Yum

If it's pouring with rain, or just cold, or otherwise exhibiting lasting signs of late winter, make this for dinner, Mark Bittman's quick polenta. Basically: cook about a cup of polenta on medium heat, adding a cup of water initially, and again, three or four times subsequently, as the cornmeal absorbs the moisture. Whisk before putting the polenta onto the burner and then after every addition of water, and whenever else it seems to need it. As you're cooking the polenta, throw some good quality sausages into a pan, and saute until done. When the polenta tastes almost done, add another cup or so of water, turn it down to low, and cook until it's tender. Then add a knob of butter, a generous amount of pepper, and a "boatload" of parmesan. Stir until combined. Throw some good sausages on top, and you're set to go. Add a vegetable on the side if you must, but it will interrupt the sheer pleasure of slurping up hot, cheesy polenta on top of little slices of sausage. This is comfort food, y'all. It will soothe your February fatigue.

A few more things need vindicating, Mary

So I've been watching a BBC series called The History of Britain, narrated by none other than Simon Schama, the wunderkind historian. Schama has truly strange delivery, and he never emphasizes the words you expect him to -- so if he'd said that phrase, he would probably have emphasized "emphasizes" and "words," all while moving his head very quickly and decisively back and forth. Even if this makes him easy to satirize, it doesn't mean he isn't an excellent and engaging historian. I mean, I say props to anyone who has enough knowledge to write his own script for a series about the entire history of England. This island has been at it for a long time!

Anyhow, a few nights ago I was watching the episode about the end of the eighteenth century, which contains a gutting section on slavery (and the irony of its existence alongside general Enlightenment calls for freedom), and goes on to talk about the French revolution, specifically about Mary Wollstonecraft's time in France. The production value for the series isn't the best: there's a lot of bad, sort of game-showey music, and really lame costume drama reenactment. So, for example, the narration frequently cuts from Schama, talking someplace historical (like in front of Wollstonecraft and Godwin's shared tomb), to this gauzily filmed sequence of Mary happily sitting across from Godwin. Any of you who are aficionados of history programs will know what I mean: when you're discussing history that happened pre-film and that doesn't involve lots of artifacts, you don't have an awful lot to work with.

So Mary was on my mind yesterday. Then I went to a C-18 reading group, and on to a pub afterward (it's customary here to go to a pub after workshop; it's a very nice tradition). About half an hour after we turned up, a legion of young women, dressed in costume, charged in. This made me think about Wollstonecraft's Vindication much more directly, because they were all, to a person, unbelievably scantily clad; at least four had garters, several others bunny costumes, or slender excuses for near nudity (a hat does not a convincing costume make...). All the guys they were with hadn't dressed up at all. This was obviously a special occasion, probably someone's birthday, and there seemed to be a vague circus theme. This kind of sight is by no means uncommon here. Fancy dress (the British phrase for costume) isn't a Halloween or bachelor party affair -- though one of the best costumes I've heard of, a banana, was used for the latter. Nor does it always involve young women wearing almost nothing and getting completely drunk. Last weekend, for instance, I saw a troupe of female ninja turtles happily charging down Euston road. But most times, fancy dress does involve young women dressing in nearly invisible miniskirts, bustiers, and drinking all night long, later to stumble along the streets. Maybe this is what enlightened womanhood looks like, but I don't really think so.

Feminism is a dirty word these days in many circles: when Manohla Dargis wrote about the underrepresentation of real women in Hollywood cinema, she made a point of saying she wasn't being a feminist. Um, ok, Manohla, but are you sure you really mean that? Here in the UK, it's something you'll hardly hear anyone admit to being. One of my friends had a young female student who said, "Isn't the work of feminism done?," and there seems more generally to be a sentiment that it no longer needs to be taught. Admittedly, feminism is such a multiple, variable thing that it cannot be considered as a monolithic concept; it encompasses a wide variety of approaches, ideologies, and claims. Not every feminist goes as far as the dugareed Dworkin. And I understand the misunderstandings that extreme feminism can give rise to: it's easy to think that all feminists are as radical as Dworkin. I'm equally sympathetic to the point of view that imagines that feminism is more or less over, and thinks we're post-feminist. I remember thinking this myself in college, and not really understanding what all the fuss was about. If I always used "he" as a pronoun, did it really have to mean something? Couldn't we just understand it as a convention?

In the years between undergrad and now -- six now, going on seven -- I've changed my mind about the importance of feminism. It's not because of anything particular that's happened to me, but it's been due, I think, to my (limited) exposure to the working world, and also to my continued exposure to the hypersexualization of women in the media. It's something that it's possible to notice even more clearly when you move to a new place: when I lived in Florence for a few months, I remember finding the car that advertised the strip joint really peculiar, and when I moved here, I've found myself repulsed by the postcards in phone booths, as well as by the apparent imperative for young women to dress and behave in a extremely determined manner. There are plenty of equivalents in the states, but you just get numb to them after a while. There's something quite stark about seeing how it breaks down in another country, because you notice it much more clearly.

I'm inured to the use of bodies in advertising -- there's a vacation poster for Aruba up in the underground that says "Arooooba" over some girl's boobs, and basically should say "A-boooooba" -- but I think that when the conventions, or trends, or whatever you want to call them, of young women's dress are so uniformly provocative in the UK, it's unlikely that all of these ladies have read their Mackinnon, had a think about it, and decided that they were going to put on a miniskirt. To be clear, the creditable strands of feminism tell you that you should put on a miniskirt if you want to. Feminism isn't, and shouldn't be, synonymous with prudery or with an aversion to sex. But as any smart person worth her salt knows, our desires are determined by forces outside of us, and I find it genuinely concerning that so many young women here seem to take this kind of personality on as their cause celebre without thinking about why it's become so ubiquitous, or what it means. Make sure it's yours, girls, before you take it on.

Englishness

I just spell-checked an article, and since my spell-check is set to 'US' -- in fact, there's a little American flag in the top right corner -- it caught my new dirty secret: sometimes I use British spellings without even noticing it. It's not gone so far as to make "colour" look okay; I can't imagine it ever will. Nor have I started wearing shorts with tights, which seems to be all the rage here. (Ladies, this is not ok!) But in any case, slowly the letter "s" is creeping in in place of "z," so I'll write "analyse." In fact, right now Blogger has underlined the word in red, so there you go.

Spelling is the tip of the assimilation iceberg. It's tricky, this business of assimilating, because England does and does not seem like a foreign country. Unlike Germany, where I don't even get the gender of bratwurst right -- I mistakenly ordered ein Bratwurst instead of eine Bratwurst; I had no inkling it was feminine, and was gruffly corrected by the sausage seller -- here I can get around no problem, and certain things, for instance the NHS, seem to run more smoothly (knock wood) than their American equivalents. Nevertheless, an American inevitably experiences occasional, or even frequent, puzzlement in the face of English traditions and ways. As Bill Bryson chronicles so well in Notes from a Small Island, which I was given as a (very appropriate) Christmas present, there's a long list of English things that stand out to an American. The variety of radio programming, for instance -- who's heard of a radio soap? or a show all about gardening questions? -- not to mention the ritualization of tea, the obsession with sparkly Saturday-night outfits, the fear of being overheard in public, and the tremendous population of urban foxes (and yes, I do mean the variety with four legs, not two, for any of you who are wondering...). There are nicer oddities, too, like the warmth of English families and the pub-to-pub walking you can do, in the countryside, or, if you like, in the city; plus Simon Schama's history programs, and any recipe by Nigel Slater. But for a nation that speaks English, it is a pretty different country. Even the word "pretty" means something different here: "pretty different" is the equivalent of "very different"; the meanings of "pretty" and "quite" are switched in British English.

That said, I think the pluses outweigh the minuses. I mean, flaming Christmas pudding? Pretty awesome. Lots of crazy tweed sold by old hat shops? Also nice. A general sense of community whenever it snows? Not so bad. Cadbury (soon to be Kraft) eggs, available from January through April, expressly designed to fatten us all up? A win. Debit cards with chips in them? Convenient. Everyone dressed in navy, grey, and brown? Easy to blend in.

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...