Caffeine

I've spent the last few days not drinking anything caffeinated and while I no longer need a cup of black tea first thing in the morning just to feel alive and the headaches have diminished to an echo at the back of the brain, I am sleeping 15 hours a day. If not more. I am indeed less anxious and irritable and lethargic in my waking moments, but they are so few and far between. This can't be a solution, can it?

the stuff that won't go away

Jeffrey Eugenides quotes Colm Toibin on writing: “It seems that the essential impulse in working is … to allow what haunts you to have a voice, to chart what is deeply private and etched on the soul, and find a form and structure for it.”

In preparation for the new semester

I am booking Restaurant Week lunches and buying shoes on Zappos.

Easier in the third person

Weddings and graduations - I don't remember much of my own, but when attending someone else's I find myself listening carefully to the commencement address, the officiator's blessing, the wedding vows, secular and sacred. As if the act of attention was not something offered not just to them - the graduand, the bride - but also to us, a renewal of our ambitions, and our vows.

overheard at the honey shop

Shopkeeper to customer: "...and it's a great gift for the person who has it all. I mean, they're unlikely to have volcanic honey from Hawaii."

doing nothing

is something I don't seem to be good at any more. That is, I'm extremely good at procrastinating, and frittering away time on the net (my latest thing: listening to back episodes of In Our Time and calling it research), and making up slightly less unpleasant errands, and generally wittering around. I can't do nothing with a clear conscience, because there's always something to do, and it's never the something I am actually doing. The solution, of course, is to either do the something, or do nothing and enjoy it, rather than what I generally end up doing, which is to do not-quite-nothing not quite well and not quite easily.

Can't make up her mind

trying out wordpress.

If I had an accountant

I would be one of those people who were cheated for twenty years without realizing it, and too embarrassed to say anything even if I suspected.

On the Avengers

1. Is Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark the first postmodern superhero? By which I mean one conscious of his role as a superhero, and of his enjoyment of his - all deprecation and irony and unabashed enjoyment of celebrity and underneath it all a bedrock of noble-minded idealism, but without the angst that often accompanies it (Spiderman, Batman - at least in the newer movie incarnations).

2. Our basic idea of a spaceship hasn't really changed, has it? The thing that they were flying on - the giant floating platform thing vaguely in the shape of a flattened airplane - that's pure Star Wars (what was it, the Death Star?), with cooler guns. In fact, has our imagination moved much beyond Star Wars? The flying platform thing, the flying chariot/scooter thing that the Chitauri were riding, even the Chitauri - perhaps it was homage to Star Wars and the pioneers of sci-fi movies (if that is what they are), but it does seem that the graphics have gotten more sophisticated and the costumes more outrageous, but our imagination hasn't expanded. We're still thinking in Star Wars terms about space. Or is it that our imagination moved downwards instead, into small things, nanotechnology, wired and wireless worlds, things like that?

3. After all these years, still Loki?

4. The day Captain America is unironically played by a non-whiteblondblue-eyedman, will be the day the race and gender barriers finally fall.

5. I do love Robert Downey Jr. Also Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper.

This discipline thing

Is it working for you?

Trade-offs

I just broke my phone contract and switched to a cheaper, no-contract plan on a different provider, because the savings over a year will cover the plastic flip phone (flip phones! remember when?) I had to buy from Walmart, the early termination fee, the acquisition of a smartphone for the budget-minded, and have a little left over for dinners out. Which is the whole point, really. It's only now, with both of us here, that I'm thinking about our finances, and how hard it is to live within our means, which at the moment are slender. It's not the big purchases which are hard to avoid, though I haven't quite avoided them; it's trying the new Indian place down the road, sharing a bottle of wine with dinner, buying a rug or a picture for the apartment, a coffee to see me through this essay, strawberries and bread and flowers from the farmers' market. It's the laptops and the coats and the boots which are a little more expensive, perhaps, but good value for money, good quality. All the small extravagances of grown-up life that you don't really think about until you think about giving them up.

What indeed

From a footnote in the Social Contract:

The name Rome, which presumably comes from Romulus, is Greek, and means force. The name Numa is also Greek, and means law. What is the likelihood that the first two kings of that town would have borne in advance names so clearly related to what they did? 

On examples

I love the Chicago ARTFL project. It gives you searchable digital copies of old French texts (although it doesn't seem to have them in printable format, which is a pity) and contemporary dictionary definitions and examples of usage for any word in the texts. For example, looking up "association" in the 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Academie Francaise gives you the following cheery example: "leur association est rompue, est finie."

Rousseau on his critics

by a misfortune that keeps pursuing my adversaries, they are mistaken even about facts that prove nothing against me.

- In his last reply to his critics on the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

On learning/on losing time

The more [man] knows, the more aware he is of having to acquire knowledge; that is to say that the time he loses only serves to excite him to lose more: only in a very few men of genius does insight into their own ignorance grow as they learn, and they are the only ones for whom study may be good: almost as soon as small minds have learned something, they believe they know everything, and there is no sort of foolishness which this conviction will not make them say or do.

- Rousseau's reply to King Stanislaus's comments (italicized) on his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts

This.

I've been reading Maurice Cranston's biography of Rousseau, and this is just perfect. 

Table

I don't particularly like its name, but it's a great-looking table. And functional as it comes: large, long surface to work on, splash of colour, minimal lines, and no drawers and things to get in the way of the legs.

Key hiding rock!

Perhaps if I got some plants and pebbles and things, and put them on the fire escape?



Via Swiss Miss.

California dreamin'

Driving through California, from Palm Springs to Los Angeles, up the Pacific Coastal Highway past Malibu and Santa Barbara to detour inland to Templeton and Paso Robles and Central Coast wine country, and back past Big Sur and Carmel and onward to San Francisco, gives me a glimpse of something I never quite understood: land itself as a character in American literature and art. Those American paintings with a strip of yellow sand and a strip of blue sky and nothing else breaking the horizon but a green-and-white striped umbrella. Georgia O'Keeffe's New Mexican desert landscapes. (I looked for them in the LACMA and SF MOMA, but found only a petunia and a valley in SF.) The myth of the wild west - and it is truly wild, the desert is alien, even in a contained setting like the Joshua Tree national park. The myth of road trips, the road stretching ahead, straight and true, hacked out from between hills and running alongside the edges of cliffs. (The man in front of me at City Lights bought a copy of On the Road, and said, I bet you sell a lot of this book huh? The guy manning the counter, silver-haired and wire-rimmed bespectacled and urbane and condescending, said, we probably sell more copies of Howl.) The light reduces the landscape to nouns: rock, sand, sea, cliff, hills. Last time I was at City Lights, eight years ago, I bought Joan Didion's essays. What stays with me is not the neurotic social landscape - Hollywood tea parties, the morning after the Manson murders, the Reagan governor's mansion - but the hot, dry Santa Ana winds blowing across the valley, bringing migraines and madness and grief. Even the rolling hills of Paso Robles are bleached dry and harsh in the light. The same climate as Tuscany, the olive oil guy said, himself a Silicon Valley retiree, tricking out his farm in tech (in effect, Apple paid for my farm, he said), but drier. The land only dwindles down to human size in San Francisco, with its damp winds and misty fogs, the fog rolling in the last day we were there, covering Treasure Island and the top of the Golden Gate Bridge and the road 100 yards ahead, until all we could see was fog, a thick mist against the car lights, grey in the distance, damp and chill and still more familiar.

After some years

I have been a long time in a strange country.
The natives have been kind, in their weird climate,
Receiving me among them as one of themselves.
Their virtues are different from ours, and in some ways
Superior. I have lost the sense
Of absurdity regarding many of their odd customs.
I get their wry lingo tangled up with my own.
Maybe you have to go far away
To learn where it is that names you. The fruits here
Are excellent; better than at home.
I can no longer taste them. I would be glad
To be standing in a drab city of my own recollection
Where no one but newsboys would name this place
And they mispronouncing. I hope I may
Before too long. Before the speech here has become
Natural to me, even more so
Than the tongue I was born to, before these
Sights cease to be foreign and are more familiar
Than any I can recall. And while I
Can still clearly remember that at home too the world
Is made of strangers. For I do not wish
To head back into expectation
Of anything better than is there, and struggling
With some illusion, find my own place
Is as far away as ever. But it should be
Soon. Already I defend hotly
Certain of our indefensible faults,
Resent being reminded; already in my mind
Our language becomes freighted with a richness
No common tongue could offer, while the mountains
Are like nowhere on earth, and the wide rivers.

- W. S. Merwin (1957)