiction to purport to care about the environment and buy water bottles all the time as a fashion statement. It's pretty good to just drink tap water, since the tap water in America is drinkable. No need to cart water all around the world and cover it in disposable plastic.

I think we need to come around a bit, similarly, on used books. Used books are very environmentally friendly: Buying used books means that people don't have to throw away their old books, and they don't have to buy brand new ones all the time (save the trees and still read!).

I give used books as gifts sometimes, but only to dear friends or family members, because I sense the stigma of giving used books, particularly if they aren't in mint condition (unless they're signed by the author or are first editions). But I really don't think that there should be a stigma about giving gifts of used books. What better way to share the books you love with other people in a way that encourages reuse? In addition, there's the wonderful smell of old books. There's the joy of imagining someone reading it before you, particularly if they signed their name in the front. There is the often superior quality of older books, unless they're those super cheap mass market paperbacks. (There is also the danger of finding a book with inane notes and highlighting, but that's just a risk you'll have to run.)

Another advantage of buying and reading used books is that it keeps you away from the idea that only new things are good. Somewhere (I think in an introduction he wrote to Athanasius' On the Incarnation) C.S. Lewis recommends reading two old books for every new one. New books are great--it's great to read reactions to contemporary life; it's great to be part of the contemporary literary conversation. But, it isn't good to reduce the literary conversation to what is new. It's good to read old books, too. (This isn't to say that you can only buy old used books--there are always a ton of new ones for sale, too.)

Credit: This idea came out of a conversation with Hopkins after her epic Epiphany party, which I am proud to say I shut down just under 24 hours after it began. Some of the ideas in it are straight up hers. Especially the part about it being a stigma to give used books as gifts unless they're first editions or signed. But probably the rest of it, too. The mostly unrelated rant about water bottles is mine. The other thing that really annoys me is making so many unnecessary things out of recycled paper as if it doesn't matter what we consume, as long as we nod our heads to the environmentalist movement.

Break In

2012-01-10T00:05:00.000-05:00

A week or so ago I discovered that my car had been broken into over night. Since I'm traveling for a month, there was a good bit of luggage in my car.

It was almost elegantly done--just a small window, perfectly smashed. My glove compartment and cds were laying on the passenger side floor, with just one record of work done to my car sitting on the seat. They stopped rummaging through the glove compartment when they reached the St. Christopher medal at the bottom that Hopkins left there. The Gideon Bible that she also left was splayed open on the floor.

It was hard to tell if they went through the trunk. I think that they did. It was in a slight disarray. I think they got my grandma's pearl necklace (utterly un-reportable in dollar amounts). But they missed some other jewelry (including a piece from my great-grandmother) that I'd thankfully shoved in my shoe. Things were a bit disheveled back there, but it could have just been from my own frantic packing, and I can't quite remember what I packed and what I didn't. But the idea that someone just ruffled through my stuff because they wanted to, showing off their power to take as much or as little as they liked, is incredibly upsetting!

The gas cap (which opens from inside the car) was open. Why in the world?

A woman stopped to sympathize while I was taping up the window (the last time I was taping up a window, it was in Waco). She said this area has had 60 break-ins recently. She said that they've just been taking small change. I can't really understand the urge to take small change.

The man who fixed the glass was wonderful (reinforcing my deep and abiding love of mechanics--I know, I know: he wasn't exactly a mechanic, but he was a person who fixes cars). I peppered him with questions while he worked: Probably it was my out of state plates that made the thief think he could pick up a GPS. They broke the small window because it was the easiest one to break. The rubber is harder to bend to fit into the window in the cold. He even vacuumed up the broken glass.

The fact that my car was broken into makes me feel vulnerable, like it could happen at any time, never entirely safe. It annoys me with its inconvenience (I spent the afternoon on the phone with the police, my insurance company, various glass companies, and my bank.) It also surprises me, in a way, that it doesn't happen more often--it wasn't too hard for someone to vandalize my property (not that he really got anything out of it).

Iris

2012-01-09T00:05:00.002-05:00

Iris is just about the saddest film ever--I cried through at least half of the movie. The film juxtaposes the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch's youth and young love (when she's played by Kate Winslet) with her husband's care for her when she's battling Alzheimer's at the end of her life (when she's played by Judi Dench).

Iris Murdoch is portrayed as a willful, feisty woman who John Bayley, the man she later marries, adores so much that he sticks with her throughout her fairly free love. She keeps him on his toes both in her youth and in her old age, when she sometimes forgetfully wanders off.

It is incredibly sad to see a woman who loves words and ideas and loving as much as Iris Murdoch does lose her memory and her ability to speak and remember and recognize people. It is painful to see John Bayley's pain at the way that Iris changes, but beautiful to see the way that he continues to care for her. John sees the persistence of her personality in the midst of the erosion of her memory.

I thought that the portrayal of Alzheimer's was pretty good, although at times it was a little too overt, harping on each stage of the progression of the disease, rather than subtly letting it unfold. Of course, the film had to squeeze a lot of changes into a relatively short time.

(picture)

Quartet in Autumn

2012-01-08T00:05:00.003-05:00

Quartet in Autumn is one of Barbara Pym's later novels, a bit more sober than her earlier ones. The novel revolves around four colleagues who are all close to retirement age and single.

Edwin, Norman, Letty and Marcia are all more or less alone. The novel explores their relationships with each other and with others. It's awkward and sad. They are each fairly strange.

This is only the second of Pym's novels that I've read (after Excellent Women), but each time I'm reading Pym, I have the urge to read her into one of the characters. She reminds me here of Letty, of whom she writes: "She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction." Of course, in this novel, Pym attempts to write about precisely that sort of life. Pym writes un-nostalgically; she doesn't try to romanticize the single aging woman. Rather, she sarcastically and ironically writes it in all of it's happiness and unhappiness.

The whole novel I spent waiting for something to happen. Things do happen: there's death and insanity, but mostly there's life--often ordinary and simple and boring life. The lesson that Pym presents at the end is the constant existence of the possibility for change. This is a real lesson for the aging quartet--surprises happen and one can make unexpected choices.

(picture, picture)

The God of Small Things

2012-01-07T00:05:00.003-05:00

I told a friend from India that I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri and he recommended The God of Small Things, which was written about the Syrian Orthodox community in southwest India, called Kerala, where he's from. The Syrian Orthodox community traces their founding to seven original families who were converted by St. Thomas, the apostle.

What a wonderful recommendation! The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy's Booker Prize winning first book. It couldn't be more different from Lahiri's writing, which is spare and plain. Roy writes in the tradition of magical realism. Her writing is fantastical and playful--she writes from the perspective of a child who is learning English as a second language, playing with words and capitalization from a child's perspective. This results in extremely poetic, Gerard Manly Hopkins-esque writing. For instance:

"Past floating yellow limes in brine that needed prodding from time to time (or else islands of black fungus formed like frilled mushrooms in a clear soup)."

Honestly, I was entirely unfamiliar with magical realism outside of its Latin American incarnation (moving up to the U.S. in books like Bless Me, Ultima). The God of Small Things is a lot like One Hundred Years of Solitude--both describe multiple generations of a big, important family. Both deal with incest.

The God of Small Things is about twins who have one soul--Rahel, our narrator, and Estha, her brother. It is about the violation of what Roy calls the laws of love: there is a sexual relationship between a touchable and an untouchable, there is a man forcing a boy into a sexual relationship, and, at the end of the novel, there is incest between the twins.

While Tocqueville announces the movement of the world from aristocracy to democracy, Roy traces, in an aristocratic society, the violent backlash of fear and anxiety against the movement toward democracy. Roy writes:

"The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, man's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness."

This is the theme of the book--power's fear of powerlessness. It is this fear that is unleashed in the society when an untouchable man sleeps with a touchable woman. It is this fear that is expressed by men beating their wives, which Roy writes about. It is this fear that is expressed in the capitalist fear of Marxism, which Roy also brings up.

Christianity is not, in this novel, an alternative to the caste system; rather, Roy shows how Christianity in India syncretized with the existing caste system. Interestingly, it's television that finally brings some democratic equality to the community, but it's democracy and equality in a globalized, mediocrity-inducing sense.

(picture, picture)

Twelfth Morning; Or What You Will

2012-01-06T09:36:00.012-05:00

Twelfth Morning; Or What You Will

by Elizabeth Bishop

Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet,
the thin gray mist lets everything show through:
the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse,
a foundered house,

—cement and rafters sticking from a dune.
(The Company passes off these white but shopworn
dunes as lawns.) “Shipwreck,” we say; perhaps
this is a housewreck.

The sea’s off somewhere, doing nothing. Listen.
An expelled breath. And faint, faint, faint
(or are you hearing things), the sandpipers’
heart-broken cries.

The fence, three-strand, barbed-wire, all pure rust,
three dotted lines, comes forward hopefully
across the lots; thinks better of it; turns
a sort of corner…

Don’t ask the big white horse, Are you supposed
to be inside the fence or out? He’s still
asleep. Even awake, he probably
remains in doubt.

He’s bigger than the house. The force of
personality, or is perspective dozing?
A pewter-colored horse, an ancient mixture,
tin, lead, and silver,

he gleams a little. But a gallon can
approaching on the head of Balthazár
keeps flashing that the world’s a pearl, and I,
I am

its highlight! You can hear the water now,
inside, slap-slapping. Balthazár is singing.
"Today’s my Anniversary," he sings,
"the Day of Kings."

Not only is this poem appropriate, since it's Epiphany, but it is also fascinating to me after becoming more familiar with Elizabeth Bishop's interest in painting. From the first lines, "Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet, / the thin gray mist lets everything show through," I am reminded of painting. In her prose reflections on a Brazilian poet she admired, Gregorio Valdes (several of whose paintings were exhibited in New York recently), she writes about how he, too, lets the background show through,

"That day we bought one of the few pictures he had on hand--a still life of Key West fruits such as a coconut, a mango, sapodillos, a watermelon, and a sugar apple, all stiffly arranged against a blue background. In this picture the paint had cracked slightly, and examining it I discovered one eccentricity of Gregorio's painting. The blue background extended all the way to the tabletop and where the paint had cracked the blue showed through the fruit. Apparently he had felt that since the wall was back of the fruit he should paint it there, before he could go on and paint the fruit in front of it."

Certain of Bishop's pictures similarly work with the foregrounding of odd plants and trees that allow, in yet another way, the background to show through:

The rest of the poem plays with perspective. The barbed-wire fence "comes forward hopefully." The horse (is he inside the fence or outside of it?) is bigger than the house. Balthazar, the boy in the poem, named after one of the three kings, is the highlight of the world's pearl.

Here Bishop is wonderful--she's highlighting something that you don't expect to be highlighted--a little boy with a gallon can of water on his head. How appropriate to pick the Feast of Epiphany to do it! On the one hand, Epiphany celebrates the arrival of the three kings, and the little boy starkly contrasts with a king. On the other hand, Epiphany is also about the welcoming of the Gentiles to worship Christ. It celebrates the inclusion of others into God's plan. In this sense, it is the perfect day to focus on the little boy with a gallon can of water on his head.

(picture, pictures)

San Francisco.2 (New Year's Eve)

2012-01-06T00:05:00.003-05:00

The rest of the afternoon we spend wandering around San Francisco, before meeting Hopkins for church and dinner. It was wonderful to see Hopkins in her natural environment.

And what a wonderful natural environment! I was amazed by all of the clothes hanging out the windows in Chinatown.

Wandering and taking pictures is my favorite way to get a feel for a city. And boy, did we get a feel for San Francisco--particularly for the ubiquitous hills. I felt those hills in my calves and shins for days.

A hummingbird just came out of nowhere when I was taking pictures! But I saw it later sitting on a branch of a bush. I didn't think that they were supposed to be able to sit down.

The weather was lovely--absolutely clear and sunny, with blue, blue water. It was strange though--when you're in the sun, you're warm; when you're in the shade, you're a little cool; when you're walking up a hill, you're absolutely hot. It was sort of dizzying.

The architecture was delightful--there were bay windows everywhere, curving in and out in rhythms along the streets (reminding me of the constant up and down of the streets).

We managed to stay in San Francisco until the midnight New Year's fireworks, which was no small feat, considering that that's 3 a.m. East Coast time.

San Francisco

2012-01-05T00:05:00.002-05:00

We started our visit to San Francisco at the Legion of Honor museum, which is a lovely art museum on a hill with great views of the San Francisco bay.

The museum had an interesting exhibit of Camille Pissarro's work, called "Pissarro's People," connecting his art to his anarchist political positions. Actually, I was thinking that the Front Porch Republic people might really like him--the exhibit emphasized the way that he drew laborers (often agricultural laborers) in order to emphasize the dignity of their work. He compared their work in the fields to his work painting. In a series of pictures smuggled out of France, he drew the threats of capitalism. In his paintings toward the end of his life, he painted a heaven-like utopia of people working in golden fields.

After the Legion of Honor, we drove down into the city.

I can safely say that in the day we spent in San Francisco, I smelled exponentially more pot than I've smelled in the rest of my life combined (and I've spent time in Amsterdam!). (Early in the day, I said, "What's that smell? It smells sort of like a skunk." Pot.)

Lemon bars.

Nevada City

2012-01-04T00:05:00.001-05:00

What I was most surprised about in California was how old things were. These pictures are from another city that we visited, Nevada City. Nevada City was founded during the California Gold Rush in the 1850s, and it is adorable!

The houses are little and they remind me of gingerbread houses--very ornately decorated.

The place is bursting with little gift stores and various sorts of shops.

And it's all set against a lovely backdrop of pine tree-covered hills (not pictured).

This last picture I just snuck in--it's the cool art deco movie theater from yet another town that we visited, Grass Valley.

A Random Assortment

2012-01-03T11:49:00.003-05:00

~ Fear the vest! (On Rick Santorum's sweater vest) (via Francisco)

~ Some TSE inspired listening via Terry Teachout. Because we all know that I would jump off a bridge if TSE told me to.

~ This article challenges ethical reasons for not eating meat (which I'm pretty wary of). It also contains a fascinating fact:

"Mice are far more sentient than we thought. They sing complex, personalised love songs to each other that get more complex over time."

~ Hopkins sent me this article. I was super confused why at first (the title is, "The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible," not really something that you need to convince me about). And then I saw the name of the author. And then I found it far more interesting, although incredibly choppy (let's blame that on the editor). Especially Robinson's argument that Christianity parallels literary realism:

"Moments of the highest import pass among people who are so marginal that conventional history would not have noticed them: aliens, the enslaved, people themselves utterly unaware that their lives would have consequence. The great assumption of literary realism is that ordinary lives are invested with a kind of significance that justifies, or requires, its endless iterations of the commonplace, including, of course, crimes and passions and defeats, however minor these might seem in the world’s eyes. This assumption is by no means inevitable. Most cultures have written about demigods and kings and heroes. Whatever the deeper reasons for the realist fascination with the ordinary, it is generous even when it is cruel, simply in the fact of looking as directly as it can at people as they are and insisting that insensitivity or banality matters. The Old Testament prophets did this, too."

(picture--I had some of these chocolates in California, and they were amazing)

Truckee

2012-01-03T00:05:00.002-05:00

One of our stops was in the old railroad town (and now, lovely mountain resort town) of Truckee, about a half an hour from Lake Tahoe.

Everyone there was complaining about the lack of snow. There was no snow at all when I visited, and I guess there are usually multiple feet of snow by New Year's in the California mountains (there are many ski resorts in the area).

Above: the C.B. White house, not to be confused with the E.B. White house (I was).

Northern California

2012-01-02T10:30:00.000-05:00

I just returned from some Northern California travels. I'm an East Coast girl, which means when I moved to Texas a few years ago, that was by far the most West point I'd ever been (before then, I'd mostly stuck to states that touch, or almost touch, the Atlantic Ocean). Since Texas, I've traveled a bit more in the U.S., but this trip is my first time in California (and Nevada!, which we were in for a second when we got a little turned around).

There are loads of tall, thin evergreens, and we stopped at some lovely vistas to look out over the mountains.

One of the places that we stopped was Donner Lake--I understand it's the place where the Donner expedition camped out for the winter.

We had lunch on Lake Tahoe, which is a charming alpine lake that reminds me of Lake Geneva (even some of the architecture of the houses around it looks like the Swiss mountain style).

What Gets Dropped on NYE

2011-12-31T12:07:00.002-05:00

I never got to see the ball drop when I was little, so I built it up to be a grand event in my head: it must be a giant ball that dropped and shattered. When I saw the real thing on tv in my late teens, it was a real let down. Here is a list of other, way more interesting, things that get dropped. This list does Pennsylvania proud--we drop lots of food items--a broasted chicken, various forms of candy, a bag of chips, and my favorite (because it's where Parker lives), a pregnant Mrs. Pickle in Dillsburg, PA (usually they drop a Mr. Pickle, but Mr. and Mrs. Pickle got married in June). There's also a big wrench drop in Mechanicsburg.

(picture)

Grigg's

2011-12-29T12:43:00.000-05:00

Grigg's is a little coffee store, in a town near Williamsport, that's been there for a hundred years.

It has gorgeous ceilings and is crowded with decorations, coffee-related and not (I love these marching elephants).

When I was there, the cafe and shop were filled with loads of Christmas shoppers, almost exclusively my grandparents' age.

The line was long, and I didn't have a book, so I entertained myself by taking pictures.

Christmas Eve

2011-12-25T20:22:00.002-05:00

(They're blurry, since I kept the flash off.)

Reading the Christmas story...

... and acting it out.

Candlelit carols.

(She mostly blew the candles out.)

Homemade ice cream.

Cousins!

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Wishful Thinking

2011-12-23T23:40:00.000-05:00

Hopkins, over at Ten Thousand Places, posts a number of wonderful gift guides each advent. In that spirit, I give you my own wish list (emphasis on "wish"):

1. Elizabeth Bishop's Merida from the Roof:

I think that this was my favorite picture from the exhibit. Somehow I weirdly forgot to take a picture of this one. It doesn't look anything like this picture above. In the real thing the houses pop with color, especially the neon yellow one in the upper right corner, which almost sparkles. The loads of windmills are dreamlike (and clearly the perfect picture to own to declare your own environmentalism!).

I have a suspicion that all of the pictures from the exhibit are for sale (the horror!). I mean, this would be great news if I had the means to purchase one of them, but it is terrible news, given that I anticipate never having those means. I'm not sure how much they cost, as I gather it's gouache to write the price down somewhere.

2. Jadeite dishes:

I'm in love: it's the color, and the fact that it's vintage. And I'd like loads and loads of it. (I also love green hobnail milk glass.)

3. All of Laurie Colwin's books, signed:

In case it hasn't been already evident on this blog, Laurie Colwin is my favorite writer ever. In fact, I'm not quite sure how I would've made it through this last year without her. Even better: a Laurie Colwin letter!

4. A green Oscar de la Renta gown. Any green Oscar de la Renta gown. This one is still my favorite (but I've never seen him do green wrong):

5. A little two-person convertible so I can drive up and down Route 1 in California with a scarf in my hair and some sparkly sunglasses and probably a green gown:

(picture, picture, picture, picture)

Christmas in New York

2011-12-21T22:56:00.001-05:00

After the Elizabeth Bishop exhibit and a burger at Kennedy's, we ran off to see The Messiah at Fisher Hall, which I understand is known for having problems with its acoustics. The Messiah is such a lovely advent meditation. It's my goal to go every single year; I'm pretty sure that this is only my second year to make it.

Fisher Hall is surprisingly plain. We had seats in the boxes on the sides and our hosts lent us fancy opera glasses so we could see the soloists (or check out the other audience members...). The only problem with the concert was the two of the soloists had colds and one left in the middle (there was no replacement!). Either way, it took my back to childhood Christmases where we listened to a tape of The Messiah while dancing around the play room.

On Sunday we did a good bit of walking across Central Park on the way to and from the Frick, a wonderful 5th Avenue art gallery. (The picture above reminds me of a Brueghel, if Brueghel painted in a big city.)

The Frick was wonderful. Because of Hopkins' rave reviews, I've been wanting to go for a while. Unfortunately we didn't go together, but I'll go back with you, Hopkins!

It was quite possible the most beautifully arranged and presented art I've ever seen. The mansion is beautiful; the rooms are exquisitely decorated; and the artworks compliment each other. It's the closest thing to a European palace that I've ever seen in America.

This painting of Sir Thomas Moore is one of the Frick's most famous. He's displayed across the room from Oliver Cromwell and they sort of glower at one another. The description on that phone thing that they give you is so funny: the man in the phone says that the fur and the velvet make you weak in the knees.

When walking through Central Park, our host carries a speaker so that he can enjoy the music. This meant that we were led through Central Park by a man wearing an orange hunting cap holding a speaker that was playing opera. It was definitely a moment that made you feel like you're in a movie.

I was really taken by all of the Christmas tree stands that lined the blocks and were, according to our host, manned by Canadians who sleep in little shelters near their trees.

We also hit the typical tourist spots--5th Avenue and Rockefeller Center, all the buildings decked out in their Christmas splendor (Oh my goodness--I was thrilled to go into the gorgeous Art Deco 30 Rock building!). And small town girl that I am, I was thoroughly shocked and appalled by the half-dressed models in the store windows (not pictured).

This is my favorite picture of all.

Last, but not least: here's the view from the window of our hosts' apartment. Moments like these make me feel like the richest person alive.

(picture, picture, picture, picture)

2011-12-21T14:49:00.003-05:00

Alternate career possibilities (you can tell how down I'm feeling about the job market at the moment, which is perhaps worse, if that's possible, while at home, where not having a job is a more unusual thing):

1. editor (ideally for a university press)
2. guidance counselor (oh yeah Mrs. Coach!)
3. professor in Poland
4. philosophical therapist
5. Northside Social barista

and to continue the list less practically, but more excitingly:

6. National Geographic photographer
7. professional blogger
8. New York City socialite
9. poet

I welcome additional suggestions, especially for things that require minimal additional schooling and don't require you to move every few years, but rather allow you to pick where you're going to live, all of which I've discovered are very valuable to me.

Elizabeth Bishop, Artist and Curator

2011-12-21T09:59:00.010-05:00

Just after we arrived in New York City last weekend (well, just after lunch at Blossom, a spicy vegan hipster restaurant [is that redundant?]), we headed over to an exhibit on Elizabeth Bishop that I've been dying to see. "We" included Francisco and our two lovely, exuberant and colorful hosts.

The Bishop exhibit was in one small room of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (I think the gallery itself was only two rooms). It was a tiny exhibit, with excellent explanations of most of the pieces on the wall. It contained paintings by Bishop herself, as well as paintings that were in her family, and other artworks that she picked up during her many travels.

It's hard to explain this, but Bishop's paintings, quite possibly more than any other paintings I've seen, reward viewing in person. They just really don't look like the photographs of her paintings. The photographs of her paintings look flat and size-less. In real life, her paintings are extraordinarily delicate--they are painted on very thin, almost translucent paper. The paper is mounted on other, stronger paper. The paper curls slightly and gathers in curves, like thin paper is wont to do. The paintings are mostly quite small, the kind of paintings that I love most, where you have to get close to the picture to examine it. Bishop's brush stroke outlines are bold and blotchy on the thin paper, but also shaky. The colors in her paintings look like watercolors--they fill in the approximate space that they're supposed to, sometimes bleeding outside of the lines.

This one says, "Happy Birthday," in the top left.

Here is the desk that she used in Brazil in front of some paintings (I was surprised at how large and rustic this desk is).

This reminds me of the picture of flowers associated with Emily Dickinson (I think that her brother's mistress painted them for her).

This picture, painted for a lover, places Baedeker's Northern Italy beside some pansies, bringing up themes of travel and home, like the poem, "Questions of Travel." Also note the tablecloth's unfinished bottom (pretty typical of her paintings).

I like the irony: the powerlines look like a light from heaven shining on the church.

Bishop not only painted, but also put together these boxes, inspired by Joseph Cornell. This one deals with infant mortality in Brazil.

This is her reflection on several lines from an Octavio Paz poem she translated (and which was dedicated to Joseph Cornell):

A comb is a harp strummed by the glance
of a little girl
born dumb.

These next pictures showcase some of the art she collected.

This birdcage, of course, brings to mind the birdcage in "Questions of Travel."

(The Economist reviews the exhibit here.)

(picture, picture)

A Random Assortment

2011-12-20T17:39:00.001-05:00

I give you today's random assortment with a generous portion of nostalgia: The fellowship program that I've been assisting with this semester is over, the fellows have gone, and I'm back home. I hate leaving people. "Superdepressfest," as one of the fellows put it.

So here's the links:

~ Some of Woody Allen's hilarious letters to Diane Keaton. I love nicknames in letters, and "Worm" is a great one. (via Hopkins)

~ Education and Roma children. Many Roma who emigrate to the UK are driven to do so by the possibilities for education there, which are not present in, for example, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, due to existing prejudice.

~ City ties! Potentially super localist! Although how much I like these ties varies according to how regular the street plan is. But, for those who like maps...

~ Paper dolls of Leslie Knope, Ron Swanson, and Tom Haverford. I love these. Especially Ron with braids. I obviously get to be Leslie (right?).

~ Robert Frost's Christmas Cards! (one pictured above)

~ This combines two things of interest to me: QR codes and tattoos. I still don't have the vaguest clue how QR codes and this randomly working one confuses me even further.

~ P.D. James' latest novel is a mystery sequel to Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes to Pemberley. The Economist reviews it here.

~ I love that Garance, too, is afraid to dance, but that she does it anyway. The video is so cute!

(picture)

Christmas Crafts

2011-12-19T14:10:00.000-05:00

Being a graduate student, I don't have loads of space in my life for creative expression. In fact, besides taking a couple of pictures and posting them on my blog, I don't have many creative outlets. Which is one of the reasons that I like Christmas: all that gift-giving opens up space for creativity. (Technically, this doesn't have to do with Christmas, but for a birthday that is very close to Christmas we'll count it.)

I needed something to wrap Francisco's birthday presents up with and didn't have any wrapping paper. I felt the need to be creative with it since he used old, carefully chosen New Yorker covers for my birthday gifts. I saw online some pictures of handmade wrapping paper using stamps, which looked amazing, and I figured I could use clip art and do something a bit simpler. I picked lots of simple pictures that make me think of Francisco and repeated them in a pattern and voila!--wrapping paper-ish sort of thing (okay, so I only had a black and white printer--this would have been way cooler in color).

Here's the final product:

2011-12-14T15:29:00.002-05:00

Don't worry, FLG: I was pretty sure that the article ranking Georgetown as the 10th most hipster university was wrong, so I checked with Edge, who is still around Georgetown a lot (I haven't spend much time there this semester). Not only is Edge around Georgetown a lot, but she's also from Brooklyn, so she knows a hipster when she sees one. She writes:

"For my part, I think this is crazy--Georgetown is not hipster at all. It remains preppy to the core, as far as I am concerned. It is hipster only insofar as hipsterdom has now become mainstream (tortoise shell glasses, skinny jeans, floral grandma prints (I read your blog, you hipster you!), etc)."

Black Floral Prints

2011-12-14T10:02:00.003-05:00

I'm pretty infatuated by really old black floral prints at the moment. I think that they might be just vintage enough to be okay to wear?

Okay, so not so much the backpack, but just showing you the prints!

(picture, picture, picture)

The View From My Window.3

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

Old views here.

Quote

2011-12-14T00:32:00.002-05:00

"Cocktails at Six"

--the epigraph on a gravestone that I came across on a walk today

On Conversion and Flip-Flopping

2011-12-13T20:28:00.005-05:00

"Why Are American Politicians Always Switching Religions?" really annoys me, mostly for asking "how we can gauge the authenticity of any politician’s conversion at all."

The article concludes by paralleling flip-flopping on public policies to converting: "Romney is known for changing his mind, but he has had two fewer wives, and two fewer religions, than Newt Gingrich. So who’s the flip-flopper?" I don't know that I have any particular problem with flip-flopping on public policy (as the situation can change or the candidate can gain more information about a particular policy), but I'm offended by the insinuation that converting to another church is a sort of flip-flopping that is primarily politically motivated. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't think you can tell, so you've got to give the person the benefit of the doubt.

(My comments here have nothing to do with Gingrich's Catholicism, about which I know nothing. If he didn't get annulments for the first two marriages, then that's a serious problem.)

It's so nice of Oppenheimer to admit that "[o]f course, when considering why people convert, genuine belief is always a possibility."

I think that the problem of the article is that he considers politician's conversions as if they're quite separate from whatever converting goes on in society as a whole. I have no idea what percentage of people do not practice in the denomination in which they are raised, but I bet it's pretty high. And I'd be surprised if politicians' percentages were very different from the percentages of Americans as a whole. (Update: Pew says that 44% of Americans do not currently belong to their childhood faith.)

And what in the world does Oppenheimer mean when he writes, "Gingrich and Obama are hardly unique in the annals of contemporary politics. Major American politicians seem unusually promiscuous in their religious affinities, not just switching houses of worship but totally altering the substance of their worship" (emphasis is mine)?! The examples that follow are Bush moving from Episcopal to Methodist, Harry Reid moving from I'm not sure what (Protestantism? nothing?) to Mormonism, Bill Clinton moving from not attending a church to carrying a Bible, and Ronald Reagan going from Disciples of Christ to possibly fundamentalist. Okay, so when there is a move from unbelief in God to belief, sure, someone totally alters the substance of his worship. But many of these cases are from one denomination of Christianity to another. I call that altering the form of their worship. The object of their worship continues to be God. (Actually, I have no idea at all what he means by the "substance of their worship.")

And why in the world does a piece about politicians' conversions turn to intellectuals converting to Eastern Orthodoxy??!: "(There is a whole other article to be written about the cerebral types who find a home in Eastern Orthodoxy: columnist Rod Dreher, the late church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, the historian Albert Raboteau, the writers Andre Dubus III and Frank Schaeffer.)" There are thousands of other articles to be written; it's beside the point to mention them there.

Green Dress, Sound of Music Edition

2011-12-13T19:06:00.003-05:00

I love this green dress that Maria is wearing when she returns from the convent. As far as I can tell from the internet, it was auctioned off and sold for $45,000.

(picture, picture)

Christmas Market

2011-12-13T13:59:00.004-05:00

I just discovered that Philly has a Christmas market! So I went down and met Sayers for lunch and we walked around. There are cute, although I'd say slightly expensive, ornaments and little gifts from America and Germany and Ukraine and North Dakota and Mexico, among other places.

Going to Europe for Christmas markets is still my goal, but this will do fine for now!

Twitter

2011-12-12T22:45:00.001-05:00

Gave in and am eating one of the things I got my dad for Christmas #imstarving #darkchocolatecoverededamame

New Castle

2011-12-12T09:14:00.004-05:00

Last night, a fellow and I made a trip down to visit some friends in New Castle, Delaware, for turkey gumbo. I had never been before to New Castle, and, embarrassingly, didn't know a thing about it. So our host took us for a walk and told us about the history of the town. (It was dark for the walk and I didn't bring my camera, so these pictures are mined from google, unfortunately.) He started with its Dutch founding, proceeded to it being taken over by the Swedes, and then to the influence of the British.

New Castle is where William Penn arrived when he first came to America. Delaware was originally part of Pennsylvania until it seceded (which, according to my friend, is why it was so eager to ratify the Constitution--before anyone tried to force it to become part of Pennsylvania again). When Delaware was part of Pennsylvania, PA had a dual executive, with governments in both New Castle and Philadelphia. Okay, so Mama Leopard is going to make tons of fun of me when she finds out that I didn't know all of this.

The old Anglican church in New Castle is very interesting, not only because it's in cruciform style, instead of the manor house style of more southern Anglican churches, but also because it's lit up with spotlights at night and the crosses on top of the gravestones reflect on the walls of the church. It's all very film noir.

(picture, picture, picture)

Dancing

2011-12-11T10:27:00.004-05:00

One of the fellows was asking one of the other fellows who was the best dancer last night, and he refused to answer. "But," he said, "it looked like Emily was having the best time."

I'd been in the mood to go dancing for months, and had been thwarted at every turn, but last night, at the spur of the moment, we managed to stuff a bunch of fellows in a huge suburban and show up at the Barbary. Of course, the Barbary had a little cover charge, and, since the fellows had just been at a piano bar with a cover charge, they didn't want to pay it. The bouncers suggested as an alternative the Barbary's 90s hip hop bar next door, which had DJ's and dancing (I, of course, didn't know much of the music, since I was homeschooled in the 90s, plus it's hard to dance to since it's slower, I think).

I have never seen a place like this before. One of the walls was a mural of the Last Supper; another was a rich red wallpaper that could have come from a palace in Vienna.

The DJ's were the cutest. Well, the one on the right was the cutest. He had a blue and white cardigan which he took off and put on every five minutes. The same with his uber-hipster neon fake Ray Bans. His hair was red and tall--it's hard to explain, but it looked like the plastic Bart Simpson that was spinning on top of the records. Not only was there a plastic Bart Simpson spinning, but there was also bear with hair all over it in tie-dyed baseball cap spinning. The DJ at one point put a bear hat with his face coming out the mouth like the man wearing the actual bear in True Grit.

Have I mentioned that the place was loaded with hipsters? I mean, I've never seen that many fedoras and cardigans in one place, especially not at a place where people were dancing. It was so funny because all the hipsters looked bored (typical hipster expression). But dancing is not a thing that you're supposed to be bored while you're doing it. You're supposed to be into it; it's one of those things that requires absorption, as Hegel would say.

(picture)

Raging Bull

2011-12-09T00:05:00.001-05:00

Raging Bull is another movie that's on netflix from that top 100 list.

I found it to be incredibly emotionally moving: It's emotionally moving in Jake LaMotta's abusiveness and paranoia. It's emotional in all the punching (the boxing part was actually too much for me, although it's pretty clearly fake). It's emotional in the remarkable downfall that he undergoes from middleweight champion to prisoner and from a man with (some) principles (at least with regard to fighting) to man who will fake a loss.

Jake LaMotta sees his fake loss as his downturn as a man. It's sort of funny, because even before he fakes a loss in a fight, he's a pretty terrible husband and brother. But after the faked loss and the attainment of middleweight champion, he quickly becomes a fat old man, not a good thing for a boxer (holy goodness, how did they get him to go from so thin to so fat!).

The mafia control of the fighting establishment is the tragedy of the film--regardless of how good of a fighter Jake LaMotta was, he wouldn't be allowed to compete for the championship unless the mafia said so. And then the mafia could tell him when to win and when to lose.

The treatment that women faced and endured was truly unbelievable. If a man commanded me to bring him his meal, I'm fairly certain I'd walk out immediately. Not to mention the physical abuse that the women put up with. The women took care of the food and the kids and then were told to sit quietly and look pretty and take orders. I suppose the exception is Jake's wife, Vicky, when she finally leaves him at the end.

As far as I can tell, Jake LaMotta is still alive. How weird to have a movie of your life, especially when it's a pretty sad one, while you're still alive.

(picture)

2011-12-08T15:15:00.000-05:00

My new teacup, which I love.

The Graduate

2011-12-08T00:05:00.000-05:00

In my effort to watch the AFI's top 100 movies, at least the ones that are on netflix, which is actually not all that many, I watched The Graduate. I found it pretty horrifying--I don't have a high tolerance for a lot of sex, and when sex involves several different members of the same family, my tolerance shoots way down.

Admittedly, it was well made. It's use of impressions was remarkable--for instance, in the way that the film cuts back and forth between the hotel bed and the pool to symbolize Brad's growing experience and self-confidence. In this way, it resembled a much tamer Tree of Life. The music was wonderful--Simon and Garfunkel are great (I just hope this film hasn't ruined "The Sound of Silence" for me forever).

I think that my biggest complaint is that the plot was so simple. Apart from Brad, the characters were not that well developed , especially Elaine--Why does she decide she wants to be with Brad? I mean, I understand why she didn't want to. I understand that her motivations were questioned when she found out that her mother lied to her. But the film just wasn't compelling: she changed her mind about 40 times about who she wanted to be with--"Maybe I'll marry you tomorrow, I don't know." Elaine's passive indecision is really not the stuff of tragedy. Elaine just isn't a strong enough character to contribute to the grand dilemma that is set up when she realizes that the man she likes has been having an affair with her mother. It's just not tragedy, people.

It's just a psychological exploration of an insecure boy/man who is taken advantage of by an older woman. And it chronicles the first real action of his life--chasing Elaine down and stealing her away from her own wedding. Oh the symbolism when he picks up a cross from the church and uses it to fend off the guests and then uses it to lock them in the church. The thing is, he's figured out how to act, rather than simply passively respond, but he acts in a way that seeks to coerce Elaine, who has been manipulated by her mother, Mrs. Robinson, in the same way that he has. What Brad really needs to learn is to act in a way that encourages others to make free choices, too (I mean, I know the whole stealing-the-bride-away-from-the-church scene makes good television, but is that really the best time to ask someone to marry you?).

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In Memory

2011-12-07T00:05:00.000-05:00

Casey, 11/20/1997-11/28/2011

It's always a bummer to share sad news, but clearly I would be amiss if I didn't say a few words about our family dog.

Casey's name was Casey because #1tomatolover hated the fact that we got a girl dog. He thought that girl dogs, like the girls he knew, would stay inside reading rather than go outside and play. And I don't really blame him, surrounded by women as he was, for wanting a boy dog. So we had to switch from Cassie, which I suggested for her name, to a more gender-neutral version.

Casey did a lot of running to the park with me and then moseying around the park by herself while I shot around on the basketball court. From early on in her life, she knew that my father or me putting our sneakers on meant a W-A-L-K. And she would get so excited that she would run back and forth in a frenzy that usually slowed down the shoe-tying process. As she got older, she couldn't go for the long walks anymore, then she stopped going on walks altogether the last couple of times I was home.

I always said that she was a terrible guard dog--she used to hide nervously behind us anytime there was someone new at the door. By and large, she really didn't like men--she slunk away from them, but would allow women to pet her. She really didn't like children or big groups, and she especially didn't like thunderstorms--when they happened, she would find something made out of wood that was near her to chew on. If she was outside during a thunderstorm, she would run away from the house, occasionally ending up miles down the road. What she did like a lot was Mama Leopard and Papa Leopard, and Mama Leopard loved her: she always did say that Casey was her favorite child.

A Random Assortment

2011-12-06T11:45:00.002-05:00

~ I wish I had invented this!: The Cocktail Party, a response to the Tea Party (wayyyyyyy better then the Coffee Party). (via Lawrence)

~ From The Fracturing of Pennsylvania (because I can't leave natural gas alone, and this article is delightfully snarky, and incredibly well-named):

"America’s latest hydrocarbon crush is shale gas." ...
"Like many rushes before it, the shale-gas version has made some people wealthy and others miserable." ...
"In the end, the best case to be made for fracking is that much of what is already being done is probably even worse. The trouble with this sort of argument is that, in the absence of a rational energy policy, there’s no reason to substitute shale gas for coal. We can combust them both! The way things now stand, there’s nothing to prevent us from getting wasted mountains and polluted drinking water, and a ruined climate to boot." (via Ilana)

~ In defense of gossip. This is how I really feel about gossip: it's how you develop your social observation skills:

"Joseph Epstein, the conservative essayist and editor, is not immune to the lure of his subject. In his new book, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, he affirms Hardwick’s contention that gossiping is often a means to a perfectly understandable end: interpreting human behavior. He even literally recommends gossip as a way of meeting that high standard set by Henry James: to be 'a person upon whom nothing was lost.'"

~ This might as well be from Tocqueville. (Okay, okay, if Tocqueville were into fashion...)

Two Things I Like

2011-12-06T00:05:00.000-05:00

I love this statue of Mary at St. Peter's--I'm always drawn to it when I'm there. I think that the curves of the statue are really graceful--your eye is drawn to her neck and ankle.

I'm also pretty crazy about these lamps, which I found at Eastern Market, as long as the gold squiggles aren't snakes, in which case, they're creepy.

2011-12-05T19:14:00.003-05:00

Because Hopkins is doing it (and really, what good ideas do I have that aren't copies of Hopkins'?), here is a gift that I'm dying to either give or receive (but am probably too lazy to give):

Audrey Hepburn's adorable sleep mask from Breakfast at Tiffany's.

(How great are those earplugs, too? I definitely want those.) Now, various people will make this for you and sell it to you for too much money on the internet, but the thing is, all theirs are (and look) homemade, as far as I can tell, so why not home-make it your self? I was going to tell you that you could buy the tassel earplugs at the store, but those, too, look homemade, so go ahead and make those yourself, too. But buy a fancy tassel so that they look a little more put together. Then put it all on, with a tuxedo shirt, and wait for a dashingly handsome man to knock on your door (or give them to me, and I'll do it).

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Interpreter of Maladies

2011-12-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

Interpreter of Maladies is Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winning collection of short stories and her first significant published work. Her later works, The Namesake and Unaccustomed Earth, focus on the relationship between first and second generation Bengali immigrants, and often on their different experiences of love. Lahiri is always treating the boundary lines that exist between different types of people, sensitively portraying both sides of the boundaries. Like the unhappy translator for a doctor's office for whom the title short story is named, Lahiri is herself an interpreter of maladies.

The things that need to be translated for the reader in this first collection of hers are much more diverse than the difference between an arranged marriage and a chosen one--we see a friendship between a Pakistani man and an Indian family, a woman, not quite sane, who cleans an apartment building while loudly bemoaning the hardships of her life, a little American boy narrating his Indian babysitter's life, and a newly married Indian couple who finds kitschy Christian pieces hidden throughout the house that they bought.

Lahiri's writing is simple and plain--she describes people and their insecurities well, using a variety of different voices, from children to newly married adults to an old woman who sweeps the steps. She's psychologically insightful. I'm realizing how no-nonsense Lahiri's writing really is through its contrast to the next book I've picked up to read, which is also by an Indian author, but is a lot like magical realism.

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Dissertation

2011-12-02T13:33:00.001-05:00

"Don't be so German!" --dissertation advice from a professor

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-12-01T00:05:00.001-05:00

I think I've figured out why all of my reviews of movies are positive: I am just not motivated to tell you about the ones I don't like. But I will discipline myself to tell you exactly what I don't like about The Adjustment Bureau.

But first, what I do like: the female lead. She's adorable, has an accent, and is a dancer. The scenes in which she dances make it look like she's an actual dancer, although I don't know.

Matt Damon, on the other hand, has already played this role before--at least in the three Bourne movies.

But the ending was just bad:

The Adjustment Bureau takes up the debate between free will and fate. There's The Chairman, who is more or less God, and some men in fedoras, who are more or less angels. The angels adjust people so that they follow The Chairman's Plan. Damon fights The Plan, though, when it means that he can't be with that cute dancer, who he loves. At the end (yes, it's a spoiler, but the movie is pretty crappy, so I don't feel at all bad about it), he decides to confront The Chairman. The Chairman allows him to exert his romantic free will.

The thing is: A) Their will still isn't very free (the plan had previously been for Damon and the chic to get together, so they were prepared to fall in love by the angels and by lots of little details of their life); B) The Chairman allowing them to exert free will in one area isn't exactly free will! It's just a concession in a particular instance. C) I would just prefer if Damon took on the chairman and booted him out. Much more manly.

Plus, then all of the people could have free will forever. But no, the angel adjustment bureau will continue vacuuming out peoples' minds when they think the wrong things. That's just too distopian novel for my tastes, but Damon isn't uncomfortable with it, because he gets the girl. Hello! Getting the girl isn't all there is too life!

Really, at one point, one of the adjustors tries to convince Damon to adhere to plan and give up the girl. He says that if Damon ends up with the girl, neither of them will fulfill their parts of the plan--to become president and world-famous dancer, respectively. They won't fulfill their callings because they'll be content with each other and not consistently strive for approval in their work. If Damon's vocation is to lead people and to be concerned with the common good, then this is just another reason that he should confront The Chairman, rather than accede to the benevolent dictator.

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The Power of Positive Thinking

2011-11-30T16:39:00.000-05:00

I've been fairly down about my dissertation/grad school all semester. I decided while I was at home with my parents for Thanksgiving that I'm done with that and that I'm now invoking the Power of Positive Thinking! I'm not sure if it will make any difference, but I'll let you know. So, for the moment, I'm super excited about my particularly brilliant dissertation!!

The Roots "Sleep"

2011-11-30T14:00:00.000-05:00

My favorite song from The Roots' new record, Undun (I really like the whole thing, except for the next to last song).

Before Sunset and Midnight in Paris

2011-11-30T10:06:00.001-05:00

Before Sunset and Midnight in Paris are two wandering-around-Paris movies.

Before Sunset is the sequel to Before Sunrise. In the first film, Jesse and Celine meet on a train in Europe, and spend an evening together. They part with plans to meet up after 6 months without exchanging contact information.

In the sequel, we find out that Jesse, who, incidentally still has the goatee, showed up at the planned meeting, but Celine couldn't make it because her grandmother died. They meet up in France when Jesse tours Europe promoting a book he wrote about the night. It's interesting that in this film, the twist is at the beginning; the ending is simply purposefully ambiguous.

They have an immediate connection once again, and discuss their sexual escapades and life changes from the intervening years. The movie is in real time, a conversation between two people (this is an improvement, I think, over the last film). The end is, once again, uber-ambiguous: it is unclear whether or not Jesse will make his flight home or stay with Celine.

I think Celine is great--she's witty and snarky and opinionated. Jesse gets on my nerves--he just agrees with everything she says. He doesn't have much strength nor opinions, other than the fact that he's bowled over by her.

Midnight in Paris, the newest Woody Allen movie, is a similar wandering-around-Paris-while-continuously-chatting film. It is really surprising in its ability to make you believe that the Owen Wilson character actually time travels to the 30s (you of course don't want to doubt him like his unimaginative, cheating fiance). At times, I think Midnight in Paris devolves into a name-dropping fest, but the point--that nostalgia can go on forever, like two mirrors reflecting each other--is a good one. At one point, I was convinced that Owen Wilson was Woody Allen--he looked exactly like Woody Allen when Woody Allen's hair was not white. The character that I liked the least was Owen Wilson's fiance, Rachel McAdams. I thought she was terribly unconvincing. But I suppose it's hard to play a spoiled, shallow woman convincingly and nuanced-ly and complex-ly.

The most adorable moment of the film was when my mother exclaimed surprisedly upon seeing a shot of Shakespeare and Company: "I went there! Stearns bought a book!"

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Twitter

2011-11-29T21:55:00.003-05:00

?uestlove, Ke$ha, where does this all end??