Other People's Things

I've been reading some Proust at night before bed. A slender volume that is nice to hold when lying down.

The length of his sentences and the interceding commas make for a literary lullaby. I find his descriptions of the art of reading and of the spaces of reading to be especially thoughtful and prosaic. For instance, he describes how remembering the books of one's childhood brings back not images of the story but rather of the spaces and events that comprise the reading environment.

Of particular note is his description of reading in an unfamiliar bedroom...

"I leave it to people of taste to make of their bedrooms the very image of their taste and to fill them only with those objects of which it can approve. For myself, I only feel myself live and think in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from my own, of a taste the opposite of mine, where I can rediscover nothing of my conscious thought, where my imagination is exhilarated by feeling itself plunged into the heart of the non-self;

...that you are everywhere touching the bareness of this life in the intention of disturbing yourself by your own familiarity, as you put your things down in this place or that, playing proprietor in a room filled to overflowing with the souls of others and which preserves the imprint of their dreams in the very shape of the firedogs or the pattern on the curtains, or as you walk barefoot over its unknown carpet..."

Marcel Proust, Days of Reading

Foreign objects, serving no purpose exterior to their own existence as things, reinforce the imaginative life of the self by signifying what is non-self. For Proust, the vial of orange flower essence on his nightstand with no relevance to his life signifies the act of reading and immersing himself in what is completely alien to the self.

“Nothing, I see, is good without respect.”

Review of Merchant of Venice in NY Times. Played at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Al Pacino plays Shylock, the maligned, misunderstood Jew, in what I imagine is a very poignant critique of our money-hungry world.

Photo courtesy of Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

How far to your lunch?

Today for lunch I made salads. Not just any salad though. Everything but the avocado and salad dressing (Annie's Naturals of course) came from within 50 miles of our house.

Spinach and green lettuce courtesy of Porter Farms CSA program, Elba, NY ... 40 miles

Cage-free organic eggs from Wegmans ... somewhere around here

Cherry, grape, and glacier tomatoes, Fortistar, N. Tonawanda, NY ... 10 miles

Arugula, random lettuce, basil, oregano, Gutmann house, Buffalo, NY ... 0 miles

Book Cover Archive

Book Cover Archive is my new favorite addiction. I have to admit that I frequently judge books by their covers, and perhaps even judge you by yours.

My propensity for all things beautiful, haunting, evocative, and composed succumbs to aesthetic stupor when faced with a book cover, piece of clothing, or plate of food. Call me epicurean or vain, but why settle for ordinary when extra-ordinary is within reach?

The Penguin Great Ideas series is a fine example of clean, precise book cover art. If I had the wherewithal, I would buy the whole series, now in its fourth series.

Final Sale

Final Sale starts today at J. Crew online and in stores.

Wish list...

Alecia suede platform peep-toes (Paris pink, size 8)

Rogue ruffle dress

Ink blossom pencil skirt

Natural Colors

While walking Bella down the old train bed beyond our dead end street I noticed a profusion of purple berries on the side of the path. I found the vines strung in and among brambles, grape vines, sumac, and any other plant that thrives out of neglect and overgrowth. The berries looked like raspberries but were the color of blackberries. Let me call them black raspberries. Lacking the requisite berry-picking paraphernalia, I saved the task of removing the vines from their delicate burdens until later in the afternoon, when I could also procure an assistant.

The weather today favored berry-picking; cool and intermittantly cloudy. Turner and I returned to the bushes with two Nalgenes and proceeded to fill them almost to the top while Bella ran freely through the verdure. Not wanting the delicate berries to waste one ounce of their fresh-pickedness, I rinsed the two pounds of berries and added them with one pound of suger to my faithful Dutch oven Le Crueset. I added the juice of one lime (lacking the lemon the gives the jam natural pectin for setting) and am waiting now for the mixture to cool before determining whether I made syrup or jam.

I did however help relieve the invasive sweet peas of some of their blossoms. They are now resting sweetly in tight bouquets around the house. Luckily, there will be no shortage of replacements as sweet peas have taken over the hillside opposite the berry bushes.

For Lack of a Better Word

It has been over a month since finishing the spring semester. I spent weeks researching and writing three substantial papers, on women and power in Chaucer, on Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth's use of river ecology in nationalist poetics, and on magic and the body in The Tempest. As you might expect, my brain was fried.

Since completing this work, I have spent my time not writing, but reading all the "fun" books that build up over the course of the school year. Oddly enough, my hands started to itch. I felt weird, reading and thinking but not writing. Writing, as the rhet/comp folks like to say, holds reading's hand. They skip together down the path of critical thinking.

And yet here was this empty, forlorn blog that I started almost one year ago. A forum, largely private (because I know few read this) for writing about what I read and think and presumably sending these notions out into the void. The challenge now is to not get fed up with writing on the blog. I have never been one for forced journaling. (That gerund makes me cringe and turning into a substantive verb is even worse... "to journal"... ugh.) In college, I took a yoga class. Since I had all my classes taken, I indulged myself in ballet, yoga, and badminton for college credit. Back to the yoga. The instructor mandated writing daily journal entries which would be turned in for part of the final grade. I was one of those people who would make up a week's worth of entries in one sitting and be done with it. I dislike writing about my feelings, even to myself. Hopefully I never end up in therapy that prescribes journaling as part of the healing process.

So why blog then? Well, I need to keep my writing fingers in shape for the coming school year, and I think that I have something to share with you. The first goal should be easy; I could just type the alphabet over and over again. The second, we'll see. I make no promises.