Humorless Feminist

Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

2008-04-20T13:17:00.004-04:00

The Humorless Feminist has been roused from her sleep by something she read in New York magazine. Also, by trees snowing petals on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. She has forgotten how to italicize, but she'll dust off her Blogger knowhow and return in the next few days with, she thinks, a rant. She is also almost done with the writing that kept her silent for so long. She hopes you're doing well.

See You In September. Or Some Time After.

2006-08-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the silence to those of you who have been kind enough to remark on it. I wish I could say that it's because I've been reviving a cell of the Symbionese Liberation Army and amassing a collection of berets to wear when I have to appear on television making my demands for universal reproductive rights and an end to this phony war on terrorism. The real story is that I have some writing to do. When it is finished, I'll return.

High Summer

2006-07-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

Up On The Roof

2006-07-10T21:44:00.000-04:00

Oh, Yes. Indeed.

2006-07-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

From the Times. The hits just keep on coming.

More Proof That The British Are Better Than We Are

2006-06-24T16:26:00.001-04:00

1. Shameless, a a BBC series about a fractured but loving family, headed by a drunk, quixotic deadbeat dad, living in a Manchester council estate. Sort of like Mike Leigh meets Trainspotting meets The Office. The show is based on the creator's own experience growing up in a council estate in the seventies. Thanks to MP for lending me episodes 3 and 4 of season one, which I just watched--season four begins on the BBC this coming January. Hen parties, bad teeth, smoky carpeted pubs, bleached hair, gold necklaces, Fred Perry polo shirts, high ponytails, Robbie Williams songs, hooded sweatshirts, countless cigarettes, shaved heads, raging hormones, stolen toddlers, fake weddings, high (chav) lunacy: I can't get enough.

2. The National Health Service has a 24-hour hotline that provides British citizens with nurses on call to answer medical questions. It's called NHS Direct. Now, the actual experience of using it might actually be like calling up 911 only to be put on hold, but I certainly wish that there was something other than the Internet to turn to when my doctor's office is closed and the emergency room is a bridge too far. But even the NHS Direct website is a model of clarity and thoroughness--as a former fact-checker who's slogged through many a health piece, I wish I'd found it before today. Here, a link to its question and answer section, wherein we are given permission to drink while on (most) antibiotics, and told how to gorge yourself on birth control pills to avoid getting your period on holiday. Our puritan FDA and NIH would do no such thing. Oh, and on the first page of the website there's a headline touting a survey on British sex habits with this tag line: "What have you lot been up to?"

3. This regular feature over at the Guardian's Culture Vulture blog. Every week the paper announces a theme--the sun, fathers, jealousy, fashion, etc.--and asks readers to write in nominating the best songs addressing those themes for a top ten list. There are often songs mentioned that I've never heard of; it sends me taking notes. Also, the guy who writes the column, Dorian Lynskey, is witty, smart about music and everything else, doesn't ghettoize or fetishize the obscure, and, thank goodness, like most British newspaper culture writers, doesn't seem to take himself too seriously. Newspaper writers seem to be allowed to write over there. You'll never find him churning out thought pieces on reggaeton or mash-ups, is what I'm saying. Enjoy.

4. Ok, ok. Proof that the British are just as bad, if not worse, than we are. Just finished watching England play Ecuador, and spotted an anorexic-looking Victoria Beckham in the stands, wearing huge shades and a hairdo that seemed like a wig. She looked like an Olsen twin with a bad fake tan. Chav Princess! Like so:

On The Ferris Wheel, Looking Out On Coney Island...

2006-06-22T07:14:00.000-04:00

Father Figuring

2006-06-18T13:38:00.000-04:00

Daphne Merkin, writing in the Times magazine today:

I am not nor have I ever been a daddy's girl, one of those lucky women who grow up convinced of their daughterly adorability. The kind of woman, that is, who is always tilting her head in expectation of male attention and might be found girlishly sitting on a man's lap when the party heats up — like the writer who recently admitted that because she was raised by a father who thought she was "gorgeous" ("not just pretty or attractive," she added, "but perfect"), she sees herself as incontestably (and unobjectively) desirable.

I suppose you could say that I am a--I hate to use the phrase, so I won't, and will say instead that I have always been my father's daughter. Meaning: work-fixated, ambitious, solitude-desiring, (fairly) stoic, emotionally detatched though violently sentimental when the occasion arises. But I do not tilt my head in expectation of male attention, and you will never find me sitting on someone's lap when the party heats up. My father's love allowed me to go about my business: being a tiny grind who, until eight years ago, would have no idea when someone was flirting with her, and had herself no idea how to do it. My father never made my sister and I feel that we had to be anything other than what we were. Many of my friends were and are loved dearly by their fathers, and it has not made them vain coquettes. In fact, just the opposite. Actually, even if they weren't, they're still wonderful women. In the end, I think, we raise ourselves. My mother and her sisters were all daddy's girls (now I can use the phrase) and it just made them, I think, gracious and hilarious women and talkers. Or perhaps the ease with one's female self imparted by a loving father is what Merkin is getting at, only she's unable to talk about how else that confidence might express itself other than flirting.

I think I'm writing because I think a lot about my father, and fathers and daughters, and am proud to be his daughter, and I feel that, as usual, Merkin has it all wrong. She is making a generalization about the female based on her own specific cold-father experience. Her and Maureen Dowd, with the blind assumptions and tiny focus groups. She doesn't say anything of use about the topic, and the damn piece seems like it's 4,000 words. She goes on at length about her own experience, and name checks a few famous father-daughter duos, but doesn't bother really thinking hard about any of these examples. She could have meditated on: King Lear and Cordelia! Or Miranda and her father in The Tempest. Or Austen's fathers, sometimes dotty and hapless, sometimes wise. Emma and Mr. Woodhouse! Mr. Ramsay in To The Lighthouse--there's something there, but it's been ten years, and I can't remember! Forgive me. I read the piece last night, quarreling with it, and this morning I heard Loretta Lynn on the radio singing "Coal Miner's Daughter," and thought, now there's a story about paternal love. It's just not all about being able to flirt. Sometimes it's about making sure things don't fall apart, and that there will be shoes for the kids to wear come fall, after they spent all summer in Butcher Holler going barefoot. I think my argument is breaking down because I'm about to get the flu.

What I woke up to this morning was this song by Tanya Tucker called "The Man That Turned My Mama On." From 1974. I thought it was the Dixie Chicks for a minute. It was surreal: who sings songs about the mystery that is parental romance? And actually uses the hair-raising phrase "turned my mama on" to do it? Here are the lyrics. Get some Kleenex.

I wish I'd known the man a little better
that turned my mama on
he must have been a heck of a man
'cause mama was a lady don't you know

Mama was no prude but she was proper
never wore her dress too short
she didn't care if you did
but she'd have never taken a drink
Grandma Kate did the best she could
To see mama grew up right
so she'd be fittin' one day for courtin'
and to wear some gentleman's ring

Chorus:
I wish I'd known the man a little better
that turned my mama on
he was always laughing
and singing the right sweet song
I wish I'd known the man a little better
the turned my mama on
He must have been a heck of a man
'Cause mama was a lady don't you know

I hear he came to town one day
in a rusty old '49 Ford
selling lady's shoes and assorted greeting cards
he was killing good looking
and easy to like
and turning all the ladies' heads
but he saw mama first
and Lord knows how some of them travelin men are

Chorus

Mama seemed to forget the things
that Grandma Kate had always told her
she ran away one night with a traveling man
they bought gas at Rita's truck stop
and drove to Dasota County
but he brought her home with a ring upon her hand
mama's told me how the fever took him
when I was barely five
but I remember him pitchin' me up
and catchin' me
and I love to sit and listen to her
tell me about my daddy
she says he thought the sun would surely
rise and set in me

I wish I'd known the man a little better
that turned my mama on
he must have been a heck of a man
'cause mama was a lady don't you know
I wish I'd known the man a little better
the turned my mama on
He must have been a heck of a man
'Cause mama was a lady don't you know

Reader, I Married Him

2006-06-17T11:54:00.000-04:00

Found this online. Joyce Carol Oates brings it re: Jane Eyre. Someone who cranks out five novels a year should not be able to write this wonderfully about other novels.

Radio, Radio

2006-06-16T14:46:00.000-04:00

I am so sad that I've only been able to fully explore the glory that is WFMU in the last few years. I could never get it in my previous apartment, but thank God for the explosion of the Internets and the invention of listening online.

My favorite on-air personality is Monica. Fridays, 12 noon to 3 PM. Here is a (non) paid promotion.

So far today she's played Los Zafiros, a Cuban vocal group from the fifties, Teddy Pendergrass, snippets from an unidentified high school talent show whose theme seemed to be "A Toast to the Boogie" from a record called Schoolhouse Funk, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, and the Polish American String Band. There's also been patter from a 1961 Judy Garland show at Carnegie Hall and last week's Tony Awards. (The tiny little showgirl in me eats that sort of thing right up.) Other shows have included Blossom Dearie, Camera Obscura, Prince, Soul II Soul, Johnny Cash, The Jubilee Gospel Team, and Barbara Mandrell. And lots and lots of amazing, why-I-have-I-never-heard-this-before jazz, standards, folk, pop from other lands (which is NOT world music!), country, gospel, soul, funk, and R&B. I believe Monica co-founded Tommy Boy Records and hails from Illinois, which explains why the show has the feel of a broadcast curated by Rosalind Russell as Mame, Prince handmaidens Wendy and Lisa, a vestal virgin tending to the vaults of Smithsonian Folkways, Stax and Okeh records--hosted by Joan Cusack.

Also, I love that for the last few shows she's been giving shoutouts to some DJs on 98.7 Kiss FM-- the Best Variety of Old School and Today's R&B. Which I turn to when the indie rock has enervated me. Especially on Sunday afternoons, because of Felix Hernandez and his soul music paradise, which is otherwise known as "The Rhythm Revue". The man's favorite books are William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man--?!? On Saturdays he does a version for aficionados on WGBO from 10 AM to 2 PM. Also because where else am I going to hear, uh, Jill Scott? And ads for the theatre event that is Issues: We All Got 'Em: The Stage Play? Oh. Here.

Also indispensible: This Is The Modern World With Trouble. Thursdays, 9 AM to 12 PM, WFMU. In her own words: "A viking ship appears on the horizon, a likeness of Loretta Lynn carved into its bow. Rare birds flock together to sing Francoise Hardy as soul hits. A sunset of blips and bleeps fills the air."

Consider this my own very small way of paying tribute to actual humans selecting and playing all sorts of records in real time. Satellite radio and Jack FM are not the answer.

This Man Brings You The Bands That Could Be Your Life.

2006-06-16T14:28:00.000-04:00

Fever Caught. Or, The Elegance Is Killing Me.

2006-06-16T13:39:00.000-04:00

I've been having a hard time thinking of reedemable American cultural product--redeemable things about America other than Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln--and these World Cup photos are making it even harder. I'm sure all the players are thugs with craven fake-tanned hussies for spouses named Chardonnay, per the awesomely lurid BBC drama Footballers' Wives, but I'm not so sure when they look like they could play the lead in an Pedro Almodovar or Fernando Meirelles film, play guitar like Seu Jorge, and/or dance with the Bolshoi when they're not leaping into the air or racing down the long field. Per Mlle. Prunes and Prism, they are indeed muffintastic. The last picture is an Ecuadorean player wearing a handmade Spider-Man mask in tribute to a recently deceased teammate. Would A-Rod or Kobe Bryant do something so silly out of heartbreak and solidarity? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Also, this, from a Times piece about an Argentinian victory, brought tears to my eyes:

Argentine fans, starting to sense something special, were deafening in the closed-roof stadium with chants of ''Ole, Ole'' and ''AR-gen-tina, AR-gen-tina.''

Another screaming serenade, with Diego Maradona swirling a blue-and-white jersey above his head and joining in, also rang out over and over: ''Vamos a salir campeones, como en '86,'' or ''We're going to be champions, just like in '86.''

Maradona helped Argentina win that last title, and watching this rout, it's not difficult to start believing it could happen again.

Tevez, who is only 22 and a coming star with 18-year-old Messi, praised the teamwork -- the deft passes and perfectly timed shots.

''When everyone does it together, it's like that,'' Tevez said.

It's like a Sesame Street sketch, no?

But finally, an image of a fan being subdued by police to remind us that while the Europeans may have cornered the market on most everything noble and good, they also invented...the black boot of fascism!

Anne Frank

2006-06-12T13:11:00.000-04:00

would have been 77 today.

Court Street

2006-06-11T23:58:00.000-04:00

My Mother, Ladies And Gentlemen.

2006-06-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I called my mother. She was getting ready to go to the funeral of a church friend's son. "Oh, forget it," I said when she asked what I needed. I was just calling because I've been tearing off large chunks of the day and sleeping. Do I have a thyroid problem? Should I stop eating sugar and flour? Do I have diabetes? Do I have Asian bird flu? In comparison, it seemed a pretty silly thing to worry about. I was still alive. There might be sitcoms later to watch. "No, no," she said. "Let's talk." So my mother indulges me. During the conversation, I hear some plastic phone noises, as if the cord is twirling around in its socket. "What's that?" I say. "Oh, it's just the phone. You know, the antique Princess phone I've got in my bedroom." Pause. "You know, an antique Princess. Just like me." We had a good laugh over that.

Chuck Palahniuk, Pastoral Counselor. Or, If I Could. And Make A Deal With God.

2006-06-01T03:02:00.000-04:00

Headline and abstract found at the Guardian:

Till death us do part
We're all doomed in the end - so when a character in a horror movie is sent brutally to their grave, it should be a great source of comfort to us, says Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.

Now I know what I'll do when I feel really bummed about mortality--my own and that of those I love. I'll rent The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Then I'll feel all better. Thanks, Chuck. You're so wise. And so superfreaking cool, with your edgy, bloody oeuvre.

In the immortal words of Kiki, she of the insane pretend lounge act known as Kiki and Herb: "People die, ladies and gentlemen. And that is all you need to know." I suppose I prefer my home truths delivered by a man in a wig doing cabaret versions of New Order and Radiohead songs, accompanied by some raging piano.

Above point accompanied by a photo of Kiki raging:

The following Kiki and Herb moment goes out to my sister and the proprietess of Prunes and Prism especially, but it's New York, it's summer, and I figured everyone would enjoy a Kate Bush song performed on a fire escape.

Even More Proof That The Seventies Were Magic

2006-05-29T14:19:00.000-04:00

Photographer Roberta Bayley seemed to have taken a picture of everyone who was anyone if we're talking the seventies and rock. The Clash, Television, the Sex Pistols, and on and on. Visit her site for great shots of Blondie, the Ramones, and Elvis, dear Elvis, when he was young and didn't yet think that marrying Diana Krall was an acceptable idea.

Here is a self-portrait from the period.

This May Be The Look of The Future!

2006-05-29T12:18:00.000-04:00

Courtesy of Seattle's KEXP, I just discovered that Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie did not write "Hangin' on the Telephone," which is one of my all-time favorite songs. It is a perfect piece of pop: anger, longing, melody, pretty, snarling girl being all angry and longing.

I want to be her when I grow up. And for the last three years or so Urban Outfitters, etc. have been preying on the wallet of every 15-to-34-year-old punk-hearted, or post-punk-hearted, girl who feels the same. (Uh, not that I, uh, ever set foot in Urban Extortioners.) Look at that picture! And I'm supposed to respond to Karen O as some sort of avatar of female rock and roll cool? You're kidding me, right?

The band that wrote the song was an LA power pop band called the Nerves. Complying with the requirements of obscure pop band hagiography, they made their rep with just one 1976 EP. Herewith:

The Nerves were Jack Lee, Peter Case, and Paul Collins. Peter Case went on to co-found the Plimsouls, who you might remember recorded that other power-pop classic, "A Million Miles Away". I found these liner notes--and thought I'd print them here because they're a perfect example of the genre. The hysterical mythmaking, the heavy-breathing of the geek who thinks he's a hepcat, the so-unironic-it-has-to-be-ironic-but-it's-not-ironic whiplash brought on by reading it. This was written in 1986 for some sort of reissue, I think. Enjoy!

The Nerves
by Kenneth Funsten

Whatever happened to the Nerves?
In the blitzed-out onrush of Los Angeles rock and roll there are always those bands that get left behind in the trenches. But in the legendary past of about 9 months ago, the Nerves had seemed to be at the very center of things here. In fact, anyone who was around way back then will probably find it hard to forget those three loud-mouthed aspirants to musical fame and fortune. And they weren't even punk! In retrospect, the Nerves set the "prototype" for L.A. Power Pop.
Jack Lee on guitar, Pere Case on bass, and Paul Collins on drums are the Nerves. It was these three who rented the dilapidated basement in the tacky movie studio at the corner of Sunset and Gower and dubbed it the Hollywood Punk Palace. From here, the L.A. new-wave was born.
At the 5 Punk Palace shows, the Weirdos, the Dils, the Zippers, the Zeros, the Screamers and many others all received their baptism under public fire. The Nerves, too, gained valuable experience.
Rejecting a loud and trashy punk image, the Nerves dressed in quiet-colored three-piece suits. They looked more like Hoover salsmen than rock and roll stars. They played only original material, crisp songs with strong melodies, like "Hanging On The Telephone" and "When You Find Out" off their EP (Nerves Records, dist. by BOMP). Their bare, skeletal sound made every lick seem memorable. They excelled in energy. People compared them to the early Beatles or the Dave Clark Five. And then suddenly, they were gone.
What Happened? Were they dead? Had they given up, stopped playing? Or (God forbid!) had they become accounting students, fanzine editors or perhaps something even worse?
None of the above. The Nerves had taken fate in hand and booked their own cross-country tour. During the first week in May, they played 3 nights at the Starwood in Hollywood. Then, loading everything into their black '69 Ford LTD Wagon ("the highest paid member of the touring organization"), the group took off for dates in San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. And that was only the first leg of their trip!
In an article for the Illinois Entertainer, Cary Baker called it a "Magical Blistering Tour." The band astounded even themselves by playing in Minneapolis on July 4, and then in Cleveland July 5. At one point they drove from Rockford, Illinois, where they'd been playing with the Ramones, straight through to San Antonio, Texas.
When it finally all came to an end after three whirlwind months on the road, the Nerves were in Chicago playing with Mink DeVille. It was by then the Nerves' thrid appearance in the Windy City. Altogether, they had logged 25,000 miles and played over 100 twenty to thirty minute sets. Whew!! As Jack Lee said, "We think we've lived up to our name."
And so it all becomes clear now. Or at least evident - the Nerves weren't dead. They were in training!
But in training for what? Since the end of July, the Nerves haven't been heard from. They've been writing new songs, of course, and talking to record companies about an album, but so far there's been nothing definite. "We've just been getting oriented to what our next move is going to be," explains bassist Peter Case. "I mean, say you're a new group, you've released your own record, you've run your own club, and then you went out and did your own national tour, now what do you do after that?"
Pete answered his own question recently at the Masque, the sleazy basement gathering place for L.A.'s young punks. There, the Nerves headlined two spectacular shows with the Avengers, the Zeros and Shock.
Their music is the same - only punchier, more refined, and as high-powered as ever. Of their new songs, "Paper Dolls" ought to become a classic. They picked up a lot from the Ramones ("those guys impressed us"), and they've changed their image some. Now dressed in streamlined, satin jackets and black stovepipe pants they have a very All-American look - that is All-American like some weird Las Vegas bar trio. But don't laugh! This may be the look of the future.
What does Nerves music mean? "It comes from being in the mainline. It's got meaning on its own for collectors," states Peter, "but when you write a song you want the greatest possible number of people to hear it. That's what every writer dreams about, and why not go for it?"
Go for it they will. They've got the brains, and the balls....and the nerve. "We don't want to be part of the scene," warns guitarist Jack Lee, "we want to be the scene."

You know what also kills me about this? Other than the line "We want to be the scene"? Yeah! The scene is here. The scene is now! We are it! It will eat itself! This line: "This may be the look of the future." Indeed. So years later what passes for Underground Rock are all these bands with one word names, aping the sounds that these guys and Blondie laid down.

And so I leave you with more proof that the seventies were magic:

Sunday, 2:30 AM

2006-05-29T11:57:00.000-04:00

But I Am Onto Him.

2006-05-28T10:03:00.000-04:00

This is the last time for a long time--I swear!--that I will be poaching from the Writer's Almanac. It is just that I discovered that today is Walker Percy's birthday. Percy, born in in 1916, died in 1990. His The Moviegoer is one of my most favorite, favorite novels. It is about the spiritual crisis of one Binx Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker whose religion is movies and pretty secretaries. The Moviegoer, Percy's first novel, was published in 1961. A quick biography: he went to UNC, got his MD from Columbia, became a pathologist, and contracted tuberculosis in the line of duty. While recovering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium, he read the philosophy and literature he could not get to while in medical school; the novel came out of that. Percy was 45 when it was published. It won the 1962 National Book Award for fiction--beating out Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. Both books talk about what Percy, a devout Catholic, called the malaise, but Percy's book shows, dimly, a way out. There is hope. And: I am on to Richard Ford. I suspect that Ford created his Sportswriter in the image of Binx Bolling--they both love pretty girls with neglible occupations, both invent terms for what their fellow humans believe and suffer from, both speak out of elegant sorrow, but maintain an ironic distance from the cheap plastic world that is making them sorrowful. Here is one of my favorite passages. Bollings has returned to his parents' home for a visit.

Three o'clock and suddenly awake amid the smell of dreams and of the years come back and peopled and blown away again like smoke. A young man am I, twenty nine, but I am as full of dreams as an ancient. At night the years come back and perch around my bed like ghosts.

My mother made up a cot in my corner of the porch. It is a good place, with the swamp all around and the piles stirring with every lap of water.

But, good as it is, my old place is used up (places get used up by rotatory and repetitive use) and when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness. Everydayness is the enemy. No search is possible. Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength. Now nothing breaks it--but disaster. Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in a ditch.

In a sudden rage and, as if I had been seized by a fit, I roll over and fall in a heap on the floor and lie shivering on the boards, worse off than the miserablest muskrat in the swamp. Nevertheless I vow: I'm a son of a bitch if I'll be defeated by the everydayness.

(The everydayness is everywhere now, having begun in the cities and seeking out the remotest nooks and corners of the countryside, even the swamps.)

For minutes at a stretch I lie rigid as a stick and breathe the black exhalation of the swamp.

Neither my mother's family nor my father's family understand my search.

My mother's family think I have lost my faith and pray for me to recover it. I don't know what they're talking about. Other people, so I have read, are pious as children and later become skeptical (or as they say on This I Believe: "In time I outgrew the creeds and dogmas of organized religion"). Not I. My unbelief was invincible from the beginning. I could never make head or tail of God. The proofs of God's existence may have been true for all I know, but it didn't make the slightest difference. If God himself had appeared to me, it would have changed nothing. In fact, I have only to hear the word God and a curtain comes down in my head.

My father's family think that the world makes sense without God and that anyone but an idiot knows what the good life is and anyone but a scoundrel can lead it.

I don't know what either of them are talking about. Really I can't make head or tail of it. The best I can do is lie rigid as a stick under the cot, locked in a death grip with everydayness, sworn not to move a muscle until I advance another inch in my search. The swamp exhales beneath me and across the bayou a night bittern pumps away like a diesel. At last the iron grip relaxes and I pull my pants off the chair, fish out a notebook and scribble in the dark:

REMEMBER TOMORROW

Starting point for search:

It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God.

Yet it is impossible to rule God out.

The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy--that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all.

Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no difference. Is this God's ironic revenge? But I am onto him.

In Memoriam

2006-05-27T12:53:00.000-04:00

Today is the birthday of John Cheever. Let us raise a gin and tonic to his beautiful stories.

Twenty Years Ago Today...

2006-05-26T12:48:00.000-04:00

this was the cover of Time. You know what's more than a little insane, other than the fact that Molly Ringwald somehow meant enough to the culture, or at least to the people who made the culture by writing about the culture, that she made it on to the cover of a major newsweekly? I still have a copy of this exact issue somewhere in my apartment. I think I read this story over and over the week it came out. I was thirteen. I remember that they mentioned her eating onion rings with ketchup and shopping for either Shiseido or Shu Uemura lipstick or eyeshadow in some Beverly Hills mall and that her jazz musician father, Bob, was blind. I guess when you're the kind of thirteen-year-old that I was--pale, plumpish, non-standard-issue, went around wishing she lived in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth, whichever--you would be pretty desperate for some sign from the outside world that you didn't have to be otherwise. I suppose that legions of cultural studies grad students have churned out papers on this topic, so you don't need me to wax on about it. Although it does now occur to me that my two formative girlhood obsessions involved two redheads with similar spirits: Anne of Green Gables and the Ringwald. More on the Ringwald: I went to a party once at her house and she complimented me on my dress. I really did think I could leave New York then--or get hit by a truck that night--and die happy. I had been to London, Paris, and Rome, and now Molly Ringwald approved of my dress. What did it matter that I was never going to be Joan Didion or Elizabeth Hardwick, or even Lorrie Moore? It has occurred to me quite a bit lately that if I was a man, all my youthful obsessions--comic books, rock bands, science fiction, movies, my raging or sputtering hormones--would make legitmate subjects for generation-defining novels. But if I wrote a novel that was a fantasia on the American dream involving Seventeen, the Smiths, Molly Ringwald, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Anne of Green Gables, it would not seem as grand or important a narrative. I have to admit a novel predicated on those cultural touchstones, as I think about it, does sound silly--it's sort of inducing a sprigged-muslin shame spiral--but maybe it wouldn't be silly. I mean, if you got Jonathan Lethem to do it.

Art, Libraries

2006-05-25T09:01:00.000-04:00

The first quote is from Theodore Roethke, and the second from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yes, I've been at the Writer's Almanac again. They both have birthdays today.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote those books.

Lapwing, Water Vole, Tree Sparrow

2006-05-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

All, in one way or another, endangered or threatened in England, per the RSPB.

Public Transportation

2006-05-22T17:47:00.000-04:00

The Fiction Writer And His Country

2006-05-17T20:54:00.000-04:00

I just read “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” an essay by Flannery O'Connor that was originally contributed in 1957 to an anthology of contemporary authors writing about writing. It’s in Mystery and Manners, the collection of her prose.

She mentions an editorial in Life magazine that asked “Who speaks for America today?” The editorial said that no novelist working at that time did, because most novelists were pessimists who weren’t writing fiction uplifting enough to mirror the bliss that was postwar America. She felt that uplift wasn’t, of course, the job of a fiction writer. She is speaking below of Christian fiction writers, but her thoughts seemed also to speak to issues raised by the Times’ search for the Best American Novel of the Last 25 Years. How possible is it, really, to write a novel that speaks for everyone here? Should you even try? And if you didn’t try, but it ended up seeming like you had anyway, what would your book look like?

Also, see A Special Way of Being Afraid for a link to (and critique of) Laura Miller’s reasons for not voting. I agree with one of her points—I do think it’s easier to pick the best book of a given year, rather than the best book of a quarter-century. There’s less of a sense that you’re kingmaking. And it’s easier to do, because there’s so much crap pumped out in a given year, and the gold ends up shining brighter. Maybe?

Also, after reading O’Connor, I felt chastened for asking what America Philip Roth is speaking for—if he can make his own country of middle-aged misogynists live, which he seems to have done over and over again, then who am I to judge? Check back later, though, when the O’Connor has worn off.

What is such a writer going to take his country to be? The word usually used by literary folk in this connection would be “world,” but the word “country” will do; in fact, being homely, it will do better, for it suggests more. It suggests everything from the actual countryside that the novelist describes on to and through the peculiar characterisitcs of his region and his nation, and on, through, and under all of these to his true country, which the writer with Christian convictions will consider to be what is eternal and absolute. This covers considerable territory, and if one were talking of any other kind of writing than the writing of fiction, one would perhaps have to say “countries” but it is the peculiar burden of the fiction writer that he has to make one country do for all and that he has to evoke that one country though the concrete particulars of a life that he can make believeable….

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not….

To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world. The writer’s value is lost, both to himself and to his country, as soon as he ceases to see that country as a part of himself, and to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character.

Don't Sleep In The Subway, Darling

2006-05-17T12:35:00.000-04:00

Because, say the Straphangers, New York's subway avengers, the cars are covered with schmutz--their word, not mine. They've released a report claiming that subway cars are dirtier than ever, the E and J/Z trains being the dirtiest of them all. They say that 66% of all cars were clean in 2003, 61% were clean in 2005, but only 47% were in 2006. Why the precipitous decline? The MTA says that it's because ridership is at an all time high--according to the MTA, in March, the number of passengers on an average weekday was the highest it's been since 1970, when the MTA started tracking that. They also say that they're concentrating on station cleaning and keeping trash off tracks, cluttered tracks being a fire hazard. Which I guess explains why none of the great subway short-outs of the last year or so had anything to do with a Blimpie cup going up in flames on the third rail. Good work, guys!

To give them credit, I do feel like I'm always seeing transit workers bleaching the station pavement.

Per the Times, New York City Transit, the wing of the MTA that runs the subways, said in a statement that "These figures defy both logic and common sense."

It's always been my feeling that Transit and the MTA are run in ways that defy both logic and common sense. And they're blind. Said Gene Russianoff, the cantakerous head of the Straphangers, in response: "We think you know schmutz when you see it." Riding the E and associated blue line trains lately, and this isn't just the rape-scene lighting in the A/C/E cars giving me that impression, I've thought, is this car totally covered in food and periodical refuse, or is it just me?

And I wonder, at the risk of sounding a conspiracy theory, whether the lines whose cars were the cleanest--the 4, the 6, and the 1, and that seems true from my layperson's eye--are clean because those lines travel through moneyed neighborhoods? The 4 going up the Upper East Side and dropping much of its freight, destined for the Connecticut suburbs, at Grand Central Station. The 1 going up the Upper West Side, which seems to me the tract of Manhattan that most closely resembles and sounds like the suburbs, and through the exceedingly well-heeled West Village.

I'll end this on a positive note. The other day I saw something I'd never seen in my nearly ten (good Lord) years of riding the subway. I was on the R train going into Manhattan and for most of my ride into the city, a man in his fifties, probably from the West Indies, dressed cleanly in jeans, sneakers and a button-down, was preaching at us. Loudly. Sonorously. Carefully. It was impressive, in its way. But I didn't have an iPod, of course, so I couldn't drown it out. And I couldn't read the novel I'd brought along because his voice filled the car. People moved away from him. The Orthodox Jewish guy across from me I swear started his own prayer in incantory retaliation. Each time this happens to me, I sit there for a good while wondering if I should get up and politely, and firmly, inform the preacher that if they're intending to win souls over to Jesus, they're probably doing the opposite. There's a violence in the preaching that I abhor. Anyway, about fifteen minutes into his spiel, when the car had stopped at a station, the conductor, a stout African-American woman probably in her forties, wearing those goggles that serve as glasses, said, politely, and firmly, "Sir, you're going to have to calm it down because the customers are complaining. They want you off the train. " He said something in response which I couldn't hear. She replied, "I understand that. But when the customers complain, as a Transit worker I have to take action." He said something else I couldn't hear, and she said, "I'm not against anything that you're saying. But again, if they complain, my job is to take action." And he got off at the next stop.

Oh, No.

2006-05-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

Imagine my dismay when I learned that John McCain set foot on the campus of Liberty University to deliver a commencement address to some young Christian soldiers. But I suppose this is just what you have to do if you want to win over 40% (per NPR) of the Republican vote. You have to make nice with people you formerly described as "agents of intolerance".

Look at Falwell. What a smug old frog. Sort of looks like Scalia there in his robe. Very much the picture of an agent of intolerance.

Though this, from a Liberty press office release re: graduation and the the university's new church building, is unintentionally hilarious:

The church will move into its enormous new facility on Liberty Mountain on July 2, marking the 50th anniversary of the church and the ministry of its founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell.

Liberty Mountain. Isn't that the amusement park with the Horseman of the Apocalypse rollercoaster and the Parting of the Red Sea log flume and where they show The Passion of the Christ in IMAX? Oh, wait, sorry.

And yet this, from a professor at the New School, where McCain will deliver another commencement address, and where students and faculty are protesting because of it, makes me want to roll my eyes. From the Times:

"Senator John McCain does not believe in a woman's right to control her own fertility," shouted Ann Snitow, a professor of literature and gender studies. "He has been opposed to Roe v. Wade for more than 20 years. He is a man who believes in female sexual slavery." Ms. Snitow added: "What would he have to do to not be invited? Would he have to say we should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran tomorrow?"

This too: Brittany Charlton, the vice chairwoman of the University Student Senate, said Mr. Kerrey's choice of speaker had left many graduates with unpalatable choices of boycotting commencement or attending and protesting.

"It is extremely distasteful and hypocritical to allow McCain, someone who does not value the ideals we have consistently been taught in our education, to speak at the ceremony that represents the culmination of our experience with this university," she said.

Peter Angelos, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, delivered my commencement speech. Which I feel in some way is an even bigger betrayal of a student body. You think that little of us that you're just going to serve up some local capitalist tool? Some Knight of Columbus, some Rotary Club honcho? I'd rather have Cal Ripken. At least there would be bromides proffered on perseverence and hard work that you could imagine were delivered somehwere from personal experience and had some sort of ring of truth. Now, back to 2006--if Rick Santorum was invited? That's a guy who really seems to want to enslave women by curtailing their reproductive rights. Then I'd protest. But the point here, sorry, is that I didn't expect our graduation ceremony--a public event held in a convention center, with hundreds of people I knew nothing about even though we ate and slept and studied within feet of each other for four years--to square with my four years of study, which was private and personal and not anything I expected anyone but maybe a dozen friends to understand. University administrators, not unlike our elected officials, hardly act in the interest of the students (and citizens) they are supposed to serve.

Hey, isn't that Al Franken to McCain's right? Does Falwell know about this?

Syllabus

2006-05-12T19:29:00.000-04:00

So a panel of judges convened by the Times has picked The Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years. Naturally, I've read hardly any of the books mentioned, because most of them were written by John Updike, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy. See here for a list of nominees and judges.

I've tried to read Beloved, which won, a couple of times, but I can't get past the feeling, and I know this doesn't make me look good, that there's an axe being ground, and the prose is simulaneously too diffuse and arch at the same time. I read most of Underworld when it came out--free copy from employer!--but then stopped because I was tired of it and I didn't think I was going to miss anything by not witnessing the ending, and the only thing I remember now is the baseball scene, which I've always thought was pretty amazing. I've read Gilead but not Housekeeping, which is wrong, I know, and it has been on my list for a long time. Though I have read Jesus' Son and Independence Day (the latter I just finished last week, phew!), and they're two of my favorite books. I guess I've been off reading the work of the judges: Paula Fox, Philip Lopate, Lorrie Moore, Cynthia Ozick, Thom Jones, Ethan Canin, Michael Chabon, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, George Saunders, Liesl Schillinger. (Just kidding! Though if you read the NYTBR, you can't avoid her.) Why isn't Mary Gaitskill on the list of judges? Perhaps she and Foster Wallace (wisely?) stayed away from this sort of thing. I'd nominate Gaitskill's Veronica, published last year, and Robinson's Gilead for this list. Why not give her two? And Saunders. Saunders' Pastoralia. Maybe Rick Moody's The Ice Storm. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine? Jim Lewis' When the Tree Loves the Ax? Though I think Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, published in 1961 and nominated for the National Book Award, might be a more horrifying indictment of American suburbs, marriage, family, and work, than The Corrections, and I think it's a lovelier novel, what about Franzen's big book?

I can see where those novels/fictions just might be too recent, though of course Roth’s 2004 book is nominated, and it's too soon to tell whether they're Great. Though I think they are. However, I am not Liesl Schillinger or Nell Freudenberger or Curtis Sittenfeld. But I'm sure not every one of those Roth novels hits it out of the park, people. Come on. Or the Rabbit novels (the first one was written in 1960, which seems to be bending the last 25 years rule). Several young men I know and admire like Cormac McCarthy, but I don't think I know any women who do. And that's all I can say about that.

Oh, Roth and Updike. Updike and Roth. My betes noir! They're each a leg on the colossus that...ok, that metaphor's gonna break down any minute now under the strain of making it work, so I'll stop. Now I've been talking to some friends lately about those two, because I still have not made my peace with them. Though I have friends who love Updike, no one I know my age carries a torch for Roth. They read him, but then they talk about him like some groping uncle that they have to put up with grudgingly year in and year out at the holidays. We're talking men and women. Also, it seems that Roth is using the same persona—essentially himself—in each book. Now, if I ever wrote a novel, I know for damn sure the heroine (and it would have a female protagonist, at least the first one) would be some sort of mouthpiece for certain of my thoughts and feelings. But every time I wrote? I’d hope not. Does fiction deserve to be praised so much and so widely when it’s pretty clear that it’s the author talking every single time out and it’s really only the story of a certain segment of the population? Now, my favorite writer list is admittedly pretty white, but whose America is Roth describing over and over again? A friend recently described Roth and Updike this way: "They're like really, really smart seventeen-year-olds. They're no different than incredibly sexually motivated young men, but they're propped up by apparatuses that make us take them seriously." Later in the conversation I believe he termed Roth “a marauding penis”.

By and large, I'd rather read novels written before 1981, and when I do, they're usually either written by citizens of the United Kingdom or written in the 19th and earlyish 20th centuries, and often both. It's a problem. Or is it? I have some shame about this.

I’d nominate these novels/fictions if I'd been asked. But they're not written by Americans, so I'd be disqualified. And two are written by men, so you know it's not just the feminism talking.

There's Possession, which I read when I was a freshman in college because I was a Huge Dork. It's a great novel, full of astonishing tricks and voice-throwing and intelligence, but A.S. Byatt is British. It won the Booker in 1990. Scottish writer James Kelman's Joyce-like How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker in 1994. Zadie Smith's 2000 White Teeth, though I agree with James Wood that it's more than a little touched with hysterical realism and that sort of bothers me. From Japan: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, published in 1997. Though Murakami, who loves Raymond Carver and American jazz and pop, might as well be American; he isn't revered in Japan the way he's beloved here. (That's him at the top.) Alice Munro's Selected Stories, published in 1996. Canadian. Like Roth, she writes about the same thing over and over again--mothers, daughters, rural Canada--but Munro, and one could discuss how female this is or not, seems content to stand back in the shadows of omniscience, and you forget she's there while her characters run around making mistakes. All these fictions have, in varying degrees, wide scope, wild imagination, and heart. I know I toss that word around too much, and when you deal with the heart, you risk messing with sentimentalism, but bear with me. "I think there's something wrong with our hearts," my friend A. said to me the other night. Meaning Americans. I think there is, too. We don't like to treat of it. We want to be tough, ironic, distant, sickeningly cute, sexlessly sexual, abstract, violent, misogynist. And it shows up in our fiction, both filmic and otherwise. Though Richard Ford is not afraid of writing about the heart, of looking at its problems head on, and I was suprised to learn he got a Pulitzer in spite of it.

Hideko Takamine

2006-05-09T13:59:00.001-04:00

I have a new obsession. It is the Japanese actress Hideko Takamine, born in 1924, who was one of Japan's biggest movie stars. She began as their Shirley Temple, spent some time as a young Judy Garland type, then became their Katharine Hepburn and worked with Mikio Naruse, my other new love, and Kinoshita and Ozu. She also introduced Kurosawa to his right-hand actor, Toshiro Mifune. I've never seen an American actress from the period (mid-century) do what she does--emote without becoming brittle or tinny or hysterical. The important thing for her, it seems, is the character and the story, and she seems willing to disappear into the film rather than decorate it or ride roughshod over it with her personality. She seems like a real woman--I don't know how else to say it. That's her in the picture above the post about Naruse, but here she is in a close-up.

May

2006-05-07T00:04:00.000-04:00

Poisoned Milkshake Wishes And Caliente Cab Co. Dreams

2006-05-04T16:17:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, all you want to eat is that New York magazine cover story about the two brothers who might have been murdered by their wives--one by a poisoned milkshake, the other was stabbed in the back. Literally. (When do you ever get to use literally correctly?) Sometimes you don't, because it's going to be just like that other story about the plastic surgeon/philanthropist/banker who got murdered by his dental hygienist/secretary/stripper friend. I'm not doing the genre justice here, but you know what I mean. I told a colleague a couple weeks ago about how much I relished the cover story about New York's finest hooker and the pimp who made and loved her, and he made some comment about how he finds that stuff totally boring and not titillating at all. Yeah, I guess. The older I get, though, the more I find myself drawn to narratives of the moneyed and depraved. Being a frustrated novelist and all. Anyway. It occured to me while reading it that maybe they didn't need 4,000 words. That maybe you would get the whole story if NY magazine just ran a list of people, places, things and quotes from the article. To wit:

Stratton Mountain in Vermont
Bill's wife, Elaine
who did ballet on skis
on his desk in Florida
didn't make it to college until a couple of years after high school graduation
a fur jacket
a 7,500 square foot Saddle River home on a couple of acres of land
a souped-up Chevy Le Mans
Doriane, his high school girlfriend
moved into a one-bedroom, $295,000 co-op apartment at 200 East 74th Street
a blonde Ivy Leaguer--University of Pennsylvania, then Columbia business school--sporty-looking, striking
she became the women world's mogul champion
on track to be an analyst for Merrill Lynch
Goldman Sachs, which shipped him to Hong Kong in 1997
became the only person who signed off on checks for the co-op
To me, he was a big phoney baloney
I just want to get this over with. I think I need some Valium.
eventually borrowed $2 million under the co-op's name
Greenwich
Wives don't know.
had managed a Caliente Cab Co.
she'd gone with their three children to avoid the Asian SARS threat
a good-looking, middle aged Vermonter
shown up at the house to repair her TV
and about the tattoo he'd taken her to get
playdate for his three children
ground-up cookies and strawberry ice cream
Rohypnol
eight-pound lead statue

Right?

One of my favorite lines (and there are many) from Metropolitan happens when Chris Eigemann tries to defend his making up a story about a hated acquaintance-- more specifically, he makes up a victim of the hated acquaintance. "It's a composite," he says calmly. "You know, like New York magazine does."

Her Lonely Lane

2006-05-03T11:12:00.000-04:00

I've just fallen in love with the films of Mikio Naruse, a Japanese director who made most of his films in the fifties and was beloved by Kurosawa (Kurosawa at one time was Naruse's assistant). Courtesy of BAM. I guess you could say the films are Japanese kitchen sink dramas. Okay, I've just seen one film--Repast, about a housewife deciding whether to leave her distracted, inattentive salaryman--but it was so wonderful that I feel it's safe for me to say I will be just as moved and delighted by the next ones I see. And I plan to see as many as possible. The last time this happened it was 2001, I was sort of heartbroken, and I hightailed it over to the Film Forum and ate as many Eric Rohmer films as I could. The only male act of art consumption I've ever engaged in--as in, the last time I was in manic bordering on pathological completist mode, and I was relieved and surprised to discover I had it in me. The point here being that the films are as gentle and surreptitiously (and not so surreptitiously) devastating as Rohmer films, and apparently the New Wavers were fans.

Here's someone (i.e. Kurosawa) saying it better than I can, because the coffee hasn't kicked in yet. From Berkeley, earlier this year, when the university hosted a festival:

“Happiness is a concept that was invented in the modern world,” remarks a character in Mikio Naruse's 1952 film Lightning; the irony is that, more than any of the great Japanese directors whose equal he was—Mizoguchi, Ozu, and Kurosawa—Naruse's world is the modern world. It's just not very happy.

Kurosawa once characterized Naruse's style as being “like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.” Naruse's melodramas are character studies revealed in gestures, plots unfolding in a glance. Raised in poverty, he was drawn to those who live on the edge of society's comforts—whether emotional or economic—and so it is not surprising that his abiding subject is women, from the stultifying oppression of marriage to the tarnished rituals of the anachronistic geisha. The novelist Fumiko Hayashi was his favorite source for plots epitomizing his own vision that modern women are offered only illusory freedom. Audie Bock, who championed this relatively unheralded director years ago in her book Japanese Film Directors and in a monograph, writes of the “condition of trapped awareness” in Naruse's women.

If you like stately, unmelodramatic melodrama*, and telling shots of weathered shoes set out before doors and cats on rooftops coupled with shots of people just sitting around eating or drinking or reading the newspaper as if they were acts of prayer, and would like to see a film that feels you leaving like you read a novel, here's the schedule.

*Can we all work together on coming up with a word to replace the pejorative "melodrama" when we're talking about something that deals with emotion and allows the plot to hinge on feelings felt?

Breaking News From The Past!

2006-05-03T02:58:00.000-04:00

Am sitting in the house writing when I hear the clanging of a bell that sounds way more broken down then your usual Mr. Softee truck chime. What the heck? Have some renegade Lubavitchers come to call on the Slope? Or the East Village Hare Krishnas? Is it the Spanish-lady-manned water ice cart?

Reader, it was a beat-up old red tin can of a mail truck containing a knife-grinder! On my little side street! Screw the Paw-Tisserie and the fancy lady boutiques on Fifth Avenue and the upscaling of the Key and Associated Foods! Del Re's Grinding, from Staten Island. Though someone's now-defunct blog tells me Del Re is from the Heights. I forgot the street address already that was hand-painted on the side of the truck. Don't know if it's the same guy they wrote about in the City section a while back. I should have run out there with the steak knives I've been using to cut tomatoes and onions since college. But I was too stunned.

The Pope, Bush, Voltaire, Etc.

2006-05-02T13:57:00.000-04:00

Good news? From the Times:

Ideals Collide as Vatican Rethinks Condom Ban

By IAN FISHER
ROME, May 1 — Even at the Vatican, not all sacred beliefs are absolute: Thou shalt not kill, but war can be just. Now, behind the quiet walls, a clash is shaping up involving two poles of near certainty: the church's long-held ban on condoms and its advocacy of human life.

The issue is AIDS. Church officials recently confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI had requested a report on whether it might be acceptable for Catholics to use condoms in one narrow circumstance: to protect life inside a marriage when one partner is infected with H.I.V. or is sick with AIDS.

Whatever the pope decides, church officials and other experts broadly agree that it is remarkable that so delicate an issue is being taken up. But they also agree that such an inquiry is logical, and particularly significant from this pope, who was Pope John Paul II's strict enforcer of church doctrine.

"In some ways, maybe he has got the greatest capacity to do it because there is no doubt about his orthodoxy," said the Rev. Jon Fuller, a Jesuit physician who runs an AIDS clinic at the Boston Medical Center....

Those of you who know me may know that I have a fondness for the Catholics. (So fond of them that I converted, and then lapsed into an agnostic funk.) A fondness that endures even as they disappoint me for their increasing willingness to partner with the evangelicals for political culture-of-life gain. These are dark days because evangelicals, who usually refuse to soften their stance on anything, have within the last decade decided to reach out to The Christians They Formerly Described As Cultish Heathens--Catholics and Mormons--to work together on issues like abortion, gay marriage, etc. The thinking is that they should dissolve their differences and work together to establish a pro-life, sexually panicked hegemon.

The point is, I'm glad to see that the Church (yes! capital C!) is willing to even think and talk about condoms, even though yes, it's ridiculous that they ban them--while evangelicals also consider condoms as bad as abortion, I'm pretty sure they won't ever, ever budge on that. They don't like to admit they might have to do some thinking about an ill-advised stance. The sinister beauty of the evangelicals is that they do not have a head office like the Vatican, and so can avoid having to come together as a body to discuss policies and mistakes and wrongs against individuals and groups. In the same way I was glad that John Paul wagged his finger at Bush about Iraq whenever they met. That Pope was a hardheaded hardass too, but in geopolitical theatre, I'll take whatever cracks in the plot I can get.

I'm reading something now by a Canadian philosopher named Charles Taylor called A Catholic Modernity?. A friend of a friend recommended it. It's a lecture he gave in 1996 at the University of Dayton, followed by responses by four thinkers, George Marsden and Jean Bethke Elshtain being the two most "famous" ones. Richard Rorty, who I like a great deal, likes him. I can see why, as both of them think (seem to think, in Taylor's case, as this is the only thing I've read of his) a great deal about how to create ways to argue for and describe human freedom and tolerance without resorting to, as Taylor says below "ultimate visions". In the lecture his aim is to address the failures of Christianity and the failures of secular humanism. Third ways are underrated and underused.

Here's something from the lecture:

Thus, to say that the fullness of rights culture couldn't have come about under Christendom is not to point to a special weakness of Christian faith. Indeed, the attempt to put some secular philosophy in the place of the faith
--Jacobinism, Marxism--has scarcely led to better results (in some cases, spectacularly worse). This culture has flourished whenever the casing of Christendom has been broken open and where no other single philosophy has taken its place, but the public sphere has remained the locus of competing ultimate visions....

So a vote of thanks to Voltaire and others for (not necessarily wittingly) showing us this and for allowing us to live the Gospel in a purer way, free of that continual and often bloody forcing of conscience which was the sin and blight of all those "Christian" centuries. The gospel was always meant to stand out, unencumbered by arms. We have now been able to return a little closer to that ideal--with a little help from our enemies.

If only this administration understood the value of keeping the public sphere a locus of competing visions, ideals, philosophies. And evangelicals understood the value of help from their enemies (other than the Mormons and Catholics). So awful to think that ten years after this lecture, we'd need our own 21st century Voltaires to do some damage.

You've Got To Be Kidding Me Part 898

2006-04-28T21:52:00.000-04:00

From the Times just now:

U.N. Agency Cuts Food Rations for Sudan Victims
By LYDIA POLGREEN 8 minutes ago
The U.N. food program said it had received just a third of the $746 million it had requested from donor nations.

Rory Gilmore Would Have Never Done That.

2006-04-26T00:10:00.000-04:00

One more reason why Yale remains my Imaginary Ivy Friend of choice--yes, Kaavya Viswanathan.

Apparently, she told the Times back in February, she wanted to be an investment banker when she finished college. She is a college sophomore who has made $500,000 before she graduated for what may turn out to be essentially doing nothing. Which actually, now that I think about it, is what investment banking is. It may be, as has been suggested elsewhere, that the packager who brought her to Little, Brown and who owns half the copyright to the book got a ghostwriter to actually write the thing. This is also a young woman whose parents seem to have had enough money to spend tens of thousands of dollars to buy a counselor who could help her get into an Ivy.

From the Times:

It was unclear whether Harvard would take any action against Ms. Viswanathan. "Our policies apply to work submitted to courses," said Robert Mitchell, the director of communications for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. "Nevertheless, we expect Harvard students to conduct themselves with integrity and honesty at all times."

Harvard's policies only apply to work submitted to courses because until the 21st century, all a college student was expected to do was to...study? Drink, start a band, date the wrong people, listen to the wrong music, get things wrong, in a good way, in an extra-curricular non-credit way-- while getting your academic work (largely) right.

My City Was Gone

2006-04-25T15:37:00.000-04:00

It's like Sybil around here sometimes, isn't it? Forgive me. Anyway, I just discovered that Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of American Cities, passed away today. She was 89, and though was born in Scranton, PA, and lived for a time in the West Village, which she writes about lovingly in the aforementioned book, she died in Toronto. She moved there when she didn't want her taxes supporting the Vietnam War. That hit home, as I type, being that we just passed the ides of April. The Festival of the IRS. Should we start a holiday tradition, to coincide with Passover, where people gather around tables to eat bitter herbs and unleavened bread, the only thing we can afford to eat now that we wrote our check out?

But I digress.

Jacobs' book should be given to everyone running a city, or even a suburb. I mean, they wouldn't read it, of course, but I feel if they did read that book, and thought about the small scales she advocated, council members and mayors might get less hoodwinked into thinking that sports stadiums (this means you, Ratner, you evil, evil man) and malls and chain stores were what people wanted out of cities. Perhaps Bloomberg would even wrest the control of the MTA from the state, the way he wrested control of the schools from the city, whatever the hell that really means. I think about this constantly, but I feel in the last year the process has been speeding up. I look at storefronts around Park Slope and Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and if there's a whiff of age or slight obsolesence (shoe store that's been there for decades, Italian bakeries making cakes like the ones you would get as a kid in the suburbs, Puerto Rican/Dominican restaurants serving longtime residents chicken soup and cafe con leches) you can almost be sure you won't see it within the next week.

From the AP bio, via the Times:

Her impact transcended borders. Basing her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand observation, Jacobs challenged assumptions she believed damaged modern cities -- that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street was safer than a crowded one, that the car represented progress over the pedestrian.

Her priorities were for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believed that economies need to be self-sustaining and self-renewing, relying on local initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies....

Jacobs thought cities suffered from an anti-city bias among planners, the romanticization of a more rural way of life. Because of this, she wrote, vital communities were being torn down simply because they were "crowded," other neighborhoods were fatally isolated and parks were being constructed without regard to their surrounding environment.

I do feel that currently people who run cities have forgotten what made them cities in the first place--the crowdedness, the unpleasantness, the oddball citizens and corners, the small, the iconoclastic, the illicit, the flourishing of the somewhat superfluous and irrelevant. If cities can't and won't give harbor to these things, where else can they go? Who else will? I'm worried.

Keep Your Yoga Pants On.

2006-04-24T18:34:00.000-04:00

It's sort of alarming, the number of borderline immodestly dressed smug pregnant women parading around my neighborhood. I feel like I'm seeing more and more pregnant women all over the city with their naked stomachs protruding from beneath their expensive James Perse t-shirts and their Baby Phat velour hoodies. More than, say, in 2005, and that was bad enough. The daffodils are out, so are lady stomachs. Good Lord! It makes my own stomach hurt just thinking about their skin straining over the life-to-be in there. Mmmphr. I know I sound like Dave Barry, but it has been making me see white. As in inducing not a red, but an absence-of-all-colors sort of rage.

On the topic: was talking to a good friend of mine about this woman, Stephanie Klein, who apparently wrote a blog about her husband leaving her while pregnant. And...what do you know, she got a book deal because of it! Regan Books, bien sur. It's called Straight Up and Dirty? Or something that unsubtle. I guess I should Google this before I write about it. Anyway, my friend, while discussing it, said, regarding the proliferation of this sort of thing, "Sometimes I forget there's a whole other level of discourse."

I thought that was perfect, so I will share it with all of you. All two of you.

Sometimes I hate my own sex. Wait--I often hate my own sex. And I'll just leave that there and move quietly on.

My Phone's On Vibrate For You. Or, Cavalcade of Stars.

2006-04-18T23:26:00.000-04:00

This one's for my sister. So tonight my friend A., the dance critic, took me to see some dance, with music by Rufus Wainwright. Who I like a great deal, but who my sister loves. In the cold light of...a subway ride and a cheese sandwich, the dance, while enjoyable, didn't really matter, because while parts of it were beautiful (the Wainwright parts), some other parts were bullshit (the part where the booming-over-the-tinny-speakers Rite of Spring threatened to obliterate the dancers, who were up to a lot of soundless fury, etc.). The choreographer was Stephen Petronio, with some costumes by Tara Subkoff. Wainwright composed three (?) songs, two set to lines from Whitman (Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well and The Modern man I sing, the last to lines from Dickinson (Hope is the thing with feathers). No instruments, just his voice, layering one part over the next. Wonderful. This and Bach's St. Matthew Passion in under two weeks! We sat right in front of him. He was wearing a dark striped shirt tucked into black jeans, and a black vest with some sort of brooch on it. Like a sheriff's star, but not--? Anyway, he was nervous, it seemed. When the lights went down, I heard him utter, sighing, "Oh, boy." As in here we go, I hope this turns out alright. Then during a pause he said to the friend he was with--"Where'd my water go? Did you drink it all? You did? Oh, I could really use some!" Then his friend said look, it's just fantastic, or something like that. Poor thing. His mother, Kate McGarricle, was next to him. Then--and I couldn't figure out whether this other person was being serious or sarcastic--his mother asked this other person if he was making a movie. And the person said, in a British accent, "Oh, yeah, I'm in this thing with Russell and Nicole. Some Australian cowboy thing, set in the thirties." But wait! Rushing into the auditorium to take my seat I was behind Lou Reed and his Downtown Queen Consort Laurie Anderson. Or maybe he's her Downtown Queen Consort--? Anyway, I was right behind them. They're both tiny and skinny, like a pair of wax beans. He seemed doddering, like a 75-year-old man. ("That's what you get for doing heroin," said my friend A. "That's one good thing about growing up in Berkeley," she added. "You get to see what years of drug use looks like, so that you want to live healthy.") Wrinkly, but not grey-haired. In a long madras-ish plaid blazer with zippers where pockets should be and maybe some pale jeans. She wore, as to be expected, some satiny chinoisey bell-shaped grey jacket, hair regulation spiked. His hair curls up in a wiry, spiky way at the back of his neck. Reader, I stared at it to remember it always. Because while he might have had the Factory, I have his neck in the lobby of the Joyce. He came up the aisle where were seated and was talking to a black guy that maybe was--not Andre Leon Talley, but someone who I knew I knew--and said, I swear to God, "Do you remember Ingrid Sischy? Do you remember we had dinner at her father's place that time?" As if that wasn't enough, Leelee Sobieski was there. I had a hard time explaining to A. who she was, because I had forgotten why we even knew about her in the first place. I once upon a time saw Baryshnikov with A., and even in the lobby of that theatre, with a trench and a baseball cap on, I saw exactly why Jessica Lange married him. Did I mention that I left the house, realizing way too late to change, that I was wearing the jeans and coat I had worn to Easter vigil at a church in the city and the candles we held blurped wax on them?

Meanwhile, while I was out, 70 people hung over the East River in the Roosevelt Island tram. Goodness. Hope they're alright. That's exactly why I've never taken it, though I've long wanted to. Also, the Spanish family that rules the corner of St. Mark's and Fifth brought out the card table and dominos tonight, so that means summer has officially arrived.

Yes. Oh Yes.

2006-04-18T18:44:00.000-04:00

This was on the front page of the Times' website last night. The frequency with which they post these sorts of pictures on the front page of the site leads me to believe that the Grey Lady employs people who, just like myself, get cheap thrills from looking at our friends the animals and their goofball mugs.

Heads. Tails. No, Do Over.

2006-04-18T15:19:00.000-04:00

Just heard this today, via NPR; it's Bush talking at a Rose Garden event about Rumsfeld and why he won't be booted:

"I'm the decider. And I decide what's best and what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain the Secretary of Defense."

Is it me, or does Bush yet again sound like some dork on the schoolyard choosing teams, trying to explain why he picked the runt in the lineup? Or a four-year-old trying to convince his mom that he needs to wear two different shoes to preschool?

Found similar from the halcyon days of June 2000, before everything went to hell. Also a funny bit about how we'll all know how he's decided. What an idiot frat boy. It helps a little just to say it. What an idiot frat boy. God. From CNN:

QUESTION: Governor, there's been some talk you're going to have a committee to go over the vice presidential prospects. Do you think it's going to be much more of personal decision...

(CROSSTALK)

BUSH: Yes, there's no committees.

QUESTION: Is it you and Mr. Cheney?

BUSH: Yes, somebody said we're running focus groups to determine who the vice president ought to be. Forget it, it's not happening. This decision process is about how I make decisions.

BUSH: And I'm a good decider, I know how to make decisions.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

BUSH: Because it's going to be my vice president, and, again, I don't need a committee to figure out who is best to be the vice president. And I'm going to take my time, and I'm going to decide, and I'll make a good decision. And I haven't decided yet.

My body language would probably be different if I decided. You'll be able to detect it right off the bat. And then you'll be saying, you've decided but you won't tell. And nor have I decided when I'm going to announce. I'm going to take my time and make a very thorough decision.

Well, it's always a pleasure. See you later.

HEMMER: And with the developing press briefing out of Canton, Ohio with George W. Bush.

What Michigan Knew

2006-04-07T17:49:00.000-04:00

This is from The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford, which I'm in the middle of reading right now. It also (like the below) takes place in New Jersey. And there's a spell in Detroit, which this passage is taken from.

Far out crowded Grand River I am struck by what seems like thousands of restaurants, and by how dedicated the population is to going out to eat. As much as cars, meals are what's on people's minds. Though there is a small and heart-swelling glory to these places--chop houses, hofbraus, rathskellers, rib joints, cafes of all good quality. Part of life's essence is here. And on a brooding spring eve, a fast foray out to any one of them can be just enough to make any out-of-the-way loneliness bearable another nighttime through. In most ways, I can promise you, Michigan knows exactly what it's doing. It knows the enemy and the odds.

John Updike Wrote This

2006-04-07T16:29:00.000-04:00

From his new novel Terrorist. This is a love scene between a 63-year-old guidance counselor and the mother of a fundamentalist teen he's concerned about.

"Jesus," says Jack Levy. "This is what life is all about. I'd forgotten, and never expected anybody to remind me." Thus guardedly, in these circumstances, without naming her, he pays tribute of a sort to his wife, who long ago had her turn at showing what life was all about.

Teresa Mulloy, naked beside him, agrees. "It is," but then adds, in self-protection, "but it doesn't last." Her face, with its round shape and slightly protuberant eyes, is flushed so that her freckles blend in, pale brown on pink.

A few seconds later--Ed.

Her rosy flush becomes the high color that follows the sting of a rebuke, a facing of her defenselessness in this dead-end adventure, another married boyfriend. He will never leave his fat Beth, and would she want him to in any case? He is twenty-three years older than she is, and she needs a man to last her the rest of her life.

Summer has attained July's swelter in New Jersey, but even so, feeling the air as cool on their love-flushed skins, the lovers have drawn up the top sheet, rumpled and damp from having been beneath their bodies. Jack sits up against the pillow, exposing the slack muscles and grey froth of his chest, and she with lovable bohemian immodesty, has pulled her side of the sheet no higher, so her breasts, white as soap where the sun never touches them, jut free for him to admire and to feel the heft again if he desires....When in fucking she sits on his lap, impaling herself on his erection, he feels the colors reflected from her walls flow down her sides along with his hands, her elongating, rib-filled, preening, Irish-white sides. With Beth, he can't imagine her weight on his pelvis, or her legs spread far enough apart; they have run out of positions, except for the spoon, and even there her huge ass pushes him away like a jealous child in their bed.

Alrighty. That's probably enough. Oh wait--a few more paragraphs later there's this:

She tugs with one hand and then with both the bit of nylon smartly up; the cedar-colored patch of frizzy hair puffs out, in its moment of capture, above the elastic waistband like the head on a suddenly poured beer.

I hope I haven't offended anybody. But I came across this at work, and could not believe how unintentionally hilarious this was. Is this classic Updike? I feel like I should stop admitting just what Important Fiction I haven't read around here, should I ever want to write for The New Yorker, but whenever I've tried to read Updike, other than his criticism, a fog descends, and I roll over and go back to sleep, ample laps and breasts floating before my eyes like terrorizing sunspots. I suppose I was also scandalized by the awful earthbound tin-eared cliched nature of the sex scene--it reminded me of that scene in Match Point where Jonathan Rhys-Myers hovers above Scarlett Johansson with a Costco-sized bottle of oil in a tableau that is meant to signify the Unhingedly Sensual. But what it really signifies is A Septugenarian Thinks This Is Unhingedly Sensual. By the way, whenever I hear the word "sensual" I get a feeling that whatever it's describing is more clinical than anything else.

Mitt Romney in Outbreak: The Containment

2006-03-31T00:58:00.000-05:00

Today Massachusetts's Supreme Court ruled that couples who live in states that prohibit gay marriage cannot travel to Massachusetts to be legally wed unless they plan to move there. What is Mitt Romney, some Mormon angling for the White House, doing governing this bluest of the blue states? How did this happen?

From the the Times:

The ruling, supported by six of the court's seven justices, upheld a 1913 law that says that no out-of-state resident can marry in Massachusetts if the marriage would be void in the person's home state, unless the person intends to live in Massachusetts.

The lawsuit began after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in May 2004 and Gov. Mitt Romney, an opponent of it, invoked the 1913 statute, which had been originally adopted in part to block interracial marriages. Mr. Romney refused to record out-of-state marriages, saying, "Massachusetts should not become the Las Vegas of same-sex marriage."

Well, whyever not? And a question: Shouldn't it seem just a bit unseemly to these people to be making 2006 law out of a 1913 law that was racist? Guess not.

Then there's this:

Governor Romney, in an interview Thursday, said, "This is an important victory for traditional marriage and for the right of each state to be sovereign as it defines marriage. It's very important to contain a bad initial decision on same-sex marriage by this court and not impose it on the other 49 states."

Impose it on the other 49 states. Contain a bad initial decision. As if people will spread their libertine, debased germs to corruptible...who? All the thirteen-year-old kids, black and white, rich and poor, who've been mainlining hip-hop and its attendant fucked-up gender politics?

Siskins, Bramblings, Feral Pigeons.

2006-03-26T09:30:00.000-05:00

Ok, that last post was cheap. Here are the results from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' Big Garden Birdwatch. Blackbirds were up 24%, jackdaws down by 12.6%. In the spring, male wrens build several nests for the female to choose from.

Sparrow, Wren.

2006-03-26T09:21:00.000-05:00

Big City Navel-Gazing--Uh, Living.

2006-03-17T00:54:00.000-05:00

Life seems to have ground to a halt over here, after quite a few weeknights of excellent, heartening socializing. Am watching Sex and the City religiously, trying to stave off the feeling that no new word can be said about female existence at the dawn of the new millenium because this thing has body bagged and tagged nearly every experience and thought any girl might have ever had, whether she lives in a city or not. I almost set a cheeseburger from Wendy's on fire in my toaster oven last night--I guess I should have taken it off the foil it came wrapped in before I tried to heat it up. Hmm. Smoking embers flew all over the place and I went to bed hoping that there weren't any lurking about waiting to burn the house down. That makes three cheeseburgers from two different dollar menus in five days. I tried to order some expensivo shirts from J.Crew today so as to show up for my freelance job looking smartly dressed and like I leave the house more than once a week, but they told me they were out of them for the forseeable future. Do I have to pick up the phone and spend money I don't have the minute I get their catalog, as if I was telecommuting to a sample sale, elbowing imaginary Conde Nast types out of the way as I speed dial? Bleh. I received a communique from barnesandnoble.com this morning with the heading "Alice Walker Alert." No, thanks. Apparently they alerted me because I'd ordered an Alice Walker book before. Huh? I've never ever read a novel of hers. Or was that in my other life, when I inked SLUT on my midriff regularly and went without lowercase letters, just like bell hooks.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The...

2006-03-12T15:02:00.000-05:00

birthmark on Gorbachev's head, even though those in my evangelical milieu would conjecture that it was the mark of the beast and a sign of the end.

On March 10, 1985, twenty-six years ago this week, your humble narrator began to breathe easy, having spent most of her childhood and preadolescence--just like many of us who grew up in the waning though incredibly tense days of the Cold War--scared to death that Reagan would finally push the button and induce the Second Coming, with Jesus coming to earth shrouded in a billowing, rolling mushroom cloud. On that day Konstantin Chernenko died and Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and would soon start engineering a thaw between the Soviet Union and the U.S. If I could attach sound files, I'd cue a little "99 Luftballons" by Nena or "Russians" by Sting (Oh, Sting, you pretentious rotter, padding your peacenik dirge with Prokofiev. And I fell for it!) Accept this artifact above as substitute, won't you?

But What Do Your Constituents Really Think?

2006-03-12T14:28:00.000-05:00

Just noticed an AP poll that attempted to take our pulse on abortion. It seems that 52% of those polled (just over 1,000 were polled) said abortion should be legal in most cases.

More numbers here.

Come Back, Justice O'Connor, Come Back!

2006-03-12T13:45:00.000-05:00

This week on Morning Edition Nina Totenberg (whose recounting of Supreme Court proceedings have the breathless drama of, say, an All My Children update) reported on an amazing speech that Sandra Day O'Connor just gave at Georgetown. O'Connor barred recording of her speech, but Totenberg gave us the gist, which is that O'Connor blasted Republicans for trying to use the courts to advance their agenda. It seems that O'Connor used the word "dictatorship" while discussing this phenomenon.

You can listen to the story here.

A Philadelphia Daily News blog--don't take it any less seriously because of the gigantic cheesesteak that is its Jolly Roger--recounts the Totenberg report here.

An excerpt:

I, said O’ Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and formerly Communist countries, where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O’Connor said we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

I saw the above picture in the Times I suppose in the late summer or early fall. The photographer is David Hume Kennerly. Caption: Meanwhile, back at the Hall of Justice, sitting in the twilight of the era in which women were thought to be men's equal, Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg emit rays of wisdom, steely resolve, compassion--and just a little human frailty.

I Turn The Work In On Time, And I Mean It.

2006-03-07T13:37:00.000-05:00

Phew. That last post was supersizedly humorless. Let's let some air in the room. It's freezing, but the sun is out with a vengeance, and for some reason birds are chirping like four dozen thirteen-year-old girls on a Skittles high outside my apartment, I'm hearing only birds--no sirens, no homeless guys searching for glass bottles in our trash, no truck rumblings, no bus wheezings. This astounds me. And so does this quote, heard on NPR this morning from Mark Morris, one of my favorite people making Art.

My Mac won't let me listen to the piece again, but I'm pretty sure
the quote is more or less verbatim, though I might have left out two or three nouns. It came right after the reporter described his work ethic and renaissance-man approach:

"I'm a dancer, choreographer, conductor, a bon vivant, I turn the work in on time, and I mean it."

I love that this is a guy making what most people would agree is Art, as in everything he does is one for the ages, and this is how he describes his M.O. No nonsense, no mystification, no apologies, with a little self-love and self-irony thrown in at the bon vivant part. I can think of quite a few writers and musicians and filmmakers who wouldn't dare cut the crap this way. Anyway, I think I want this on my tombstone: She Turned The Work In On Time, and She Meant It.

Afterschool Special Installment

2006-03-06T14:25:00.001-05:00

Facts that the Family Research Council, et al., will conveniently ignore, in the Times today. Apparently forcing young women to tell their parents they want an abortion does not reduce abortion rates.

Some excerpts:

Abortion rates have been dropping nationwide since the mid-1980's, most precipitously for teenagers. But in three states — Arizona, Idaho and Tennessee — the percentage of pregnant minors who had abortions rose slightly after the consent laws went into effect....

Of the remaining decline in teenage abortion rates in the Times study, Dr. Joyce said that some of it might be attributed to minors going out of state for abortions. The health departments in these states do not track data on such abortions, but in three previous studies of states where such data were available, completed before 1991, two found that any drop in minors' abortions was matched by an increase in minors getting abortions out of state....

But providers interviewed in 10 states with parental involvement laws all said that of the minors who came into their clinics, parents were more often the ones pushing for an abortion, even against the wishes of their daughters.

The point being, abortions will be had no matter how the pro-life movement tries to prevent it. Perhaps those in the pro-life movement are--wildly?--out of touch with the hearts and minds, as they might put it, of those who choose abortion. But those in the pro-life movement would probably describe the above as "facts," the better to keep selling their sex-panicked hysteria as "arguments".

Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur

2006-03-02T14:15:00.000-05:00

They both had birthdays yesterday; Lowell was born in 1917, and Wilbur in 1920.

Here's a Richard Wilbur poem, his most famous. People like Robert Bly thought he was an uptight, form-focused old fogey, but people like Robert Bly are partly responsible for the nineties mania for drum circles.

Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;

Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance."

A couple months ago I asked a former professor friend what else I should look into of Robert Lowell's besides Life Studies and The Union Dead--should I read Lord Weary's Castle, which won him a Pulitzer? "Lord, no. It's not even written in English!" he said, laughing. So I didn't. And that, my friends, partly explains why I'm not a Yale grad. Then he added, because my professor friend loves poems and loves stories, "But you might want to look up those poems he wrote about Caroline Blackwood and Elizabeth Hardwick." On it! I also recently learned that Flannery O'Connor fell hard for Lowell during a period in which he was aflame with Catholic feeling--courtesy of Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own. The thought amused me--no-nonsense, bespectacled, plainspeaking O'Connor, the torrential raving of Lowell, weighted by his brain and breeding. What must that have been like?

Here's a poem from For the Union Dead, in honor of New York and slush.

Middle Age

Now the midwinter grind
is on me, New York
drills through my nerves,
as I walk
the chewed-up streets.

At forty-five,
what next, what next?
At every corner,
I meet my Father,
my age, still alive.

Father forgive me
my injuries,
as I forgive
those I
have injured!

You never climbed
Mount Sion, yet left
dinosaur
death-steps on the crust,
where I must walk.

Debutantes! Dowagers! Chorines! Mannequins!

2006-02-27T02:10:00.000-05:00

I just rented George Cukor's 1939 film The Women. In the original theatrical trailer, those four words popped up, in rapid succession, describing the cast of characters, over scenes from the film. Made me want to get myself a turban and a caftan. Or some pleated shorts and tap shoes.

Greetings to the New Brunette

2006-02-27T01:40:00.000-05:00

This is Billy Bragg. I am indebted to him for many things, one of them being the line below the title here. It came from his song "Must I Paint You a Picture". Apparently he's 48, says Rolling Stone, which recently told me he's got a box set out now, and writing a book called England Made Me, Too, but this picture looks oldish. Here's a gratuitous Brush With Celebrity Charm story. A few years ago I interviewed him. I'd just bought a microcassette recorder that morning and apologized for having to fuss with it a bit to prevent technical difficulties before we began. At some point I asked him, I don't know why, now I'm a bit ashamed that I did, if he ever wrote songs to woo women. "Absolutely! That's the whole point," he said. Then he went on to talk about how he'd been guilty of sending thinly veiled messages to ladies in lyrics. "For instance. Say I go home tonight, write a song, and put a lyric like 'She had a brand new tape recorder that she didn't know how to work,' in it." Say you did indeed. He didn't have to be that nice to tiny faux-journalistes earnestly questioning him in hotel conference rooms, but he was. Did I mention he's British?

Addendum: Or, Really, I'm Not As Fascist As Evelyn Waugh

2006-02-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

The day after I went on and on about how great the British are, I discovered that Radio 4 is going to axe a five-minute medley of British folk songs--"Greensleeves" and "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor" among them--that they've been playing each day at 5:30 AM for thirty three years. Which is what I deserve for waxing on as I did--I mean, these people have a stock exchange, too. And they're responsible for the thing that is "Posh" and "Becks," and were led into a fake war by an opportunist-in-chief. (Though sometimes when I listen to Tony Blair I want to cry--he can at least string words together coherently when he's trying to explain why Iraq needs us there. And as the proprietess of Prunes and Prism reminds me, the British, see the phenomeon of chavs, may even do rednecks better than we do.) The medley, called "The UK Theme," announces the moment when Radio 4 switches off the World Service and begins its daily programming. Why? The BBC director thinks that its listenership may be better served by a "pacy" news brief and an extended shipping forecast. To me, "pacy" has the ring of "dodgy". I'd much rather wake up to completely unnecessary and irrelevant tootling of strings and woodwinds, even if the whole thing does smack of nationalism. Wouldn't you? But I'm not British, I'm just a crank, and so here are reports and judgments from across the pond. On the bright side: the completely entrancing, equally irrelevant shipping forecast gets expanded.

So That's How Things Are In Their Family

2006-02-13T09:09:00.000-05:00

I am in the Poconos. A region whose classic rock needs are served by Rock 107 FM, which is giving away tickets to an upcoming Motley Crue concert. I was listening on Saturday night while making dinner and some guy--Kevin?--was the winning caller. Kevin from Exeter. You won tickets by being the first caller to identify whether an audio clip was from Tommy Lee's sex tape or Vince Neil's. I had no idea that Vince Neil had been working in that medium as well. So the DJ says "So Kevin, are you sure it's Tommy Lee?" And Kevin laughs. "Heh. Yes, I'm sure." Some banter about the concert ensues, and then when the DJ asks who he's taking, Kevin, who sounded no older than, maybe, 38, answers: "My pregnant stepdaughter." From the tone of his voice--an audible, Grinch-like smirk, heh-heh--it was clear he couldn't wait to tell the whole of Northeast Pennsylvania that.

My mother and father were married 35 years ago today. They honeymooned in the Poconos the weekend after they were married--just a weekend because, my father now says sarcastically and ruefully, thinking about the maniac workaholic he was, he had to go to a sales training session that started the Monday after. Lest you think my parents were not romantics, there are pictures of my mother in a heart-shaped bed. As a child those photos to me seemed the height of....well, I guess I'll say adult glamour. And I think I was more fascinated at the suggestion of a their having a life before they had my sister and me than embarrassed by that suggestion. Who were these people, lying around in bed, who now relentessly, heartlessly, rout us out of ours? Now that I'm older, I'd say that there's a little bit of Breathless meets the Mount Airy Lodge about those photos. My mom, at 23, sort of looked like Catherine Deneuve, if Catherine Deneuve did the bookeeping for the business office of a car dealership with one younger sister and had another one who worked at the proto-Sizzler steakhouse chain Rustler. In the way that my sister sort of looks like Gwyneth Paltrow, if Gwyneth had been raised on Birds Eye frozen vegetables and reruns on UHF. Cheers to my parents, and here's hoping I can build things that last that long.

P.S. Why wasn't Cheney the one that got peppered with pellets, not some nearly octogenarian (though Republican) lawyer? More proof that we are living under a Teflon administration: Did you all read that story in the Times about a major Italian study showing that (duh) aspartame causes cancer in lab rats? Apparently Searle, the company that devised aspartame back in the 70s, was headed by Donald Rumsfeld during the years it submitted most of its research on the safety of the chemical to the FDA. The studies' credibility was seriously questioned, and the justice department suggested a grand jury investigation, but the lawyer who was tapped to look into it went to work for the law office that represented Searle soon after, and the investigation went nowhere. Then Reagan became president, appointed a new FDA chief, and aspartame was quickly approved. This won't just give you hives about your Diet Coke addiction.

The Writing Life, And How To Live It, Maybe

2006-02-03T16:18:00.000-05:00

Cheers to Harper Lee, who wrote one book that was neither tract nor tome, changed people's lives, won a Pulitzer, and then was hardly ever heard from again, on purpose, while people went on reading it and reading it and naming their children after her and her characters. Without ever shtupping 18-year-old Joyce Maynards in the process.

An excerpt from the recent Times article, which you can read here.

With more than 10,000,000 copies sold since it first appeared in 1960, "To Kill a Mockingbird" exists as one of the best-selling novels of all time. For decades, Ms. Lee has remained fiercely mindful of her privacy, politely but resolutely refusing to talk to the press and making only rare public appearances, in which she always declines to speak. She has maintained her resolve despite renewed attention in the wake of the film "Capote," in which Ms. Lee is portrayed as the moral conscience of her childhood friend Truman Capote; the coming "Infamous," another Capote movie in which Sandra Bullock plays Ms. Lee; and a biography of Ms. Lee scheduled for May.

***

But since the essay contest, sponsored by the Honors College at the University of Alabama, got going five years ago, Ms. Lee, who is 79, has attended the ceremony faithfully, meeting with the 50 or so winners from most of the state's school districts and graciously posing for pictures with the parents and teachers who accompany them.

At a book signing after the ceremony on Friday afternoon, a little girl in a velvet dress approached Ms. Lee with a hardback copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird," announcing that her name was Harper. "Well, that's my name, too," Ms. Lee said. The girl's mother, LaDonnah Roberts, said she had decided to make her daughter Ms. Lee's namesake after her mother-in-law gave her a copy of the book during her pregnancy. Another girl, Catherine Briscoe, 15, one of the essay contest winners, had read the novel six times. She trembled and held her hand to her heart as she spoke of its author: "It was breathtaking to meet the most important person in my life."

I read this and thought So just shut the %@#*& up already, Philip Roth! Take a lesson! Longer, more coherent post to follow.

Tuppence A Bag

2006-02-02T14:38:00.000-05:00

Here is something that I found that cheered me up a bit. While also depressing the hell out of me, because it's one more piece of evidence bolstering my hypothesis that the British really are better than we are. We can start with the preponderance of great British rock musicians and great British women writers relative to our own, the graphic design of the Tube, the graphic design in Boots, their biggest chain of drugstores, and then move on from there. Also, they have celebrity chefs, mock their Rod Stewart shags if you must, who have actually tried to remedy what I last posted about. Before we gave them the idea to replicate The Biggest Loser, they were airing this.

But first, please do visit the website of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and spend some time at Tales of the Big Garden Bird Watch. If you mist over at memories of going to sleep with Radio 4 murmuring in your London hotel room, this is the next best thing. Additionally:

1. They are promoting nationwide birdwatching "schemes" under the rubric "Aren't Birds Brilliant," no question mark, because of course they are.

2. Their slogan is "For birds, for people, for ever".

3. The design is clean and sharp with clean and sharp and lovingly snapped pictures of...birds.

(Yeah, it's hipster-girl porn, as is this, which the proprietess of Prunes and Prism turned me on to. Related: A Special Report from A Special Way of Being Afraid on mascot-on-mascot violence that is not to be missed.)

An excerpt, voiceover done by Jim Broadbent:

As a father of two small children, the excuse to sit down and lock myself away for 60 minutes is welcome. However, this year, Molly (just turned five), joined me to take part in Big Garden Birdwatch.

My garden in Cambridgeshire is fairly standard, a couple of bird tables and lots of bushes. It backs onto a cow field which in turn backs onto the River Ouse. I get all sorts of things flying over or along the river but what would I get actually in my garden this weekend?

The suspense is unbearable! Put on a pot of Earl Grey, get yourself a canister of milk chocolate HobNobs, and settle in.

P.S. I decided to learn to link. I don't suppose you can tell.

Oh, Come On! Part Two Hundred And Six

2006-02-02T10:07:00.000-05:00

From the Times today:

In New York Schools, Whole Milk Is Cast From the Menu
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
To reduce the risks of obesity, diabetes and other health problems, New York City has decided to serve one percent and skim milk.

I haven't read the article, of course, and I know there was something in the paper a couple weeks ago about a program to encourage bodega shoppers to buy lowfat milk but: like it's really the thimbleful of whole milk served and likely unopened on the cafeteria tray that's causing childhood diabetes and obesity. Maybe it's the chips eaten for breakfast (how many times have we all seen that on the subway and wanted to cry? or maybe that's just me), the McDonald's for dinner, the soda constantly imbibed, the tater tots I know they're serving alongside the whole milk. Maybe the whole milk is the only actual food these kids get all day, even with the hormones and God knows what else they pump it full of. Maybe the problem lies in the fact that we have an underclass, and no one wants to admit it, or do anything to address the root causes of potato chips for breakfast. Because look, some has-beens are skating with celebrities!

Forgive me for being more humorless than usual. I'm in a bad mood after hearing Bush say this yesterday: "I'm the educator in chief" and "in times of uncertainty it's my job to explain our path to victory."

I can no longer pretend I'm in a six-year-long episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 wherein the goofy unreal images on the screen are Bush and his merry band of big fat liars, who are aliens to the human race and the compassion needed to govern, and I can vent my rage by supplying alternative dialogue to state of the union speeches, NPR broadcasts, and various periodicals. Good thing the Republicans keep keeping it easy to get a gun. Oh, wait, but they've made it so they could probably imprison me for writing this.

This One Goes Out To James Frey. Are You Here Tonight, James?

2006-02-01T14:36:00.000-05:00

Lyrics to the song "What does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" from What Are You On?, the new record from East River Pipe, otherwise known as F.M. Cornog. On Merge. Sleepytime angry-funny drug rehab music, like Elliott Smith crossed with Stephin Merritt.

What does T.S. Eliot know about you?
He knows nothing in particular
but you talk and talk as if he do

You bought that April stuff
Just like an innocent pup
But all those months are equally cruel
When I rip off the mask
You wanna hang with Slash
Smoke bong hits by a heated pool

What does T.S. Eliot know about you?
He knows nothing in particular
but you talk and talk as if he do

Yeah, you read half a book
Then you say "Take a look!"
T.S. is my new best friend!"
You just want showbiz kisses
From Hollywood bitches
Not visits from the hollow men

He knows nothing 'bout you
Nothing 'bout you

Beaver's Index

2006-01-31T13:09:00.000-05:00

I've just been reading Simone de Beauvoir's letters to Sartre. She has a January birthday. January 9, 1908, to be exact.

An index, culled from letters to Sartre written during the period of January 1930 to September 1939, which is as far as I've gotten:

Number of crosswords done in French newsweeklies: 2
Number of meals recounted: have given up counting
Number of times tempted to play pinball: 2
Number of hours spent in cafes or on strolls: as many spent placating her two female lovers, which is to say seemingly innumerable
Number of times Portrait of a Lady is termed "not at all bad": 1
Number of times Snow White viewed at the cinema and described as being of "an apalling vulgarity": 1
Number of bread soups with weevils eaten: 1
Copies of Marie-Claire read: 1
Dreams about Maurice Chevalier confusing himself with Colette: 1

This Day In Suburban Legends of the 80s

2006-01-20T11:40:00.000-05:00

According to Q104.3, New York's Only Classic Rock Station, on this day in 1982, Ozzy Ozbourne bit the head off a bat.

A Self-Indulgent and Highly Subjective Best of 2005 List

2006-01-18T17:32:00.000-05:00

I figure if some of us are still waiting for the Village Voice's annual Pazz and Jop poll, I can still squeeze in a verbal reel of the year in transportive experience. The items will be numbered in order of their occuring to me, not necessarily in order of their importance, because I'm sure I have early-onset Alzheimer's.

1. Barcelona and its winding wet-dog smelling streets, on one of which the city's patron saint, St. Eulalia, was apparently rolled down in a barrel full of glass and nails. The more I think about it, Barcelona's gothic cathedral proper--not Gaudi's Sagrada Familia--was what moved and fascinated me. The gargoyles alone. Then there was drinking in a bar that pretty much hadn't been tampered with since the 19th century: all mirrors and wood, about a hundred old bottles covered in dust, Morris print curtains, something straight out of Degas and Renoir. The bar served absinthe--with bottled water and a sugar cube--and so was filled with tourists and young shaggy Europeans who were trying to live like Che. New York would never let a thing like that collect all the dust that it has. It would raze it to the ground and put a Diesel store in it. New York, you'll put a mall over a mass grave. Now I'm no Orwell or Gellhorn or Rough Guide staffer, so I'll just say that if anyone is thinking of going, visit the Raval neighborhood. It's like you're walking through scenes from The Conformist (if it was set in Spain, not Italy) crossed with San Francisco's welcoming hipster-slash-hippie spirit. Williamsburg wishes it could be the Raval. You will want to move there. And kill yourself with numerous plates of patatas bravas, as the Willing Companion and I almost did.

2. Sleater-Kinney in Camden, London, September, same trip. This was the second time I'd seen them in England, and both times it made me proud to be an American girl--forgive me, but I think we're living in another backlash, or maybe it never went away, and it made me think that feminism must have worked on some level, because it resulted in these three women, one of whom was a mother, being able to make a huge, idiosyncratic noise that thrilled both sexes, and for probably the same reasons. The concert hall was filled with hipster guys who looked like they had come there to rock, not to ogle. They had come there for the bottom-heavy, Who-like, wall-shaking sound. Even the Willing Companion, raised on Van Halen and Black Sabbath, acknowledged their greatness. The noise being made by these three women wasn't just pretty good for a bunch of girls, it was probably one of the better rock shows we would ever see. Even better: the inexplicable number of Bob Hoskins lookalikes drinking Foster's tallboys nodding along approvingly. Also: drinking with W., our sorely missed expat friend, and the beloved adventuress T., in various pubs, one of which was carpeted in Astroturf.

3. More music. The New Pornographers at Webster Hall, October. I've seen them a number of times, but this might have been the best. Mainly because Neko Case wore this ridiculous gown that joyfully gave the finger to good taste--it was a nearly flourescent pale lemon chiffon floor-length empire-waisted dress with long winged sleeves. You knew she was paying homage to Loretta Lynn appearing on some TV variety show circa 1968. When some band member started making fun of her for her Stevie Nicks sleeves, the band started up with "Dreams" (you know, thunder only happens when it's raining) and then it blossomed into a full-fledged cover. Also: the drummer, Kurt Dahle, came out from behind the kit, passed Pringles out into the crowd, and when he settled himself back at the drums, disclosed the flavor thusly: "Barbecue, motherfuckers!" Speaking of unspeakable epithets, why am I so annoyed by Kelefeh Sanneh's knee-jerk perverse pop music epicure's preference for Dan Bejar over Carl Newman? It's like Lennon v. McCartney, and, according to Sanneh, Newman's fronting Wings. While I'm thinking about it, My Morning Jacket, October at Webster Hall, is in a three-way tie with the above two for best live show of 2005. Keep in mind I hardly went out. And am not a professional music critic.

4. Reading Anna Karenina for the first time. Now, I realize that is shameful. I am woefully underread in the Russians, for various stupid reasons. But I am disposed toward the omniscient narrator, 19th century vintage, for various unfashionable reasons, and Tolstoy beats all--not only does he believably inhabit the conciousnesses of a sorrowfully adulterous aristocrat, a sympathetic yet comically idealistic young man, and an innocent high-strung princess, among others, he even manages, at one point, to climb inside the head of Levin's dog for a minute. And pretty much get away with it. Thanks to A. for lending me the proper translation--I started on a Mobil Masterpiece Theatre tie-in that I found on the street. Though I guess I could have gone around saying "Oh, I'm reading the Carmichael" and watched everyone nod suspiciously at me through narrowed eyes--then run out and search for my Joel Carmichael translation, only to find it is out of print, because Bantam probably just ran a few thousand off to give out to anyone who got a full tank of gas during the month that it aired in 1978.

5. Myself and E. vs. Maureen Dowd's NYT magazine article one night in Fort Greene over drinks--magazines out and pens in hand, going through each specious, shortsighted line. E., with her wise, cool-headed algorithm with which to divine the appropriateness and meaning of male date payment, won handily.

6. That same night, watching an entire bar, bartender and barmaid included, dancing and singing to "Gold Digger". Twice.

7. "Gold Digger".

8. "Gold Digger".

9. Evenings at the ballet, courtesy of A., with peanuts smuggled in for intermission by A. It turns out that I am a Balanchine fan. It turns out that I may be a fan of Gillian Murphy of the American Ballet Theatre the way some people are a fan of [insert Major League Baseball player here], because of her performance in Swan Lake. It turns out that I may be turning into a balletomane. Which is good, because one cannot live on indie rock alone, now that I'm aging and all the bands sound like self-serious, yelping hand-clapping wolf collectives that caught fire at the arcade and borrow heavily from Built to Spill and the Flaming Lips. Also, watching Charles Askegaard, Candace Bushnell's blonde and lunky ballet dancer husband at the New York City Ballet, dance is like watching Will Ferrell pretending to be Nureyev, with none of the irony. Which is just as enjoyable as you'd imagine.

10. Mary Gaitskill's Veronica. Even though she fell prey to the JT LeRoy truck-stop-hustling mystique. She deserved the nomination for the National Book Award--for turning teenage girlhood and young womanhood, with all its idiocy and idleness, into poetry. And for rescuing the stuff of young women's lives--friendship, female rivalry, ambition, desire, beauty, family--from chick lit novelists.

11. Finally realizing that there may be such a thing as too much NPR.

12. Arrested Development. Jason Bateman! Jason Bateman! Jessica Walter, Tony Hale, Michael Cera, and David Cross, but oh, Jason Bateman! Whom my sister had a crush on in late elementary school, but because I was 10 going on 50, I dismissed as a smirky asshole. I hope he doesn't bloat up on drink and drugs now that the show is going to get axed, or get involved in any embarrassing failed movie projects that try to bank on his flinty charm and his thatch of expressive, Huck Finn hair. Speaking of which, can someone pull Mark Ruffalo out of the mediocre-romantic-comedy ghetto and give him another role like the one in We Don't Live Here Anymore?

13. Arrested Development. And Will Arnett, too. Will Arnett! Someone told me recently that they'd heard when he and Amy Poehler got married, they walked into their reception while "The Heat Is On" played.

14. Watching Ricky Gervais play the flip side of David Brent on Extras--he still drops down the rabbit hole of titanic, witless selfishness, but he's a self-aware crank with some sort of moral compass who bleeds when the David Brents of the world prick him. Oh, and hearing this euphemism for the male member, uttered on the show by Kate Winslet: purple-headed womb ferret.

15. Embarrassingly sincere high school yearbook portion of the evening in commemoration of some transportive moments in lady friendship that have not already been commemorated here and elsewhere, before my Alzheimer's gets really bad, and there's more where this came from, 2005 edition: Playing Dorothy Parker with T., various occasions. M.A., whether on phone or in person, whether indoors or out on a street with a fire hydrant exploding, alone or with J.! Afternoons of long conversation with M. and the baby W.; M. marshaling a party and cupcakes together in January. Watching Prime with L., both of us with our turtlenecks pulled up to our noses because it stunk so bad, groaning and gasping in disbelief at the bad, bad dialogue, Meryl Streep's ethnic-amulet-necklace therapist drag, and the wayward boom mikes. Cracking up at Days of Our Lives and One Life to Live one afternoon with D. P. confessing a secret love of the song "Life is a Highway" over dinner. Drinking at Passerby with E. and M.F.; when I asked the bartender if he had any nuts, because we were all starving, he shot back, smiling and gesturing at the bar patrons, "Take a look around." Anything involving my sister and a bag of chips and/or an oven range and/or cable-free television.

16. This line from Me and You and Everyone We Know: Miranda July, lying on her bed waiting for John Hawkes to call, growling at the silent phone, willing him to ring: "We have a whole life to live, you fucker!"

17. Two ways of looking at the male sad-sack: Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and James Urbaniak in Thom Pain.

18. Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters, which tells the story of the three New England sisters whose home was the heart of 19th century American literature and ideas; two of them romanced Hawthorne, one with her mind and the other with her feminine charm, guess who won, and they were guiding hands of Transcendentalism. Marshall worked on it for twenty years, and it reads like a novel. Why wasn't this nominated for a National Book Award?

19. Broadcast's fourth record, Tender Buttons. Laura Veirs's second, Year of Meteors. Though it's due out in March, I heard it in December: Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.

20. The last few sentences of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking.

Body By Irma

2005-12-19T01:45:00.000-05:00

Rombauer, that is. Deviser of The Joy of Cooking. And if I don't stop procrastinating with its pages, there will be some dress size fluctuation in the wrong direction. Did you know that you can use a coffee bean grinder to turn sugar into the superfine sugar necessary to make their master cookie recipe--and the resultant peanut butter cookies won't at all taste like eight-month old Eight O'Clock coffee grounds? The real reason I'm here is that while rustling around the kitchen for ingredients for the above, I noticed this recipe on the side of a box of Key Food raisins.

Diamond Jim's Chicken Hash with Champagne Raisins
3/4 cup Key Food raisins [make sure they're not Sunmaid, because that would totally detract from the feeling that you're eating something out of a church cookbook from the Las Vegas area circa 1959]
1/3 cup champagne [did you ever think you'd see the words "Key Food raisins" and "champagne" this close to each other?]
3 tablespoons flour
2 1/2 tablespoons butter or margarine
3/4 cup chicken stock or broth
1/3 cup whipping cream or half and half
3 cups diced, cooked chicken
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

It will take me too long to type the directions, but the expert chefs among you could probably figure out what goes where. Who is Diamond Jim? Who does he know at Key Food? Do they have chain gang escapees manning their test kitchens? Serve with toast points!

Miracle of Lost Bands of the Nineties on Fifth Avenue

2005-12-16T13:17:00.000-05:00

Hello. And welcome to day sixteen. Just kidding! Ahem. Today is--oh, I'll let you all in on a secret. I subscribe to the Writer's Almanac email newsletter. That's how I knew about the James Wright birthday. It is why I know that today is the birthday of Saint Jane--Jane Austen. A moment of silence. Pause. Ok. Here is something from her letters:

"Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband."

You don't know whether to gasp first, then laugh--or laugh first, then cover your mouth. Let's see Franzen, et al. try that.

Speaking of laughing in spite of yourself. Last night my parents drove up to take us all to the Met and then out to dinner. We had a very lovely visit and a very lovely dinner in my neighborhood, and just when it couldn't get any better, my mother topped it all off.

My sister just bought a new hat for the winter. I was with her when she bought it. It cost some dough. It is a marbled pink and white and purple knit, has a little peaked cap with a strap that can button under your chin if you want to. Charmant, right? Well, not if you have cat-eyed glasses and brown chin-length hair. "You try it!" she said. I did, and then whipped it off--my sister, with her long blonde hair, looked like something out of Hans Christian Andersen, but I looked like I should be pushing a shopping cart full of recyclables with a transistor radio and my thousand-page unpublished novel about Catherine of Siena, the Whore of Babylon, Mary Magdalen, and Tammy Faye Bakker being the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse perched atop. My sister wore it out of the store and then caught herself in a window. "Do I look ridiculous? Oh, well, too late!"

She put it on just as we were about to leave the restaraunt. "Oh, it's cute!" my mother said. Pause. "You look like that guy from--what's the band? Nine Inch Nails?"

"Alice in Chains?" I said.

"Pearl Jam? Nirvana?" said my sister.

"No, no--the Spin Doctors!" said my mother. And we all cracked up. Even my sister, good sport. I think she was so stunned that my mother even remembered that piece of detritus from whatever was on the radio during her daughters' musical youth. I think that blocked out the fact that my mother was essentially saying she looked like a strung-out hippie elf.

Breakfast at Claire's

2005-12-16T00:00:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went out Christmas shopping with my sister. After we parted, I stopped in at Claire’s on Broadway by 8th street. I wanted to get some earrings. At the buy-two-get-one-free rack, I found some “pearl” studs for $4.50. Score! Now, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman approaching her 33d year should probably have some real pearl earrings, but I am not really a woman approaching her 33d year. I am a woman who, when given actual pearl earrings by one of her best friends for her 32d birthday, promptly loses one of them the next evening at a party. Score! And I can’t even say that I lost it because I was dancing on a table or drinking from a funnel. No, it just popped off and scampered into the night. It was expensive jewelry, and knew that it had to reject my person as a host. Hence the $4.50 studs, for another party. An office Christmas party, thrown by the office of a friend, and I am hoping since the office is a Huge Media Conglomerate, it will rival the one depicted in the Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Desk Set--I believe there’s an aerial shot of a network television office with a bird’s eye view of countless cubicles containing riotous, alcohol-fueled merrymaking and a scene where Hepburn and Tracy are getting soused on, or is it under, a fireproof desk with a bottle of champagne. I was born too late and moved to New York to work in The Media too late, clearly. But I digress.

While at the rack, a woman entered the store. “Welcome to Claire’s,” a clerk said. “Can I help you?”

“I need a boa,” the woman said. “Do you all have boas?”

“No,” said the clerk. “We’re all out.”

“Well, do you have tights?” Here I zoned out, trying to determine whether the “sensitive solutions” silver was going to turn my ears green. Then I heard the woman say “But where do all the divas get their tights?”

“You should try 8th street,” said the clerk. “You know, where all the shoe stores are. I think they’ve got all that stuff.”

“What about,” said the woman, “something silver. Like a silver cape or a shawl or something. I’m not afraid to look like a hooker. I’ll go there.” Where is it you're going, I thought, that you need a boa and tights and something silver? Take me with you!

The clerk laughed. “I’m sorry. We don’t really carry that sort of thing either.”

Even though Claire’s had been found sorely wanting, the woman was still in good spirits. “Where are all the queens when you need 'em?” she asked, shaking her head, and then going off into the night.

The clerk turned to me. “Did you hear that?” She was laughing. “The things you hear in this store. She wasn’t afraid to look like a hooker. I am not that sort of girl, though. I hope she wasn’t insinuating that I was.”

I loved that the Claire’s clerk got huffy about her standing as a virtuous woman. I guess working at Claire’s isn’t like working in Spencer Gifts, where there would be penis-shaped pasta, hardy-har-har, on the shelves, or Victoria’s Secret, which, I suspect if it did not exist, mob guys would not know what to get their wives and girlfriends for gifts. I have luck at Target, but where do all the divas get their tights?

Two By James Wright

2005-12-13T21:19:00.000-05:00

I just discovered that today is the birthday of poet James Wright. He was born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, in 1927, and died in New York City in 1980. I was also reminded that Wright, round-faced and salt-and-pepper bearded, looked like one of my very favorite people in the world--a college professor of mine who introduced me to the second poem. So, two poems by Wright.

From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower

Cribs loaded with roughage huddle together
Before the north clouds.
The wind tiptoes between poplars.
The silver maple leaves squint
Toward the ground.
An old farmer, his scarlet face
Apologetic with whiskey, swings back a barn door
And calls a hundred black-and-white Holsteins
From the clover field.

Lying in a Hammock At William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Also, while I'm here, a shout out to M. and A., two of my other favorite people in the world. They had birthdays yesterday. Sagittarians from Berkeley unite!

Miracle of Canadian Bacon on Fifth Avenue

2005-12-09T15:20:00.000-05:00

I bought a Christmas tree this week from the French Canadian elves who are selling pines from Nova Scotia on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn. Those of you in the 11217 zip code, you know the ones--they're camped right outside Key Food. The guy who sold me my tree said he was born in Quebec City, raised in Montreal, and told me that he learned a lot of English by watching Growing Pains and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I walked by their camp last night and I swear I heard "Take Off" by the McKenzie Brothers coming out of the radio they had in their tent. Maybe this is only making me laugh. Maybe I'm the only one left on earth who, when this time of year rolls around, prays that she will chance upon hearing their version of "The 12 Days of Christmas". ("Good day. And welcome to day twelve.") It cheered me up because earlier in the evening, on the way to meet a friend, a homeless guy in a wheelchair asked me for change. I was in a hurry and, of course, didn't feel like I could stop to see what I had in my bag. Although I certainly could and should have. I knew I would pay for it. And I did. "I'm gonna tell God on you, lady," he said to my back. I wanted to say something like "God already knows I'm a shithead," but that would not have helped anyone.

Because I Could Not Stop For Jesus

2005-11-27T11:43:00.000-05:00

Lacking any original thoughts or the will to create them, I will merely draw your attention to another episode of "Those Evangelicals Are Scary and Insane!" brought to you by The New York Times. Having grown up evangelical, I suppose I should be shrugging my shoulders by now at yet another piece of news that suggests most Americans would like to live in a world in which the Enlightenment never happened, but it still makes me cry out in disbelief when alone in my apartment reading the paper. Today we learn that Emily Dickinson, when not properly taught, is as corrupting a force as Marilyn Manson. According to the "Week In Review" section, a group of California Christian high schools are suing the University of California because the university system refused to credit some of the high schools' courses when their students applied to U of C colleges. Having been sent to a few different Christian schools, I can attest that this is a wise decision on the part of the University of California. One of the courses under fire is "Christianity and American Literature," which uses a textbook published by Bob Jones University called Elements of Literature for Christian Schools, an excerpt of which showed up in the Times. Here you go:

Dickinson's year at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary further shaped her "religious" views. During her stay at the school, she learned of Christ but wrote of her inability to make a decision for Him. She could not settle "the one thing needful." A thorough study of Dickinson's works indicates that she never did make that needful decision. Several of her poems show a presumptuous attitude concerning her eternal destiny and a veiled disrespect for authority in general. Throughout her life she viewed salvation as a gamble, not a certainty. Although she did view the Bible as a source of poetic inspiration, she never accepted it as an inerrant guide to life.

Christina Rosetti, however, gets the green light:

The loneliness she faced is often reflected in her poems. But stronger than her loneliness was her total confidence in and submission to her Lord and Savior. Rossetti filled her mind and heart with Scripture. She gained from it a unique appreciation of the sustaining and sacrificial love of God. Her poetry and uplifting devotional literature are the natural overflow of her complete dependence on God.

I'm going to get my hands on that textbook to see what they say about Flannery O'Connor.

The Terrible Odds of Syntax

2005-11-18T00:08:00.000-05:00

A reading from the book of Strunk and White:

Clarity, clarity, clarity. When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not attempt to fight your way through the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded roadsign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Usually we think only of the ludicrous aspect of ambiguity; we enjoy it when the Times tells us that Nelson Rockefeller is "chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, which he entered in a fireman's raincoat during a recent fire, and founded the Museum of Primitive Art." This we all love. But think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity; think of that side, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

Or heinously poor, I suppose, if you're George Bush.

Post That I Will Regret In the Morning

2005-11-13T12:12:00.000-05:00

Ah, Peter Sarsgaard. I knew I loved you for all the right reasons, and here is more proof, from the Times magazine:

Sarsgaard attended an all-boy Jesuit high school in Connecticut, where he became interested in movies. "The priests would screen films after school," he recalled. "Some really racy Italian cinema like Fellini, actually. I think that was their only excitement." Sarsgaard, who was brought up a Catholic, still has faith. "I like the death-cult aspect of Catholicism," he said, half-jokingly. "Every religion is interested in death, but Catholicism takes it to a particularly high level. I mean, you can't miss Easter Sunday. Everybody's born, but rising from the dead - nobody else did that." He laughed. "Seriously, in Catholicism," he went on, "you're supposed to love your enemy. That really impressed me as a kid, and it has helped me as an actor. I don't believe there are bad people. Just people who do bad things. The way that I view the characters I play is part of my religious upbringing. To abandon curiosity in all personalities, good or bad, is to give up hope in humanity. Like somebody who is mumbling on the street - I'm always curious if his words make any sense. I'm interested in lost souls. They possess another sort of secret." Sarsgaard paused, then added: "And sex is better being Catholic. A little conflict makes everything more interesting."

Does Maggie Gyllenhaal like the death-cult aspect of Catholicism? If not, I offer myself up for a little conflict.

She Was Very Pretty

2005-11-08T22:36:00.000-05:00

Friday, before I left town, I went to see the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes exhibit at the Grolier Club on 60th Street in Manhattan. Yeah, I know. Smith College and Emory University opened their archives and dumped them out in glass cases, for which I was grateful. There was an older couple there, and the wife seemed to have known Plath at Smith. At one point her husband, tiny, tweedy, said, "She was pretty." Quietly, as if this was somewhat of a surprise to him. She, standing beside him as they gazed through the glass, corrected him: "She was very pretty." In the proprietary and defensive way, I suppose, many women have corrected what they feel to be shortsighted, erroneous impressions of Plath. Worth noting: on the Smith College memorandum paper she'd pilfered from the school and used well into adulthood, she made an outline for a novel called Falcon Yard, which was, of course, a thinly veiled retelling of the dissolution of her marriage to Hughes. She had brief descriptions for every character, and this was the heroine's creed: "A voyager, no Penelope." I wish she'd written it. No other American woman novelist seems to have created such a heroine since then except Erica Jong, and Fear of Flying, for me, veers off and away into an ether of yammering chatter. Also of note: in a letter to a friend complaining about encountering some suspicion of Hughes' ability and desire to make a living in America, she writes that she wishes people would get off his back and stop asking what he's doing. "He lives, people! That's what he does." I love how she suddenly gets all Rosalind Russell or Bette Davis on their asses. Not a usual Plath move. And I should know, because I discovered that I somehow knew many lines from the correspondence on display somewhat by heart--that and John 3:16 and some lines from Hamlet. I think I just lost a husband right there.

Nineteen Years Went Under The Bridge Like Time Was Standing Still

2005-11-03T21:50:00.000-05:00

I just finished watching Pretty in Pink. I think it has to be about ten or fifteen years since I've seen it. I picked up a tape from the free table at my last job and it has been languishing under the VCR in its cellophane wrap for about two years now. It stared out at me while I watched various entertainments, taunting me, hissing Contend with me! Face the fact that I might suck, and how! Also, I just feel like my generation puts enough masturbatory nostalgia out into the world, and I should in this little way be a conscientious objector. Boys and girls, it does suck, and how! I suppose I am the last one on earth to realize this. I guess the chief thing I'm taking away from this is that Molly Ringwald is not a good actress. She acts, it turns out, solely with her bottom lip. I did not remember this. I think I thought she was Audrey Hepburn in granny boots. Perhaps this is why Betsy's Wedding, etc. She can't act! But this does not mean my idolization was in vain. She's still amazing to stare at, and she seems like a real girl, not something created in a Disney test-tube, and Paramount let some band (the Rave-Ups) play in the film because she liked them, not because they thought they could sell records on the synergistic label. And unlike the ladies Duff and Lohan, she didn't demand, even though she could actually sing (now my mania is known), to parlay her teen queendom into poptartlet stardom. It's still true that she gave hope to all the little disgruntled but not yet cynical thirteen-year-olds who would soon don their own thrift store dresses to get all worked up about Unrest and the patriarchy. They shot the thing in Chicago, too, at Wax Trax and some club and setting scenes in Annie Potts' character's kitsch Chinatown lair, which sort of makes the movie an Adrian Tomine story with even less traction and worse dialogue. Verdict: They Still Don't Make Teen Movies Like They Used To, And Putting Death Cab For Cutie on The OC Doesn't Make Up For It.

Also: how strange to watch a John Hughes movie at home in the evening and not on channel 11 through dust motes and self-loathing at 3 in the afternoon on Sunday, so that shit and fuck are not dubbed over with socks and fudge. Piquant!

Toni Bentley Watch

2005-10-30T10:38:00.000-05:00

Toni who? You know, the woman who wrote the book about finding transcendence through anal sex--about how she entered paradise through her exit or some such. Called The Surrender. Oh, right! Right. She's got a piece in The New York Times Book Review today on a collection of women's letters from the Revolutionary War to the present. Why do you care? Yes, good question. Well, this is the second book that she's reviewed for them in the last couple of months, and I suppose I'm a little worried that they're turning her into some Daphne Merkin type who now gets exclusive rights to the opining on anything related to women and literature because she confessed before God and the chattering classes that she likes to do something very naughty in bed. Her first offense was a front-cover review of Vindication, a really lovely, lively biography of Mary Wollstonecraft; in the review's opening lines she made some reference to women being great dramatizers--when, you know, maybe that's just you. I like to think that Wollstonecraft, who spent her life writing and living in opposition to women trading on their sexual charms--and writing and living in opposition to any specious generalizing about who women are--would be rolling in her grave to think that some self-dramatizing former ballerina had the honor of reviewing her biography. (Oh, said a former dancer friend of mine, a ballerina would write a book about that.) Makes a lady think that the only way she's going to get byline action is by putting her exquisite perversities on display like so many pieces of delicate, slippery, unsubstantial underthings.

Which brings me to the Maureen Dowd showcase in the magazine. So we don't like it when men take us up on our half-hearted offers to go dutch and Botox is setting the movement back about thirty years? You don't say. Those towering and castrating-looking red pumps Dowd wears in the accompanying picture sure are fascinating, though. I did like the line about how she longed for the style and wit of the 30s while growing up in the Eros-mad sixties. That I'd like to read about. And if you would too, you should look up a book called Fast-Talking Dames by Princeton lit professor Maria DiBattista. In which DiBattista discusses why the rapid-fire, razor-sharp dialogue engaged in by screwball heroines of the 30s makes for a shining (equal) moment in American sexual relations. That then got obliterated by the John Wayne type.

Shopgirl Bloodbath!

2005-10-27T15:22:00.000-04:00

On Sunday my sister and I went to see Shopgirl. We love Claire Danes, we love Steve Martin. Well, I start to lose it during a scene where Danes is doing nothing more than sitting on her futon in blanketous white pajamas, sniffling so stoically and gracefully because (I think I got this right) she has stopped taking her antidepressant and Steve Martin does not love her. Stop crying! I say to myself. It has been a very long time since I've read Pauline Kael other than the capsule reprints in the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker, but I think that she would not approve of me losing it at a movie that really is nothing more about some girl who isn't getting what she wanted out of life. I think: Anthony Lane would probably hate this film. Stop crying! But then a few scenes later my sister loses it. We exit the theatre and a tall man asks me what movie is everyone crying over, and I feel a bit better because I thought we were the only sentimental fools.

What made it so sad? asked a friend who also wanted to see it. I tell her that it was that this was the first time I think I'd seen this particular sort of female yearning and loneliness, the kind that is a particularly urban female yearning and loneliness, put up on screen. Plus it was communicated largely silently through Danes' face. And her character acts in so much good faith but is let down by the men who were drawn to her (precisely because of the radiant good faith). Oh, says my friend in recognition, the usual girl story.

The usual girl story. And how often does that get told without stilettoes and vibrators and velvet ropes and pink drinks and glib wisecracks as props? And without being something based on a book by Jennifer Weiner that inspires weirdly long stories in the Times about the shoes that serve as the story's main metaphor. (Ms. Weiner, I will read your books one of these days because you are from Philly and somehow got Elaine Showalter to give you props, but chick lit deserves the disrespect it gets, and you can't convince me otherwise.) And when will the female condition ever be extrapolated by audiences and readers into something approximating the human condition? [Raise fist to sky here.]

Which is why David Edelstein's Slate review made me wanna throw stuff. And I usually enjoy him. It is not that I can refute him point by point, because I do see how the movie can rank "among the most noneventful romantic triangles ever committed to celluloid" and is "sadly vacuous, with a sadly vacuous center." I see how it's really no better than Pretty In Pink with Richard Neutra houses and she makes drawings not dresses to show that she is Creative and Unique. But having been what he calls "a blob of neediness" I must object, even though I know my objections are entirely personal in nature. It should not be the chief end of art to make you feel better about your own girl misfitness. But re: the nonevent, Virginia Woolf tells us that "life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged" and obviously he has never been a young woman in a big city baffled by her own desires while being simultaneously hampered and bolstered by a moral center. Because the film nails that. And I think his objective critical faculties may be clouded by the subjective: I bet he probably had to pick off a few blobs of neediness back in the day, and it made him tired. My other friend pointed out, astutely, that perhaps he suffered from the same male narcissism he spotted in Martin and his character, but had to annihilate it rather than own up to it and/or merely acknowledge it as a phenomenon. Also, I smell some misogyny. Dude, if you had ever been on the business end of male withholding, you might feel differently. (I should mention I love men. Really.)

Finally: "In any case, the best performance is by Bridgette Wilson-Sampras as the conniving but peppy slut at the perfume counter. Her big scene—farcical, filthy, surprising—is also the best in the movie." Screw you, Monsieur Edelstein, for privileging the peppy slut when I can get that always and everywhere from Us Weekly and oh, nearly every corner of culture? See--I told you this was personal.

For a really good appreciation of Danes, who is doing what Molly Ringwald (straight face, y'all!) should have done when she got older but ended up making Fresh Horses and Betsy's Wedding (the latter I paid to see in the theatre because my love knew no bounds), see Suzy Hansen's New York Observer story of last week. Once I figure out how to link, I will, but I think you all know how to Google.

Last Night Joan Didion Saved My Life

2005-10-26T18:10:00.000-04:00

Well, more like the other night. So on Monday some friends and I went to see Joan Didion read at the Paula Cooper gallery over on W. 21st Street. I'd never seen her read, though she is a patron saint, and figured I should go pay my respects. You had to buy The Year of Magical Thinking--first edition, signed--from 192 Books to gain admission. Since I do not have an office job, I volunteered to go early to lay out various personal effects on folding chairs. The high drama, perhaps to be expected from a certain segment of the Didion fan base--I myself go in for the cool customer making lists of what's in the linen closet and the larder--began early. A flock of probably wealthy, chunky-necklaced middle-aged ladies who clearly had been waiting all day for this, began hectoring the blazered bookstore staffer about their waiting list status. Some people play a mean game of tennis, or sing solos in the church choir—these women hector. Chairs still were being brought in; we all had to keep waiting. Then some leather-jacketed and near-balding writer--for the Voice, I think he said?--hectored the staffer about not being able to gain admission without having bought a book, walked out I swear while whipping his scarf around his neck. I was embarrassed for us all, and felt my own migraine coming on. Then Stephin Merritt showed up with a tall companion; they both seemed to be wearing tan field jackets, and Merritt, under a red baseball cap, seemed to have ginger hair. I always thought he had dark hair and sunken eyes and looked more like a crushed cigarette stub of a man--but here he looked almost as if he had been eating a lot of cheese and butter and had been taking the Irish setter to Maine a lot. I related all the high drama to one of my friends when she arrived and she gave two snaps up and said "Joan Didion!" in response. Another said: "Do you think she'll sign my book 'To a fellow Cal alum?'"

Ok, so Didion. Too-large navy blazer over a salmon colored cotton cable-knit crew. Too-large glasses--picture Carrie Donovan, only more square--and, heartbreakingly, one tortoiseshell butterfly clip holding one side of her bob off of her face. Maybe it was even plastic. All of us ladies died: "That clip!" It was not anything we would have ever worn ourselves, or expected her to wear, and I think it spoke to valuing expediency but not vanity, and some weird mix of grandmotherliness and girlishness. I'm still working out the totemic nature of that clip. But then I saw her slowly, deliberately sweep some hair away from her cheek and it was as if she still thought of herself as a beautiful woman who knew the power of her beauty.

And then she read. When she came to the bit about Dunne, after rereading A Book of Common Prayer, telling her "Don't ever tell me again that you can't write--that's my birthday present to you" she broke up. And others broke up too. Breaking up behind expensive and severe eyewear.

During the Q&A she revealed that she still isn't sure she can write. "And publishing books doesn't make it any clearer," she said. Someone asked why she loved Honolulu so much. "Well, it's simple. It's blue. And pink. And there are flowers, and it smells pretty."

It is on.

2005-10-25T22:50:00.000-04:00

More TK, as they say.