diamonds and rust /  by mrm

I don't want to be that person who never leaves California, and I don't think I am or will become so, but walking home tonight, a skirt, thin stockings, and a light jacket I thought oh, I don't miss real winter, I don't.

himmel /  by mrm

Tonight was attempt #2 at Bavarian Pretzels. Using this recipe and some food-grade lye I'd ordered on the internet, I made immensely delicious (if not perfectly Bavarian) pretzels. So tasty! Aesthetically, there is a bit of room for improvement, and next time I would prefer it if they don't stick quite so much to the baking tray. Sadly, no photos. I was first very busy cooking and second very busy eating. Too bad. Images of me clad in elbow-length gloves while dipping the pretzels – very quickly – in the water/lye solution would have, no doubt, been humorous. Some other time, perhaps. I will make these again. I will double the recipe.

au revoir, my dear Lessing /  by mrm

Five books later, I think I must give Doris Lessing a break. Forgive a final out-pouring of crush, please.

"Why should I stay in this country? I'll tell you something, I've just understood it – when you've left one country, then you've left all countries, forever."
          – Landlocked
"[she] found that [he] had, in the intervening years, become possessed, had succumbed (to what? She didn't know – unless one chose to use shorthand words like evil, to be done with thinking about it)"
          – The Four-Gated City

"She had become that person which she hated and feared more than any other – the matron*."
          – The Four-Gated City

She does favor the em dash. But I favor her.

*An insult I can recall stretching back a long time "You sound like my mother" or even simply "Okay, Mom." Female authority as disparaged, unserious, and sexless. So much of The Four-Gated City (the fifth book) explores how we were (or are) socialized to hate our mothers – for their self-abnegation, their sacrifice, their compassion. And then you have moments such as this:
"It can be taken as an axiom that all governments everywhere lie – it is inevitable. Naive people think that conspiracies are seven men around a table in a Machiavellian plot: a conspiracy is an atmosphere, or frame of mind in which people are impelled to do things, perhaps those things that they could never do as individuals, or couldn't do at other times when the atmosphere is different."
It boggles the mind that she isn't more widely read.

it's so nice /  by mrm

when someone comes along and reminds me I'm not the only one:
"I am actually almost completely anti-wedding and not so keen on the 'institution' of marriage either. I did get married, at City Hall no less, and I only got married because my then-boyfriend kept asking me and I thought it would be easier to get a mortgage if we were married, but I was perfectly happy and fully committed just living with him (I am still perfectly happy and fully committed). What I hate about weddings is the patriarchalism. I hate the surprise proposal. Why does the man get to decide when the couple marries? Shouldn't marriage be something that both adults discuss together? I hate the getting down on one knee. The idea that it is the woman who has to be wooed and it is the man's responsibility to do so. I hate the engagement ring. Aside from the fact that buying diamonds supports an evil, destructive 'business,' I hate the idea that the woman needs to be 'bought' with a diamond and that putting a diamond on her finger suggests some sort of ownership on the man's part. I hate that the father walks the bride down the  aisle and 'gives her away.' I find the whole thing to be sexist pageantry and a needless expense. I hate the conformity of the whole thing. I think the best reason to get married is if you are gay. Then it really means something valuable."
                 – Ellen Tarlin on Slate.com's DoubleX, a project with which I do not always find myself in such perfect sympathy as I did upon reading this (full discussion on weddings here)

seals part deus ex machina /  by mrm

It was so wholly good to take a day off, get out of town, and do something strange that I almost thought that was all I was going to say about it. Or even that I wasn't going to say about it, just relax and put up some photos.

Elephant seals are so bizarre and, as always seems to happen when observing other species and their sex relationships and reproductive behaviors, many comparisons were made to humans. Well. We could play that game all day, and for every behavior that reinforced the patriarchy you could find one in monkeys or seahorses or what have you that subverted it. The point being that it's pointless. Whether or not you agree with Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen that "Nature is what we were put here to rise above," we've got to stop pointing to animals that suit our purposes and say "Look, they do it." We're people. We've got to decide what that means.

water oliphants /  by mrm

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee...
                       – John Donne

 
Elephant Seals at Año Nuevo

 
California is so strange. 

But I don't care what they say.

I like it anyway.

(my camera died this weekend, exhibiting a surprisingly spectacular sense of the inopportune. All photos courtesy of CS).

hair /  by mrm

In a Safeway in Sacramento, the woman at the check-out counter said to me "I love your hair."
"Thanks!" I replied, "I do it myself."
"You must not have a man at home who yells at at you if you cut it off, then," she said with a smile, laughing.
I smiled slightly and said "No one gets to yell at me" and thought but you don't have to accept this system, these systems, that your hair should be long, that long hair is feminine, that femininity is even worthwhile, that your husband or boyfriend or anyone has anything to say, much less to shout at you about it, that possessiveness is indicative of being desired or cherished, that this is what love looks like, and I said "Have a nice day."

in memoriam J.D.S. /  by mrm

"Seymour once said to me – in a crosstown bus, of all places – that all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold."
- Franny and Zooey

"You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes."
- Franny and Zooey

"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."
- The Catcher in the Rye

"This is a people shooting hat...I shoot people in this hat."
- The Catcher in the Rye

let me see your sushi roll /  by mrm

because I won't show you mine. Saturday was great. It finally didn't rain for a bit, and so I got to go for my run. Then I went to see the Emigre exhibition at Gallery 16. Pretty nifty stuff. The clear highlight for me, exhibition-wise, was the booklet of love letters. Histrionic and erudite and dripping with the purplest of prose, it was a surprising and fun way to show off and market various Emigre fonts. Laugh out loud funny, at least for yours truly, and so pleasing to the eye.

Then in the pm my dearly beloved downstairs neighbors threw a sushi-rolling birthday party for a Japanese ex-pat accordion player. What's not to love? People brought just about every good thing to roll into the sushi, there were massive and intimidating pots of rice, and plentiful beverages. Well. Didn't I just have a good time. My serious failure for the evening, however, was in rolling the sushi. Like the true beginner I was (am), I got too excited and tried to put everything in one roll: mango, crab, avocado, cucumber, and probably a couple other more things. It was, ultimately, delicious and unstable. I think I ended up with three pieces that held together and could be identified as sushi. The rest exploded all over the plate upon slicing. But so very tasty. Then, live music and a little dancing. The company wasn't bad, either.


Sunday was quite a decent sequel. Yummy brunch, though I say it myself, and in the evening, free concert from the Conspiracy of Beards, an all-male Leonard Cohen a capella choir.

surely she's joking /  by mrm

Certainly many contemporary domestic scenarios are less than ideal, an imbalance which would often be at least partially aided by government-mandated (and perhaps supported) childcare. However, Sandra Sing Loh's NYT piece is so ridiculous reductive and poorly considered that I had a hard time believing I was reading it. This would not have been published in the NYT, I hazard a guess, had it been written by a man. While others – many feminists, as a matter of fact – have opined in the past that "everyone needs a wife," Loh's bizarrely idealized notion of domestic life in the 1950's shows that she should probably a) read The Way We Never Were or at the very least b) watch Mad Men. Bah. It's such knee-jerk reactionary nonsense that I'm even having a hard time getting my dander up about it.

beer! /  by mrm

Always extraordinary housemate Kristin began brewing beer today. What a wonderful thing to wake up to on a Sunday. While we cannot yet drink the beer (oh waiting, you are never my friend), the smell – a jumble of bread baking, tea steeping, and well, beer – wafted down the hall in the most wonderful way all afternoon.

Meanwhile, 10 points to Lea for describing the hops, which I likened to rabbit pellets, as "astronaut beer." It's got to be better than Tang.

somewhat mystifying but decidedly aromatic bag of things which compose beer

reminiscence /  by mrm

Nostalgia can be kind of like a drug, I think, if you let it get to you. You think not only about the way things are, but the way you always wished they'd be, the golden idyll of then which is at such a safe remove from now. But this entire longing backward is unsustainable, impossible – time is perhaps not an eternal forward march, but neither is it something you can just reach back and grab. It recedes and eludes. Like catching hold of your reflection in a pool of water. You've got something. Not what you wanted.

mi mancha firenze /  by mrm

It's always a delight when I am presented with an opportunity to practice my (increasingly rusty) Italian. Enter Luciano Landi. A winemaker from Marche, he is as impeccably dressed and effortlessly charming as I have come to expect Italian men of a certain age (of any age) to be, and his English was somewhat hesitant at best. Cue the tiger pouncing. We got on famously, and I purchased two bottles. Well, under normal circumstances I wouldn't have, I'm sure, but nostalgia holds sway like undertow and I'm happy I came up with my head above water. It's all been a bit much, lately.

Lacrima di Morro d’Alba. Cin Cin!

there is no good reason /  by mrm

that I forgot to quote this months ago, when I read it. It bears reviewing:
Ebenezer hesitated ' 'Tis a great step.'
' 'Tis a great world and a short life,' replied Burlingame. 'A pox on all steps but great ones.'
and
'If you'd live in the world, my friend, you must dance to some other fellow's tune or call your own and try to make the world step to't.'
                   – John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor