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Unless you're an insomniac. That's how little I got going on. Today's report:

* I changed my desktop background to a Jacob Black photo.

* I spent a certain amount of my work day watching a stink bug stroll back and forth along my window sill, totally nonplussed,* which pissed me off, frankly.

* I decided I'm going to buy the new John Mayer album in CD form instead of iTunes because he tends to have cool liner art.

*Someone who calls himself "A Friend" informed me that I am misusing nonplussed here. Oopsie.
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Jennifer Carpenter, from Dexter.

Not only does she have great emotional range but she's created a real personality for her character, someone believable and fully realized, not just a TV type. Love her.


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1. Apple crisp.

2. Apple pie. (If I buy the crust. I know, I know . . . soon I'll be asking for credit for making "iced water.")

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To make this, you use the exact same method as seared scallops, but with a longer cooking time. So to review:

1. Oil, salt, and pepper the steaks (i.e., the oil goes on the steak, not in the frying pan).

2. Heat pan to high,then sear the steaks 5 minutes each side. (You can cook them a few minutes longer on medium heat if they are particularly large or you like meat cooked to medium).

3. Remove them from the pan, and add 1/2 c of liquid, salt, and pepper. Reduce by half and stir in a slice of butter. Tonight, I used a mixture of chicken stock and marsala wine for the liquid, and it was delicious.
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One of my favorite cookbooks is "How to Cook without a Book" by Pam Anderson. Her philosophy is that if you have to follow a recipe, you'll never cook on weeknights. So she focuses on some simple techniques that you can memorize and improvise with. I've got her frittata down pretty well, and now I'm moving into the searing section.

Herewith, how to sear sea scallops:


SEARED SEA SCALLOPS

1. Sprinkle 4 sea scallops with oil, salt, and pepper.

2. Sear them on high heat for 2 minutes each side.

3. Make a pan sauce to accompany them. To do this, remove the scallops from the pan, add in 1/2 cup of chicken stock, salt, and pepper, and cook till it reduces by half. Swirl in a slice of butter till melted for extra body. You can substitute part of the chicken stock with another liquid (white wine, orange juice, Grand Marnier, etc.).

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This was one of my favorite movies in college, and I just caught it on cable. It has held up well! Great combination of humor and seriousness, feminism and longing. Every single element of this movie is good: the acting, direction, lyrics, music. And I was completely in love with Mandy Patinkin. Eve speculates that I like scruffy guys because neat, All-American men carry (for me) a sense of a veneer hiding corruption (I guess like Michael Douglas in Wall Street).



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From last weekend in NY:

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This photog has an exhibit at the Corcoran. I really hope we have a chance to catch it.

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Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern, by Joshua Zeitz (2006)

I really enjoyed this history of women in the 1910s and 1920s. It was interesting to read how the introduction of various technologies (the bicycle, the phone, electric lighting) influenced social mores, doing away with the traditional parlor courtship and giving young couples new freedoms to spend time alone. As electric lighting created a city night life for the first time, and women started moving to the cities, having jobs, and living independently, courtship was replaced by dating, which was both a blessing and a curse to women. Now, couples went out on the town for fun, which someone had to pay for. And since men made twice as much as women for the same jobs, and women were often expected to turn over more of their earnings to their parents, young women relied on men to pay for entertainment, creating an uncomfortable indebtedness.

It was interesting to read when various changes occurred in history. For example, until 1900, most clothes were made at home. The dress pattern was created in the 1850s, and ready-to-wear clothes were popularized in the early 1900s, when heavy Victorian clothing gave way to lighter outfits for women.

As America became less agricultural, many families had fewer children. Parents gave more attention to the children they did have, and many young people had leisure time and hobbies for the first time. By the 1910s and 1920s, youth culture had emerged, along with advertising and a new consumerism.

The book was easy to read and informative, but the author sometimes spent more time on some narrow topics (the biographies of three silent film stars) that were only tangential to the central idea of the emergence of modernity. It was interesting to see the different forms that women’s lives could take, though.


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1. Jay decided he's going to start going by the moniker Bartolomeo Cappuccino. I created a friend for him, Panache Aulait.

2. On the way home from the movie, Jay asked if I had heard about the controversy swirling around Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I said no. He said, "Apparently his new novel . . ." "Wait! Wait!" I said; "let me guess---his new novel features a man having sex with a young girl!" "Yes!" he said. "Ha," I said, and patted myself on the back.

3. This is the movie we saw. It was amazing.

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This morning Lynn and I were discussing the familiar W.H. Auden poem below, and she suggested I put up this observation on the blog.

I'm not sure whether someone pointed this out to me or I noticed it on my own. The poem, which is one of my very favorites, is for the most part quite difficult to sound out. One feels that the speaker must be talking very slowly, in a monotone. It is as if his* overwhelming sense of grief has left him tongue tied. But he begins to break down in the third stanza, and the words come tumbling out ― haltingly at first ("my North, my South, my East and West") ― then in a free flow of tears ("My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song"). Just as quickly he shuts down again, and the last stanza is back to a despairing drone.

*As far as I can tell from a little Internet research, Auden had in mind variously male, female, and universal speakers/singers (the poem was originally written as a song with lines for both male and female voice) for different versions of the poem. Although it is not likely that any version referred to one of Auden's own partners, at one point he included it with other poems exploring same-sex relationships.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message “He Is Dead”,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W. H. Auden - Twelve Songs IX. Funeral Blues
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This month's Esquire published an article on Twilight, asserting that women love vampires because they (get ready for it) want to have sex with gay men. Jezebel.com has a great riposte to the article, with equally great reader comments. Like this one:

"We women are so complicated. Thank goodness there are smart magazine articles to tell us what's going on in our batty brains."

And this one, which starts with a quote from the Esquire article:

" 'Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because straight young women want to have sex with gay men.' Does this statement remind anyone else of Mad Libs? It is so odd and arbitrary."

These days, everyone is trying to find some deep, dark explanation for why women like Twilight. It's a complete obsession with Twilight haters and "serious" cultural critics, and their explanation is always some twisted psychopathy in women's "batty brains."

Please, people, it's not that complicated. Good story + sexy boy = we like! Throw in that percentage of the population who have a tendency toward fandom (you know, like guys who love sports, video games, or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue), and you have the Twilight phenom. But whereas male fandom carries prestige and pride, female fandom always carries a whiff of hysteria or psychological unhealth in the wider culture. I think part of my own obsession with Twilight is rebellion against that. I want to push back against the belittling of women's taste and enthusiasms. The subtle disdain for what women value is like a sepia tone applied to a photograph which colors everything in the frame, and it's something that falsifies us, falsifies reality.

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We just got back from our New York jaunt (extended to Monday, as it turned out). We had a great time. We stayed at Broadway and 32nd, which was a great neighborhood. On Sunday we went to the Whitney and the Frick. But the highlight was definitely seeing Hamlet on Saturday night at the Broadhurst Theater. Jude Law was a fantastic Hamlet, and the production was great overall.

Having seen so many productions of Hamlet, what I really look for is for the actors and the director to have a clear idea about the play and the character. Some productions have emphasized his indecision, some his intellect, some his distaste for what is essentially a horrible thing to be asked to do. Jude Law's Hamlet was not indecisive. He was a man of action, one who is doing, all through the play, exactly what he intends to be doing. For example, in the scene where he comes upon Claudius at his prayers and thinks of killing him, the scene is played like this: Claudius is toward the front of the stage, and Hamlet walks by an opening at the back of the stage. As soon as he sees Claudius, he strides in forcefully and pulls his knife, lifting it over his head, ready to strike. Then he delivers the lines that say (essentially), Why should I do him the favor of killing him while he prays and thus sending him to heaven? This is not played as indecision or making excuses but as part of Hamlet's revenge. He wants to make this as bad for Claudius as he can.

In this production the tragedy is not in Hamlet's actions or inactions---the tragedy had already occurred when the curtains rises. The tragedy is the murder of his father, and the subsequent loss of Hamlet's sense of security, love, and goodness. When his father dies, he loses that sense of security that we all have until something goes horribly wrong. We take our good life for granted as the natural way of things, until a baby dies, or a friend is raped, or we are paralyzed in a car accident. And then we realize that what we thought was the natural order of things was just a string of incredibly good luck. Then he loses his sense of love when his mother, who seemed completely in love with his father, remarries almost immediately. All his ideals of love are shattered; if what was between them wasn't love, then can anything be considered love? Finally, he loses his sense of goodness when the final piece drops: when he learns that his uncle murdered his father. I imagine this as akin to how the family must have felt when their son-in-law murdered their pregnant daughter. All at once, you lose not just someone you love, but you realize that snakes live among us.

All of this is to say that this production emphasized Hamlet's natural reactions to a devastating loss rather than focusing on any "mistakes" that Hamlet is conceived of making in other interpretations. Jay chuckled at me when, at one point in the performance, I leaned over and whispered, "It's just so SAD." Well, yes, it is.

Another thing I liked about the production was that the female characters, Gertrude and Ophelia, were not played as gentle innocents. Gertrude was strong and practical (but not evil) and Ophelia was playful and almost modern. They were really fresh conceptions of the characters. The actor playing Gertrude was Geraldine James, who I recognized from other British productions. It was also nice to see the psychosexual undertones UNDERplayed for once.

The costuming was modern but plain---which worked well. And the set was cool: a black stage floor, and a set of wooden walls in the back that moved back and forth, opening and closing as needed for various scenes. When open, you could see a plain background illuminated with a blue light.

The production had a nice theatricality and physicality, but not overdone. Some performances of Shakespeare play up the bawdiness and commedia dell'arte stylings with almost a self-conscious pride and wink to the audience, like "Look how irreverent we're being." This was just right---theatrical without seeming to linger or self-reflect on the physical tricks and playfulness.

The only downsides were two poor performances: the ghost of Hamlet's father, and Fortinbras. Normally a small part like Fortinbras wouldn't make much of an impact. It's just unfortunate that Fortinbras closes out the play---he speaks the last few lines. The actor was a little iffy. The actor playing the ghost was outright embarrassing---really over the top, almost a caricature of Shakespearean acting.
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The New Moon soundtrack gets an "A"from Entertainment Weekly. Promising!

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Jude Law as Hamlet
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I love this book. It's a police procedural that takes place in Ireland. Procedurals tend to contain the same elements, so it's kind of a mystery why some plod along and some soar. The writing is great in this book, on the literary side. But there's something about the set-up and the pacing that's just right too. Also, I think I know who the killer is. And those of you who know me well know that I believe the reader should be able to figure it out about 3/4 or 4/5 of the way through. If not, the author has strained to create an array of equally likely suspects, and the answer won't have a sense of rightness or inevitability to it.

Also, for book geeks: This is a cool website: www.coverbrowser.com

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I, like half the civilized world, heard about this group on Oprah this week. I have't signed up to sponsor yet, but I'm going to. The organization hooks you up with a woman in the Congo (which is, according to Lisa Ling, "the worst place on earth") to support and correspond with her. Oprah and the guests made the point that we think these problems are so vast they are insurmountable. But not true---a little help can really transform lives.

www.womenforwomen.org

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Google the Tonight Show clip in which Rob Pattinson asks (German) Heidi Klum if she's read the Niebelungenlied.
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I've read a couple of interesting nonfiction books recently.

One is A Vindication of Love, by Cristina Nehring: She talks about love and passion in general and also in various famous literary love stories. I like her general comments a little more than her literary analysis. For example, she notes that Tristan and Isolde keep separating and coming together, putting up unnecessary obstacles to their love, and sees this as evidence of the characters' need for drama to keep the passion alive. I would say rather that it's evidence of the author's and readers' need to repeat the drama of overcoming barriers in order to experience that passion of reunification over and over within the same story, rather than just once. In other words, that plot pattern doesn't arise from the psychology of the characters but from that of the readers and author. A small distinction.

Overall, the book is great. I like particularly how she argues that love is not blind: "Love, far from being blind, is the very emotion that allows us to see. It is the only state of mind in which one is entirely and uncompromisingly open to another person." I used to get mad at slow or timid drivers on the highway, but Jay is a slow, careful driver---it's just not in his nature to look ahead and plan out how to get around the cars in front of him. He just goes with the flow. He also doesn't have good night vision and can really have trouble driving at night. So now when I come upon a pokey driver, I think, "That could be Jay," and I'm much more sympathetic. This also happened when my mom got older and started driving much more carefully. When I see an older driver, I think, "That's somebody's mom."

Another book is The End of the Novel of Love, by Vivian Gornick. I read this a few years ago and didn't think much of it. But I read it again this month and was able to appreciate it much, much more. My feeling toward it was exactly the opposite to the Nehring book. I felt like Gornick's book was weaker in the general comments (e.g., people don't believe in the redeeming power of romantic love anymore---I don't think that's true) and stronger in the literary analysis.

Her literary sense is so fine, I've rarely seen the like of it. One chapter discusses the hard-boiled detective genre and its cousins (e.g., Hemingway, Richard Ford). Here's what she writes about Ford's novel The Sportswriter: "It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world. . . . He feels compassion for women but not empathy. . . . In his mind, the people who embody his condition are other men he runs up against in a random fashion. There are these men, who are like himself, and then there are the women, who can no longer give comfort against the overwhelming force of life."

She finds writers like Ford to be, not misogynistic, but sentimental. Their whole existential dilemma is predicated on a romanticization of a sexual love that they've had and lost. But did their relationships ever work like the authors and characters want to believe they did? Or is it just nostalgia for the time in their life when they believed it worked redemptively? Nostalgia for an idea they had, not a reality they had? This is what Gornick objects to: The characters don't learn, which would be okay if the author demonstrated a distance between what he knows and what his characters know---but this isn't the case. The characters persist in a "dreamy" confusion about their state that the author doesn't give lie to, narratively.

I disagree with Gornick about the inevitability of romantic disappointment. For her, romantic love can never be redemptive or transformative, and she would like authors to evince an understanding of this. I'd say rather than it can sometimes be redemptive, sometimes not. There is way too much variety in relationships to allow for a single rule. It does seem hard for writers to convey the reality of redemptive romantic love. I wouldn't say that it's an impossible task for literature, but apparently a very difficult one. The kind of day-to-day, year-by-year transformation that love can bring is perhaps not very plot-friendly.

That's why, in the past, the wonderful and life-changing effects of love were couched in stories of courtship. Anne Elliot (in Jane Austen's Persuasion) is almost a spinster, with all that that implies. She foolishly spurned the love of a good man because of family pressure about his social status. Now she is 26 years old, lonely, and---without a husband or family of her own--lower in social status herself than ever before. She is subject to the whims and the disdain of others. When against all odds she meets again with her suitor, the painful awareness of all that she's lost is devastating. By the end of the novel, her life has turned around in a way she never could have hoped for. She is married to someone she loves, someone who adores her, and she is embarked upon a life of adventure and interest. The novel ends with the wedding---Austen never tackles married life itself. But we feel, in that one ecstatic moment in which the characters have everything they ever dreamed of, a lifetime's worth of the joy, comfort, and companionship of true love over time.

I can't think of one single novel that tackles the reality of love in a detailed, extended way---not through a metaphor like a wedding after a trying courtship but directly. If you can think of one, let me know!
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An acquaintance of ours is really devoted to her dog, and she did a lot of research on the best dog food. She imports two kinds of dog food:

* A venison/salmon mix from Canada

and

* A kangaroo/apple mix from Australia
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Got Justice?

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Thanks to Deb for highlighting this article on director Roman Polanski, who fled the US in the 60s while on trial for raping a 13-year-old.

An interesting comment from the now-grown victim in the case:

"He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life."

Thankfully I think the laws have changed regarding media treatment of rape victims and minors during legal proceedings. Still, I think about how Michael Jackson's accuser has spent his life in hiding ever since the trial, fleeing not so much the media as the rabid fans who constantly threaten him. It's crazy; the price of pursuing justice is high.

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