Snip snip

Earlier this week, I realized I had been in London for three months already. More specifically, I realized that I had been in London for three months already and it was definitely, urgently, unquestionably time for a haircut. My bangs had grown past my eyebrows and then past my eyes weeks ago, and I'd adopted a swept to the side style that I hoped looked deliberate or even just passable, rather than like a feeble attempt to conceal my ill-kept locks. Previously, I'd attempted to trim my own bangs, but it didn't go well. Soon after I'd tried it I was told at a dinner party that I looked a bit like John Bunyan, so I decided not to try it again. Plus, much as I love Tom, I wasn't about to ask him to trim my bangs, so I decided to find a hairdresser.

In most aspects of my life I'm not superstitious or religious, but I am, I suppose, a bit religious about who cuts my hair. I figure that hair is one accessory worth investing in: you wear it every day, and it has the potential to make things look better, rather than worse, so why not? Plus I've been growing out my hair, and I wanted to find someone who'd restore order without chopping off too much length. I'm growing it out in part because I really want to have long hair again, and haven't since I was very young, and in part because my hair is finally longer than Tom's, and I'm not about to give up that hard-won victory just yet. It was cool to have hair shorter than his, and maybe I'll go back to it sometime, but not just yet.

So, I started looking around for a place. Everything in London is expensive to begin with, so I couldn't go straight to the place where Tilda Swinton gets her hair done. Mind you, I was sorely tempted, especially as it's called Tommy Guns. But instead I settled on Hair and Jerome in Spitalfields, in East London. I didn't know anyone who'd been there, but I thought, well, it's worth a try. It's run by ex-Parisians, and the walls are an amazing shade of dark yellow, with contrasting black trim. Everything is perfectly done, and the barber chairs are antiques. When I walked in, I thought, these are all signs of a place that will be too cool for school, not to mention for me. I was wrong, though: it was very unpretentious.

Anyhow, I was reminded of how the experience of going to someone new for a haircut requires complete trust. You have to cede faith to the scissors. It's been a while since I've had to do this, and there were a few moments when I found my heart in my throat, as Ismarie, the lady in question, cut off huge pieces of my hair. I kept thinking, wait, I thought we were going to keep it long, and here there are these four-inch-long pieces falling to the floor. But it turned out very well in the end, and I have to say, I dig it. Ismarie herself was amazing, and could have been right out of a Garance Dore blog post. She had effortless elegance, and was surprisingly hilarious. Telling me about going to a friend's house, but being warned that the friend's mother didn't like French people, she said to me, "I don't understand! It's not like I showed up all like this!" -- and she shoved her hand between the buttons of her shirt, Napoleon-style. Awesome.

The Holidays

In the past, I would not have described myself as particularly gung-ho when it comes to the holidays. I love the small family rituals we have, like putting the fat, old-style colored lights up on the tree, the sort that I'm not sure are even made any more, or eating lots and lots of stollen on Christmas morning, sometimes in combination with pannetone, or battling Dad about whether it's ok to have Mannheim Steamroller providing the soundtrack. I'm a naysayer on the last issue, just for the record. But in general, aside from my enthusiasm about seeing family and friends, and having a generally expansive excuse to eat, drink, and make merry -- plus an occasion to bake new kinds of cookies, like ones you shape in spoons -- I'm not usually holiday-crazy. You'd never find me wearing a headband with reindeer antlers (which I spotted at the airport a few years ago), nor a flashing necklace. I don't carol, and my interest in nativity scenes tends more towards stories about how churches have had to start installing GPS tracking devices in baby Jesus to prevent theft than towards strict scriptural interpretation.

Now, I'm not wearing an appliqued santa sweatshirt while writing this, but I have to say that living in England has made me much more keen about holidays. Usually Thanksgiving passes without too much fuss, but this year, when we had a Thanksgiving here with my parents and Tom's grandmother, one of Tom's brothers, and Kristian, I felt the full onset of holiday enthusiasm. I suppose I associate Thanksgiving and Christmas with the States, and so having a Thanksgiving meal with all the fixings is a way to feel as if I'm not so far from home. Cranberry sauce turns out to be much more important when you're in England: somehow it makes the States seem less far away. I'm not quite to the place of saying, admiringly, like a group of tourists I saw a few weeks ago, "Now that's an American car!" when a gigantic stretch Navigator rolled by -- that doesn't make me feel at home! -- but I am feeling especially keen about the holidays this year. But I'll keep it under control, I promise. And if I cave and get the headband, I'll be sure to wear it while singing carols out of the sunroof of a SUV limo.

The White Ribbon, or when the movies won't let you off easy

I don't know if Michael Haneke's film, The White Ribbon, is out in the States yet, so if it isn't, ignore this. It won Cannes and has generally been getting a lot of attention, I think -- there was an article about Haneke in The New Yorker (here's a snippet) and the BFI has organized a festival to celebrate Haneke's life and work. He's definitely made his mark: this recent film has been called his best, and it clearly develops the only other film of his I've seen -- Cache -- presenting an even more pared-down and relentless meditation on violence so systematic that it appears sourceless. In Cache, a French family keeps on receiving footage of themselves that has been filmed without their knowledge, and menacing things happen to their son. The basic conceit -- surveillance without a clearly-identified source, cruelty of and to children, and a preponderance of violence -- carries over to The White Ribbon. In other words, Haneke seems to have a basic form he's working with, and he keeps telling the same sort of story in different historical settings.

The White Ribbon is set in the Germany of 1913-14, as no viewer can fail to notice. The assassination of Ferdinand is important towards the end of the film, and while the first World War doesn't make a direct appearance per se, it's clear that Haneke is connecting the terrible things happening in a small village, dominated by a baron and populated by workers who staff the baron's estate and work the surrounding fields, to the way that WWI and WWII wreaked such havoc across Europe. It's clear, in other words, that the trauma of the twentieth century is something that Haneke feels we still need to process. The link that many have wanted to draw, having seen this film, is between the group of children at the center of the film's events, and the fact that they will be adults on the eve of WWII. The connection, in other words, is one between the (apparently unreasonable) cruelty of children and the (obviously unreasonable) cruelty of Fascism. But more than that, Haneke is trying, I think, to take an almost allegorical approach to the history of the twentieth century by presenting the viewer with a series of events that happen in one village to a handful of people. He suggests that these events -- which are unsolved crimes -- are paradigmatic of the rise of Fascism, but more importantly, he shows the problem with thinking about it this way, and suggests that it is necessary to harness responsibility for atrocities to human actors, rather than blaming larger systems or ideologies.

One thing I've found to be true of both Cache and The White Ribbon is that violence in each film appears paratactic. This is Haneke's way, I think, of representing the difficulty of understanding the points of contact between individual human intention or agency and events that are much larger than the work of one particular person. The gang of children who uncoincidentally show up at the door of the houses where injured victims of unsolved crimes are convalescing want to see "if they can do anything." They aren't there just out of curiosity, nor just out of atonement. It's hard to tell why they're there, and Haneke deliberately leaves it unresolved. But this atomizes the sense of responsibility such that characters seem to be harmed by things (a wire stretched across a field that trips a horse; a rotten floor in a sawmill) and seem to take their revenge on things (a field of cabbage). You as a viewer feel terribly unsatisfied with leaving the cinema not knowing who did what, and one way of making sense of this is to say that Haneke's films are polemics against not believing that humans have to be held responsible for harm to other humans that they have caused; that the idea of accident or contingency is unsatisfactory, especially in the context of a mass atrocity which was facilitated by active as well as passive participation.

I lay awake for a long time the night I saw The White Ribbon. In part, I was frustrated because I didn't think there was a reason for all the violence Haneke used, nor did I think that he deployed it sensitively, despite what the program notes suggested. But I suppose it made me think about the claim Adorno makes about the impossibility of lyric (i.e. a kind of poetry of beauty) after the Holocaust. I tend to be very resistant to Adorno, because I frequently find him a pompous ass and think he's subject to the worse sort of hypocrisy, living this hugely decadent lifestyle while decrying the fall of civilization and the bankruptcy of modern morality. But watching Haneke's film, which is beautiful but also horrible -- you can't take one without the other -- made me think that maybe, strangely, that claim about committed art and the impossibility of beauty as such after 1939: maybe that's right. There's another observation Adorno makes -- this time in the company of Horkheimer -- about cartoons being a kind of cathected humor which just makes you laugh at the brutality you're subject to. Haneke isn't cartoonish or antic, but he lures you in by giving you something beautiful and then showing it to be terribly destructive. This is, perhaps, the same kind of move, and regardless of how The White Ribbon fares, I think it's part of the longer conversation about how aesthetic possibilities are directly shaped by certain large and irreversible events in history.

Nigel Slater loves you

Make this. It shall not disappoint. It's from The Kitchen Diaries, Nigel Slater's fantastic chronicle of a year of cooking.

Onion Soup Without Tears

onions - 4 medium
butter - 40 g
a glass of white wine
vegetable stock - 1.5 litres
a small French loaf
grated Gruyere, Emmental or other good melting cheese - 150 g

Set the oven at 200°C. Peel the onions and cut them in half from tip to root, then lay them in a roasting tin and add the butter, salt, and some pepper. Roast until they are tender and soft, and toasted dark brown here and there. You might have to turn them now and again.
Cut the onions into thick segments. Put them in a saucepan with the wine and bring to the boil. Let the wine bubble until it almost disappears (you just want the flavour, not the alcohol), then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for about twenty minutes.
Just before you want to serve the soup, make the cheese croûtes. Cut the loaf into thin slices and toast lightly on one side under a hot grill. Turn them over and sprinkle with the grated cheese. Get the soup hot, ladle it into bowls and float the cheese croûtes on top. Place the bowls under a hot grill and leave until the cheese melts. Eat immediately, whilst the cheese is still stringy and molten.

Enough for 4.

The art crowd

Don't worry, I haven't disappeared under a great big stack of books in the British Library. (Do you remember that story in the NYT several years ago about the man who had so many books in his apartment that when a few stacks fell over, he couldn't leave the place? Well, it's nothing like that here.) Tom and I have just returned from a few days in Paris: it was Tom's reading week, which meant that he didn't have to teach, and I was happy to take a few days away from work, so we hopped on the train and headed for the land of stinky cheese. It was a great visit: we went to this spice shop where there was a "bar du sniffing" -- a place where you could smell all these different kinds of spices -- and to more bakeries than I'd care to admit. As I have probably said to many of you, if I had to be a type of food, I'd definitely choose to be a carbohydrate. And if I could have a pain au chocolat for breakfast and lunch most days, I would. Then I'd start to look like the ladies in the Reubens room in the Louvre...

Speaking of the Louvre, I have to say that visiting that museum is completely exhausting. You feel a bit like all the masterpieces are just dominating each other and dominating you. The way they're arranged, in these colossal long halls, sometimes hung one above the other, makes it impossible to focus on one. Instead, the composite effect is like seeing all of these postcards of masterpieces pasted up on the wall. The thing is, though, they aren't postcards; they're the real thing, but you're so overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of them that it's hard to believe that each and every painting is the real deal, an original. You see a whole run of David and the first two or three take your breath away, but pretty soon nothing seems impressive because everything is. Paul Valery has this little essay on museums, which I read at Tom's urging -- and though in general I'm staunchly pro-museum, in this case I think Valery's exactly right. Here he is, from "The Problem of Museums" (1923):

"Only a civilization neither voluptuous nor rational could have constructed this house of incoherence. I don't know what to make of the insane result of this neighborhood of dead visions. They are jealous of, and argue over, the attention which gives them their existence. They call from all sides for my undivided attention. They throw into panic the living force which carries with it all the machinery of the body towards that which entices it.

"The ear won't support hearing ten orchestras at once. The spirit could never follow, never drive several distinct operations, and there aren't any simultaneous reasonings. But the eye, in the opening of its mobile angle and in the instant of its perception finds itself obliged to admit a portrait and a seascape, a kitchen and a 'triumph,' of people in the most varied states and dimensions; and, much more, it must greet with the same look harmonies and modes of painting incomparable with each other.

"Just as the sense of vision finds itself violated by this abuse of space which constitutes a collection, so the intelligence is no less offended by a close reunion of important works. The more beautiful they are, the more they are exceptional results of human ambition, the more they need to be distinct. They are rare objects, and their creators would certainly have wanted them to remain unique. This tableau, one sometimes says, kills all the others around it."

After three or four hours in the Louvre, you can get to thinking that all the masterpieces jostling for your attention do fail to be unique: they fail because they do not monopolize your attention, do not take your eyes away from all the other pieces. Ultimately it's hard to know what the effect of so much luxury is, whether you might as well stop looking around after you've seen three or four paintings, because you do stop seeing them. At first I found it frustrating that there were crowds of visitors photographing the works rather than looking at them, but then I got to thinking that perhaps that was a better strategy than trying to take them in all at once. The Louvre is like a gigantic catalogue of famous works, and producing your own index of photographs is one way to put all the works on even footing.


But I also understood why Thomas Struth took those pictures of visitors looking at paintings in the Louvre (the image immediately above is by Struth). It's a place where you can't help but find yourself amidst big crowds, and the experience is about seeing the art from within a crowd and seeing the art as itself a crowd. Even though the eye first wants to edit all the viewers from Struth's images, to see a Louvre empty of people, he's right to insist that there's no getting away from the crowd. The paintings themselves are a bustling, jostling crowd, each clamoring for your attention.

The necessities

Exciting development on the house front: we finally got around to building the frame for the futon, which practically doubles the amount of furniture we have. We would have built it earlier, but first the floor was being redone (wood in place of very bad blue carpet [VBBC]) and then a seriously fierce crew of electricians were fixing almost every wire in the place. A few weeks ago, Tom turned on the bathroom faucet and got a big electric shock. Thinking that he must have been imagining the shock, he tried again, and lo and behold, it happened again. This meant that the faucet was live, which should never ever happen, because things like faucets (and showers and pipes and the like) are supposed to be grounded. Needless to say, ours weren't. This is when we called the electricians, who came in and fixed everything, and put in a new fuse box, so our wiring isn't Edwardian anymore.

God bless the electricians, I say. Halfway into my first English fall, it also seems fitting to give shout-outs to:
1) my trench coat, which I've worn nearly every day since arriving, and which is perfect for weather that's alternately gray and sunny, damp, occasionally windy, chilly but not properly cold
2) the tradition of roast Sunday dinner, especially roast potatoes, which are basically the best thing ever
3) the museums in London, which continue to impress. Just yesterday I went to see this exhibit of medical wax-works at the Wellcome Collection, and it was peculiar but good.

At Liberty

Last night I went to an evening event at one of London's more remarkable department stores. Imagine a gigantic tudor house five stories tall, done up in different period styles, with a gorgeous central atrium and lots of nooks and crannies full of vintage furniture, velvet and satin sheets, expensive dresses, stunning shoes, antique mirrors, pillows with the founders' images on them, and huge handbags. Half museum and half store, Liberty is a visual feast, and last night they were serving up wine and Chambord martinis in an attempt to capitalize on everyone's amazement at the sheer abundance of goods on offer. It's the fashion equivalent, I think, of being shown piles of diamonds and gold in someone's well-appointed cave. I didn't forget myself and walk away with Miu Miu anything, and I kept my covetousness of the Marc Jacobs navy coat I saw thoroughly in check, but the designs and displays were so wonderful that even the experience of just walking around was thoroughly satisfying. I don't know who does the windows -- according to Emma, who invited me along, someone new has just started to do the displays, but there's a wunderkammer sensibility to it all. I didn't take any pictures last night, unfortunately, but when I went there last summer, this is what I saw in a small window. The entire store is full of these kinds of arrangements.


The main piece in the atrium was a huge, mobile-style creation made from Liberty-print scarves. It was halfway between kite and chandelier, and moved a bit in the breeze created by the crowds of people making their way up and down the stairs. There was also a zebra head decorated with bright scarves: apparently the zebra head is a Liberty staple, and moves around the store to go with various displays. Chic kitsch, I suppose, is how best to describe it. But really, the shoes were swoon-worthy, and I saw more impressive fake eyelashes than I ever have before, at the Shu Uemura counter. Do you think I could wear them to our housewarming party?

Fashion seems magical right now, between the reports of fashion weeks I've been reading (by far my favorite is Garance Dore on the Chanel show) and my experience last night. I'm still showing up at the library in my uniform of jeans and gray sweaters and shirts, mind you, but a girl can dream.

From the British Library, with love

I've been reading this amazing book about the history of automata from ancient times to the present. This is the first time that my research has felt a bit like paging through the Sotheby's catalogue, but I'm not about to complain. In addition to little, pearl-studded mice that run around in circles when you pull their tails, and caged birds that sing every hour on the hour, there are even more impressive feats of baroque engineering that I've discovered: a flute player, a speaking figure, and -- most famous of all -- Vaucanson's duck. This duck is a composite of model and machine: it's attached to a gigantic mechanism of gears and levers that's larger than a washing machine. It toured Europe in the middle of the eighteenth century, and was famous for approximating the motions of an honest-to-goodness duck: eating, drinking, preening, and even pooping. Apparently there are over four hundred moving parts in just one of its wings. When people found out that the duck wasn't actually digesting the food it ate, but was producing pre-fab waste that had been stuffed into it before the show, a huge outcry erupted. The idea that an automaton could mimic animal life entirely was plausible enough at the time -- few were entirely sold on materialism's mechanical explanations for the principles of life, but plenty considered it a possibility -- that it was an offense to the concept of the materialist body to produce an imperfect mechanical model.

My favorite contraption from this remarkable collection of automata, however, isn't the duck. Instead, it's a fake eagle someone made to lead his hot air balloon into uncharted territory. The description finishes with the comment, "Gentlemen with hunting-dogs are requested not to bring them, as experience has shown that these animals can be dangerous to the eagle, which imitates nature to perfection."

Historical accuracy

It's a bit hard to get over, as an American, how old everything is here in England. Unlike Berlin, where even the neoclassical buildings are only fifty or sixty years old, the pubs here can be 17th century, and the houses, 18th or early 19th. My awe has waned a bit since the proprietor of the Lord Nelson pub told me that, built in 1637, his pub was older than the Mayflower -- he was wrong! the Mayflower sailed in 1620 -- but I'm still impressed by the stolid walls and squat houses leaning into each other along the rows of London's streets. This isn't a city that believes in condos with single-word names like 'Dwell'. Which is not to say that it's a city without gentrification; to the contrary, I can't imagine a place where it's easier to burn money. My small purchases of a power drill, cleaning supplies, and paint samples have been surprisingly expensive.

Speaking of paint, we're going to repaint the living room of our place, and we're currently in the process of choosing the color. At present, the room is a shocking shade of periwinkle blue, but mercifully there's a mirror-shaped swath of white paint where the mirror above the fireplace used to be. That's where we've been testing paint colors, and so the space looks like it's got a bad case of the cream-colored measles. Whenever I have to choose paint -- and to be honest, this is only the second time in my entire life I've done it; the first was when I decided to paint the kitchen in my first Hyde Park apartment, and I chose something like 'San Francisco bay blue,' with 'baby-eyed blue' coming a close second -- I'm completely astonished by all the names. They're even more ridiculous and finely distinguished than the names for shades of clothing, which are themselves often laughable. You've got to wonder whether there's a computer, a robot, or a human with better-than-average sensibilities choosing J Crew's 'toasted chestnut' and 'fawn'. But even more impressive are names like 'nutmeg cream', 'pale hessian', and 'crumpled linen'. This isn't even taking into account my favorite detail of paint-choosing in England: there are entire lines of colors which reproduce Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian shades, so you can paint your period home to be historically accurate. Seriously: there are paint chips that say Edwardian at the top. This is called the Heritage Collection. Can you imagine the American equivalent? Antebellum, WPA, Red Scare, Free Love -- how would we periodize it?

Not much other news of note. It's pretty much been all house stuff, all the time. We did, however, have our first meal at the new place. Boiled eggs and toast. Boxes served in place of a table.

A man, an American, and a van

Greetings from the UK! I arrived on Monday morning, early -- we were woken on the plane for breakfast at 5 am London time -- and the last four days have been a whirlwind of box-moving, paint-considering, floor-examining, roofer-calling, van-loading, nap-demanding goodness. All for a worthwhile cause, I hasten to add. We're living in Bloomsbury, in central London, just a stone's throw from UCL and a short walk from the British Library. The previous residents left the place in good shape, but there are a few peculiar details: a forgotten photograph of a child in a Harvard sweatshirt (manifest educational destiny!) and, far odder, a red light in the foyer and bedroom. Presumably the red light bulbs were just put in empty sockets at the last minute, but the effect at night is pretty impressive; the place looks like a bordello. Which it isn't, just for the record.


The not-bordello remains relatively empty. Actually, it's full of boxes, but we haven't unpacked any of them yet. We've been collecting Tom's belongings from various lofts and attics. Between the hardware stores and the van rental place, there isn't a whole lot of interest to report, but as soon as we get the right kind of light bulbs and the futon gets delivered, I'll probably have more adventures to share.

Sometimes, carbohydrates are the answer

Even if you're not moving right now, you still might want to consider making these cookies from the Tartine cookbook, or even just going whole hog and buying the cookbook. Baking provided welcome relief from the grumps I was feeling after wrapping nearly every piece of my kitchen in paper. I used back issues of the LRB (big page size) and Cooks (good paper stock), plus the pile of J Crew and Victoria's Secret catalogs I've amassed. This makes for a pretty awesome combo, and it means that when I unpack, my silverware will be wrapped in pictures of fuchsia bras. Score!

Ok, down to the details.

Chocolate-Oatmeal-Walnut Cookies
(yield: 24 3-inch cookies)

12 oz. bittersweet chocolate (you can use a bar or chips)
2 c. all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2 c. old-fashioned rolled oats
1 c. unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 c. sugar
4 tsp. blackstrap or other dark molasses
2 lg. eggs
2 tbsp. milk
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. salt
1 c. walnuts, coarsely chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick liner.

Coarsely chop the chocolate into 1/4 - 1/2 inch pieces. A serrated knife works well. Chill in the freezer until needed. (Or just get yourself some Ghiradelli bittersweet chocolate chips and cut this step out altogether.)

In a mixing bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and oats. Set aside. Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter on medium-high speed until light and creamy. Slowly add the sugar and mix on medium speed until light in color and fluffy. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Add the molasses and beat until well combined. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition before adding the next egg. Beat in the milk, vanilla, and salt and then stop the mixer again and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the flour mixture and beat on low speed until well incorporated. Stop the mixer, scrape down the sides of the bowl, and fold in the chocolate chunks and the walnuts with the spatula.

Have ready a small bowl of water. Scoop the dough onto the prepared baking sheet. An ice-cream scoop works well (about 3 1/2 oz. or 100 g. for each scoop). A spoon is also perfectly suitable. Dip your fingers into the water and press out each scoop into a thin, flat 3-inch circle.

Bake until the edges of the cookies are lightly browned but the centers remain pale, 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer the cookies to a wire rack and let cool. They will keep in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 2 weeks.

'Nourish the inner aspect'

Gwyneth Paltrow teaches us how to roast a chicken! And de-bone it! She's been to the farmers' market and has some 'sweet English peas' and 'gorg'* carrots! Watch the Youtube video here.

This video comes from her lifestyle website, which I've just discovered thanks to the fug girls. It's called GOOP (I know not what the acronym stands for, but maybe her initials?) and its tagline is 'nourish the inner aspect.'

Oh, inner aspect.

When I spent a summer working in the basement of The Paris Review, answering phones, sending rejection slips to the stories sent from prison, and generally doing unglamorous things -- the building was arranged in a literal hierarchy, so that George was on the second floor, the honest-to-goodness editors were on the ground floor, and the interns and lackeys were in the basement with the hundred-year-old roaches -- George was very taken with Gwyneth. One morning he came down into the office, dressed in his seersucker (as he almost always was that summer), and with a sort of distant, distracted expression said, "I met Gwyneth in the elevator last night. I was just captivated. I didn't want the ride to end." He had been at a Radiohead concert in Madison Square Garden, and was in a VIP elevator, and had been so charmed with her manners (but more than that, one imagines, her appearance) that he claimed to have spent the rest of the night feverishly unable to sleep. This is the man who famously hired Jane Fonda as an intern in the early days, and made his way not only through the professions (football, boxing, traveling, writing, editing) but also through the ladies of the beau monde. By this time George was in his seventies and was a devoted family man, but even so, he was smitten.

That was an amazing summer. I'd pick up the phone and Vonnegut would be on the line, all gravely-voiced. The parties were what made working in a basement totally worth it: we'd all assemble in George's apartment, with the view of the East River, the pool table, and an endless supply of gin, and I'd get to meet my heroes. Anthony Hecht, Robert Pinksy, Colin Greenwood. Good times.

*this is a very Californian thing, to shorten words like this

On the road, almost

So I was going to write a post about the anticipatory nostalgia you feel when you're about to leave a place; everything starts to look especially beautiful or poignant, the hot dogs begin to have a certain appeal, and you almost think about going to a baseball game, just for the hell of it. I've been walking around my neighborhood and thinking about how much I'll miss my Saturday pilgrimage to Intelligentsia for coffee and Reckless to browse the new arrivals. And the farmers' market in the playground of the nearby school, and the cashiers at Treasure Island, my local grocery store. Even though it doesn't have signs that list the contents of the aisles, and even though I wouldn't buy meat there in a thousand years, it's where I shop. I've even been feeling occasional surges of fondness (a clear sign that my emotions are at a high pitch right now) for all of the perfectly tan joggers who pass me on the lakeshore path. Who's going to motivate me to run faster in England? Kevin Spacey might be in Regents Park, and he might make me run faster, but he isn't there to jog...

But in amidst the bloom of nostalgia and fondness, things have gone a bit -- as the British might say -- tits up. There's some sort of major difficulty getting my visa letter, I can't find anyone to take my apartment, Facebook keeps suggesting that I might want to friend an ex (I think I already tried that, Facebook, but thanks), and I can't find my favorite sandals. Waah, right? I agree that I should get over myself. And that's what I'm trying to do, with the assistance of the occasional ice cream cone and dose of loud music.

Back to moving and how it feels: it's a pleasantly predictable blend of happy and sad, sort of a pre-fab mixture not unlike the sensation a romantic comedy aims to deliver (though, mind you, I don't see my move to London as part of a romantic comedy). Perhaps a comedy, definitely a romance, but not a rom com. But the compressed emotion of being about to leave a place takes everything that place was and wasn't -- everything it lived up to and fell short of -- and compresses the combination of hope and actuality in which actuality calibrates hope into a heady moment of being about to go. You're about to plunge forth into the not-yet-determined Future, but the bills aren't in the mailbox, the roof isn't leaking, you haven't had trouble finding a clothes dryer, and you haven't become inured to the lack of good coffee in London yet. It's the moment where you just get to inhabit the hope (combined, in my case, with some fear of being sent home if I don't get a visa). It's what travel produces in miniature, and it's part of what makes travel so heady, I think. I'll miss Chicago and all of the people and things that make it dear to me, of course, but I'm ready to go, and I'm excited to be going.

I have to ask you dear about the tan line on your ring finger

I remember feeling shocked the first time I saw ads projected in a subway tunnel, still images arranged so that they produced a moving image. When the El slowed, I got a look at just how many pictures of the Honda Accord were projected onto the wall: lots. I was reminded of this when I was walking up the jetway in Heathrow yesterday upon returning from Berlin. I saw an ad for marriage, I think, or an ad for a bank. Hard to be sure.

There's a particular kind of ad that always seems to appear in jetways, one which involves a repeated image with different captioning. So, for instance, sometime last year I saw these paired diptychs of side-by-side photos of a businessman and a rock star, with respective captions of "normal," "groundbreaking"; "groundbreaking," "normal." I think the ad was for a bank, so presumably they were more on the suit side of things. But advertising in a space like a subway tunnel or a jetway, where passengers are on their journey from a to b, dreaming of buying a sandwich or finally getting to use the bathroom or maybe just idly wondering how long it will take to get into the city or whether they can remember where they've parked their car, seems often to capitalize on fantasies of reinvention. Walking off the plane into Heathrow, behind a French man who looked like Prince but twice the size, who was wearing a gold leather jacket and a gigantic faux-diamond cuff, I passed three images of plastic figures of a bride and groom on top of a wedding cake with the captions: fear, fate, fairy tale. Sure, there are people who think these things about marriage -- probably a rare cross section who think that it's all three -- but because this was about financial managment, why the cake? But of course, marriage and money cross paths again and again. I was just watching this BBC program called "Who Do You Think You Are," which is a delightful mix of geek-out genealogy and celebrity gossip, because it traces the family lines of various stars (Jerry Springer; today, the character Mark from Peep Show). The highpoint of the episode was when Mark goes to visit a distant relative who's got a copy of Mark's great great grandfather's will, in which he writes his wife out of it because of her "intemperance." "I regret to say," he writes, "that to my beloved wife I can leave nothing." He goes on to catalogue her sins. But to get back to the image of the wedding cake as a way to convince weary travelers to use this bank instead of another: what is the idea there? That I'll have a kind of pavlovian response of either fear or fate or fairy tale, understand the multiplicity of views on marriage (much like the multiplicity of views on investing!), and figure out which term (which investment strategy) is right for me? I'm leaving out the other option, which is that I'll desperately want to eat the cake. I think that's the most likely.

Rebecca Mead and others have said earlier and better what I might on the topic, so I won't add anything, but I do think that the chroniclers of late capitalism (yes, that's you, FJ) should be rushing to their typewriters to ask why we're suddenly producing more and more powerful images of permanence at a moment when we're discovering that credit isn't a guarantee. Certain forms of the virtual are failing us, but at the same time we're holding on to them. I suppose what I mean is that I think the resurgence of the desire for stability (whether through marriage or through investment strategies) is about fictions of stability. And of course stability has always been accomplished through fictions, but these seem different.

Sign language

On my way to the laundromat yesterday, I stopped into a corner shop to buy a bottle of water so that I'd have appropriate change for the machines. This was my second experience at the laundromat, and this time I didn't need to look up various words (waschpulver!) in my pocket dictionary to confirm that it was indeed soap I was getting to put into my clothing. I was waiting in line with my water and my ten euro note, and everything was going fine until the very friendly proprietor offered me a date stuffed with a walnut. Thanks!, I said, eating it appreciatively while he told me what it was. Turns out that the German words for date, walnut, and coconut are all practically homophones, and I could see what it was anyway. After I finished chewing the proprietor was waiting expectantly for my response, and all I could do -- because I sheepishly didn't want to admit I didn't know German -- was make an ok sign with my hand, which didn't seem to mean much to him (thankfully I wasn't doing this in Brazil, where it's the equivalent of giving someone the finger) and say thanks again. The one other phrase I've mastered in German is I'm sorry, do you speak English?, and I say it several times a day, when someone asks to borrow a pen, or asks for directions, or asks me whether it's cold in the library (oddly, it isn't). So it's decided, I think: it's time to learn German.

Also on the topic of language appreciation, there are certain phrases that are particularly funny to my American ear. In addition to the worldwide phenomenon of wearing t-shirts with phrases in foreign languages that you think are cool but really don't make sense (do you know that says Media Blitz, Mr. Cool?), the names of German bars amaze me. The Rodeo Club. The Polish Losers' Club. Muschi Obermaier.

I'm going to leave that last one untranslated. It's probably for the best...

On Berlin

When Tom and I were trying to find a mop in a department store yesterday -- a necessity that our flat lacks, given its resident's clear prioritization of things mental over things physical -- I said to him, 'I don't think this guy has cleaned since the wall came down.' While that surely is an exaggeration, it's nevertheless the case that the wall -- and the building, razing, and rebuilding it has entailed -- continues to be a part of everyday experience here, and is characteristic of how this city is uniform only insofar as it's a consistent hodgepodge of squares and train stations and different period styles which were all built, more or less, over the same two or three decades after WWII. The diversity of postwar reconstruction is genuine, but it's nevertheless peculiar: all of the columned, neoclassical buildings look convincingly old, but as soon as you remind yourself that the majority of the city was flattened in the war, you recognize that the stately buildings along Unter den Linden, which runs from the Brandenburg Gate past the opera house and Humboldt University are actually the same vintage as the geometrical, primary-colored highrise apartment buildings that are clustered in different neighborhoods of the city. The old is as new as the semi-new; you can't trust your eye to date buildings based on period appearance. Because rent in Berlin is so low, you see shops in the middle of the city that you would never see in London, say: walking from our flat to the Lidl (the Aldi-equivalent supermarket), you pass a shop that only sells wheels for heavy-duty carts, and a shop that sells gadgets to assist the elderly with bathing and walking, and a variety of other clubs and shopfronts. In a way it evens things out, so that cheap places and expensive places exist side by side, but it also makes for a randomizing effect such that a collonade, which appears to have survived the war, is across from the industrial wheel shop.

I don't have a clear sense of the East vs. West legacy: parts of the wall are in many places throughout the city, in the East Side Gallery, in Potsdamer Platz, where I get off the train every morning, in museums and on posters and reproduced in shops. A friend says you can tell East German men by the vests they wear, khaki for the workplace and black for dress (witness Brüno's assistant). It's easy to stop noticing them; they're usually obscured by tourists anyhow. But it's hard to stop noticing the inconsistencies in the city's reproduction of the accumulation of styles over time: when you realize that the concert hall is no more baroque than the gigantic, space-age Kulturforum, which is mustard yellow and really appears to be designed by an alien architect, it's like seeing the wires suspending the acrobat. The reality effect of this city is a simultaneity that wants to stretch over time, and does, largely because almost all of it is covered with graffiti. As soon as you cover a wall in spray paint, it matters less whether it's old or new, I think. And in any case, one of the ways this city expresses its delightful unruliness, in the midst of an otherwise bureaucratic and rule-bound state, is through all this scribbling. Even the walls of the Camper store along one of the trendy shopping streets are covered with graffiti. When you go in there you can write on the walls. Maybe once it's become part of shoe shopping, it's hardly the same sort of activity, but even so, I like trying to spot artists' work across town. One of my favorites is a Warhol Velvet Underground banana that someone has put on all sorts of walls.

Stealth blogging in the Staatsbibliothek

While I don't officially know that it's against the rules to use the library computers for things other than strictly academic pursuits, the gigantic list in German next to the computer -- though I understand basically none of it -- presumably declares it bad form. So in the spirit of not breaking the rules too much, I'll try to be brief.

Not understanding lists and notices and announcements -- not understanding much at all, really -- has been the order of the last few days. Tom and I have been in Berlin since Sunday, and we've settled in nicely. In general I've been able to get by on the Berliners' excellent English and my baby phrases like 'a coffee, please' and 'thank you!' I think I say 'please' much more when it's one of the fifteen words I know. Unfortunately the word for 'sorry' is really long, so I've had to keep practicing it. Walking around whispering it to myself makes me remember a similar moment when I'd just moved to Florence and Meredith and I were trying to figure out how in the world to pronounce 'spoon' in Italian. We were walking down the street saying the equivalent of 'spooooon' until we realized that we probably seemed like we had sufficiently limited capacities that we ought to be taken off the streets immediately, and possibly even spoon fed. That quieted us down, at least for a moment.

Other than my utter inability to speak or understand German, which makes certain everyday tasks more challenging than they otherwise would be, I have to say that I love Berlin. We're staying in a great big studio in Schoneberg which we've rented from a historian whose WWII books line an entire wall, floor to ceiling. The kitchen is tiled orange and the stovetop is on the windowsill -- just two burners. It's just right for the summer. There's a Turkish market up the street with more fruit and varieties of dried beans than I've ever seen: a good antidote to a city that's otherwise committed to meat and beer. About the latter, it really is good here: I had some pilsner in a ceramic mug with my dinner the other night, and I wasn't about to complain.

Even though I've been away from the states for only two weeks or so, it seems like longer, partly because I've been in London and Berlin since then, partly because so much has happened. We moved Tom out of his Cambridge flat (this involved renting a very, very big van), Tom passed his viva, we did some celebrating at Rules (London's oldest restaurant), we had a BBQ, complete with s'mores, in the garden. I explored London a bit more and got to see Queen Mary, where I'll be a visiting student next year. I also saw the production of Phedre that the National Theatre broadcast to 100 cinemas all over England. Helen Mirren was in it! She was really good -- the whole production was excellent, really. What an unrelenting play. When you see it, you think: 'This is tragedy; it just won't give up being doomed.'

On a lighter note, we're seeing Bruno tonight. I can only imagine...

London calling!

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but haven't had the chance: I'm moving to London in the fall! Tom got a job in the philosophy department at University College London and I'm going to go do my dissertation work at the British Library and Museum, where they have all of the things I work on in manuscript form. Sources tell me that the Science reading room is the place to work at the BL, rather than the Humanities room (apparently scientists practice better hygiene), so I'll probably be splitting my time between there and other study spots. And of course Borough Market, where I'll have to start wearing disguises so the vendors don't refuse me samples after my umpteenth return.

I'm really happy about the move -- well, okay, maybe not about the move itself, but happy about the reasons for it, and glad that I kept the boxes from last year. I guess this means that I'll have cause to keep up The Queen's English. I'll be sending dispatches from Berlin and Chicago this summer, and then from England in the fall.



There are many reasons I'm going, of course, but first among them is Tom. He's wonderful. For those of you who haven't had the chance to meet him yet, I hope you do soon. Come visit!

Reading

The other day I was reading a short piece in the London Review about Google Street view, which has just been put up for the UK as of this March. It's written by a journalist who isn't too keen on the idea of having these pictures up online, which is either ironic or entirely reasonable (take your pick) in light of the fact that there are more security cameras in the UK than anywhere else, I think, in the world. It turns out that wearing a hoodie is actually a practical measure if you're trying to avoid having your profile recorded on camera. I had no idea.

Anyhow, the piece begins with a reference to Stendhal: there's a memorable moment in The Red and the Black where Stendhal describes the novel as a mirror being carried down a road:

"Look here, sir, a novel is a mirror moving along a highway. One minute you see it reflect the azure skies, next minute the mud and puddles of the road. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of immorality! His mirror shows the mud and you accuse the mirror!"

On Stendhal's account, the man photographed leaving the strip club on Google Street view doesn't have grounds to accuse Google, but this isn't exactly the author's point. I hadn't thought of this passage for six years at least, but it immediately made me remember reading Stendhal in college. I took this one class on nineteenth-century novels, and I was reading, reading, reading all quarter to keep up with it. I'm a remarkably slow reader, especially for a graduate student, and when I had to blaze through Lost Illusions in a week I neglected my other work to get through it. But I really loved those weeks.

Maybe it's something about the French, but I've been thinking about the pleasure of reading more generally of late anyhow because I've embarked on Proust. Proust, for all of his decadence -- it's sumptuous prose, and if you're in the mood for something spartan, it just won't suit -- really understands why we read, and this makes the experience of reading him all the more enjoyable. It's adolescent, I suppose, but how to resist?

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

Making jam

Last week, I found myself with another bunch of rhubarb; I have no willpower when it comes to the farmers' market, and the piles of rhubarb looked too pretty to pass up. Since it's not exactly something you can snack on, I needed to come up with something to do with it. I had half a mind to make it into a dessert for Kate's birthday, but I made Kate a chocolate cake instead, so I still had to use it up. This is where Tom's grandmother comes in. I've never actually met her (I take it that meeting Granny is sort of like being allowed into the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City; you've got to be a member, and suffice it to say that I'm not, at least not yet) but I've eaten many of her specialties. Cakes, jams, flapjacks, apple sauce, cabbage, soup, fish pie, entire canisters of chocolate: the whole lot. She seems to be someone who believes in expressing love by feeding everyone around her, to excess. Tom can't visit her without returning with a crate of things she's made. And she's the one who taught him to cook, too, so judging by her prodigious output and the quality of her students, I think she's got some serious culinary prowess.

So when I opened the fridge for the umpteenth time and saw that rhubarb staring at me, once again, I thought: I should make Granny's ginger rhubarb jam. I got the recipe (Tom has access to the temple, you see), and made it on Sunday morning. I haven't tasted the results yet, but I think they look pretty promising.



Rhubarb and Ginger Jam

2 1/2 lb. rhubarb, trimmed and chopped (prepared weight)
2 1/2 lb. sugar
Juice of 3-4 lemons (reserve peel from one lemon and seeds from all lemons)
1 oz. fresh root ginger
4 oz. preserved or crystallized ginger, chopped

Put the rhubarb in a large bowl in alternate layers with the sugar and the lemon juice. Cover and leave overnight.

Next day, crush or bruise the ginger root slightly with a rolling pin and tie in a muslin bag with the lemon peel, chopped, and the seeds.

Put the rhubarb mixture into a pan with the muslin bag, bring to a boil, and boil rapidly for 15 minutes. Remove the muslin bag, add the preserved or crystallized ginger, and boil for a further 5 minutes or until setting point is reached.

Remove any scum, then pot and cover in the usual way.

Akerman love

So as of last night I have a huge brain crush on Chantal Akerman. She's a Belgian director, and Emily and I went to see her movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at Siskel. I guess it's not in wide release, but if you ever get a chance, you must see it. It's a meditation on boredom and routine with very little dialogue and even sound. The shots are long and stationary -- the camera is positioned as habitually as Jeanne herself, who goes through the patterns of her day so obsessively that you're shocked when, after watching her wash and dry and put away the silverware relentlessly slowly, she finally drops a spoon. The structure of the movie follows her through three days of her life -- she's a single mother who takes one client a day as a prostitute to support herself and her son, but the bulk of the film is concerned with her domestic routine, and sex stays off screen until the very end. So mostly you see her walking down the hallway, turning on the light in the bathroom, washing her hands, turning off the light in the bathroom, walking to the kitchen, turning on the light, putting the kettle on to boil, grinding coffee, pouring water through the filter, setting out bread and butter, going to wake her son, coming back into the kitchen, and so on. It sounds impossibly boring, and in a way it is, but it's also captivating, and it makes you as a viewer attached to her habits and the objects she uses so carefully (the thermos, the cubes of sugar). This means that when the habits start to come undone -- first she burns the potatoes, then dinner is late and everything starts to happen out of order -- you switch from this hypnotic vacancy (your state is just like hers, you realize) to mild distress, because you no longer have traction on what's going on. The transition the movie accomplishes at this point is impressive, because you move from feeling this vacancy to recognizing that you haven't had any idea all along what she's thinking; she's hardly spoken, and you've just been watching her wash dishes and fold and unfold the tablecloth for two hours now. And then the thought you have is that you don't know whether she feels nothing or whether she's entirely mad. At no point do you identify with her: you see her as a figure of domestic labor, and as a commentary on how housework can be like prostitution (or prostitution a form of housework), but you don't know what it's like for her. And the radical opacity you recognize towards the end, when she makes the first facial expressions of the film (which has been going on for three hours at this point) is all the more powerful in contrast to the peculiar thoughtlessness that the film forces you into initially. Visually it's a beautiful piece, a study in miniatures and interiors that shows you all the things Hollywood films don't, like an extended scene at the sink when her back is to you the entire time. Psychologically it's amazing: it produces a new kind of boredom, but more than that lulls you into a state where you find yourself finally surprised at how inaccessible someone else's experience is, even though you've just been (or so you think) feeling a version of it.

Radio career fail

'Come on baby play me something, like here comes the sun' sings Metric on her new album, Fantasies. I went into Reckless last Tuesday to pick it up after I heard this track. Before I could even make it to the counter to ask the record man for the album, a woman came up to me and asked whether she could ask me a few questions. Turns out she was from NPR and doing a story about Record Store Day, so we went to the back of the store, by all the classical records, and she proceeded to ask me about whether I bought my music on vinyl (no, not really, only when I buy for Tom), whether I spend all my money on records (no, again; clearly losing coolness points here), what I'd come in for (Metric! that amazing Canadian band, I said), and what I thought about the scene in Chicago as opposed to New York (very vague answers here). The whole experience was a bit odd because I had the distinct feeling of speaking into the future even as I was looking at her and talking into the mic. This made me say embarrassingly stupid things like, "I'm not really into material objects, but I like records." I didn't even know I could utter that platitude, but apparently I can. Anyhow, I ended up on the cutting room floor, I discovered when I heard the piece on 848, but it was still fun to be interviewed, and I'm glad that NPR cares enough about local record stores to do a piece on them.

Metric's lyrics keep running through my mind -- 'Would you rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?' -- in very peculiar combination with lines from the Milton sonnets I just taught. Very different sounds! So, guys: Beatles or Rolling Stones?

If this were a Facebook status update, it would say "Andrea is rhubarb tart and Hello Saferide"

Ever since I saw bright pink stalks of rhubarb arrayed on a table in Borough Market, I've been wanting to make something rhubarb-y. Apparently the rhu doesn't go with strawberries in Old Blighty -- for reasons that remain unclear to me -- and so taking this to heart, I was thinking that I'd make something just with rhubarb. Unadulterated, tart, etc. When I arrived back to my apartment in Chicago about two weeks ago, I had three sorts of mail, more or less: bills, academic publishing catalogues, and cooking magazines. (What this says about me I'd rather not consider, but there you go.) In the April issue of Gourmet, there was a quick recipe for rhubarb tart. It's a bit like tarte tatin, in that you slice the rhubarb wafer thin and lay it flat, overlapping a bit, on the pastry. After you bake it you glaze it with a reduced orange glaze. The results are pretty spectacular, and they actually taste like rhubarb, which made me realize that I didn't know, until now, what rhubarb tastes like. A bit like a tart apple with an unidentifiable punch. And pink, to boot!

The other thing that I feel like evangelizing about is my new favorite album. I was listening to it all day yesterday, and my neighbors are probably ready to take their broom handles to the ceiling (in fairness, it was only my old neighbors who did that; these neighbors are perfectly nice). It's called "More modern short stories from Hello Saferide." It's not quite out here, I don't think -- I bought it at a record store in Berlin called Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free -- but it's the best thing I've heard in a long time. Have a listen!

Full circle

I know that I was a bit remiss about posting during the final weeks of my time in England. In part, that's because I went to Berlin (which is my new favorite city), and in part that's because I was so occupied with the idea of having to leave, and not wanting to, that I didn't have much to say. But now that I'm in Richmond, and I've just come back from a British-style pub with Beatles albums, illustrations of men in full tartan dress, and football scarves on the walls -- a pub where you can go to watch football matches, no less -- I feel as if I should write a final installment about the UK. I was there for long enough for it to start to feel like home, long enough that when Kristian picked me up from the airport and we were driving down 90/94, I found that the highway signs looked strange and the cars seemed big and the facades of houses and buildings just seemed different. There's something to be said for this, for the experience of perceiving the place where you've been for quite a long time as if you have just arrived: it's defamiliarization, I suppose. I was at this party in London, in fact, where I was having a conversation about Shklovsky with a composer who turned out to know much more about him than I did, and we were agreeing that it's valuable to see things that are familiar as if they are strange. And now that I'm in a gigantic hotel in the middle of a city I don't know, I could be anywhere, really. The self-sufficient convention center is a world unto itself. In a way it feels like a buffered transition back to life in Chicago. But then again, it's just another place. A place where everyone is giving papers about the eighteenth century, mind you, but just a place. And so in the past week I've walked up Parliament Hill, come back to Chicago, left again; in the process, I've seen the dials of spring turned up and down and up again. If I kept it up it might begin to feel like time travel, but for now it just seems like I've got an established relationship with my suitcases. And after I've soaked up all the eighteenth-century talks I can, I'll saddle up and head back to the midwest for a spring of teaching Milton and getting work done. I look forward to cooking for all of you within range soon!

Old school

There is, on the way to Norfolk, a town called Little Snoring, and next to it, a town called Great Snoring. In fact, there is one intersection where the signs point to both: head left, you're on to Great Snoring; head right, Little Snoring. Perhaps snoring meant something different in Anglo-Saxon -- like great warrior of the night -- but these days, the jokes about sawing wood must get old quickly. Along the coast in Norfolk, there's a whole scattering of towns, separated by only a mile or so, and there are old pubs and inns in almost all of them, plus the odd windmill, smokehouse, and so on. There's a farm shop that sells only real ale, a man who smokes all his own fish, and a small shop where the labels on the strawberry jam are hand-printed and the flour for sale is ground at the local mill. There are also larger towns with three ice cream stands per block and an arcade on either side of the street -- more familiar beach-side fare, at least for American eyes -- but the rest of the villages, which are still largely original in the sense that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings are still standing and only slightly modified, are unfussy and quiet. If you go to the village where Nelson was born (Nelson didn't always stand on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, it turns out), and go to the pub called the Lord Nelson, and ask the proprietor how old the place is, he'll tell you 1637. Almost older than the Mayflower, but not quite. The doorways are so short that you have to be careful of your head as you pass through. Not every town along the Norfolk coast boasts a naval hero, but even so, there are stone beaches and windy quays and all manner of good, unpretentious food. If you ever find yourself in Norfolk, you must, must go to Morston Hall, where you will be fed an alchemical set menu made by Galton Blackiston. All of the food comes from the area (maybe even the hedges outside!), and I can't remember a better meal. Plus some of the last steam trains run through that part of the countryside, and if you're lucky, you'll see one puffing along a bridge near the sea. The spectacle attracts hobbyists with impressive cameras who follow the trains as they pass: these are the trainspotters. I'm probably the last one to learn the origin of the term, but there you go.

Fancy people

Spotted, outside the Coliseum after the British premiere of Dr. Atomic: the stunningly androgynous Tilda Swinton, standing nearly six feet tall, in a short blonde haircut, buzzed at a sharp angle in the back and gelled into submission in the front. Wearing a well-tailored tuxedo suit with satin lapels and a plunging neckline, and very tall, fishnet-style shoe boots. She disappeared swiftly down a nearby alley, and we were left temporarily speechless.

The opera itself was good too, of course -- the production was entirely different than the one at the Lyric, less stark but also less full of awkward dance numbers. They solved the problem of getting a gigantic number of people on stage at the same time by building this massive framework of little rooms stacked on top of one another, basically a grid. Before the opera began, there was a huge periodic table of the elements projected on the scrim in front of the stage, with the radioactive elements missing. In the opening scene, this morphed into the grid full of singing scientists. At first the faces of the actual scientists were projected onto fabric in front of the grid, and then individual curtains opened to reveal the singers. Later, they all arrayed themselves in different postures, pressing their legs and arms against the walls so as to suspend themselves in different poses, and the collective effect -- you saw ten or fifteen different bodies across the whole grid -- was to give a sense of split-second frames of motion, like the pages of a flip book, or a Muybridge shot. In this production, when Oppenheimer, at the close of the first act, sings Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" -- the test site is called Trinity -- he faces away from the bomb and only turns to it at the end. "Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue," he recites, suddenly frightened at the power he is in possession of, needing, or seeming to need, to believe that there is something outside of himself that will check his actions.

The close of Dr. Atomic, which represents the explosion of the bomb followed by Japanese voices, is apocalyptic, but in the most aestheticized way. You're expecting the explosion throughout the entire opera, and though the extremely loud thrumming is terrifying, it's hardly surprising. As the volume builds, you watch the entire cast put on protective glasses and kneel down to watch the bomb, but they're facing you, and a bright light flashes that casts them into silhouette and illuminates the mountains behind them. The staging acknowledges the spectacle: they're watching you, you're watching them. Then voices, then the curtain.

On Surprise

This Saturday, I was wandering around London with my dear friend Meredith, who I've known since college. It was a stunning day, warm and sunny and preternaturally spring-like, and everybody was out, on foot, on bicycle; with children, with friends; wandering, talking, eating. We walked from Camden to Westminster Abbey via St. Pancras churchyard, where Mary Wollstonecraft is buried. I met someone here in Cambridge, an English student, who visited Wollstonecraft's grave on her first date with her boyfriend. He brought her flowers to put in front of the tomb. As she said, it's the kind of gesture that really tells you something about someone; it's definitive. I have to say, I'm not sure I'd be all that keen on graveyard dates, but maybe seeing Marx and his gigantic beard would be an exception.

We walked on to the Abbey, passing Big Ben on the way and unwittingly getting in more tourist photographs than we knew. Everyone was out and everyone was photographing each other in front of everything. Apparently there's a phone booth, one of the iconic red ones, in view of Big Ben, and tourists are constantly going into it and posing as if they're on the phone. This from a friend of Meredith's who works in an office with a view of the phone booth. There's something overwhelming about the constant stream of people taking snapshot after snapshot: seeing Big Ben of course brings Woolf to mind, because of the bit in Mrs. Dalloway where the clock striking sends discs through the air that reach the ears of Londoners all around the city; they synchronize all of the distinct consciousnesses for a moment. The idea of being brought into agreement by hearing the same thing requires as its counterpoint the bustle and dissonance of the city: everything going on constantly around you is held in suspension for an instant only, and then rushes back in.

After we heard evensong (so much gold leaf in that church!) we headed through St. James Park on the way to the National Gallery, where we had about half an hour before the guards professionally shooed us out. In one of the rooms at the National Gallery, there's an anamorphic box called a peep show: there are small eyepieces at either end, and if you look through them, you see the interior of a Dutch house with a woman (I think) reading. The side of the box is open, and if you look from that perspective, everything appears massively distorted: the chair in the corner is stretched to gigantic proportions, and the woman resembles a damaged doll. There's another anamorphic painting in the National Gallery, though I didn't see it this time -- it's a painting of ambassadors by Holbein, and there's a skull at the bottom which only comes into relief from a particular point of view.

Then to Monmouth Coffee -- where you can have something called a 'flat white,' basically a latte with less milk, which is among the best things ever -- and through Regents Park on the way to dinner in Primrose Hill. A long walk, but a nice one: walking is the best way to see cities, I think, because you happen on things you don't expect. For example, when Meredith and I were making our way through Primrose Hill, and were walking up to the hill which bears that name, we noticed a light in the sky above us that looked a bit like a floating candle. We thought it must have been some kind of homemade luminary that someone had set off from a balcony. But then Meredith spotted a whole group of people at the top of the hill lighting these miniature hot air balloons, so we walked up to get a closer look. The balloons were about three feet tall and two feet wide; after you lit one you had to hold it to let it fill with air, and then you released it into the sky. They flew fast and looked spectacular against the skyline, these flying torches making their way into the darkness. The people setting them off were drinking champagne straight from the bottle and were on their way to a fancy dress party, costumed as their favorite artists.

I was stunned to have stumbled on this, and said to Meredith as we walked on to dinner that this was one of my favorite things about cities, how they surprise you. I corrected myself to say that of course the surprise cuts in both directions; it's both good and bad -- we laughed as we remembered the guy in Italy who flashed us (from which I learned: always beware of Italians in sweatpants)! And it's not just cities that are surprising: there's a tree in the middle of the desert in Nevada, literally the only thing for miles and miles, and when you drive past it you're going so fast that you hardly notice and you have to turn back to see, but it's got hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from it, because everyone goes there to throw their shoes over the branches. But how amazing, right? To see lit hot air balloons in the middle of London, a shoe tree in Nevada, a miniature replica of Stonehenge cut from the ice on a lake in Wisconsin -- such a good kind of surprise.

Here I fear that I'm starting to sound like Alain de Botton, and in an attempt to sound less like him, I shall close by reporting that on Sunday we saw Vicky Christina Barcelona, in which Penelope Cruz plays the best jealous lover ever (that woman knows how to do crazy). The film contains an amazing exchange between Scarlett Johanssen (the sexually liberated, experimental blonde who only knows what she doesn't want, not what she does) and her foil (the engaged brunette who is secretly ambivalent about her fiance). The fiance is saying something uptight about the love triangle ScarJo's gotten herself into, and the brunette fires back, "Not another turgid argument about the categorical imperative!" Snap!

Class consciousness

Dear readers, I haven't written for a bit because I've been wanting to save you from overly-twee narratives of walking through Grantchester yet again, or being won over by poached pears. But what I've just experienced, while largely to do with food, will hardly be twee, so it seems fit to share. Tonight I went to high table for the first time and I have to say that this marks the first proper instance of culture shock I've experienced since I've arrived. As those of you who are British or have spent time in Britain (whether actually or imaginatively) will probably know, high table is a time-honored academic institution at Oxbridge where the fellows of the college, dressed in robes, sit at a collection of tables in front of the dining hoi polloi, which is to say the students. Upon entering, you await a phrase (in Latin) to sit down; then you are served a variety of relatively fancy foods that require a wide range of cutlery to eat. As the lovely and generous gentleman sitting across from me said -- a historian of science and the saving grace of the meal -- you really have to view the experience from the point of view of an anthropologist. This seemed to me to be code for at least two things: 1) use the forks I'm using! and 2) yes, we know that this is a bit silly and perhaps seems antiquated, but it's been a tradition for longer than anyone can remember and we kind of enjoy it. What was stunning to me was the visual display of tradition and authority: we proceed in, we proceed out, we say bits in Latin, which we've been doing since the thirteenth century, but we have contemporary conversation: we talk about whatever crosses the conversational screen -- Mike Davis, Freud, Woody Allen movies, Monty Python, parents, academia, Richard Posner, nicorette patches. It's not as if the conversation is limited to the kings of England and the sorts of port one likes to consume after dinner -- the conversation operates as any lively, self-respecting dinner conversation would, and is in no way anti-democratic -- but everything that surrounds the conversation, including the way that you're served, exudes privilege and custom. Perhaps even more rarefied than high table itself is the wine you consume afterwards: you retire to another room and a similarly long, rectangular table where there are posh cheeses with flags in them that report their denomination, as well as wines in crystal flasks that are hooked together, three in a train, and wheel around the table. As my conversation partner was telling me -- and bless him for talking to me -- smoking used to be permitted until recently. The winds of change: they're blowing strong!

It was counterintuitive, in a way, to hear this gentleman tell me that he objected to a presentation he'd just seen on The Order of Things which entirely neglected its historical (which is to say provoking or polemical, pre-'68) aspects while we were eating in a setting that was so pre-'68 in certain regards. How is it, that in a moment of economic crisis, in a nation where academics are worse paid and less respected than in the states, there is this kind of ceremony which constructs the very privilege it needs to delight in? If you manufacture your distinction and get tipsy on three kinds of wine on Tuesday night, what's happening, what's happened? I'm no marxist, that's for sure, but I was astonished by the fact that this seemed like business as usual. Indeed, Cambridge and Oxford have been around for longer than the states have even existed, and I'm sure there are all sorts of events with gowns and fancy wines behind closed doors at American institutions, but this is part of the fabric of the everyday life of college fellows; it's not a particularly special occasion. And perhaps academics are often guilty of saying one thing and living another -- Adorno railed against decadence but sat delicately in his swimsuit and loved his luxuries; Homi Bhabha goes on tour proclaming that theory can end (or if not end, make sense of) genocide, but spends his spare time sitting on the boards of advertising corporations rather than volunteering for the TRC -- hypocrisy's not new to the field. Perhaps the lesson here is that seeing elitism in a slightly different costume or setting can put you on the lookout for it on the home front; can make you think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Don't get me wrong: I love fancy dinners. But if the academy is indeed dedicated to critical inquiry, it needn't require being served by a silent staff dressed in bowties to do so. Perhaps I get tradition totally wrong; that may well be the case. But my anthropology, when it wasn't focussed on forks and glasses, was attentive to the various forms of discomfort I felt, and what they might have meant.

Abstract city, concrete city, new city, old city

In my hopelessly predictable way, I was looking at the Times this morning before starting my reading in earnest -- and taking a moment to procrastinate was, I think, justified, given that I was reading about the reception of Locke's theory of personal identity in a book called The Naturalization of the Soul -- and what I found delighted me. It was a collection of Lego representations of NYC life: Central Park, the Gowanus Canal, a waiter overwhelmed by a gigantic pepper grinder, a glass of beer, another of foam (when they've just changed the keg), the Verizon building, and -- my favorite -- a plastic bag hooked on a tree branch. If I had a dollar for every plastic bag that caught on a tree in the city, I'd be a rich woman. And then there's the iconic shot from American Beauty I think of whenever I see a bag in flight, the shot which makes me consider, however adolescently, the merging of waste, choreography, and chance.

The guy who made these models is a recent expat: he says that he plays Legos with his two small sons in the living room to while away the long, dark German winter. It seems rather clever to me, turning Legos into coffees rather than battleships and buildings (as I always used to do -- I seem to remember being big on houses, too) but regardless it made me think, in that slightly foggy mindspace of the morning, of cities and how we miss them, and how missing them makes us represent them to ourselves, makes us look for new patterns in our new homes. It's not that I miss New York, particularly, even though I lived there for a year five years ago, and had a life I liked very much, and all the strategies and secrets of a city dweller (the best place to stand on the subway platform; the cheapest coffee; the least crowded bar for after-work drinks). It's more that I've spent the last six months between Ithaca, London, and Chicago, and while I've built a good collection of suitcases and learned how to make my life portable, I'm particularly aware just now of how much our sense of cities is comparative and cumulative. So, for instance, a week or so ago Tom and I went to see a revival of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre. We got there early and sat on a bench along the river, eating cookies and naming all the buildings we could (not so many). London at night, from that vantage, somehow looks smaller, almost like a model. It doesn't have the dense skyline cluster of New York, or even Chicago, and every time I saw a double-decker bus drive across the bridge, the thought that this was a foreign city flickered across my brain. It doesn't take a bus, of course: going to Borough Market and seeing the pheasants and rabbits for sale, hearing the chatter of voices anywhere, shopping at Tesco, having trouble counting change, these are all reminders.

The Lego guy, who makes his living as an illustrator, did pixellated designs for the showers in his new home in Berlin. The master shower is a fancy in-joke reference to an artist who kept six kilos of butter in his studio for years (um, ew) and the kids' shower is a slightly simplified version of the NYC subway map. I think the subway map gets it right, more or less: when you pick up and move, you need to bring the necessaries with you, or find a way of keeping them a part of your days. My sine qua non isn't the MTA -- nor is it the unforgettable suitcase contents the person whose lectures on Marx and Hegel I've been attending mentioned the other day: academic gowns, German toothpaste, a copy of Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text. But even so, part of learning to travel is learning how to stop worrying about where you are and start being there. That, I think, I've managed.

The tart's very good cake

PS - I made it again, for a lunch with Tom's brother William and his wife Natasha, so here it is in all its sunken glory.

I don't have a picture because we ate the entire cake before I thought to take one, but here's an amazing, amazing Nigella recipe. It's from How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Basically, I think you should bake it as soon as possible, especially if you're in a place where winter's taking its toll.

Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake

225 g soft unsalted butter
375 g dark muscovado sugar (i.e. dark brown sugar)
2 lg eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
100 g best quality dark chocolate, melted
200 g plain flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
250 ml boiling water
23 x 13 x 7 cm loaf tin

Preheat the oven to 190 C (375 F), put in a baking sheet in case of sticky drips later [basically, the loaf tin will be so full that it might, while baking, overflow], and grease and line the loaf tin. The lining is important as this is a very damp cake: use parchment or something similar.

Cream the butter and the sugar, either with a wooden spoon or with an electric hand-held mixer, then add the eggs and vanilla, beating in well. Next, fold in the melted and now slightly cooled chocolate, taking care to blend well but being careful not to overbeat. You want the ingredients combined: you don't want a light airy mass. Then gently add the flour, to which you've added the baking soda, alternately spoon by spoon, with the boiling water until you have a smooth and fairly liquid batter. Pour into the lined loaf tin, and bake for 30 mins. Turn the oven down to 170 C (340 F) and continue to cook for another 15 mins. The cake will still be a bit squidgy inside, so an inserted cake tester or skewer won't come out completely clean.

Place the loaf tin on a rack, and leave to get completely cold before turning it out. Don't worry if it sinks in the middle: indeed, it will do so because it's such a dense and damp cake.

Makes 8-10 slices.