Tuesday Dinner Club

Trent on NPR

2011-12-20T21:00:00.002-07:00

There are very few NPR programs that trigger an immediate urge in me to turn off the radio, but heading the list has to be Fresh Air, at least whenever Terry Gross is actually interviewing guests, and not a stand-in. Gross is almost infallibly exasperating, either because she's fawning, she's unfair, or she's simply ignorant and shallow.
Still, she does tend to interview interesting people, and M. happily tipped me off yesterday to Gross's interview with someone I consider to be incredibly interesting, my favorite musician, Trent Reznor.

Gross, expectedly, doesn't know much about Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, and from her introduction and questions it's clear that she relies heavily on Wikipedia. Still, I'll never pass up an opportunity to hear Trent speak or play.
My favorite quotes from the interview are Gross displaying her usual brilliance

GROSS: "And I think, I mean that's true in the sense that I mean you really are composing. It's not like noisy noise. It's more composed noise."

Yes, Trent actually makes music.
and Trent's humor

GROSS: Let's hear another Nine Inch Nails song. And this is another kind of - another one in the canon of Nine Inch Nails songs.
REZNOR: Play a happy one just to break - oh wait, there aren't any.

The interview is worth a listen, or a read, as is another NPR interview from the time when Trent won an Oscar for the original score for The Social Network.

Some Reznor/Finch songs from David Fincher's version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are available for a listen here.
And here's the movie trailer:

Getting restarted

2011-12-02T22:08:00.001-07:00

TDC sputtered through the winter of 2010, when M. and I were grinding out job applications largely pointless and unrequited, and during that summer as well, when we spent a wonderful if exceedingly intense three months back in what we both fondly think of as our second hometown, Ithaca, NY. Our summer 2010 experiences deserve their own blog entry.

What happened between last November and this one? I had hoped to build blogging momentum through NaBloPoMo, but I quickly fell off the wagon. We were yet again struggling (mentally and physically) with job applications on top of our regular teaching and research duties, and this time around we were also preparing for the imminent arrival of The Bean. TB made his grand entrance at the end of January 2011 and promptly began keeping us exhaustingly and exhilaratingly busy tending to his every need. M. naturally took point in terms of Beancare, while my normal work duties continued unabated, along with the job search, which thankfully turned out much more more positively this time: I landed a nice job in Salt Lake City.

The new opportunity meant an immediate amplification of stress and disruption, of course. House hunting, renting, packing, loading, trucking, flying, unloading, unpacking, shopping, repairing, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, and so forth. And a conference in the US, half the summer in Germany, a conference in Sweden, new employee orientation .... and suddenly a teaching job for M., so last minute that there was no time to find daycare for TB. Up to this point, we have been juggling two full-time jobs, one full-time Bean, and an incomplete house. What spare time we've had has been largely devoted to sleeping up to this point.

But we've made steady progress and things are finally seeming to settle down. It seems reasonable to start writing in this space again. With some effort and discipline, regular TDC blogging may even prove sustainable.

I'm still thinking about what to write about in the rebooted TDC. The old categories, of course: writings read; art and music appreciated; movies, plays, television watched; items eaten, imbibed, and cooked.

And at least as far as my contributions to the new TDC go, more soccer.

Others are still encouraged to join in!

TDC Lives

2011-12-01T20:56:00.001-07:00

After a year long hiatus, TDC blogging resumes! Longer, regular posting to follow, along with some reorganization.

Lahm Tag

2010-11-11T20:43:00.007-07:00

NaBloPoMo 11 (Make Up Day 1) The external impetus of NaBloPoMo was obviously insufficient to overcome my immense blogging inertia, and the posting streak ended after a mere seven days. Let's try this again, refreshed after a restful national holiday.

Which holiday, you ask?

The administrative staff at BU were mercifully absent today due to Veterans' Day (a somber memorial whose observance I support), and in Cologne they celebrated the start of Karnival, but in this Familie the eleventh of the eleventh is Lahm Tag, being as it is the birthday of the all-time number world class Außenverteidiger, FC Bayern München star and German National Team captain, our Topfavorit Philipp Lahm.

Philipp Lahm is Numero Uno!

Why I Wake Early

2010-11-07T20:44:00.001-07:00

Because daylight saving time ended this morning, among other reasons.

For the final day of our recuperation weekend, M. and I were thrilled to attend the season opener for Coro Allegro and to hear the singing of our friends J. & T. The choral concert was held at Sanders Theatre at Harvard and comprised three pieces. The first was In the Beginning, Aaron Copland's first choral composition, musically staging the first verses of Genesis, and it featured the lovely mezzo-soprano voice of Hanna Penn for the solo.

The middle piece, Frogs, set a series of Edo period haikus (all involving amphibians and translated by Harry Behn) to music. Incredibly, rousingly fun, especially the a capella rendition/imitation of

Frog-school competing
with lark-school at dusk softly
in the art of song…

The concert finished with a familiar piece, Why I Wake Early, which melded the music of Ronald Perera and the poetry of Mary Oliver. The verses, written over the course of 30 years, trace a day's cycle through the observed natural world, and though my appreciation of poetry is meager and uncultivated, even I found Oliver's words lovely.

The evening finale (a perk of having friends in the band) was dinner with the musicians, including soloist and choral director, at Rani, the excellent Indian restaurant at Coolidge Corner we'd been meaning to try for quite some time. Delicious.

The music was gorgeous, always, and the meal with friends was a wonderful cap to a terrific weekend. With an extra hour of sleep, I think we'll be able to face the coming week.

Bébés

2010-11-06T21:51:00.001-06:00

NaBloPoMo Day 6: After M. taught readin' and 'ritin' (but not 'rithmetic) to her German high school students, we took the afternoon off and walked the Battle Trail of the Minute Man National Historical Park. Quite nice, especially since so few people were there, but we discovered that we are far out of practice just walking around. By the time we'd made it to the end and back (four miles at most), the light had faded and we were pooped!

Our postprandial entertainment was the film Babies, which tracks four infants, from Namibia, Mongolia, Tokyo, and San Francisco, through their first year of life. It was pretty, but also pretty simple. Lesson for would be parents: raise your child in the desert! Life in a marginal environment appears to instill a rough, effective discipline yet does not subtract from playfulness. The children develop faster and the parents don't act like overanxious froofroo goofballs who rolled up their sense with their yoga mats and left it in the trunk of their SUV. Just let the kids roam together (goat and human alike), and they'll probably turn out fine. Worked for me, anyway.

Va, Tosca!

2010-11-05T09:49:00.000-06:00

NaBloPoMo Day 5: M. and I have just returned home from an absolutely and deservedly (especially for M.) wonderful Friday evening out. Especially deserved for M. because she mailed off the 400 page final draft of her dissertation to her committee at the start of the week, culminating months of arduous, unceasing, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing intellectual labor. She needed a break (and a round of applause)!

Finally, an opportunity for a date. First we dined at our favorite French restaurant in Boston, the ever-exquisite Petit Robert. Warm, crusty pain baguette, melt-in-your-mouth boeuf bourguinon, incredible apple tart. Oh la la, c'est deliceaux!

Following this gustatory delight, we attended the opening night of Tosca at the Boston Lyric Opera, which will likely be our only opera this season. This was the first time either of us had seen this particular opera. We arrived with high expectations, and neither Puccini nor the players disappointed. I am too ignorant a music listener to say more than that the singing and the score were beautiful, and the acting near superb. I will say that the BLO's artistic sensibilities impressed (as they usually do): in this rendering, the story was set in 1930s fascist Italy, a staging choice that worked perfectly. Bravo to the director and to the set and costume designers.

And the youthful denizens of Beantown also contributed to an authentically Friday Night Boston experience. Walking from the theater to the Boylston Street station, we were overtaken by waves of rude young men stumbled after by throngs of hooker-chic clad young women in totteringly steep high heels. They pushed past us into the T, but fortunately a clique of more completely dressed students were crowded around us. They were BU students who had also just seen Tosca from the cheap seats reserved for the college constituency. Give them cultural participation points for choosing opera over Bros and Hoes night with the Dekes, but shake your head at the level of rhetorical sophistication $50,000 a year buys these days:

"And you know that Scorpio dude, I was like, girl, that guy is going to play you hard. He was just like downright untrustworthy, you know what I'm saying?"

A Dog's Eye View

2010-11-04T20:40:00.001-06:00

NaBloPoMo Day 4: After such a long hiatus, it has been very hard to get back into blogging with any regularity (though of course, even at the best of times posting here has been quite irregular). November's NaBloPoMo challenge seemed to present a good opportunity to use an external stimulus to get back into the swing of things. Even in the midst of a more stressful job application period last year, M. and I found the time and energy to post something each day of November. Yet just four days into this year's NaBloPoMo, I'm struggling to maintain blogging momentum! And the posts have been pretty boring, even by my standards. Yesterday's post satisfies the conditions of NaBloPoMo only by the thinnest technicality, and I would normally be embarrassed to report on celebrity comings and goings in the Twitterverse.

My excuse is that I was in the midst of reading The Hippopotamus at the time, and nothing else popped to mind to remark upon. I finished reading Fry's novel last night, and I can report that it is a satisfactorily entertaining, if thinly plotted, little story, stitched together from the sort of silly, supercilious banter which the BBC has trained us to expect from the waning British aristocracy. Perhaps most enjoyable was the vocabulary — I learned a new word every chapter. (Apologies to Mr. Barfield, my high school Latin teacher, but "balneal" required a visit to Mr. Webster. But then again, I seldom bathe.) And if the author's wit and diction are as fluent in person as on the page, he must be iridescent as a cocktail party guest. Still, the book is only worth reading if you're in the right kind of mood, say you've just watched a Wodehouse adaptation and want more of the same, only a bit more modern. I wouldn't rush out to buy the next Fry novel, but I'd pick it up on remainder and keep it on the shelf for when fancy strikes.

For no good reason, other than my affection for dogs, be they full-furred or fictional, I'll end with a quote:

Soda jumped and barked with pleasure. Never occurred to her to wonder what the fuck we were doing playing games like this late at night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Still, I suppose if you're a dog and are used to watching humans zooming around at high speed in metal boxes, staring at large sheets of paper at breakfast-time and breathing in smoke from short white tubes, then nothing the species does has the power to surprise you.

Not even supporting the Tea Party?

NaBloPoMo Filler

2010-11-03T20:23:00.001-06:00

Until tomorrow ......

Twittering Hippopotami

2010-11-02T20:39:00.001-06:00

Jeeves is giving up twittering because of the uproar/controversy/negative response to some comments he made recently. I have no comment on his comments, other than that they seem pretty foolish, but when it struck me when I read them that they sounded awfully familiar. Indeed, the sentiment, spoken by a dissipated poet making an ass of himself at a dinner party, appears almost verbatim in a novel he wrote some fifteen years ago, The Hippopotamus. Art presages life.

Mmm ... tasty!

2010-11-01T21:06:00.001-06:00

I spent the middle of last month in Edinburgh attending a vastly overpriced and underwhelming conference on systems biology, a still nascent field which lies (face down in a puddle) somewhere near the intersection of computer science, physics, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, statistics, mathematics, entrepreneurial finance, and, to a slight extent, biology. I'd had high hopes for the conference, but by its third day I was thoroughly convinced that my time would be better spent exploring the city and the surrounding area than being bored into a coma listening to another talk whose chief scientific conclusion was "The system turns out to be a lot more complicated than we originally thought."

More complaints about the conference (followed by lauds of Edinburgh) to follow in another post. Here let me just say that though I found the Scots to be far friendlier than their neighbors to the south, but their culinary taste leaves just as much to be desired. Exhibit A:

Vastly Overrated Technology

2010-06-12T22:26:00.001-06:00

(Ithaca, NY) -- Taking up the topic Toby introduced, I would add to his summary of Amusing Ourselves to Death the following: A central image in Postman's essay is the contrast between the predictions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley of how mass media would be used for social control. In 1984, Orwell foresaw state control of media (and education, historical records, etc.) leading to omnipresent, blatantly intrusive (and coercive) propaganda in the style of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century (fascism, Nazism, and the manifold varieties of revolutionary communism), where social control via thought control is accomplished through repetition and the subliminal threat of violent retribution against those who resist the official message. Fear is the ultimate guarantor of obedience. North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge come to mind as partial realizations of the world Orwell envisioned.

In Brave New World, social control is maintained through the manipulation of desire and the distribution of pleasure. Order is maintained by controlling what individuals crave, deciding what they will believe they love, by creating and sustaining addictions. Interestingly, it is saturation with pleasure, rather than its withdrawal, which is the most effective method of subjugation.

In either case, like sheep, most people follow along, all too happily. And in either case, the social system inevitably becomes unmoored from its founding goals, forgetting that there had ever been a reason for its existence beyond self-perpetuation. But in Oceania, there is always a war to be fought against the outside, while in the brave new world, aimlessly adrift in an ocean of entertainment, one's (sightless) orientation is ever only inward.

(My understanding of economics is somewhat naive, but I speculate that the Orwellian model is best suited to situations in which the economics of scarcity obtain, while the Huxley's parable provides superior guidance to those who would rule the affluent society.)

Postman argues that America is best studied under a Huxleyan lens, and he focuses his attention on the role of the media of communication, specifically television, in abetting the unplanned stupidification and social control of American society. His essay is well worth reading.

I agree with most of it, including the assertion that the computer is a "vastly overrated technology." The idea of computation has come to dominate discourse in the sciences, the humanities, and what is left of middle-brow culture. It is a commonplace that thought is simply a form of computation, and the idea that perhaps the universe is just a giant computer running a version of Conway's Game of Life has tipped from novelty to banality in the span of thirty years. We take the Church-Turing thesis for granted, and we don't even know it. (We don't know any better, or we think that we know that we can't know any better.)

Do we realize what we are taking for granted in allowing the metaphor of computation to overrun our thinking, to dominate our analogies? I don't think so.

That the Internet is a "transformative" or "disruptive" technology is indisputable, even if the definition of these adjectives is vague (to the point of meaninglessness in the business world). For scholars it reduces the time and effort needed to track down a reference, to transmit a data set, to submit a publication. But is finding an answer (by typing in the right keywords to a search engine) really the same as answering a question? A popular idea (especially among Google employees and fans, for whom it is also self-serving) is that cognition is really just a form of search. I doubt it, and I find the fact of its suggestion disturbing, for it serves to narrow the mystery of thought through the rhetorical trick of redefinition, rather than enlightening it. It is an example of the detrimental trend in the evolution of our dominant thought-cliches that Jaron Lanier discusses at length in You Are Not a Gadget (also highly recommended): rather than adapting our machines to ourselves, we, being highly adaptable, change our definitions of human-ness to match prevailing technology and its interfaces. We first scheduled our lives according to the chiming of the town clock, then learned the rote maneuvers of the factory, and now we structure our actions to appease badly written software.

This is particularly pernicious in the case of the internet, the social web, where we are amused to distraction, yet never satiated, and where we fear above all else disconnection, to be out of the loop, to miss a pseudo-event or skip a tweet. We define ourselves to accommodate the categories available on our Facebook profiles, we measure our social valuation by the number of links pointing back to our homepages, and we continually tweak our web presences to attract more hits. Are we happier? Wiser? Better?

Sustained discourse? Hard to say, but I am skeptical.

I like the internet, but I would like less of it.

Like Postman, I find aspects of it to have been "great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

Amusing Ourselves to Death 2010

2010-06-05T22:06:00.002-06:00

Erik recently loaned me Neil Postman's 1984 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman chronicles and analyzes the Huxleyan transition of an American media and culture based primarily on typography to one based on light-speed communications and images (perfected in television). The basic thesis is that, in 1984, American culture and discourse (politics, religion, education, etc) has devolved by means of its primary medium (TV) into entertainment where attention spans are measured in TV commercial spot times and where the substance, consistency and veracity are not the metrics of discourse but rather the way the message makes us feel. (This latter issue reminded me of the people who preferred GW Bush because "they could imagine sitting down and having a beer with him.")

Flip to 2010. The Internet is gaining ground on TV as a medium of discourse. In the final paragraph of his book Postman writes:

"I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology -- that the principal difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data -- will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organization but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

I smiled at "vastly overrated technology." Clearly the speed-of-light retrieval of data has fundamentally changed how we, as individuals, work and even think. The answers are a click away. The Internet, unlike the TV, is a place where sustained conversation and exposition can exist. One might worry, however, that our attention to discourse will measure no longer than a wikipedia article and that the noise of email will drown out any sustained thought. The question I thought would be interesting to discuss here is whether we, as a country, are clicking or tweeting ourselves to death.

Birthday Adventure, Part I: Reisepass Lost

2010-05-15T16:21:00.001-06:00

While I wait, for the second time this weekend, to fly to England, allow me to tell you a story.

Friday two weeks past I celebrated a birthday, my first and probably last non-trivial fifth power natal commemoration. To treat myself on that special day, I went to the RMV, what Bay Staters call their Bureau of Vehicular Regulatory Perdition. This was not purely for pleasure: my Hospitality State driver's license was due to expire on my birthday, and I was unable to renew online. (Gone are the days when I could fill in a web form, input my credit card information, and receive from the Magnolian DMV a newly laminated identity card, sans signature and photo, holographically embossed with the phrases "Valid without Photo", "Valid without Signature" -- a treasured novelty possession I was loathe to relinquish the last time I renewed my license in person.)

Relatively proximate to our house is the Watertown Mall RMV branch, just fifteen minutes' bike ride away, albeit an automobile and highway fraught ride. Having no teaching duties the day before my birthday, I planned to spend Thursday morning getting the new license. I filled in the paperwork at home (print your own PDFs), collected the requisite proofs of identity, citizenship, and residency (old license, passport, utility bill), and biked out to Watertown, careful to secure my documents in my zippered vest pocket, and to bring reading material (How Fiction Works) -- for it was sure to be a long wait.

The route to the mall uniformly has more commuter traffic than most stretches of my usual commute, passes by the offices of WGBH and the New Balance warehouse, and passes over the Mass Pike. The day was sunny and clear, but very, very windy, and at times each turn of the pedals seemed a tachi-ai against the wind. I made it to the mall area, but didn't see the RMV where I expected it, so I pulled out my trusty iPhone and asked Google Maps to steer me to my goal. I was only a few hundred feet off. The RMV, it turns out, is the anchor store of the waning (decript) half of the mall. And anchor the mall it does. Twenty minutes before ten, the RMV still secured by a steel portcullis, a line of two hundred supplicants already snaked through the main hallway and out to the rear parking lot. I took my place at the tail and began to read. The gates clanged open and the line crept forward. Halfway to threshold, I checked that my papers were in order. Application forms, check. Old license, check. Electricity bill, check. Passport, ....?

Passport? Passport? Passport?

No passport.

Not in the vest pockets. Not in the bike pannier I carried as ersatz backpack. Not on the floor in the mall. Not at the dinky rack where I'd locked my bike. Repeated searches produced the same null result.

Best case scenario thinking: Had I left it at home? I called M. just as she was rushing to Brandeis to teach. She quickly checked the most likely places. Not on the desk. Not in the lockbox. Not on the table. Not in my normal dumping spot for pocket paraphernalia. No luck, must dash.

Damnit.

Maybe I dropped it. Probably when I pulled out my iPhone to check directions. I returned to the bus stop where I'd oriented myself. Nothing there.

I retraced my steps further, eyes to the ground, walking my bike the two miles back to the apartment. There was nothing to see, just broken glass and rusty car bits, the detritus of old collisions. Some newsprint swirled in eddies of wind, reminding me that chances of recovery were miniscule if I had dropped it. Most likely it had blown away, maybe even onto the Turnpike.

A thorough search of the house, including ransacking every paperwork repository, turned up no trace of the passport.

This presented a problem. In two weeks I was scheduled to fly to England, where I would meet up with M. and attend the nuptials of our friends E. & J. This was not a trip to be missed, not at all.

Could I obtain a replacement riki-tick? Maybe. The State Department's website insisted that I report my passport lost immediately, so that it could be decommissioned and invalidated for travel. Then I would have to reapply, not for a passport renewal, but for an entirely new passport. All supporting documents, photos, etc., starting from scratch. Social security card, birth certificate, utility bills, and two forms of current photo identification. Id est, valid state-issued driver's license.

No driver's license, no passport. No passport, no driver's license.

And now we see that Mr. Heller has been ghostwriting this narrative.

But he's relaxed a bit in the afterlife. There are exceptions to the rule these days.

To get a license, I could redo my paperwork, take a different set of identifying documents to the RMV (birth certificate in lieu of passport to prove citizenship), surrender my old license, and hope that the bureaucracy would be mercifully expeditious in this particular circumstance. Estimated wait time for a new license: two weeks. Until then, no valid ID.

To get a passport, I could request an emergency hearing at the regional passport issuing office (luckily located in Boston) and bring U. S. citizens who have known me for at least two years to attest and certify that I am who I claim to be, upon pain of imprisonment. So I would have to get my pal J. and his wife M. (a different J., a different M.) to take off work and wait in some dim, claustrophobic holding pen downtown in order to sign an affidavit swearing that I am indeed that dude who lost his passport. And I would have to pay a considerable sum to have the passport hearing, with no guarantee of success.

But first, I would have to deregister my passport. Should be easy enough, just call this toll-free number. And wait. And wait. And wait.

Forget it, I had to go to work.

To be continued …

Point Omega

2010-04-25T07:38:00.001-06:00

I picked up four books on our first excursion to the Fanueil Library: The Daughters of Cain, by Colin Dexter, How Fiction Works, by James Wood, The Suicide Run, by William Styron, and Point Omega, by Don DeLillo. The last two I plucked from the New Additions bookshelf. Styron hasn't been writing for a few years, sadly, but his short stories are being collected and periodically (re)issued; The Suicide Run is folio of five Marine Corps stories. I enjoyed Styron's slender martial story-novella The Long March, and I expect these stories to be good.

Point Omega is a Deep Book about a Deep Subject laden with Deep Meaning. Like many a Deep Book, its setting is lonesome and isolated, its descriptions spare, its dialogue terse, its characters unburdened by personality. Blankness equals deepness, not to be confused with depth, which is really a shallow novelistic affectation. A ghostly mental chosisme is the ideal. Let the reader fill in the blanks.

Don Delillo is a very good writer, but I have somewhat ambivalent feelings about his novels. White Noise was a delight to read, and very cleverly done, but was its point even memorable? Underworld was superbly written, page by page, sweeping and endlessly layered, like its grand subject, a book to be read twice (though I've only managed one pass through), but was it enjoyable to read? Point Omega may pose an important metaphysical conundrum, one that deserves pondering or even savoring. I don't know. In style and subject, it seems to be a book that might have, nay, should have been written by Paul Auster. It probably would have been more interesting, and definitely would have been more fun.

Save the Fanueil library

2010-04-24T10:31:00.001-06:00

In the late afternoon of Thursday a week ago, M. and I took a walk through the nicer parts of our neighborhood, meandering along the streets of the river-facing slope of the hill atop which our apartment sits. In the sunshine, the houses shed their wintertime drabness and seem cheery and quaint, and we are able to imagine Brighton as a real neighborhood, rather than a noisy entrepot jumbled with students, pseudo-yuppies and working stiffs.

We didn't have a fixed destination guiding our wandering, but as we neared Oak Square we decided to check out the small branch library on Fanueil Street. It's rather tiny, but stocked with an excellent selection of books from every leading digit of the Dewey Decimal System. The new fiction section didn't necessarily boast the month's latest releases, but I did find several books that had only been published in the last four to six months, and of course classic literature was well represented. And there were a lot of detective novels and a decent set of science fiction books (though not so many by the old grand masters) available.

The library was even full -- there adults being tutored for the GRE, census workers, internet browsers, readers like ourselves casually scanning the shelves. The art deco children's room, which has a stage for readings, muralled walls and ceiling, a fireplace, and beautiful old wooden bookshelves, was full of quietly busy children, several apparently well known by the library staff, who took their phone calls: "Jerome, it's your mother. She wants you home. Right. Now." The front foyer was plastered with flyers advertising concerts, art lessons, museums, and volunteer opportunities -- working with distressed veterans, reading to the blind, spending time with homeless children. The atmosphere was wonderful, and it stirred neighborly feelings for our fellow Brightonians.

Thrilled as we were to discover a relatively convenient library branch, one with plenty of books to read and movies to watch, we were dismayed to learn, from the same bulletin boards, that the library is slated for closure due to budget woes. If it is closed, we will have no active library branch within walking distance. The main Brighton branch, which lies a hair closer to our apartment, albeit in an uglier direction, is a moldy cinderblock dropped beside the local courthouse, and it has been closed for renovations all year, with no outside indication that it will reopen anytime soon. The closure decision is not yet final, but multiple-choice budget cut proposals presented to the public seem slanted towards just this outcome. The numbers for the past few years---budget reductions of 60% accompanying a 30% increase in library use---seem crazy. I'd happily pay an extra percent in sales tax if I knew it went to the library. Or even a library tax on book sales in Boston. Whatever -- save the library! It's one of the few nice things Brighton has going for it!

In a nutshell

2010-04-18T20:29:00.004-06:00

After a teasingly warm and sunny workweek, we've had dreary, dismal weather all weekend: cold, grey, rainy. Nonetheless, M. and I decided to make a brunch excursion to Coolidge Corner, tired as we were of being cooped up indoors for so long. Despite the pluvial weather, there was a line out the door at Zaftig's, and we opted to try a new deli, Michael's ("The Corned Beef King") just down the street. Not bad, indeed, quite good, but not Zaftig's. Afterwards we made our obligatory rounds at the Booksmith and TJs. In the bookstore we were drawn to the "dealing with your job"/"finding a job" section, as we retain our membership in the ranks of the academically frustrated and underemployed.

I was drawn to this book, which I first mistook for a potential candidate tome to be handed out to each new university employee: Dealing with Difficult People

Upon reading the subtitle, I realized it was the wrong book.

E: "I don't need '24 lessons for bringing out the best in people.' I want '24 lessons for punishing the worst in people!'"

M. skimmed a book intended to help find the right job for you, based on your Myers-Briggs personality type; from our experiences in this year's academic job market, professorships may not be the right jobs for us. She's an ENFJ/P, I'm an INTJ/P, almost affirming the "opposites attract" maxim. We are both situated midway along the "Judging/Perceiving" axis, though M. would surely attest that I am more judgmental (not one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, am I) and less perceptive (particularly in matters of fashion and household cleanliness) than the inventory reveals. My ideal jobs, whether J or P, seem just right: mathematician, writer, software entrepreneur, judge. Hers seemed wrong: flight attendant? receptionist? At home we realized that we'd looked up the wrong type: ESFJ, not ENFJ. The new suggestions made more sense: actor, diplomat, executive management, politician, social worker, teacher--college level humanities.

We amusedly browsed the subject on the web, finding more possibilities and role models.

E: "Famous INTJs include Neils Bohr, Isaac Newton, Dwight Eisenhower, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Nietzche, Peter the Great...."

M: "Well, I'm in between Oprah Winfrey and Martin Luther King, Jr."

E: "So I'll rule the world, and you'll make people feel better about the situation."

M: "Honey, that's our relationship in a nutshell."

BU vs. CAM

2010-04-15T05:29:00.001-06:00

The past several months have been very difficult for us. Here's hoping that the advent of spring, soon to be summer, means better times ahead.

We're in the home stretch of the semester, thank goodness. Teaching, at least for me, has been quite a burden, one piled on top of a hundred other responsibilities requiring more effort than can possibly be mustered. M. has had a much better teaching experience (and she's a better teacher), but she, too, has been worn down by the semester.

This summer we will be back in Ithaca: I will be working for the Cornell Summer Math Institute, and M. will wrap up her dissertation. We are quite excited by the prospect -- summer in Ithaca is always terrific, and we need a respite from Boston.

I was asked recently to give advice to a prospective graduate student, interested in mathematical biology and dynamical systems, who had been admitted to both BU's math department and Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics. I had fun sharing my opinion:

Dear ***,

It's taken me a while to find the time to answer your email, as this was a very busy week for me. I'm happy to give you my two cents about BU and CAM.

I think the academic strengths of the two departments are similar in many ways: both have very strong programs in dynamical systems and in probability/statistics. If either of those are your main mathematical interest, you would be well served academically by either institution.

With that said, I will express my opinion forthrightly: I would choose Cornell.

Academics: I don't have direct experience with the grad courses at BU, but I do have firsthand knowledge of the undergrad program (since I teach in it) and I know many grad students. The math grad students I've interacted with at BU are generally quite good, more or less on par with those at Cornell. The undergraduates at Cornell are considerably better than their BU counterparts, if that makes any difference. In terms of your grad focus, you should know that BU's dynamics group has three camps: one doing complex dynamics, one doing mostly PDEs and multiple time-scale systems (centered around *** and ***) and one with a focus on applications to neuroscience (centered around ***). Each group is quite good at what it does, but there are a few things to note. First, there's essentially no connection between complex dynamics and mathematical biology. Second, the students doing work with the PDE group seem to be quite well-trained in the relevant mathematics, but their projects have little or nothing to do with biology, and they are not trained in bio-speak to any significant degree. Students in the neurodynamics group, on the other hand, tend to have a good grasp of the relevant neuroscience but are weaker on the mathematics. Third, the only real biology applications that are actively pursued at BU are in neuroscience. As far as I can tell, there is no other bio component to the math bio program at BU.

Cornell is very strong in dynamics, probability, computer science, biostatistics, etc. etc. Within the dynamics subcommunity of the math world, you will find people working on applications to neuroscience, ecology, climate change/sustainability, social networks, animal movement/behavior, gene dynamics, and so forth. Many of the mathematicians work on applications in multiple fields, e.g. Guckenheimer and Strogatz. The main applied dynamicists, Guckenheimer (my advisor), Strogatz, Rand, Ellner, Wang, Vladimirsky, Healey, and others, are very good, and so are the more "pure" dynamics people, like Illyashenko. It's hard to go wrong, unless you have a very specific interest that doesn't match one of those people. It happens: I had a friend who was interested in modeling cardiac dynamics and in PDEs, and there just wasn't anybody working on that at Cornell. She left for U. Utah (which also has a very strong math bio program) after a year and was much happier after she transferred. (You should realize that you are not completely locked in after choosing a particular grad school, but transferring is not a completely trivial process.)

Finally, the facilities---buildings, computers, and especially libraries---are much, much better at Cornell. And the BU bureaucracy is an awful zombie-hydra that continues to torment even after its manifold heads have been lopped off and the necks cauterized. Inanity and incompetence are inescapable. At Cornell, by contrast, people seemed to know what they were doing, be able to get it done, and make a real effort to do it well.

Ithaca vs. Boston: I loved living in Ithaca, even in the winter (which is cold but not brutal -- it's the grey, seemingly interminable transition to spring that gets to you). "Ithaca is gorges," as they say, and the town and its environs are great, if you are comfortable with small town life. Ithaca has 30,000 year-round inhabitants, and there is plenty to do off campus, with very good restaurants, several cinemas (including independent theaters that are as good or better than the ones we have in Boston), a few clubs, bars, etc. You can walk, take the bus, or ride anywhere with no problem. If you like outdoorsy stuff, you will have much to choose from. If you are a devoted urbanist or a clubber, you will be understimulated in Ithaca and continually itch to get away, but be stymied by Ithaca's "central isolation" -- an hour from Syracuse, four hours from NYC, two hours from Rochester. You may also get annoyed with Ithaca's laid back, hippie-dippy granola atmosphere (which I found charming, though I'm hardly a tie-dyed tee-shirt and Birkenstocks kind of person).

Boston seems to be a good town for the young and single---neither of which I am anymore---with a huge student population and a lot of nightlife and other activities. The dating scene in Ithaca is more difficult, simply because it's smaller and dominated by people on an academic track, who all tend to be just a little bit weird -- else why would they want to go to grad school? That being said, there is a very active social/dating scene, partly centered around the Big Red Barn grad student center (where I met my wife) and partly located at the downtown bars, and there is plenty of fun to be had. (I recommend trying to cross the science-humanities divide). These considerations might also not apply to you.

If you're into sports, Boston is a good place to be, unless you favor the Yankees. There is plenty of music for all persuasions, but the art scene is pretty lame. Because it is small and the town is dominated by two colleges, Ithaca is, on the average, pretty intellectual and cosmopolitan (this is not the case for the rest of upstate New York), but also homogenous in a weird way that's difficult to put into words (everything is different in the same way, somehow). Boston is much more diverse, with the Brookline and Cambridge areas being yuppier and hipper, Newton older and more upscale, Jamaica Plain and Somerville middle of the road, Allston and Brighton a mix of students and working class, and the rest of Boston pretty solidly working class. You can find just about anything here, but getting to it might be a problem. Public transportation is but a cruel joke for anyone who has spent time in Europe or NYC. Automobile traffic is an absurd nightmare. (I now bike just about everywhere, though Boston is not a particularly bike-friendly city, and in this it is somewhat dangerous -- two days ago a cyclist was killed by an MBTA bus, for example -- but if you do decide on Boston I suggest you bike for health and happiness. Since giving up on the bus my blood pressure is down and I no longer arrive home after work contorted in apoplectic rage. I still have more encounters with the rude and the insane than I would like, but this is unavoidable since such people constitute the vast majority of Boston drivers.)

The cost of living in Boston is quite high. Housing is particularly expensive, and to find an apartment one typically deals with the local mafia of real estate brokers, who take a month's worth of rent as fee for finding you an overpriced apartment. (If you come to Boston, avoid brokers when looking for housing.) My wife and I pay about $1600 for a relatively large 2 bedroom apartment in an okay but by no means great location. We would pay around $800 - $900 for the same apartment in a much better location in Ithaca. Food, entertainment, and just about everything else (except gas) cost 30-50+% more in Boston. In Ithaca you can live very well on a grad student stipend; in Boston you will feel poor.

A final note: One of the great things about CAM, when I was there, was that we had a very fun, active social community, where people hung out together, went hiking, movie watching, running, biking, you name it, either as a big group or in small clusters. We were, by and large, friends and friendly. We didn't spend all of our time talking math, a topic which eventually gets boring to all but the most obsessive. (However, the small townness of Ithaca means you can't escape the presence of Cornellians, and there is a strong proclivity to talk about work and stress at social gatherings, a bad communal habit that should be avoided. The many external opportunities in Boston would tend to counteract this tendency towards inward focus and preoccupation.) Even when I was stressed out by work (as we all are at some point), I had a great time with my fellow CAMsters. I get the impression that there is no such community at BU. We go out for a Friday afternoon beer now and then, but after an hour or so people scurry off to their apartments for weekends (and weeknights) spent independently. We don't hang out together, and we generally don't live close to one another. As a general rule, there is little or no social mixing between departments, and I don't know of much of a social connection with other universities in the area, either. If you want to build a social life independent of your school, this is fine, but if you expect your cadre of work/school associates and free time friends to overlap significantly, this might be a problem.

There you have it: my clear though probably biased opinion. I hope you find it helpful, and I wish you the best in your decision-making and your grad school career.

New Year's Resolve

2010-01-17T08:45:00.001-07:00

Given the length of the interval since the previous TDC post and the intention to post more frequently and regularly proclaimed in the year's inaugural post, I have to confess once again to overpromising and underdelivering so far this year. I blame, in part, my inability to keep up with my resolution to blog (daily!?) on the demands of our other resolutions, which we have stuck to so far, with good results.

This semester is going to be a demanding one for us, with increased teaching responsibilities piling upon already burgeoning research requirements: M. is wrapping up the big Dissertation and teaching at Brandeis, and I'm founding a new math course and trying to publish, publish, publish in preparation for next year's job market. (It already appears that this year will be a wash in the employment department, but somewhat perversely this is a bit of a relief, as at least we are spared the anxiety accompanying tentative plans to move on to new jobs and new vistas.)

Along with the rest of the planet, we took the opportunity presented by the opening of a new calendar year to pledge ourselves to leading more virtuous lives and embracing salutary habits. We take heart in the investment brokers' caveat that past performance is no guarantee of future returns: Last year I resolved to

take a walk each evening.
watch no more than one TV show per night, and at most three per week.
stop surfing the web and reading the news online on weekends.
quit reading the news and checking email first thing in the morning.
quit reading the news and checking email immediately before bed.
avoid restaurants with televisions.

To remind myself I posted the list conspicuously close to my computer screen, always within my visual field when typing, but then I proceeded to ignore it assiduously. Resolution success rate? Approximately zero, though mindless TV consumption plummeted when we killed our subscription to cable TV.

This year our goals were no more modest, but we have approached them differently, and we have external support in meeting them. My teaching duties begin at 9, and we agreed that we wanted to exercise before work so that we would have the entire workday available, uninterrupted by nagging thoughts about when and whether to head to the gym. (The cost in time of traveling to work, home, gym, stores, etc. imposes significant limitations on our flexibility. Getting around Boston is simply a pain in the posterior.) In order to have time for all of the lifting, running, etc. we want and still be able to arrive punctually at BU and Brandeis, we have to hit the gym close to opening time. We spent a week acclimating ourselves to a radically different schedule: Five days a week, we awake at 5:15, pull ourselves together and catch the 5:45 bus. We arrive at the gym by 6, then lift, run, etc. for two hours. M. heads to Waltham by 8:15, and I go to my office to review my lecture notes. I teach, prepare more class notes, and then try to work uninterrupted until 6 or so. M. also teaches in the morning, then has the afternoon hours available as a solid block of writing time. We reconvene around 7 at home, cook a preplanned meal together, eat without electronic distractions, and then have an hour or two of free time before we wind down for sleep by 10.

One strict rule we follow is that we turn off all electronics (internet, television, radio) at least one hour before bedtime. Our brains settle and the hyperactive buzz of the pointlessly distracting outside world fades. We sleep well.

The biggest initial obstacle was adjusting to the sleep schedule, which appeared to be a self-constructed temporal cage. (Back in my pseudo-martial phase, early to bed, early to rise, regular exercise was my mantra, so I was mentally prepared to arise before dawn and immediately exert myself, but my body was not.) After a week, however, we were used to it and even felt less tired than before. Now we fall asleep quickly at bedtime and we awaken at the right time without the crutch of an alarm. (The weekend schedule is different, and we sleep in to the decadent hour of eight. There is a kind of secret deliciousness in being awake to enjoy the dawn while the rest of the city slumbers.)

So far, we have kept most of our resolutions (some cribbed from the NYTimes health blog):

Floss daily.
Eat dinner together at the dining room table.
Get enough sleep.
Turn off all electronics at least one hour before bed.
Sit up straight. (I'd been having back pain from poor posture.)
Pay cash.
Blog daily.

The last one is the hardest. (I'll cover a few of these resolutions in more detail in a later post.)

All in all, our routine, which we've now kept up for two weeks, is salubrious and refreshing, not burdensome. We seem to be less stressed, even though we are working as much or more than before. I certainly think more effectively and work more efficiently. But among the consequences are that we spend less time each day with our home computers, and we feel less inclination to do so. That includes spending time blogging. But perhaps a bit of blogging now and then can be worked into the routine. In the meantime, perhaps you, gentle reader, would be gracious enough to fill the void?

Jonathan Lethem, Clothed

2010-01-03T11:44:00.002-07:00

At the end of last October, though we were nearly somnambulant from writing papers and job application materials, M. and I convened at Coolidge Corner Theatre to hear Jonathan Lethem read from his new book, Chronic City. I had obtained tickets from the Booksmith a month in advance: I counted Lethem as one of my favorite active authors, even though I had only read a remaindered copy of Motherless Brooklyn (soon to be a movie) found at the Friends of the Library sale a couple of years earlier. The Booksmith had anticipated a large crowd, too much for its used book basement to contain, but the theater was only a quarter full, if that, and I think Lethem and his hosts were rather disappointed that attendance was so far below the mark set by Nick Hornby.

Undeterred, Lethem read almost the entire first chapter for us, and it was fantastic. Though my eyelids were leaden, the reading (and Lethem is quite adept and engaging as a public reader) kept me alert and engaged for the whole hour. (Poor M., much more exhausted by the month than I, did nod off.) He also answered a few questions (Writing a comic book was a life's dream but in the end unrewarding enough for him to do it again; the process of reading for the audiobook is too taxing for him.) before we repaired to the bookshop for the signing. I very seldom buy hardcover books, and I even less frequently stand in line for an author's signature, but this one seemed worth it. (Lethem signed each book efficiently, but did add a few flourishes beyond the normal illegible scrawl of a name.)

As excited as I was when I purchased Chronic City, I didn't find time to read it until Christmas break. It is a great book, extremely well written. (The reviewers at the NY Times, among others, agree with me, and have listed it among the best books published in 2009.) Word for word, sentence for sentence, Lethem is an outstanding writer: It is the quality of his prose which propels the novel much more than the plot, which involves, among other things, conspiracy theories, Manhattan writ large, marijuana (superficially essential, in the fashion of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or The Big Lebowski), and (tangentially) an astronaut marooned in orbit. (The narrative admittedly sags a bit in the middle of its arc but rebounds with verve and intelligence at the end.) Chronic City is perhaps the best novel I've read in the past five to ten years exploring one of the four great literary themes of this (post-?)post-modern era, the Great Metaphysical (epistemological? ontological? it all blends together) Conundrum: What (can I trust) is real? (The other three themes being, of course, We're All Connected (an idea worn thin ever since Go (definitely since Crash) by Hollywood's gimmicky repackaging of intellectually threadbare scripts into "deep" cinema), The End of the World (see Cormac McCarthy), and Zombies.) Though they are very different writers, now that we no longer have Kurt, I'm glad we have Jonathan.

Bonne Année!

2010-01-01T17:11:00.001-07:00

After a monthlong hiatus, we are returning to regular TDC blogging and, in terms of content, tacking back in the direction of the blog's original aims. As the marvelous M. has said, referring reprovingly to the thematic devolution apparent in the last few posts, we can't allow TDC to degenerate into yet another repository of "Foolish Crap I Found on the Internet" -- and it shan't.

Happy New Year to all, and stay tuned!

Tell me why

2009-12-01T19:43:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day N+1: I had planned to take the day off from posting, but I found something odd and entertaining when I turned to Google to help me answer a question on one of my job applications. The top ten Google suggestions (completions) for a search beginning with "Why...":

why do men have nipples?
why is the sky blue?
why is my poop green?
why do cats purr?
why do dogs eat grass?
why did the chicken cross the road?
why is there a dead pakistani on my couch?
why did i get married?
why do dogs eat poop?
why did michael jackson turn white?

I am not the first to discover this amusing quirk. A lot of interest in pets and poop it seems. Interestingly, the weirdness of #7 seems trigger additional Google searches, perpetuating its inclusion in the top ten list. Autocatalytic internet searches -- cool!

Kitty Litter

2009-11-30T21:58:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 30: Whew! We made it to the end of the month without breaking the posting streak (albeit with a bit of automated posting assistance over the holiday). Irregular posting shall resume shortly!

To finish off the month, I'll expand a bit on some of what we saw during our museum tour of NYC. Met, MoMA (Bauhaus rocks!), Guggenheim: we hit the big three (at least in my mind) art museums in the city. The main feature at the Guggen was an exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings and drawings, arranged chronologically from bottom to top along the spiral to illustrate the progression of the artist's expression. That exhibition (which we viewed from top to bottom) was magnificent -- c'est l'art!

Set off to the side of the Guggenheim's main spiral, about every other revolution, are smaller, conventionally rectilinear, nook-like galleries; these held non-Kandinsky works, two of which deserve special mention. The first, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn, was a curtain of gold plastic beads hiding a sheet of gold foil on the floor, reminiscent of the cheesy countercultural interior design sensibilities of the late Sixties and early Seventies. I could see how it took the combined genius of two artistes to come up with that one.

Even more stunning was the Intervals installation by Heidelberg's favorite daughter Kitty Kraus.

Rather than doing her work injustice by attempting my own description, here are what must surely be her own words, since they appear accompany nearly every one of her exhibitions:

"Kraus works in a spare, elegiac vocabulary of monochrome forms and humble materials such as light bulbs, mirrors, ice, and cloth. While her sculptural installations at first recall the cool, geometric precision of Minimalist art, they possess an internal volatility that can prompt their gradual fragmentation or sudden collapse. The spirit of her practice is thus more aligned with the focus on process and alchemic transformation associated with Post-Minimalism ....

The trajectory of dissolution at the heart of Kraus’s work is encapsulated in her series of bulbs or microphones encased in blocks of frozen ink, in which the heat from the embedded electronic device gradually melts the ice, leaving only a residue of murky liquid pooled on the floor or trailing the gallery walls.

Likewise, her sculptures constructed from bulbs enclosed in mirrored glass boxes ... are sometimes calibrated so that the heat from the light source eventually shatters the casing.

As a young artist defining her career at the beginning of the 21st century-—a time of profound questioning and global crises-—Kraus rehearses the trend towards degradation and chaos known as entropy, finding a mournful beauty in the literal and symbolic failure of form."

I think that should read "the literal and symbolic failure of artistry." The retching sound you hear is me choking on the stench of bullshit. Intervals, more aptly titled "Stain on Floor with Broken Lightbulb" is just some unorganized trash in an otherwise empty room. Even the poor security guard posted in the gallery was embarrassed to be guarding that junk; he rolled his eyes knowingly when saw me look askance at the display. Without a doubt, Kitty Kraus is crap.

Apropos, I quote the wisdom of the shitmydadsays guy (albeit regarding science, not art):

"The whole world is fueled by bullshit… What? The kid asked me for advice on his science fair project so I’m giving it to him."

Amen, brother!

End of the line

2009-11-29T21:54:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 29: All good things must come to an end, even Thanksgiving holiday vacations in White Plains/NYC with the Sherwood clan. We returned to Boston this evening (first via the scenic but congested Merritt Parkway, which wends through some attractive, 'burbish areas of Connecticut, then via the torpid Mass Pike, a trip that lasted half again as long as the anticipated three hours -- the one positive note: NPR's Car Talk and Classics for Kids (American Composers with a Boston Connection) were playing on CT public radio. Easy puzzler this week.) just in time to grab a bite at the Jasmine Bistro, a French-Hungarian restaurant in our neighborhood which M. and I had often eyed but never tried until tonight's dinner. It was a somewhat somber supper, as we were not at all looking forward to saying our goodbyes and parting ways, but the Wiener Schnitzel and house red (a very smooth Argentinian Malbec) were delicious diversions before we wished my folks "Bon Voyage!" It was a wonderful, overdue holiday respite and, as always, a joy to spend some time with family and friends. If only it could last!

Back to work tomorrow; in the meantime, pleasant dreams of the terrific week that was!

This sentence no verb.

2009-11-28T20:43:00.004-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 28: On train from NYC to White Plains. Day in review: MoMA (M. student membership.) No Tim Burton exhibition. Bauhaus! Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Dias, etc. quite good. Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock unimpressive. Book on WPA history. Art Students League. Art store. Columbus Circle mall. Hell's Kitchen. T. & H. visit. H. artist's home studio tour. Terrific talent. Dinner at Chinese restaurant, excellent. (Marlborough Riesling 2007 NZ good with Asian food.) Stuffed, happy. Good day! Ice cream later? (Sorry no links today.)

Cozy with Sarkozy

2009-11-27T19:45:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 27: Since the preponderance of tonight's dinnertable conversation (conducted between bites of succulent turkey leftovers and mouthfuls of creme brûlée pie) comprised fun French lessons with our French-Dutch-Belgian-New Yorker relatives, and as the postprandial entertainment is American television, it seems apropos to post a clip of classic American TV that's recently been wildly popular in France:

Nicolas Sarkozy et Carla Bruni dans les Simpson !

Stuff My Wife Says, Thanksgiving Edition

2009-11-26T12:20:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 26: "Why are you always reading the newspaper when we're talking? Why do you have to be antisocial? ... Yes, this is a vacation, but that doesn't mean it's your vacation!"

Happy Thanksgiving!

Eclectic Electric

2009-11-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 25: The following blog post has been pre-recorded ...

Following up on my previous post, I'd like to recommend a podcast for those whose tastes align with offerings of SomaFM: Just Good Music by Cez. This is a smooth monthly mix of house, ambient, funk and electronica that I really enjoy. When I was cranking out my dissertation in Milan in the wee, internet-free morning hours each day, Just Good Music provided the soundtrack. (How I Feel -- and Allen Toussaint's "Night People" (remixed) -- is great when you're still typing at four in the morning.)

The DJ seems to be from the Detroit/Chicago region and frequently has guest DJs put together a mix. Lots of good new (and old -- Ministry's "Work for Love", for example, shows up on Dave Siska of Sonic Sunset's Let's Go Lo-Fi) tracks. I admit I haven't yet bought any music from the featured artists, but were I to start buying music again I would use this podcast's tracklist as a starting point.

Returning to the question my friend posed: I like Aes Dana, whom I first heard on Space Station Soma, but they're hardly new.

Frisco radio

2009-11-24T09:13:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 24: We're scheduled to hit the road some time today, so I guess it behooves me to post a bit earlier than the stroke of midnight. A friend recently asked me in an email whether I'd found any good new music recently, a somewhat odd question for him to pose to me, for the transfer of musical knowledge between the two of us has always run in the other direction.

I don't buy much music anymore, though I might start again at some point, and I've largely stopped listening to music with vocals except at concerts and as treadmill accompaniment. Riding the T or walking the sidewalk I normally listen to podcasts (Bill Moyer's Journal, Planet Money) on my iPhone in order to catch up on news and commentary. But when coding at work (and occasionally at home) I frequently slip on my headphones to tune in to internet radio, especially when I need to aurally escape from the office hours being held by my officemates. Music with vocals is too distracting for me to listen to while programming, but usually avoid classical music while working because it only liminally registers when I'm concentrating and I feel as though I've missed something important when my consciousness drifts back to the music.

So I listen to various electronica, and SomaFM is my source: Groove Salad, Secret Agent, and Space Station Soma are my top choices, and I sometimes channel surf towards Beat Blender. This all-internet radio station based in San Fran has 18 channels (including two holiday music channels during the season) and a pretty wide variety of music, no commercials and no irritating DJs or stupid morning shows. I dig it.

Closed Mondays

2009-11-23T21:25:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 23: The folks were on vacation today, but for M. and I. it was just another working Monday, and having reached the end of it, we are completely pooped. (I recall a t-shirt I saw at MBI: Closed Mondays. Describes my brain.)

The nadir of my day was driving around Boston -- borrowing the rental car brought more frustration than convenience, for it takes even more time to drive from Boston to Waltham (or just about anywhere in electric Volt range around here) than it does to bike. The zenith was dinner at the Washington Square Tavern with M., my folks and our Obama pals T. & J. Mmmm ... fried pickles and steak frites .... Or perhaps the zenith was dessert at Athan's immediately afterwards. Hard to say. (Visits from my parents are always wonderful occasions for gustatory indulgence.)

(M. says that she found the conversation to be the most enjoyable aspect of the evening. (Point well made -- outings with T. & J. are always notable for the high level of conversation.) Yet again I am reminded that I married a superior woman! ;-)) (Yes, that is a double-chinned smiley; waist-watching and punitive cardiovascular routines shall commence post-haste post-Turkey feast!) (And yes, I like to write (and program) with (both) parentheses.)

We head to White Plains tomorrow, where internet is (thankfully) in short supply. Posting is forecast to be light and breezy for the remainder of the week; we'll see how well the iPhones do as blogging platforms.

Good eats, new treats

2009-11-22T21:12:00.004-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 22: Today we chauffeured my folks around Beantown (in their rental minivan -- we normally don't drive around here) to see a couple of the sights: The Harvard Museum of Natural History (the glass flowers in particular) and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. M. and I had already visited both museums (with J. & M. acting as our chauffeurs and tour guides), but at each place we discovered something new.

The HMNH is fabulous, and the glass flowers and minerals are spectacular, but so are the permanent collections of dinosaur skeletons, petrified bacteria, and (preserved) mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians, and fish. There seemed to be acres of exhibits to explore, and M. and I vowed to return soon to take it all in. Science Sundays, anyone?

Each piece at the IGSM is of very fine quality, yet the impression left by the collection of art and architecture in toto is shaded more towards quirk and charm than refinement and exquisiteness. One gets a sense that Isabella was a woman possessed of fine taste, great sensitivity, wide curiosity, and deep pockets, but somehow lacking a system (remember Sammy Jankis ...). As appropriate for being her former home, the ISGM feels more like a museum about Isabella than a museum of art -- but it is nonetheless beautiful and not to be missed. We arrived in the late afternoon, and we discovered that part of the second floor of the museum (the Tapestry Room, past where the sketches by Dürer and Rembrandt are kept) was closed to visitors due to the weekly concert. We stood close to the concert chamber entrance (just past the sketches) and could hear a few strains of angelic singing. Choral music afficianados that we are (becoming), we'll have to get tickets some time.

The day's highlight, though (as least for me), was brunch (with Dr. J.) at Henrietta's Table, an all-you-can-eat locavore gourmet extravaganza. Pricey, but delicious. I ate three (restrained) courses, trying to get a taste of everything. Verdict: herrlich! (And the waitstaff didn't hurry us out the door but let us enjoy the meal and the opportunity to talk.) We shall definitely return for more gustatory enjoyment (when the folks are around to treat us)!

Mall Rats

2009-11-21T21:45:00.003-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 21: My parents arrived in Boston today -- three hours late due to slothful TSA screening in the City with Soul (half of the usual complement of screeners were MIA) that kept three planefuls of passengers from being able to board their flights on time. I'm sure the airlines were pleased to eat the cost of rebooking all those people.

My folks will be in Boston until Tuesday, then we'll drive to White Plains to visit my dad's side of the family, stuff our selves with turkey and dressing, and sally forth into the madness that is NYC on Black Friday. We have several hoity-toity excursions scheduled for the Beantown segment of my parents' visit, including the MFA and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but today was reserved for an American core (consumer) culture outing: direct from the airport to the Burlington Mall.

The shopping mission was completely selfish: I desperately needed better shoes, but I hate shopping and require the suasion of two strong women to get me into a shopping mall. I'm also very cheap. Even though I began to hate my Garmont shoes within a few weeks of buying them, I refused to spend any money to replace them until they virtually rotted off my feet, which happened this month. (My cheapness also extends to willingly indulging my mother's impulses to clothe and shoe me as an early Christmas gift.)

Though I dislike malls on principle, I have to say that this one is not so bad, even if its size is overwhelming -- I think the population of the greater Jackson metropolitan area could have parked their pickup trucks in the parking lot without causing any shortage of spaces. Chief among the mall's attractions is its Apple Store, which we unfortunately didn't have time to check out. Also high on that list is that the shoe stores are clustered together, so finding a decent pair of shoes (Ecco) that were comfortable enough for me and stylish enough to meet my wife's approval took barely half an hour, almost a personal best, as I am an irritable, miserly, and indecisive shopper. I also appreciated the relative dearth of unsupervised seedy-looking teenagers roaming the mallways. Mallrats may have spoken to my generation a decade and a half ago, but now I can't stand those people we once were.

Points of the story: No cultural events today; family follies begin in earnest tomorrow. Don't buy Garmont shoes -- they suck. Ecco shoes -- they seem comfy.

Further observation: NaBloPoMo has a downside -- pressed for time, I wrote about going to the mall, of all places. I'm embarrassed, but there's no time to remedy the situation today.

Quite the ride

2009-11-20T16:40:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 20: If Ridgemont High were in Texas and I were Charles Jefferson, or if I landed a job at UT Austin but didn't get tenure, lost the rest of my hair, and M. ran off with George Clooney thus accelerating the onset of my midlife crisis, this would be the car to drive:

Found in Brighton.

Serious Men

2009-11-19T21:23:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo 19: After I turned in the grant application Tuesday, M. treated me to dinner and a movie, order reversed. We saw A Serious Man at the Coolidge, the latest from the Coen brothers, who are perhaps M.'s favorite American filmmakers and who are high on my list as well. Set at the beginning of the 1960s, ASM recounts the travails of a middle-American Jewish physics professor (up for tenure) over the course of a few rough weeks. He was a seriously overwhelmed man. The movie was funny, but not uproariously so, and I'll admit that I probably didn't fully catch what deeper message it tried to convey, though I think that was the intended effect, a kind of meta-joke. I have to say that I (sometimes? often? I'm not sure of the frequency) can have a difficult time with Jewish humor, in that I get the joke at a sort of intellectual level, but the punchline or the irony or whatever simply doesn't arouse the right kind of belly laugh in me, though I recognize that the comedic situation is indeed funny enough to deserve that kind of response. I sometimes have the nagging (sometimes not just nagging but directly confrontational) feeling that I'm witness to an inside joke that, not being Jewish myself, I don't really have permission to be party to, and that even if I did, my inexperience with Jewish culture would preclude me from really getting the joke in its fullness. I'm usually left a little bit dissatisfied in a manner that seems intrinsic and inevitable; even the magnificent Portnoy's Complaint left me with the uneasy sense of ineluctably missing something. Whatever -- it was a good movie. Go see it.

This evening I finished watching Smiley's People; M. lost interest about two-thirds of the way in, so I viewed the last hour alone. The plot is somewhat difficult to follow and requires a fair level of familiarity with the tropes the spy novel; there is at least one scene in which the twists and turns are recounted point by point for the benefit of the bewildered audience, yet the next events are hard to fathom unless one apprehends the peculiar logic of Cold War espionage gamesmanship. George Smiley, Alec Guinness's character, is an admirable enigma, full of meaningful silences. He is definitely a serious man, rational, unflappable, dedicated to the craft of the spy trade, and surrounded by dilettantes. I liked him, and overall I liked the film. Too bad M. missed the big payoff at the end: the appearance of Captain Picard. (Final advice: read the novels before watching the movie, but do watch the movie.)

mdr

2009-11-18T21:02:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo 18: Pay no attention to this post (perhaps a little) -- I'm just writing to keep up my own blogging streak -- and read MKlotz's humorous entry instead. I'm simply going to add a few links for those less familiar with l33tspeak. (For those of you thinking of posting something, please do!)

LOL confusion

2009-11-18T19:09:00.003-07:00

Considering the way that new words and phrases are circulated within our language ("TWILF" among the most recent) got me thinking about an acronym that is relatively old now--more than a couple of years--and that is apparently still causing some problems for people. That acronym is LOL. Usually the misuse of a word or phrase creates confusion, a slightly awkward situation, and a potential for embarassment. This particular misuse has had more serious and dryly comic effects. A friend told me a story about a condolence note sent after a funeral that the author signed with "LOL." The enraged phone call that followed from the grieving family came as a shock. She had thought that it meant lots of love. A similar event occurred recently to a friend of mine, after the birth of baby named Gabriel, and it was publicized on Facebook. While Sarah was in labor at a hospital in Winston-Salem, her grandmother posted on the father-to-be's wall: "So happy Gabriel will be our 6th Greatgrand child! 4 boys 2 girls. Tell Sarah I am with her in Spirit. lol." Rather than reading this as a subtle post-Woolfian statement that all suffering is undergone in solitude, I would instead point to this as one more instance of a broader LOL misunderstanding. Is it time for a public service announcement? Perhaps instead a streaming message that occasionally pops up in news feeds: "LOL= laughing out loud."

Shofar and friends

2009-11-17T21:14:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 17: The grant was submitted this afternoon with about ninety minutes to spare, so no excuses this time: Here's the Coro Allegro blog post!

I should say first of all that we were introduced to Coro Allegro through T. and J., friends of ours from the Obama campaign. We were lucky to catch a ride with them to Manchester, N.H. on election day for the final get-out-the-vote door-knocking. We hit it off almost immediately and spent much of the rest of the day together, meeting up at the Joshua Tree to watch the returns and then to celebrate a terrific victory. Germany and choral music were among the interests we had in common, beyond a burning desire to elect a Democrat as president. T. & J. sing tenor and baritone, respectively, in Coro Allegro, Boston's "not-for-profit classical music organization composed of members and friends of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities and dedicated to the performance of significant choral works for the enjoyment of all." Enjoyment indeed! We have attended four concerts so far and have loved every single one!

This Sunday's concert was no exception. Coro Allegro's normal venue is the Church of the Covenant, adjacent to Newbury Street and not far from Copley Square, but this time the concert was held at Sanders Theatre in Harvard's Memorial Hall, a striking brick neo-gothic building at the north end of Harvard Yard which was originally erected as a memorial to Havardians who had died in the Civil War (now half of it is a dining hall). M. and I had passed by the chapel many times but had never entered prior to this weekend -- it is quite beautiful inside, reminiscent of Princeton's Alexander Hall.

The featured piece of this year's fall concert was Robert Stern's Shofar, a modern work featuring orchestra, chorus, and four soloists. The narrative of the piece centers around the interaction between God, Moses, and the Jewish people as Moses received the law from God on Mount Sinai (and as the Israelites fashioned an idol down below). The four movements explore a very interesting (and, in a novel fashion, quite anthropomorphic) interpretation of God's evolving relationship with his people. This was Coro Allegro's second performance of Shofar; Robert Stern enhanced the original score with additional parts for chorus and orchestra. Though I never heard the original version, I appreciate the additions, for I liked the orchestral and choral components the most. The soloists were all very good; M. and I agree in our approbation for the bassists, Donald Wilkinson (Moses) and David Kravitz (God). I didn't particularly care for the soprano, Teresa Wakim, but M. thought she was super. (I recognize that she has a beautiful voice, but I thought she didn't project very well. Maybe I am going deaf, or even tone deaf.) On the other hand, I liked the singing of tenor Jason McStoots; M. not as much. (Lest anyone accuse of high-brow cultural snootiness, some of our criticism is decidedly adolescent: the soprano's proofy-busty dress was a rather unfortunate choice, and the tenor's pants were too short.) But ignore our nitpicking -- it's just to fill space. Shofar was superb.

Perhaps even a bit better, to my ears (which are somewhat conservative), were the two other pieces of the concert: Ralph Vaughn Williams's Five Mystical Songs and Gabriel Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine. Definitely more traditional arrangements, they were simply beautiful and very moving. Sanford Sylvan, who had been scheduled to solo for Five Mystical Songs, canceled due to flu, but no matter -- Donald Wilkinson filled in and was phenomenal. M. and I both absolutely loved the singing of the soloist and the chorus. The Coro Allegro singers and their artistic director, David Hodgkins, always put on a terrific show.

When the venue is the Church of the Covenant, we always look forward to mingling with the chorus over juice and cookies after the concert. Unfortunately, the space at Memorial Hall doesn't really allow for that. But we still had the opportunity to eat dinner with T. & J. afterwards, which is always a blast.

Good friends and great singing: Coro Allegro concerts are definitely our favorite musical events in Boston. We are already looking forward to the next one!

Teasers

2009-11-16T21:42:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 16: The clock is ticking on an NSF grant proposal and on this blog post; the grant proposal will have to win out. This means I won't be blogging about choral music as I'd promised, but rather I will have to postpone that entry until tomorrow. I'll leave you with a photo from another event that deserves a future blog post instead, The Head of the Charles:

Before signing off, I want to wish faithful readers L & J and E & J the warmest congratulations -- new little Dinner Club diners are on the way! Hooray!

As seen in Mad Men

2009-11-15T21:32:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 15: Today marked one of the highlights of our autumn, the fall concert of Coro Allegro, our favorite Boston chorus. It will receive a proper entry tomorrow. For this evening, then, a placeholder.

As you well know, Mad Men is one of our favorite television shows, but having killed our cable connection, we watch with a one season lag through Netflix. We've already made it through the second season, which was terrific, and we're looking forward to watching the third season, presumably this summer. On one of my infrequent trips to the conventional supermarket (Trader Joes and Whole Foods, while obviously just grocery stores, do seem a bit different from most supermarket chains.), I spotted this display, which had a special resonance as we had just watched "The Benefactor" episode, prominently featuring Utz potato chips:

I could just see Jimmy Barrett about to rip a bag open with his teeth. (If you haven't seen Mad Men, you should. Absolutely terrific.)

Movie suggestions

2009-11-14T20:43:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 14: We've taken a bit of a break today, napping and knitting, said labor being divided along gender lines. It's been raining in Boston since before dawn, and the grey atmosphere has been the perfect inducement to lounge about.

Had the weather been nicer, we would probably have taken a walk over to Coolidge Corner to see a movie this afternoon. Instead we stayed home and are now in the middle of watching Smiley's People, the 1982 British adaptation of the LeCarre novel, starring the masterful Alec Guinness. He's absolutely terrific as the Cold War spymaster called out of retirement. (As I write this, we're taking a short break. Two hours of viewing already, two more to go tonight, then another disc from Netflix later next week.)

But back to movies. I was reminded this week that I should mention a couple of films we've seen at Coolidge Corner this season and which we highly recommend.

Revanche (now in its Ithaca premiere, as I was informed by the Cornell European Club email announcement Thursday) is an Austrian film that explores the repercussions of an bank robbery (and a couple of lives, really) gone wrong. Strongly acted and engrossing, even though it's paced rather slowly. As in most German films I've seen, the production values are chosen so that whatever nudity and violence are shown speak plainly, rather than being needlessly and meretriciously eroticized, as is so often the case in Hollywood movies. The Austrian and Russian accents are so thick that even native speakers may need to rely on the subtitles to follow all of the dialogue.

When our NYC friends visited a couple of weeks ago we saw An Education, screenplay by Nick Hornby. I would normally have tried to talk M. into a more ostensibly "masculine" choice, but the two wives prevailed upon their husbands and we ended up seeing quite a good movie. I won't summarize the story (NYTimes review here), but I will comment that (1) Peter Sarsgaard did a quite convincing job as the lead sleazeball; (2) I liked Rosamund Pike's sly and somewhat subtle balancing of insecurity and obliviousness in her portrayal of the sleazeball's ignorant girlfriend; (3) the ending was the weakest part of the movie, but not unexpectedly so, and it didn't detract all that much from the enjoyability of the film as a whole.

Friday links

2009-11-13T21:25:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 13: The weekend has finally arrived! I feel like I need a break from a pretty intense (and literally gut-wrenching) week, so today's post is just another link collection:

Adding a somber note to the Right Stuff theme, the engineer who pushed the button to launch John Glenn's first orbital flight has died. He was also instrumental in getting the Apollo program on track to land a man on the moon, where we now know there is water.
Picking up another recent thread here, George Packer has a nice little comment on November 9 and toppling dominoes occasioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I still recommend M.'s post above all others.
A Serious Man and Pirate Radio are two movies I'd like to see; I like the Coen brothers even if the NY Times isn't completely impressed with the latter film, I'll watch just about any Philip Seymour Hoffman flick. But maybe I should watch the most important ones I missed this past decade first.
Should I give up trying to read Heidegger on political grounds?
Megan McArdle appears to be a fan of Doctor Who, which is just about the only positive thing I can say about her. I skim her blog at The Atlantic occasionally when I feel I haven't encountered enough opinionated fools for the day. More on this topic in a future post.
On a tenuously related tangent, this review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest is crap; this commentary on his oeuvre is consonant with my own thoughts on the subject.
I like dogs. They're happy to see you when you come home, especially after a long deployment.
And on a political note, I think this is a great cartoon.

Enough random linkage. Have a pleasant weekend. More tomorrow.

Right Stuff Sightseeing Tour

2009-11-12T21:34:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 12: I'm back in Beantown, finally home sweet home with the lovely M., but I almost missed my flight back due to some unplanned tourist activity. For the final day of my trip to Columbus I was housed and fed (intestinally unchallenging but tasty food) by Mr. Dr. and Mrs. Dr. Joe, two very good friends from the good ol' Cornell days. The were very gracious hosts, and they have a terrific little Craftsman style house that they are rightfully proud of. This morning the plan was for them to take me to the airport on their way to work; having never needed to go to the airport before (they moved to Columbus at the beginning of the semester), Joe checked the directions with Google before we departed, and then off we went.

After half an hour or so of happily chatting and listening to NPR, we began to be a bit concerned by the lack of obvious signage directing us to the aerodrome, but then we spotted the discreetly marked turnoff. Onward we drove, passing woods, fields, and a lot of warehouses and hangars, never catching a glimpse of any indicators of long-term parking, baggage claim, departure drop-offs. It was weird. And then we saw the sign: Welcome to Rickenbacker Airport.

Named after Ohio's WWI super-ace fighter pilot (also race car driver and cartoon scripter), Rickenbacker Airport is the international cargo airport for Ohio. No passenger airlines (except charter). Google had steered us wrong! Following quick consultation of the glove compartment map (trusty paper, not fickle bits) we turned right around and sped off to Port Columbus Airport with the lift-off countdown clock ticking. We passed John Glenn Avenue on the way, and we made it to the airport in time for me to rush to my departure gate just as the plane was beginning to board.

I thought it was quite apropos to have driven by a couple of signs of Ohio's recollection of a couple of its native sons who definitely had The Right Stuff just a day or so after I'd finally finished reading the book. (Spoiler: Glenn made it into orbit.) Verdict: The true story was astounding, the book was excellent, the movie was pretty good, and Chuck Yeager was awesome.

Veterans-Carnival

2009-11-11T07:19:00.002-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 11: Today is Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day. It's also the start of Carnival season in the Rhineland -- the day is marked by a huge drunken festival. There's a big celebration in Cologne; the first time I witnessed it I was at the top of one of the spires of the Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) looking out at the cityscape. I heard a bunch of commotion -- singing, chanting, marching band (plus accordion) music -- and peering down I saw a mass of costumed revelers filling the streets. I had no idea what was going on, but a German standing in line on the narrow staircase of the tower filled me in. It was quite a spectacle!

Celebrity Endorsement

2009-11-10T21:26:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 10: I'm still in Columbus, which is lovelier than I'd anticipated, and I'm still a bit under the weather and a bit pressed for time, so I'll eschew any attempt at an extended post and simply note the incredible career-launching implications that publicity on the Tuesday Dinner Club blog can have: Less than a fortnight after garnering a mention here, the Tweeter behind shitmydadsays has reportedly landed a book deal and a contract for a CBS comedy show based on his father's salty quotes.

The Tuesday Dinner Club shine is sure to rub off on others recently featured here: I predict Nick Hornby's latest will reach bestseller status, and I'm sure Tom Wolfe, John LeCarre, and Michael Pollan will soon start seeing the success they deserve, now that they've been given this blog's (half-read) nod.

(I also predict that CBS's version of shitmydadsays will not be funny.)

Happy Wall Fall Day

2009-11-09T20:50:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 9: Though I may be accused of nepotistic applause, I'd say that M.'s post about her memories of the day the Wall fell can't be topped in this subject category, though there are plenty of mawkish, bloviating, and/or simply boring opinion pieces, collected by Arts and Letters Daily, which may be considered by their authors to be in the running. Today's NY Times has two particularly bad op-eds on "what it all meant" by authors whose by-lines should automatically induce a view askance. Douthat's is dumb, and Zizek's, well, does it actually say anything in the end?

Stick with M.

I Was There

2009-11-09T09:07:00.001-07:00

You have no doubt come across some of the news coverage celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The New York Times is running a pretty cool interactive before/after slideshow, a gallery of readers' photos, a graphic detailing the wall complex including the notorious death strip, and the original 1989 NYT article announcing the fall of the wall. Germany's magazine Der Spiegel is offering a "live ticker" running the original press releases by AP, dpa, AFP at the exact time of day they were issued twenty years ago. I have neither graphics nor historical documents; I don't even have photos. But I have a couple of blurred memories:

I was 11 years old at the time and without a clue about the political situation. When I was much younger I somehow thought that it was all a matter of technology: West Germany, West Berlin, and most of the world seemed to be a on a different planet, and traveling to East Germany required an advanced spaceship that we (the East Germans) simply hadn't developed yet. So while everyone could visit us, we could only travel on our own little planet, which included the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria. No one ever corrected my space ship fantasy, but once my (step-) grandfather turned 65 and legally left East Berlin to visit his cousin in the West by walking through a much-guarded door at the crossing Tränenpalast, this explanation didn't hold up any longer. During the summer and early fall of 1989 I joined my family watching the (West German) news about refugees who escaped East Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and about the large protest demonstrations in East Germany in which people demand to travel abroad. In early November, a million people gathered in Berlin to protest the East German regime.

At the time of that massive demonstration, which we could see from my grandmother's apartment windows, my baby-brother needed emergency surgery. We moved into the waiting room of the hospital. On November 9, after successful surgery and a couple of days of supervised recovery, the baby was released home and things went back to normal.

My dad, a civil engineer, and my mom, a lecturer of economics, had, by GDR standard, a pretty good income. We had a phone line, a car, an apartment with gas heat (rather than cockle stoves), and a full bathroom; we traveled twice a year, often to countries in Central Europe. Rent was cheap, food was cheap. Things like color-TV and cassette players, however, were exuberantly expensive. My dad had started working as a cabbie the previous year to buy a Sanyo stereo (which he still owns today), and since he liked driving and since the extra money was nice, he continued to drive a cab a couple of nights per week in 1989. He was on taxi-duty the night of the 9th.

When he returned home, at 10:30 or 11 p.m., he told my mom about this crazy person who flagged his cab to catch a ride to West Berlin. My dad had laughed at him and refused to pick him up. As he was telling the story, my mom interrupted him to summarize the historic news conference she'd followed on TV, during which Günter Schabowski, at around 7 p.m., had announced that new travel regulations would allow private travel to the West (with a visa). Because Schabowski hadn't been part of preparing these regulations and didn't know the details, he responded to a journalist's question as to when these new regulations would come into effect by stumbling sofort ("immediately," rather than the following day, as planned, to allow for border police to adjust to the new situation: that would have been the correct answer). Berlin radio and TV stations declared the wall was open, and tens of thousands of East Germans gathered at border crossings. Faced with massive crowds, the border police, itself without any direction from above, couldn't but let them through. My mom had followed the events on TV while comforting the baby, and she urged my dad to take us (me and my older brother) to West Berlin.

I was asleep at the time. I remember my dad woke me, saying we'd be going nach drüben (over there). I didn't believe him and went back to sleep. Next time I woke I found myself in the back seat of our car, wearing a coat over my pajamas and shoes on my bare feet. My older brother was in the front. We were stuck amidst hundreds of cars at the lesser-known border crossing of Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, and I kept dozing off. It seems to me we waited for hours; my dad says we were moving the entire time. I don't remember much of the crossing; there was a lot of noise and many people were yelling and screaming with excitement. On the other side of the wall Wessis were greeting us, offering my father free beer. He asked for directions to go somewhere kid-friendly, and a West Berlin man took the lead in his car to guide us (and others) to Kudamm, a famous boulevard-style shopping street that was already packed with ecstatic Berliners dancing and hugging each other. We went to Europa-Center (a small shopping mall and once an iconic building of West Berlin) to see the large water clock (picture here). My most vivid memory of the night is standing in my pajamas in front of that clock, with my dad explaining to me how it worked.

My first impressions of the West that night were that things smelled different and that the night--which in East Germany was just plain dark--was colorful and bright. In East Berlin hardly any stores had illuminated shop signs, but West Berlin shone with bright neon signs everywhere. As to the smell: all of West Berlin smelled like a huge intershop (an East German chain of stores offering West German products for hard currency [D-mark or dollars], aimed at Western tourists and, unintentionally, the stuff East German material dreams were made off), an aroma my mom identified as result of the combination of coffee beans, dark chocolate, and washing power, the quintessential content of any West-Paket (a package from the West) arriving in the East for Christmas.

We weren't in West Berlin for very long, and we didn't see the celebrations at Brandenburg Gate. My dad took us home in time to sleep a couple of hours and go to school the next morning. I had math during first period, but our math teacher 'went missing' over night (along with half the students), and a different teacher substituted for him. This substitute teacher happened to be the school's party functionary and, perhaps, even a Stasi informant (thus the rumor). He had spent the night with his sick mother and missed everything. By the time he walked into class he still didn't know what had happened, and he was furious that so many students were absent. We explained to him that everyone was in the West, that most of us present had been to the West already. The man quite literally lost it. He suffered a nervous breakdown that day and was taken from school in an ambulance.

After school my older brother convinced me to go back to West Berlin. At this point people could cross the border but had to provide ID cards. My older brother was 15 and already had his own ID. I didn't, and in retrospect it seems crazy and quite reckless that we crossed the border without our parents. I don't remember what we did that afternoon, but I imagine we wandered among the crowds and were quite happy. My mom went to West Berlin that day with co-workers and she was one of the people who were lifted up to stand on the wall.

Much more could be said, but I do want to keep it short. Just one thing: my parents' marriage, which already was disintegrating before the fall of 1989, fell apart during the next year. My mom met my now-stepfather, who is from West Germany. Within two years of the fall of the Berlin wall I had both, a family in the East and a family in the West. Therefore I don't strongly identify as Ossi but consider myself a child of unification. Everyone in my family has benefited from the 1989/1990 Wende, but one person is bitter about it: my aunt's husband who, as an East German heart surgeon, tried to escape the East, was caught, spent a year in prison, and was eventually 'bought' by the West German government. He paid a high price for his freedom and possibly resents that 17 millions East Germans got it for free.

Anyway. Happy 20th fall of the wall anniversary!

Sick Man's Post

2009-11-08T18:35:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 8: Many thanks to the bloggeress-in-chief for picking up the slack for me while I am somewhat incapacitated. I hope to have recovered from my illness enough to resume 'real' posting tomorrow, but this is it for the moment. But in the spirit of the Dinner Club, I'll end with a bit of advice for liquid diet gourmands: Purple Pedialyte tastes much better than the orange flavor.

Placeholder

2009-11-08T18:08:00.001-07:00

Folks, the blogger-in-chief is ill in Ohio! Erik went to attend a workshop and got violently sick on the plane (stomach stuff, fever, chills). He's trapped in his hotel room, beginning to feel better after a pretty bad night. He briefly contemplated to go to the ER, and I briefly contemplated to go to Ohio, but in the end we stayed put. He sends his greetings to y'all and asks for your forgiveness for letting you down during NaBloPoMo. If you consider yourself a good mate of his, pick up the slack and post something! I'll be back tomorrow, giving you my first-hand account of the night the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago.

Leaving on a jet plane

2009-11-07T09:43:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 7: I'm about to get on a plane to Columbus via DC to attend a math workshop headed up by my favorite senior mathemagican. I'll be back in Boston Thursday. Posting may be difficult, but I'm going to try to keep up with this month's challenge.

Of course, others could pitch in with their own posts, nudge nudge.

I leave you with a link to one of our favorite Boston musical groups, Coro Allegro, where two of our best Boston (and Obama campaign) friends sing. Their season is about to start, and we're eagerly looking forward to some beautiful choral music!

I'm off to (slightly) sunnier climes. Tschuss und aufwiederbloggen!

Lazy Man's Post

2009-11-06T21:56:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 6: I had hoped it wouldn't come to this, at least not so soon, but posting an entry every day is taxing for those of us lacking self-discipline. I have plenty to write about, but only 25 more minutes to make today's deadline, so I will resort to a tactic that most of the prolific and popular bloggers we all aspire to emulate stoop to from time to time: the link list. I'll just jot down some links to the prose and photography of others, you fill in the rest.

Good dogs -- I had a German shepherd growing up, and he was no canine genius, but he was a superb dog. If he had been a human, I would say he was a "man's man", but saying he was a "man's dog" would seem to be stating the obvious, and I have no idea what it means to be a "dog's dog".
These two posts have excellent rules for restaurant servers. Too bad hardly any Boston restaurants ensure their employees follow them.
This sounds like a good walk. Speaking of British walks, Will Self had a series of essays on walking for the NY Times a few years ago...I should dig those up at some point.
This theory is somewhat funny, but I'm reminded of an awful David Brooks column from a year ago in which he tried to say that there were two emerging narratives about the roots of the financial crisis, either the Wall Streeters were greedy or they were stupid, and which narrative you favored depended on your political ideology. Ever the false dichotomist, our David. Wall Streeters are greedy and stupid, of course.
As a computational neuroscientist, I feel entitled to weigh in on the whizbang science that fascinates David Brooks (and Tom Wolfe). It's about 75% BS.
It took no Einstein to guess that something like this was coming. I'm sure GWB has no regrets about highlighting the founder of this worthless product company in his 2007 State of the Union address.

There you have it folks -- a few minutes trawling the NY Times's Most Emailed list and you have yourself a blog entry!

(I'll try to be more on the ball in the future.)

Nick Hornby, Naked

2009-11-05T21:27:00.003-07:00

Well, maybe just bald. (Speaking from experience, when the winter wind whips around one's tonsured head, it feels as if one is naked against the chill!)

NaBloPoMo Day 5: Towards the end of September, which feels like half a year ago, we saw Nick Hornby at Coolidge Corner Theater, the venue for those Booksmith author events expected to need extra seating capacity. We went with our friends Matt and Norah, big Hornby fans who have read most of his oeuvre. The theater was indeed packed; the age demographic was surprisingly broad -- young to old and fairly uniformly distributed, as best I could tell.

I've only read one of Hornby's books, High Fidelity, which I enjoyed considerably (not a bad movie, either), not least because I could glide through it in a few hours. There is something to be said for the writerly talent of making each page easy to turn without gumming up the sentences between with poorly constructed cruft. Like a knack for composing catchy pop melodies, it's not to be compared with the genius required for classical masterpieces, but nor is it anything to sneer at. Hornby has this talent, to be sure.

Hornby dressed casually, as though he were out to watch a football match, and he read breezily from his latest, Juliet, Naked. (New York Times review here.) It was thoroughly pleasurable to hear the text read, but I can't recall any of its content -- this is one of the hallmarks of Hornby's writing and my early onset Alzheimer's. Following the reading, Hornby took questions from the audience, and my chief, lasting impression is that he seems like a wholly amicable, pleasant, friendly, and witty but otherwise unremarkable person, the perfect barstool neighbor to share a few pints with. Most of the questions I can recall were posed by younger fans obviously ensorcelled by the desire to become writers themselves: questions about writing habits and inspiration. Having read enough "How to Become a Writer" books myself, I recognize such questions as signifiers of naivete and perhaps dilettantism. Novels, poems, dissertations, research statements, grant applications -- the fundamental ritual is applying ass to chair (hat tip, Richard Rhodes's How to Write). For the curious, Hornby has an office near an elementary school where he writes on a shiny new iMac. And he says writing screenplays is much easier than writing novels.

I liked the Nick Hornby who visited Brookline much more than the faceless author of ubiquitous paperbacks whom I had (not really) imagined before. When next fancy strikes and I have a free afternoon, I'll be more inclined to pick up another of Hornby's books for a few agreeable hours.

Join in all the fun!

2009-11-04T21:19:00.001-07:00

Day 4 of NaBloPoMo: The challenge of National Blog Posting Month would seem to offer a golden opportunity to widen the circle of contributors to the Tuesday Dinner Club. Over the past few weeks, we've been contacted by friends interested in posting their thoughts here -- everyone is very welcome to post!

If you'd like to get started, this older post has instructions.

I've reissued invitations to join the blog to those who haven't signed up yet. We hope to read lots of new posts from new bloggers this month! (Here, by the way, is the original post, which explains the intent of the blog and also extends an invitation to join in posting.)

(No, this is not a scam to avoid the work of posting daily this month. We'd like to encourage everyone who's interested to join in the fun.)

On a completely different note, a friend of ours shared some delicious diet-busting brownies with us last Friday. Served warm with ice cream, they were quite a treat. The recipe (thanks, Barefoot Contessa) can be found here. Enjoy!

Books on hold

2009-11-03T21:11:00.001-07:00

NaBloPoMo Day 3: Apologies in advance for what may appear (rather correctly) to be a filler post, but I am still rather under the weather and not feeling up to much of an entry. Melanie has already made the requisite posting for today, but I would be remiss not to do my bit as well.

As we've complained at every opportunity to anyone who will listen, last month was very difficult and stressful. One of my biggest complaints about October is that I didn't read very much outside of work (where I read a few newspaper articles while I eat my brown bag lunch). I have a stack of quarter- and half-finished books by my bedside that chides me as I turn in each evening.

War and Peace: Undoubtedly a great work, this book requires attention! I had hoped to catch up with John and Tom in time to join their book club, but that vain idea soon fell by the wayside. I think I've read no more than 300 pages; by the time I get back to it I'll probably have to start over.

The Right Stuff: Tom Wolfe's narrative of the race to put the Mercury 7 astronauts into space. Though its fast pacing promises a quick read, the verbal pyrotechnics (the obligatory descriptor of Wolfe's prose) made it an unsuitable bedtime book (hard to fall asleep), so I set it aside before Glenn made his way into orbit. Easy enough to pick up again, I'm sure.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: I bought this one for $3 to help me pass the time waiting in line to see John Irving at the Coolidge Corner Theater a couple of weeks ago. I've been impressed with Le Carre ever since I read Absolute Friends on our New Mexico trip. This slim volume was plainly written but still held my attention until the doors opened 60 pages later, though I had the nagging sense that I'd read the book before. I suppose I'll finish it next time a famous author comes to town.

The Shield of Achilles: Though the thesis of Philip Bobbitt's massive tome promises to be interesting, its detailed exposition is ponderous in places, and the book was recalled before I'd made it 200 pages in.

A Place of My Own: Food guru Michael Pollan's paean to architecture and house-building, which are not synonymous. As always, unpretentiously erudite and smoothly written (though one unforgivably stupid off-the-cuff remark in it did send me into a rage), it made me want to design and build my own writing shack. I did actually finish this one.

The House of the Seven Gables: Perfect for fall evening reading, this is one I'd skipped in high school. My current choice right before shuteye.

Ten on Tuesday

2009-11-03T19:38:00.001-07:00

Every Tuesday Yano comes up with a new Ten on Tuesday challenge, and this week s/he is asking to list "Ten Ways to Waste Time on the Internet." This one is in fact challenging, since I don't consider many of the sites I visit to be wastes of time. So, I'm changing the challenge slightly and listing the ten most frequently visited sites.

1. Ravelry. It's a knitting website. Unless you knit, don't bother checking it. I'm very obviously wasting internet time with Ravelry. (OMG)

2. New York Times. That's my start page. The older I get, the more fascinated I am with the Health section. I don't check the obituaries yet. I always read Judith Warner's column, although most of the time I think she's a bit lame. I tend to get completely worked up about a) movie reviews and b) articles on fertility treatments. Which is strange, since I'm not much of a movie-goer and not yet in need of fertility treatment. I think that the NYT does a lousy job covering German news.

3. Leo. My favorite English-German dictionary.

4. The Oxford English Dictionary. I subscribe to it through Cornell. I will miss it very much once it's gone.

5. Facebook. (Argh. I know.)

6. The MLA job list. (No comment.)

7. It's a tie between Huffington Post, Arts & Letters Daily, Der Spiegel.

8. Since we got rid of TV I started watching stuff online. Therefore: Netflix Instant Play.

9. The Paris Blog. (Sometimes this link will take you to websites you could do without seeing... but most of the time it redirects you to the right site. Just a word of caution here.)

10. I read tons and tons and tons of blogs. English and German, mostly. French and Finnish when I feel adventurous. Lots of art/museum blogs, some Berlin/Germany blogs, fewer writing/literature blogs. Many political blogs. Knitting blogs, many of those. And photography blogs.

Weekend Visit

2009-11-02T20:49:00.001-07:00

Day 2 of NaBloPoMo: This weekend we had a wonderful visit from Toby and Hyeseung, a much needed, extremely relaxing and enjoyable interruption of the autumnal academic grind. (I came down with a cold/sinus infection, which I passed on to Melanie, but sniffles didn't keep us from having a great time.) Perhaps the best part of the visit was the conversation, the binding thread of friendship, but we also made a few excursions. Saturday evening we skipped trick-or-treating and instead ate a late dinner at the Washington Square Tavern, which is perhaps our favorite restaurant within easy walking distance. Very good scallops. After a long sleep-in, including bonus hour, we ate a late brunch Sunday and then made our way over to Cambridge, where we strolled through Harvard Yard and along the Charles, inhaling the aromas of fall and admiring the fiery foliage. (Wow, that was purple!) Later that afternoon we caught the bus to Brookline, where we introduced our guests to the Booksmith and then watched a movie (An Education, excellent) at Coolidge Corner. Dinner at Zaftig's, then back home to prepare for the real world: teaching, research talks, grant applications, .... Perhaps nothing culturally extraordinary happened this weekend (though I will post about the movie this week), but after an extremely stressful month, the change of pace and the welcome visit are certainly blogworthy!

NaBloPoMo

2009-11-01T21:10:00.001-07:00

To get us back into the swing of things after our extended hiatus, some website has declared November National Blog Posting Month. The challenge is to post a blog entry each day. The gauntlet having been thrown down, who are we not to take it up?

Needless to say, with increased volume there will be an ineluctable reduction in quality (and length). So let's just start by scraping the bottom of the barrel and bring the level of discourse down as low as possible with some four-letter-word humor!

I hate Twitter on principle, but this particular fount of tweets has provided the humor to get me through a month-long slog of job applications: shitmydadsays. The description is simple:

I'm 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says.

It's basically a collection of quotes from a real-life incarnation of George Kostanza's dad. Some of my favorite gems:

Oh please, you practically invented lazy. People should have to call you and ask for the rights to lazy before they use it.

Just pay the parking ticket. Don't be so outraged. You're not a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement. You double parked.

That woman was sexy...Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them.

You're like a tornado of bullshit right now. We'll talk again after your bullshit dies out over someone else's house.

I turn the kitchen faucet on and the shower burns you, yes, I get it...No, I'm not gonna stop, I'm just saying yes, I get that concept.

The worst thing you can be is a liar....Okay fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but THEN, number two is liar. Nazi 1, Liar 2

Everybody loves that Da Vinci code book. Bullshit, it sucks. I read it. It's for all the dummies.

(watching the Little League World Series) These kids are all fat. I remember when you were in little league.... You were fat.

You know, sometimes it's nice having you around. But now ain't one of those times. Now gimmie the remote we're not watching this bullshit.

Your mother made a batch of meatballs last night. Some are for you, some are for me, but more are for me. Remember that. More. Me.

My flight lands at 9:30 on Sunday...You want to watch what? What the fuck is mad men? I'm a mad man if you don't pick me the hell up.

(left on answering machine) Hello? Hello? It's Sam. Anyone there? Nobody checks this god damned thing. HELLO?! HELLO?! Screw it.

I didn't live to be 73 years old so I could eat kale. Don't fix me your breakfast and pretend you're fixing mine.

Why would i want to check a voicemail on my cell phone? People want to talk to me, call again. If i want to talk to you, I'll answer.

To state the obvious, I dig this website.

Distance Equals Rate Times Time

2009-10-03T21:19:00.001-06:00

To our three remaining readers: We apologize for the blogging drought. We've simply had no time whatsoever to spare for writing. There were far, far too many mindless boob tube broadcasts to glue our eyeballs to*: CSI Miami, Designstar, House Hunters, Property Virgins, Wife Swap, Oprah, Real Housewives of New Jersey, House Husbands of Hollywood, The View, Dr. 90210, Dancing with the Stars, Glenn Beck .... The list goes on and on. Completely entranced, unable to move from the couch, we would awaken at 3 a.m. from a semi-catatonic doze to find ourselves still on the living room futon, hypnotically dialing the 1-800 number flashed on the screen, ordering our nth Flowbee and n+1st Sausage Accessory Kit. But then Guiding Light came to an end, and we knew was time to stop.

Now things are better. Taking a line from one of the two most influential rock acts of this area (the other, of course, being Rob Zombie), as well as a wonderful bumper sticker seen all over that eviroelitosocialist paradise called Ithaca, NY**, we had ourselves a vision, and we killed our television:

As you can see, we're much happier now.

And we've found new ways to entertain ourselves:

Cable was switched off this week, after an incident in which I was locked out of the house and had to call Jackson, Mississippi to recover my keys and let in the cable technician. Long story. Stay tuned for more posts!

* Actually, we've just been horribly busy, overburdened by much too much work, especially with trying to churn out a couple more papers and preparing job applications. Many thanks to Norah for picking up the slack for us while we were slaving away. We'll be back in the salt mines again soon, at least until the job apps have been filed, but we'll try to be better posters. Of course, everyone is welcome and encouraged to post anything at all -- we would love to read what you have to say! Here are instructions; email us if you'd like help!

** We love Ithaca. That website is funny in a right wing looney tunes sort of way.

And here's another video I ran across when looking for Distance Equals ... I can't resist posting it. Watchu know about math, punk?

Blah

2009-09-27T20:56:00.001-06:00

...is how I feel about Germany's general election result. FDP? Blah. Yellow-black coalition of FDP & CDU? Doubly blah.

Liberal Arts College

2009-09-25T09:04:00.001-06:00

What do you think of this liberal art college's mission statement?

The College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so called "social justice" and "multicultural diversity," which judges individuals not as individuals, but as member of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles. (Full text here.)

Crazy?

10 songs

2009-09-22T14:24:00.001-06:00

Hey all,

Just a quick post to say hello, and to recommend some tunes. Here are my ten favorite songs of the moment. This list changes frequently, but I thought I'd share the current obsessions.

1. Going Missing -- Maximo Park
2. Psycho Killer -- Talking Heads
3. Real Bad News -- Aimee Mann
4. Black-Eyed -- Placebo
5. Plus Profound -- Hooverphonic
6. Hey Eugene! -- Pink Martini
7. A Sorta Fairytale -- Tori Amos
8. Troublemaker -- Weezer
9. The Crane Wife 3 -- The Decemberists
10. Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth -- The Dandy Warhols

Reading and banning books

2009-09-11T06:13:00.001-06:00

The NY Times had a story last week about the 'Workshop Method' of teaching reading which lets students create their own reading lists. I think the results speak for themselves. Here's an old reading list alongside a new one:

BOOKS ASSIGNED

"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

"Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank

"The Giver" by Lois Lowry

"Roll of Thunder, Hear My

Cry" by Mildred Taylor

STUDENTS' FAVORITES

"It's Kind of a Funny Story" by Ned Vizzini

"A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines

"The Book Thief" by Marcus Zusak

"Life as We Knew It" by Susan Beth Pfeffer

"Maximum Ride" series, by James Patterson

James Patterson, the man behind the "Toys R Us Kid" ad campaign? Rumors of our culture's death have been greatly understated. (And since when have book titles been written in quotation marks rather than being italicized? Shame on you, Grey Lady.)

I suppose it could be worse -- we could ban books from school libraries (click for larger image):

Prownsville, Oregon tried to ban a book that has lain on the CAM coffee table for years. As for Mississippi, is the lack of book banning a sign of open minds and a commitment to the spirit of free inquiry, or do we just not read anything?

A quick recipe

2009-09-07T06:36:00.005-06:00

This weekend M. and I did a bit of entertaining: we had my officemate and his wife over for dinner, reciprocating their invitation to us from a few months ago. Finding a good time for a get-together with them can be rather difficult, as she is working on her PhD at UC Merced and spends most of her time there. (Unfortunate for us, really, as they are a lovely couple to hang out with.)

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They had served up a very tasty and somewhat fancy dinner when we ate at their apartment, and we wanted to match up to their offering, but we also weren't up to anything too complex or too expensive. We settled on a classic American country menu of salad, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and peach cobbler (a la mode), but all gussied up by Cook's Illustrated. (CI is our only food-related subscription currently, and we heartily recommend it. Almost every recipe we've tried is quite delicious; it does have the downsides of occasionally requesting fairly expensive ingredients and usually requiring quite a bit of prep time the first time we try a recipe. It doesn't take long to get the hang of them, though, and they can make excellent 'staple' dishes. (Sorry for the linked recipes being hidden behind a pay wall. Email us if you want instructions.))

The dinner was a lot of fun, though the preparation and cooking took about three hours (managing to cook everything with two chefs splitting between them prep bowls, measuring spoons, a chopping block, a three burner stove and a somewhat cranky oven takes some coordination!)

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All of the ingredients came from the Brookline Farmers Market, which boosted the tastiness as well. I think everyone had a great time, and the only entertaining snafu was pretty humorous: we inadvertently created a modern art sculpture worthy of a low-budget poseur gallery when the wax walls of our trusty bathroom candle finally gave way.

But what about the recipe? It's one I ran across while digging through our CI collection. My dad sent it to me when I was a grad student as a suggestion for CAM's weekly coffee hour. It was quite a hit the second time I made it; the first time I think I might have eaten it all.

Fully cover a baking sheet (1/4" sides) with saltine crackers. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Melt 2 sticks of butter together with 1/2 cup light brown sugar. Heat to rolling boil for 3 minutes to thicken. Pour this mixture over the crackers.

Bake for 10-18 minutes, until brown. Remove from oven and cover with 1 bag of semisweet chocolate chips and one bag of regular chocolate chips. The chips should melt and cover the crackers smoothly; you can return the crackers to the oven briefly to help this along.

Finally, cover with pecans or your favorite nuts and refrigerate to set. Mmmmmmmmmm.

Enjoy!

Ice cream for all!

2009-09-03T21:12:00.001-06:00

As a chubby hubby*, ice cream lover, pun aficionado, and supporter of everyone's right to marry, I was pleased to run across this**:

Next time I get a late night craving and raid the White Hen across the street, I'll pick up a pint! (Though I'm still a loyal fan of 3 Scoops and an even more loyal fan of Purity.)

* Not my fault, though, at least according to the 1907 NY Times:

Whoever heard of a fat lover? But though few chubby men enter the connubial state, they achieve a dangerous corpulence -- or have it thrust upon them, in the opinion of the learned diarist of The North American Review -- through the aid and abetment of their wives.

** "Ceremoniously?" Really? I don't think they even meant "ceremonially," but ceremoniously bears much more strongly the connotations of pomposity that accompany being "given to ceremony; punctilious in observance of formalities, esp. those of intercourse between ranks or persons." I hope the act was performed cerevisially instead!

Two small comments

2009-09-03T12:26:00.009-06:00

Thought I'd chime in, since Melanie pleaded. ;)

First: Erik, I LOVE the bookshelf-stairs. What a neat idea. Also, props on citing Neil Postman as a "favorite modern social critic-observer." Have you read "Amusing Ourselves to Death"? I just finished this a few months back, and it's a wonderful(ly depressing) book about the shift in epistemology that comes from TV. In other words, the book is playing exactly into my personal beliefs. I highly recommend it.

In somewhat related news, M. and I are embarking on one of our periodic "media fasts." We're not watching any TV or movies in September. Unsurprisingly, this frees up a lot of time. What shall we do? Cook, play guitar/piano, write letters, and of course, read. Oh, the places you'll go!

Secondly, in response to Melanie's favorite contemporary artist, I thought I'd mention my own: Jessica Drenk (http://jessicadrenk.com/). I would encourage you to go check out her galleries. I especially like the "Reading our Remains" section. Here's an example:

M. and I have two of her more modern pieces, as well as an older painting. (One minor factor in this is that she's been my best friend since we were four, but that doesn't stop the art from being fabulous.)

Young Member Party at the Met Museum in the Big Apple

2009-09-02T18:23:00.004-06:00

Both Mr Gemmell and I thought that a museum party for young members sounded either painfully cheesy or horribly dull when we received an invitation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Annual Young Members Party. Much to our happy surprise this was not the case! Arriving around sunset at the Met, we entered not so much into a museum as a grand residence. Such a treat to be able to wander through the museum's maze of rooms without the nuisance of tourist-ridden banter. We could actually spend time in rooms where no one else was present, taking our pretty time enjoying various pieces. To be honest, most of the people all gussied up at the party did not seem to be present for the sake of privately viewing the artwork, but no matter for this only gave us more of an opportunity to have rooms to our dorky selves. Although it took a while for the party to get hopping, at around ten o'clock in the evening a gush of handsomely clad members arrived. Cocktails and strange canapes were served, we all stumbled to the rooftop where a Roxy Paine installation entitled Maelstrom was lighted by many-coloured lights and surround by members who were equally on their way to being sufficiently lit. The canapes apparently weren't as satisfying as promised, for a good 3/4 of the crowd were stumbling down through the exhibits at around eleven....as we ourselves faltered about through the long corridors near the end we could only think of tomorrow's potential headlines with all of the attendees in their finery barely missing disastrous encounters with various Greek and Roman statues, wobbling on the way to the taxi line. I must say that it all felt very Gatsby-esque and Trey and I half expected to walk out into West Egg upon exiting the party. It was all quite amusing and I can only recommend that you join us next summer.

The art of Obama

2009-09-01T20:15:00.001-06:00

Last spring Melanie and I joined my folks on a minivacation in New Mexico, the Georgia O'Keefe state. At the Georgia O'Keefe museum in Santa Fe there was a prominent special display for Jimson Weed, which had been on loan to the GWB White House for the previous six years, at Laura Bush's request.

I personally think that it is a beautiful painting, and the former First Lady's choice attests that at least one person in the White House had some taste.

Apparently (and unsurprisingly) things are quite tasteful in the new First Domicile, which embraces abstraction and ambiguity with equanimity. Awesome.

Twilight Sounds, Norman Lewis, 1947

I'm still a fan of this Obama art, though:

Obey Giant!

And BTW, when I'm president, I'm going to have my official portrait painted by the creator of this one:

My favorite contemporary artist...

2009-09-01T10:46:00.002-06:00

is Hyeseung Marriage-Song, who's a NYC artist trained in the classical tradition. She's updated her website, and her web gallery is worth checking out. Her work is presented by the Classical Arts Studio, in case you're interested in expanding or starting your art collection.

We are fortunate to have one of her paintings in our living room:

In my dream house --

2009-09-01T10:35:00.001-06:00

after I get my dream job (I like Utah for it's sensible driving laws) -- there will, of course, be lots of books and hence a need for lots of shelf space. Here's a novel bookshelf solution that I like:

Only a problem for people who climb stairs left-right-left.

Why You (Probably) Hate Your Job: Richard Sennett Explains All

2009-08-30T08:24:00.001-06:00

Richard Sennett is without a doubt one of my absolute, all-time favorite modern social critic-observers (in the pantheon with Neil Postman, Christopher Lasch, and Jane Jacobs). Sennett, who trained as a concert violinist at Julliard but gave up professional music after a hand injury, is a sociologist and philosopher at NYU and the London School of Economics whose interests range through labor relations, urban studies, and the culture of work and craft. I chanced upon him first in the bargain basement of the Brookline Booksmith, where I picked up a used copy of Authority, an examination of social, emotional, and psychological interactions interwoven in the modern concept and practice of authority, which is more than a simple power relation. It is, as are all of his books I've read, incredibly well-written and insightful.

Since this first read, I've picked up his books whenever I've had the opportunity. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities is an engaging extended essay about the growth and structure of the Western cityscape and its implications for public and private life. The Craftsman is a terrific examination of the "the desire to do a job well for its own sake" and its loss, rediscovery(?), and value in modern society. Both books were excellent; my only complaint about Sennett's essays is that at the end of the exploratory ambulations on which the reader accompanies him, he seems too reticent to draw prescriptive conclusions. With so much to think about, though, it does seem reasonable to take the time to ponder before asserting what is to be done.

Most recently I read his short essay from the late 1990s, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. The book is as good a read as all the others. His own blurb:

Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a high-tech Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime.

In some ways the changes characterizing the new capitalism are positive; they make for a dynamic economy. But they can also be destructive, eroding the sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self, and trust in others that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character. The Corrosion of Character enables us to understand the social and political context for our contemporary confusions and Sennett suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of “no long term.”

The question is what effect do the changes in the structure of work and the work environment (flat, networked institutions, everyone a consultant, team-orientation, outsourcing, etc.) -- and their subsidiary effects on the bonds of trust that tie together any community, even a soulless corporation -- have on the development and maintenance of character:

"Character particularly focuses upon the long-term aspect of our emotional experience. Character is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long=term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratification for the sake of a future end. Out of the confusion of sentiments in which we all dwell at any particular moment, we seek to save and sustain some; these sustainable sentiments will serve our characters. Character concerns the personal traits which we value in ourselves and for which we seek to be valued by others.

How do we decide what is of lasting value in ourselves in a society which is impatient, which focuses on the immediate moment? How can long-term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term? How can mutual loyalties and commitments be sustained in institutions which are constantly breaking apart or continually being redesigned? These are the questions about character posed by the new, flexible capitalism."

Why is our work a source of stress, resentment and apprehension rather than self-definition and meaning, stolid and tragic though it may have once been? The diagnosis is grim. The promises of freedom and empowerment promulgated by the new capitalism are largely illusory. It is clear that the people who succeed most in this new kind of world are not those who are most useful and productive, in the traditional, ethical sense, but those who, when called account for failure, ensure that they emerge unblemished and that someone else, or no one at all, bears any blame. Hardly progress.

I won't say more. Read the book.

Mastering the Art of Posting to the Dinner Club

2009-08-29T08:35:00.001-06:00

Several people have told us that they'd like to post something to the blog but don't know how. This post is intended to help -- and to encourage more people to participate. (We enjoy writing our posts, but we'd really love to hear what other people are reading/writing/watching/hearing/etc. We hope the blog becomes more of a conversation than a mono(duo?)logue.) Here goes:

Make sure you have accepted the invitation to join the blog for posting. Do this by following the link sent out in the invitation email. If you don't have the invitation anymore, email us and we'll send you another one. So far, 11 people have signed up to edit.

The body of the email looks something like this:

The Blogger user Erik has invited you to contribute to the blog: Tuesday Dinner Club.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://long-link-here

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.

To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.

When you click on the link (http://long-link-here in the above), you'll be taken to a webpage that asks you to sign in. If you already have a Google Account (i.e. Gmail account), you can just enter that email address and password. Otherwise, follow the link that asks "Don't have a Google Account?". Once you set up your Google Account, try the invitation email link again and sign in with your new Google Account. You'll only be able to login to post to Tuesday Dinner Club using the Google Account with which you accepted the invitation.
Having signed in to Blogger using your Google Account, you'll be taken to the Dashboard, which shows all of the Blogger blogs you can post to. Tuesday Dinner Club should be on the list (maybe the only one on the list). To make a new post, click on "New Post". You'll be taken to a form that allows you to enter a title and the body of the post. It's pretty straightforward.

Here is Blogger's (Google's) help page for posting to the blog via the web.

Be sure to click the "Save Now" button from time to time in order to save drafts of longer posts you are working on. That won't post anything to the web, just keep you from losing what you've written if you navigate off to a different web page or something.

Once you're ready to make your post public, click "Publish Post" to release it to the Dinner Club community.

For posting photos, you can either upload them or add a link to an existing picture on the web, e.g. if you have a photo on a Flickr or Picasa site you'd like to incorporate into the blog. This is relatively easy to do with the web interface -- just click on the icon that looks like a miniature photo of some mountains and you'll get a pop-up that walks you through it.
That's should be enough to get you started posting, but if you run into trouble, email us and we'll help you out. If you don't like using the web interface, you can use a standalone blog editor, which can be much more convenient. For the Mac, ecto and MarsEdit are good ones; Melanie and I use MarsEdit.
If you write a post, publish it, and then realize you made a mistake, you can always go back and fix it. Login to Blogger, go to the Dashboard, select "Edit posts" under Tuesday Dinner Club. You'll see a list of all the posts ever made to the blog. Click "Edit for your post and you'll be right back to the editing screen, ready to make changes.
On a related note, you can also use the RSS feed for Tuesday Dinner Club. Just click on "Posts" button under "Subscribe to the Club" on the righthand side and you'll get a popup list of places you can get the RSS feed. I just use my web browser. I bookmark the link feed://tuesdaydinnerclub.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default, and whenever there is a new post, my web browser is notified. That way I don't have to remember to check the blog regularly -- my browser tells me whenever there is anything new. (I like using Vienna, a free RSS reader, to manage all of my RSS feeds.)

We hope these tips help, and we look forward to seeing more posts on the blog!

No Such Thing as Too Much Butter

2009-08-20T15:02:00.001-06:00

In honor or Julia Child I took some photos of butter. My charming husband left it out over night, and what I found this morning looked like this:

I wonder if Julie and Julia would have saved it? I threw it out.

Well, I'm sharing these photos with you because I wanted to reinforce Erik's assessment of Julie & Julia. So delightful! I laughed and cried and laughed some more. (Click on the link above to see the trailer; 'cause of silly legal stuff I can't embed it here.)

Just out of curiosity Erik checked prices for the first edition of Child's cookbook; it goes for 400 dollars, and I'm sure that price will go up over the next few weeks. Fortunately I already own the first edition of Child's memoirs, My Life in France, which is a lovely, lovely book that I very much recommend.

Anyway... must clean the kitchen now to get ready for cooking dinner later. Erik's at the Farmers Market picking up fresh corn, to be eaten with plenty of butter, I'm sure. Cheers!

J, J, J, M, & M (+E) go to the movies

2009-08-20T06:47:00.002-06:00

Among the many perks of her new gig at Brandeis, Melanie is entitled to purchase half-price "Silver Experience" movie passes for AMC theaters. We'd talked about seeing Julie & Julia, the no longer quite so new Meryl Streep/Nora Ephron film, ever since we saw previews for it. France, French cooking, a tall, striking woman, blogging, very nice husbands ... the attractions (and parallels to our fantasy life of literary brilliance, gustatory indulgence, and a chic apartment in La Ville-Lumière) are obvious! (For those who haven't heard of it yet, the movie tells two stories: primarily the story of how Julia Child learned French cooking and wrote her famous cookbook, and secondarily, as a frame, the story of a woman, Julie Powell, who blogged about cooking all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the course of one year.)

Last weekend we tried using our magic tickets to see J & J but were turned away, as they are only honored after the second weekend of a movie's run. Instead of the movie, we saw the ICA's Shepard Fairey exhibit and The Comedy of Errors, as M. wrote about -- an excellent outing, but we were still panting in anticipation of seeing the popular and critically heralded film (even crochety ex-politicians and dismal scientists recommended it).

Our opportunity came Wednesday, Nth day of a humid heat wave here that has left us steadily, sweatily dripping to the point that we're ready to consult with the village witch doctor if his rain dance can speed along relief from the braising we've suffered! (Fortunately, Hurricane Bill is supposed to send some thundershowers our way, a break in the weather that should drop temperatures ten degrees or so, in exchange for some flashes and bangs.)

We met up with our pals Jerrel and Minh at their workplace downtown, which is conveniently located next to McCormick and Schmick's, a pretty fancy fish place that we normally can't afford to frequent, but which has a dirt cheap happy hour food menu paired with reasonably priced (for Boston) cocktails. The ladies stuck with their favorite, the Raspberry Cosmimosa, J. a martini and a Manhattan, and I tried the caipirinha, something I have to admit never having heard of before. (Bartending remains a large lacuna of my social knowledge base. We're we magically transported back to the Mad Men era, I'd have to study hard to raise my mixology grades enough to fit in.) It was delicious, competitive with the Long Island iced tea I favor (disdaining the opinion of the Atlantic Monthly -- what do they know?), but the main ingredient seems exotic enough for Boston (less than 1% exported, and most of that to Germany) to keep it out of our home cabinet for some time to come.

How was the movie: Terrific! All enjoyed it tremendously. Meryl Streep was in top form, and the supporting actors, particularly the "saintly" husbands, were quite good. (I have to say that I found the actress who played Julie completely forgettable.) The script was sweet and sentimental (for Paris in the fifties and sixties) with out slipping into syrup or saccharine. The portrayal of Paris fifty years ago makes one want to pack up and move across the ocean and back in time; the portrayal of cooking and eating French food impels one to run out and buy a copper-bottomed saucepan, ten pounds of butter, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and head to the kitchen! Completely delicious, highly recommended. Bon apetit!

(At Minh's behest, we finished the evening with a visit to BerryLine a refreshing twist on frozen yogurt -- the fro-yo tastes like real yogurt, and the toppings are predominantly fruit. Relatively lo-cal, yet yum!)

Five on Monday (i.e., What We Did Last Weekend)

2009-08-17T08:14:00.002-06:00

We had a spectacularly wonderful weekend, and here are the five favorite things we did (I'm deliberately not telling you about cleaning, grocery shopping, and napping, since these are all activities we do each weekend, more or less. Another weekend routine: to go to the Brookline Booksmith, our awesome neighborhood independent bookstore, and buy at least one used or bargain book. Not worth mentioning, really, since we do it all the time!)

1. Long in the planning, we finally got together with Matt and Norah for a Saturday outing to the ICA (John B., Erik's new playmate from work, and Jenn couldn't make it, unfortunately). E & I hadn't been to the ICA before and got seriously lost on the way there: while the building is quite obviously and visibly on the waterfront, we just couldn't find a way to bike there: we ended up on some nasty highway intersection just to be (mis-)led into the World Trade Center from which we escaped by going underground through a subway station, all the while seeing the damn thing but not getting there! Be advised, fellow-Bostoners: don't take Summer Street Bridge. Anyway... just rambling away here... eventually we caught up with Norah and Matt, who were happily sitting at the back porch of the museum, where it is really, really lovely. Perfect picnic spot, I'd say.

The reason we were excited about the ICA was the Shephard Fairey exhibition, which unfortunately ended yesterday. Amazing stuff, beyond the super famous Obama image and the almost equally famous Giant series. Norah and I almost missed the first room, though, since we were too engaged in our rant about how irrational the "discussion" on health care has become.

Just about as irrational as the "debate" between the Polish social activists caught on tape by artist Artur Zmijewski: their task was to represent their own beliefs on a poster and critique the posters presented by the other groups. Guess what happens when you throw conservative Catholics, Jewish activists, the nationalistic Polish youth, and the socialist Polish youth into one room? Posters go up in flames... Zmijewski's video "THEM (SIE)" is quite unsettling, if predictable (probably unsettling because predictable).

Aside from Fairey and social documentary video art, there was a bit of (lame) sculpture (but that's just my opinion), some good photography (ditto), and some blah painting (ditto). The coolest room in the museum: the mediathek:

You can't see it, but outside the giant window: well, it's all water. Imagine your office in here!

2. Next to the ICA is the famous Boston seaside restaurant The Barking Crab. While making written (Facebook) arrangements for meeting with Norah, I had accidentally misspelled the name and asked if she wanted to go to The Barking Crap, and really, that name fits more properly. Of course, we didn't know that at the time.... We went because we wanted to have an authentic Boston experience, which the Crab claims to offer, and because we wanted to sit outside in a Biergarten-like atmosphere to enjoy the warm evening while hanging out with friends.

In respect to the Biergarten atmosphere, the rustic picnic tables, plastic utensils, plastic flatware, and plastic glasses and pitchers, all kept underneath a giant tent, were completely and fully acceptable. So was the menu, prominently featuring fried fish and beer (and lobster). We should have been suspicious that the menu didn't list beer prices, but instead we happily ordered a pitcher along with our food. Big mistake, as it turned out. The service reminded me of airport restaurant service: the waitstaff wants you in and out as quickly as possible. Our food arrived immediately, the plates were taken before we were done (we had to stop the waiter twice), and the bill arrived with all glasses still half full. And when we didn't leave right away, we were asked after just three minutes if there was anything else...? Because otherwise...? Yes, we got the message; we had overstayed our welcome.

For a glass of beer, a plate of fish and chips, and one fourth of an appetizer (we shared), you pay 25 bucks, thanks to the hidden beer price that was completely insane. The food was okay: it was your typical pub food. Of course, you can order the lobster at 18.50 a pound, and crack is open by whacking a rock down on it, as the people who shared our table did with utmost enthusiasm. They belonged to the unbearable group of yuppies that, while a rare sight outside of downtown Boston, gathered en masse at the Crap, 'scuse me, Crab, to enjoy their fancy fare off of plastic. That's decadence.

3. Norah & Matt went their way; E & I went ours. And it took us past the Boston Commons, where we could see tents and stalls and a big stage. So we stopped, asking what the commotion was all about. In retrospect I feel sheepish we didn't know: it was Shakespeare on the Commons! For two weeks, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company had been performing The Comedy of Errors for free each evening, and Saturday marked their second-to-last show. So we plopped down on the grass, got our share of Ben & Jerry's ice-cream ('cause all that fried fish just wasn't enough!), and enjoyed a truly magical production. It was really, really beautiful, and it was such a lovely evening, and it's such fun to sit in the grass, and... and... and... *sigh* It was so romantic!

4. I didn't need to beg Erik to come along to the Open House at NESOP, the New England School of Photography at Kenmore; he fully supports my photographic ambition.

That ambition hasn't translated into anything yet, so don't ask. But I'll tell you anyway: My grandfather was a photographer, and when he passed away all his equipment went to my dad, who then transformed a closet into a tiny darkroom. And when I was young, I spent hours in that darkroom with my dad. In high school I took two darkroom classes, and in college I went to the darkroom with my friend Konni, who's a professional photographer. Then digital photography happened, and since then I've been taking lousy snapshots with my lousy compact digital camera (and photos on our honeymoon that turned out nicely because I had borrowed a good camera, a Canon Rebel XTi). In any event, I finally dug out my old film SLR, and I'd love to get back into doing film photography and developing film myself. In addition, I'd like to get a better understanding of digital photography. NESOP offers evening workshops for people like me who like to take pictures and want to make a hobby of it. I'm thinking of taking a class this fall, and that's why I wanted to go to the open house.

Alas, the open house was more geared towards people who are interested in taking a two-year course at NESOP as full-time students. We joined a tour to see the dark rooms and computer labs and studios and the equipment room, and we met with faculty and students who talked about their work... and that was all super interesting. Erik (who particularly liked the photojournalism work) told me to keep my bicycle helmet on to keep my head from exploding from all the excitement. If you're interested, NESOP has a beautiful gallery with recent work by students: it's all really, really good work!

5. After we spent the early afternoon at NESOP, we crossed Kenmore in search of food and found Le Petit Robert, a small French bistro with an impressive collection of miniature Eiffel towers and a real French waiter who I wanted to take home with us 'cause his accent was so cute. (But E convinced me that a dog is better qualified as pet.) We went for the "express lunch option" and got really delicious food for very little money. We'll definitely go back to explore the dinner options. The waiter warned us to make reservations: apparently, the place gets packed for dinner. No surprise there!

So. That was the weekend. All those activities interfered with doing laundry, which is usually on our Sunday to-do list. Hence, I'm staying home today to wash and dry and iron and fold. And to work on my syllabi! Yes--I'm starting to teach in eleven days! Totally excited about it... and therefore I leave you with pictures of my new office that I have all to myself (taken with a phone camera):

Berlin, Part II

2009-08-16T16:00:00.009-06:00

Visiting Berlin was a business trip: I was there to give a talk in a workshop on "automated parameter estimation methods for compartmental neural models" at the Organization for Computational Neuroscience's annual meeting. (It won't spoil the suspense to affirm already that it was just as exciting as it sounds.)

Family visitations were scheduled for the days prior to the start of the conference: The day after Sheketak, we slept in and then ate brunch at the KaDeWe. The Kaufhof des Westens (Department Store of the West) is the second largest department store in Europe, the continental crown jewel of consumerism.
Its seven floors house all manner of high end merchandise, including all the names of high fashion and expensive jewelry. Most impressive to me (and my parents when they visited Berlin two years ago) are the sixth and seventh floors, which are packed with food -- an astounding array of meats, cheeses, scrumptious confections, aromatic breads, wines, you name it. One could (as my father did) spend hours just salivating over the wares in their display cases.

Melanie and I were there to sample the KaDeWe's rightly renowned champagne brunch in the Silber Terrasse (Silver Terrace) Restaurant, one of Melanie's favorites. The setting is elegant, with dark wood and leather chairs, heavy silver utensils, fine china, and an excellent view of the bustling city. The waitstaff's impeccably solicitous, yet wholly unobtrusive service is wonderful; the waiters are veterans who know the names, habits and preferences of their clients, mostly regulars, so well that their favorite tables are reserved, their drinks poured, and their new coiffures comment upon when they arrive at their usual times. We observed this kind of ritual performed for a couple of conservatively well-dressed, aristocratic octogenarian ladies, clearly used to being served, who sat next to us and imbibed a couple of preprandial whiskeys before beginning their vino rosso brunch. (I should mention that the staff knew Melanie, too, though only from semi-annual or so dining, and we were attended to wonderfully.)

The one area where the KaDeWe is lacking, an area where it has declined from its former woolly glory, is yarn. There isn't much there for knitters, but we did cruise through that part of the store and picked up some goodies for The Stash.

After brunching and yarn seeking, we walked home past Berlin Zoo (former home of Knut) and stumbled across a quaint and nifty alley of streetlamp exemplars from all over Germany. In the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, most major cities in Germany produced their own streetlamps, the design of which (perhaps) expressed something of the cities' individual character. They ranged from the relatively utilitarian, probably indicating the lesser affluence of the town of origin, to dainty rococco, replete with curlicues and filigreed ironwork, imitations of Parisian style reflective of Germany's mild but longstanding envy of what is perceived to be the charm, artfulness and easy living inherent in French culture. "Leben wie Gott in Frankreich" -- to live like God in France -- is the universal German Sprichwort for The Really Good Life. Postwar streetlamps were clearly designed to meet practical demands, rather than to appeal to the people's artistic sensibilities -- though I suppose you could argue that enforced plainness of the GDR's public architecture (and it was all essentially public) was an expression of a "People's artistic sensibility", one subordinated to the political will of the Party. The rest of Thursday evening was spent at home, eating an excellent fish dinner and preparing slides for the CNS workshop talk.

Around midday Friday, needing to get out of the house for a while, we took a walk along Oranienburgerstrasse, strolling past the restored remains of the Neue Synagogue, two-thirds of which was irreparably damaged by Allied bombing during the war. The restored remainder is guarded around the clock by the Berlin police, a testament to the still uneasy conditions for Judaism in Germany. The problem is not the sentiments of the greater population, but the small, adamantine kernel of anti-Semites that seem to have an insatiable need to spread their ugliness.

Just past the Synagogue we ate a hearty lunch of Berliner specialties, then looked for a paper store, for it was a couple of days before our first anniversary -- paper. We did find a very quaint, cute one where I bought a couple of items, and we stop by a beading store, but there was not a lot of shopping to be done. We headed over to Friedrichshain, where Melanie's father and stepmother live. We had a pleasant, and interesting -- in the universally understood 'familial' sense of the word -- afternoon tea with them, Melanie's paternal grandmother, and a great uncle and aunt. 'Nuff said about that.

Saturday I was in class: the CNS ran a day of tutorials to teach the latest methods of the computational neuroscience experts to the masses. The location was great: Gendarmenmarkt, site of the beautiful Deutscher und Französicher Doms and Konzerthaus. The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences has its offices there, with a set of high quality lecture halls, which is where the tutorials were held.

The location was, sad to say, of higher quality than the tutorials themselves, which were aimed at beginning graduate students. Many of my fellow attendees had clearly just gotten off the plane and were stumbling about in the throes of jet lag. One man sitting in front of me suddenly pitched back and whacked his head against the screen of my laptop, which was perched on my knees.

The refreshments (Kaffee und Kuchen mit Sahne) were excellent (and I should take the opportunity to praise the extremely helpful and competent conference staff), but by the afternoon tutorial session I was about to succumb to similar drowsiness, so I left for home early, and walking towards the S-bahn station, I had an encounter with the seamier side of the city. Stay tuned....

Bueller … Bueller …

2009-08-09T09:21:00.001-06:00

John Hughes, creator of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, the Home Alone series, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, died this week.

I didn't follow his career, which held less meaning for me than for those a bit older, but I enjoyed some of his early and mid-career movies: As I was born just past the trailing edge of Generation X and too early to be counted amongst Generation Y, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club are not included in the pantheon of "defining movies of my generation," but Weird Science was one of the first movies I ever saw (part of a weekend spent at a childhood friend's grandparents' house -- they should not have let elementary school kids see this one), the National Lampoon's Vacation films hit the comedic bull's eye for me before I reached calendrical double digits, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off sits high atop the list films that serve to weave together the self-referential pop cultural skein through perpetual quotation.

Ironically enough, the ability to consistently recognize allusions to these movies, among others of the period, became a signifier of social inclusion and astuteness as much as other forms of fashion following that were such sources of teenage angst for the characters of Hughes's most remembered films, see e.g. references to The Breakfast Club in Go.

Hughes's later films were not so much to my liking, and he did unleash the twin monsters of Ben Stein and Macaulay Culkin, but the admittedly superficial sense I get from reading his obituary is that he was a pretty good guy. Retreating from the hurly-burly to live in quiet seclusion on a farm, starting a fresh script immediately upon finishing the current one -- admirable ways to live the writing life.

Berlin, Part I

2009-08-08T07:53:00.007-06:00

I have been criticized recently by a sizable majority of this blog's readership (3 of 5) for posting too sporadically, and posting too lengthily when I actually do write anything. I've also been prompted by my significant other to get on the ball and relate the tale of our Berlin-Madison trip while the memories are still fresh. So here, in bite-sized chunks, goes:

We spent the first day in Berlin as zombies, trying to beat jet lag by walking around, struggling to keep our eyelids apart. Setting out from Melanie's mother and stepfather's apartment, which is nestled near a slight bend in the River Spree a few hundred meters from the Bellevue S-Bahn stop, a quiet, green little quarter with a pleasant mix of old churches, modern offices, and Turkish groceries, we set out into Tiergarten, the city's fabulous analogue (and precursor) to New York's Central Park.

We wandered the paths of Tiergarten until we hit upon a small biergarten in a clearing, ate a bit of sausage and potato salad and drank some real bier! Actually, I had an Alster (mixed limonade and bier), one of the various Mischgetränke that are quite refreshing on a hot day (others have strongly contrary feelings on this subject). Enjoying the uniquely German pleasure of relaxing in a biergarten was the perfect way to start our visit, an experience marred only by the discovery that a bird had shat on the back of my shirt sometime during the meal.

Full and sleepy, we pressed on past the the Reichstag, long since unwrapped, and trotted down Friedrichstrasse to Dussman, a terrific big bookstore. But we were hard pressed to keep from nodding off on our feet and could hardly muster the concentration to read more than a few sentences, so we rode the S-bahn back to Bellevue and tumbled into the apartment on the verge of collapse. After a quick dinner of Aufschnitt with the folks, we were trundled into bed and slept until the next afternoon.

After a leisurely post meridiem brunch, we met with Papa and Petra near the former site of the Palast der Republik, the former home of the East German parliament and a major East Berlin cultural and entertainment center, housing restaurants, discos, a bowling alley, and the like. Long left standing in disrepair, it was gutted because of asbestos, then never rebuilt and finally torn down -- probably due to politics more than health concerns, or, perhaps because it was the site of an Einstürzende Neubauten concert. Let them explain:

In its place is simply a large open lawn, dotted with sunbathers, picnickers, and frisbee games.

After a picnic on the grass, we wandered to our evening entertainment, the Rhythym in Motion show by Sheketak, an Israeli dance and percussion troupe.

Something like STOMP with a bit of rap and physical comedy thrown in, they were quite energetic and pretty good, but not superb -- more towards a very high level of street performance.

Entertaining nonetheless. After the show, M. and I wandered back towards Bellevue and tried to find a place to get a drink outside by the river, but we ran into an absurd level of inconvenience everywhere we went and finally just headed back to the apartment to turn in for the night.

Palin Poetry

2009-07-30T04:46:00.001-06:00

We're back from our trips to East and West Germany (Berlin and Madison, Wisconsin, respectively); blogging shall begin shortly!

In the meantime, here's a (probably already well-worn) clip of Palin's farewell "speech" interpreted as poetry. Apologies if you've already seen it, but I think it's pretty funny:

Shatner's Version (Tonight Show) (with a commercial, sorry!)

The Original (C-Span)

List of Things

2009-07-10T12:10:00.001-06:00

Since Erik and I are both overwhelmed with work, here just a list of things we did and saw and ate during the last week or so, while our friends Emma and Stephen were visiting us (coincidentally and independent of each other):

1. Looks like chick flick, smells like chick flick, walks like chick flick: but it's not a chick flick. Watch Away We Go, if you get a chance. It's a bittersweet comedy about two 30-somethings without a real job or home, and because they are pregnant they really want to have both before their baby girl arrives. If you're in grad school, you know the feeling of "Oh Gosh, I'm a loser, 'cause I'm so old but haven't really achieved anything yet!" It's that kind of movie...

2. We watched three other movies on DVD; Gran Torino (with Clint Eastwood) was quite good; How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was quite awful; and xxxxx was so bad I don't even want to admit to having rented it.

3. Culinary highlights:
(a) In restaurants: Casual dinner at Zaftigs, our all-time favorite delicatessen; and fancy dinner at the Washington Square Tavern, which was out! of! this! world!
(b) In backyards: The 4th-of-July BBQ at Norah and Matt's house included a very fabulous banana pudding that Norah claims is a tradition in her Montana home, although I've had it only in Mississippi before. Paired with Jenn's delicious (French) apple pie---mmmmm!! On July 5th, John and Tom invited us into their backyard for another round of tasty BBQ that included homemade cole slaw and Greek beer.

4. John's two nieces joined us on Sunday, and we forced the older one, Eva, to play Tom's piano. Boy, she knows how to play! The music highlight of the summer so far, really.

5. Norah brought back a present from Paris, where she's spent two weeks this summer: I now own a Paris apron!!! (Remember, I blogged about how much I wanted one.)

6. I showed Emma around Harvard Yard, and we walked almost the entire length of the Freedom Trail (we skipped the U.S.S. Constitution). And because it was the 4th of July weekend, we were joined by 200.000 tourists and about as many tourist guides, the latter dressed in period outfits. It was very crowded but fun.

7. I took Erik and Emma to Brandeis campus to show off my new office. Yes, I need to brag: I have an office, all to myself, with a giant window. All I need are the keys to it... :)

Hungry?

2009-06-28T21:13:00.001-06:00

If you're an environmentalist, a health freak, or an animal rights activist; if you closely follow food politics; or if you have read Marion Nestle's excellent Food Politics, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan's wonderful books The Omnivore's Dilemma or In Defense of Food: well, then there's no need to watch Food, Inc.. You won't learn anything new.

But you should watch it anyway.

Playing in selected theaters near you (in Boston: at Coolidge Corner).

Here's the trailer:

Mad Scientist, Anyone?

2009-06-25T08:58:00.002-06:00

Being without a car has the big drawback that we can't leave Boston as easily as we would like to sometimes, especially when the rain has finally stopped and we're graced with a sunny day (a rare occurrence, this summer). We very much depend on our friends Minh and Jerrel to drive us around to explore the area surrounding Beantown. Thankfully, they seem to like doing so, and a couple of months ago they took us on a little expedition to Lexington, Concord, andWalden Pond. Two weekends ago we went north to Salem, site of the famous 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials. Salem's very pretty to walk around; it has some gorgeous architecture, a nice pedestrian-only city center, the Salem Maritime National Historic site, the Peabody Essex Museum, and dozens of witchcraft shops that invite tourists to experiment with white magic or buy their next Halloween costume. Both destinations--Concord/Lexington and Salem--make for great one-day trips.

Last weekend we had plans to go to Karls in Saugus to buy German sausages to grill that night, but first we wanted to do something more "cultural" (although Karls--no apostrophe!--is quite the cultural experience, too. Those of you German speakers: think Blutwurst, Bierschinken, Weisswurst, Thüringer: Karl has got it all, and on top of that Löwensenf and Curryketchup and Mon Cherie and Oblaten and Fa-Seife).

A long time ago Erik was told about Hammond Castle, in Gloucester, and since neither Minh nor Jerrel had been there, we decided to check it out before going to Saugus.

Oh boy! Hammond Castle! One mad scientist lived to see his boyhood fantasy come to life, I think. John Hays Hammond, Jr., "second only to Edison in number of patents" (I'm quoting from the website), built this castle in the late 1920s, supposedly as a gift to his bride, but who was he kidding? The man designed a Gothic castle, including a great hall with an ear-deafening organ (the curator played a sample, turning up the volume only half-way as not to hurt us), a draw-bridge, secret passageways, and, according to folklore, dungeons that served as top-secret laboratories. Hammond filled the castle with his extensive collection of medieval artifacts, some original, some exact replicas: medieval armor suits and weapons, tapestry, furniture, etc. Visitors are invited to roam freely--and roam we did, up and down the many circular and narrow staircases, to a number of rooms all stuffed with interesting curiosities (among my favorites: a large medieval-looking manuscript depicting the family tree of Hammond, which links him directly to Charlemagne and all British royalty). Completely wonderfully insane: the indoor patio that's modeled after a medieval town square: around a small pool in the middle are walls that are designed to look like a Gothic church entrance, a Southern France shop front, a Germanic-looking home. The "town square" is covered by a glass ceiling to which several small pipes are connected: if desired, it rains from this artificial sky, and since Mr. Hammond was a clever cookie, it doesn't just "rain": it drizzles, it pours down, it mists, it storms. Another little quirk: the castle's been used for psychic seances, and apparently you can still attend those today.

After our visit to the castle we stopped by Manchester-by-the-Sea, which has one beautiful beach. It was the first time I dipped my feet into the Atlantic, while the boys dissected jelly fish.

And the grilling? Oh, it was lovely! Much to Minh and my delight, the guys didn't touch the Blutwurst (cooked pig blood, yummy) but indulged in the Bauernwurst.

PS: As always, more pics on our photo gallery!

Readings, briefly

2009-06-18T18:44:00.001-06:00

I haven't written about books in a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. Here's what I've read, some recent, some from several months ago that need to go back to the library, with brief commentary.

The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby: A history of the decline and fall of rationality in American public discourse. The most interesting chapter is the one on Middlebrow Culture. Recommended reading.
Faceless Killers, Henning Mankell: The first of the Swedish Wallander mysteries, which are becoming a regular feature on PBS's Masterpiece Mystery. The mystery was a bit thin, and the writing is serviceable, at best, the promise implicit in the setting and the detective are discernible.
The Cruel Stars of the Night, Kjell Eriksson: The second novel in another Swedish detective series, this one with a single mom as lead detective (much easier to pull off in Scandinavia). Eriksson's prose is several steps above Mankell's (though both men's books suffer from weak translations by non-native speakers), but the case was far-fetched and a bit melodramatic. Eriksson did a much better job than Grafton in alternating between the killer's and detective's perspectives, but it still didn't really work. Particularly troublesome in the story, though, was that for all the emphasis on the single motherhood of the lead detective, her interaction with her child, not to mention the child himself, is barely mentioned. Just one of several ways in which the set of characters wasn't made interesting enough to induce me to read any more books in the series.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson: Quite entertaining tongue-in-cheek early 1990s cyberpunk. Read it in most boring non-science class during your nerdy adolescence. If you've already passed that developmental stage, Cryptonomicon is a better entry point to Stephenson's oeuvre.
The End of Order, Francis Fukuyama: A kind of dry follow up on some ideas in Trust, which was a kind of dry follow up (read Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone instead, or at least first) on some ideas implicit in Fukuyama's (infuriating, incorrect, but interesting) policy-wonk bestseller of nearly two decades ago, The End of History and the Last Man. As with the works of Richard Posner, one of the small number of right of center public intellectuals worth engaging with, there is a methodological/worldview problem: every phenomenon is reduced to markets and questions of utility maximization -- the dismal science to save the day! This can be useful for making a model to help get a grasp of certain aspects of the system under consideration, but the meta-issue of not confusing the model for the system seems to pass pundits of the economicist persuasion by more often than not.
Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs: A great little book, written at the end of Jacobs's life, an example from my favorite nonfiction genre: gloom and doom decline and fall thrillers. (Perhaps "thriller" exaggerates.) Jacobs identifies five trends pointing towards social decline, and they're not the ones you'd expect. Her discussion of these trends is intelligent, proceeds from an urbanist point of view (she's famous for The Death and Life of Great American Cities), and uncovers interesting insights and connections (using language and analysis that reminds me of dynamical systems theory). It's too bad she'd dead; I would have loved to read more.
Case Histories, Kate Atkinson: Melanie already mentioned this one, but I hadn't read it. A relatively quick, entertaining read. Atkinson is definitely a good writer, with sure-footed prose and interesting characters. (The female one's talk and think about sex or lack of it way too much for my taste, though. It distracts from the mystery story.) The mystery itself is a bit thin, and though she plays fair with the reader, there is enough that's far-fetched to raise eyebrows, but you keep reading, in part because the detective, Jackson, is quite likable. I'll read the next one.
Gott schütze dieses Haus, Elizabeth George: The first Inspector Lynley mystery, and the first book in German I've read in six months. The German was at just my level, though even I could tell that it was pretty bad. A pleasant read nonetheless, with interesting characters and not too much interpersonal romantic intrigue to turn me off.
The Craftsman, Richard Sennett: A completely terrific book, deserving of its own post when time permits; in the meantime, read the NY Review of Books article on it. Another book about the work of hand and head was recently featured in the New York Times, but I have a hard time imagining that it could match the deep insight and lucid prose of Sennett's ambitious book, which, happily, is the first of a planned trilogy.

What I'm still working on:

Essays, Roger Bacon: I made it through the first half on the trip to NM. A stranger on the train from Grand Central to White Plains late one night (we were riding back after a lovely Friday evening with our friends Toby and Hyeseung) asked jokingly if it were a real page turner. I could honestly answer affirmatively.
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy: Advice from the same stranger on a train -- just make it through the first chapter, then it sails along. I have yet to make it through the first chapter without falling asleep -- I read mostly at bedtime -- but I have high hopes.
The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry: One of my birthday gift books, sporting a fabulous green cover. At the sentential level, exquisitely tautly crafted, it doesn't overplay the noir style. It promises to be a very clever, entertaining book, but the somewhat whimsical-magical scenario and atmosphere requires me to be in the right frame of mind to really delve in and enjoy it.
Collapse, Jared Diamond: I feel like I know the punch line, and each case of yet another mysterious vanished civilization is presented with the same verve as an invited review in Science. It's a bit too much like reading for work, which is a disappointment -- I'd expected a more engaging read, based on ten year old memories of thoroughly enjoying Guns, Germs, and Steel.
A Death in Belmont, Sebastian Junger: From the man who brought you the perfect storm, the story of a murder that happened in his childhood Boston neighborhood -- when he was still an infant -- while the Boston Strangler was on the loose. This one's pages turn easily.

Back on the Blog

2009-06-18T18:06:00.001-06:00

As M. reported, we were in New Mexico on vacation at the end of May. Before that, I attended two conferences in Utah, which is rapidly rising in my ranking of potential places to live and work. It was my first time in Salt Lake City, a surprisingly attractive, livable town with a high quality university and friendly inhabitants. The town is ringed by beautiful mountains that promise wonderful hiking and skiing. The first conference was held at the university, the second at Snowbird ski lodge half an hour outside of the city. During the second conference, I never made it far enough outside the lodge complex to experience much more than the clean dry air and the strikingly clear blue sky, but I thoroughly enjoyed the place, except for the outrageous food prices charged to the captive market (I paid $10 for a hotdog for lunch one day).

I don't have much to add to what M. has already written about New Mexico, and there's not so much more to say about Utah -- my memory for specific details has begun to fade -- so let's get back to books and music and just keep Utah on the books as a great destination.

Art & Food

2009-06-01T17:11:00.001-06:00

What a combination! And no matter where you go in New Mexico, you'll run into it.

Art

I'm not going to pretend I know anything about the cities we visited, but it's a fair assumption that Santa Fe and Taos are best known for their vibrant art scenes. The coexistence of Hispanic, Anglo- and Native American cultures has attracted artists all along; Georgia O'Keeffe is obviously the most famous artist who moved to New Mexico, but she surely wasn't the only one. Our little trip was much inspired by O'Keeffe's legacy; we stopped at the O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, visited her summer vacation spot at Ghost Ranch, and ooh-ed and aah-ed at her home and studio in Abiquiu, where she permanently lived for more than three decades. Even if you know nothing about O'Keeffe or don't like her, I guarantee you'll love her art (and admire her for the feminist she was) once you've seen where she's lived and worked. Patroness of the arts, Mabel Dodge Luhan invited many artists and writers (most famously O'Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence) into her house in Taos, which we visited, along with the home of the Blumenscheins and Nicolai Fechin's Russian-inspired house. Fechin has to be one of the greatest portrait artist of all times; I was surprised to learn he had lived in Taos (if only for a few years).

Among the most memorable art on display in Santa Fe were baskets--woven, sewn, glued, hammered; traditional and very untraditional. If you pass through town before September, do visit the exhibition Intertwined (at the New Mexico Museum of Art). These baskets are amazing (if not necessarily always baskets). I want to learn how to do basketry now! And weaving! (Oh, those woven rugs everywhere!) Of course, jewelry and pottery are among the most prominently practiced crafts in the region, and we visited the Santa Clara Pueblo specifically to look at the famous black pottery, of which Erik's mom owns a few pieces.

Food

Yes, we ate plenty. I will exercise self-control and restrict myself to naming just three places (although I could name six, easily). (1) If you have a thing for gnocchi (which is a weird thing to admit to, but here I go: I love gnocchi. The home-made kind, the one that makes potato mash stick to everything in your kitchen and beyond, the one that is particularly delicious with melted butter and fried sage), go to the restaurant at the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe. Gnocchi with oyster mushrooms: hello heaven! (2) There's nothing in Abiquiu but O'Keeffe's house, the smallest post office you've ever seen, an old-fashioned general store (called Bode's and quite famous), and the Abiquiu Inn. The food at the Inn--wow! So good! We had dinner there and breakfast, and both meals were absolutely fantastic. (Tamale Cake Napoleon, anyone? And that's just the appetizer.) (3) Vegetarians, don't be offended: I highly recommend the The Steakout Grill and Bar in Taos, but mostly because of its risotto. This was almost as good as Martina's risotto in Milan.

Oh well, here some more restaurant recommendations: Great breakfasts at (4) Tia Sophia's in Santa Fe and (5) Church Street Cafe in Albuquerque. Fabulous desserts at (6) Café Paris in Santa Fe.

I leave it to Erik to write about the New Mexico wine we tried. Cheers!

We Are Back (and Five Pounds Heavier)

2009-05-31T14:09:00.003-06:00

If we haven't posted anything lately, it's 'cause we vacationed in New Mexico and were offline for most of the past two weeks. We returned last night, have tons of laundry to do and an even larger (virtual) pile of emails to attend to, but we will write again soon: we saw great art and architecture, and we stuffed our faces with terrific food, and we need to tell you all about it. (Sounds like a threat, doesn't it?)

For now, visit our photo gallery; there's a new album with New Mexico pics. For those of you who don't know the password (which we'd be happy to email to you), here's a photo mosaic:

Mystery Women

2009-05-13T08:44:00.001-06:00

I agree with Norah; mystery is the fluff I read when I need something light that doesn't require much thinking. Usually, I read mysteries when I'm sick. And while sick in bed the last time around, in January, I discovered three woman crime writers: the queen of mystery writers, Elizabeth George; the relatively new-to-crime-but-otherwise-tenured writer Kate Atkinson; and the brand-new writer Tana French. George is American; Atkinson is British; and French is a bit of everything (her bio states Irish-Italian-American; she lives in Ireland). George has written God-knows-how-many books featuring Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Tommy Lynley and his side-kick, the unattractive, frumpy Detective Sergeant Barb Havers; Atkinson has three crime novels under her belt, telling the tale of private eye Jackson Brodie and, increasingly so, his friend (and, presumably, future lover), Detective Inspector Louise Monroe; French just published her second book, in which a murder case is led by Dublin murder squad Detective Cassie Maddox, the ex-partner of Rob Ryan, the first novel's detective. Shaking the illness in January, I wasn't quite ready to shake crime fiction, and I've read a lot of George/Atkinson/French the past couple of months.

Here my two cents' worth of wisdom:

George obviously knows what she's doing. She crafts her plots well enough that each book remains a whodunnit up to the last page. Her writing is fun to read. Both these points make her books good, readable, and enjoyable crime fiction. The big "but" is the books' flirtation with the romance genre: Lynley doesn't just represent New Scotland Yard, he's also the Earl of Asherton, who doesn't need to work but chooses to do so. Havers, on the other hand, is at the opposite end of the class spectrum. Lynley has everything (the manners & money, looks & ladies); Havers has only her dementia-ridden and smelly parents to look after, and a really bad temper because of it. It's not that Lynley and Havers ever get together--it's not that bad--but the story of Lynley and his love interest, Lady Helen Clyde, and the little love triangle between Lynley, his best friend (and forensic investigator) Simon and his wife, Deborah (Lynley's ex), seem tedious at times, especially because George uses romance fiction language. If you're a frequent Masterpiece Mystery! watcher (turn to your public television station on Sunday evening) or stay up after Tatort, chances are you're familiar with the BBC production of the Inspector Lynley series. One of the best mystery series on public TV, if you ask me.

I read Atkinson's novel in a weird order, starting not with her first, but second book, One Good Turn. This was a very fun read; even though the solution of the crime puzzle isn't as rewarding ('cause disappointing, in as far as the story promises a bigger bang than it delivers), reading the intertwining narratives of the different characters is quiet entertaining. This is also true for her third novel, When Will There Be Good News?, but not so much for her first, Case Histories. It appears that Atkinson gets better with time. Her books center around ex-soldier and ex-cop Jackson Brodie who, as private eye and divorcee, stumbles into crime scenes as accidentally as into relationships, but he does so convincingly. The romance doesn't take over the crime, as it occasionally does in George.

French writes long books, books that take a long time to read, which, depending on the illness you're sick in bed with, can be quite good. What distinguishes French from Atkinson or George is her literary ambition. French obviously wants to write a novel with a mystery in it, not mystery fiction. Her ambition is, at times, her downfall, in particular in her new book, The Likeness. It was impossible for me to take the leap of faith required to follow her story: that undercover agent Cassie, who looks precisely like the murdered victim, gets away with living among the victims' roommates without being found out. Once you can accept this basic frame of reference, you're off to a good read. However, if you're constantly doubting how any of this is possible, it's a bit of a pain to make it through almost 500 pages. I picked up her second novel after having enjoyed her first one quite a bit: although In the Woods also requires you to accept certain unlikely facts, it's easier to do so. Her first book is driven as much by the crime as by the relationship between the two detectives, Cassie and Rob. Once this relationship turns sour (by the end of the first novel), French runs out of ideas for a second novel, and I wonder if she's personally more invested in her detectives' relationship than the crimes they're supposed to solve.

All in all, I think it's noteworthy that woman mystery writers seem to add a love narrative to their crime fiction, as if crime alone won't do the trick. It's not bothersome at all in Atkinson, and I'd also highly recommend George, but I don't extend my recommendations to French.

Mysteries

2009-05-13T06:16:00.003-06:00

Grafton isn't my favorite writer in the female-protagonist popular mystery genre, but she certainly paved the way for dozens of variations to spring up. I do think she was the first author to do quite what she does, at least in recent times, and I'm glad for that. I followed her series through about R, but by then I think she was just continuing to finish out the alphabet rather than because she had that many more good ideas. If you want to try Grafton in her prime, I recommend something earlier on. The Kinsey sequence is pretty fun along about D and E, if I recall.

Then, I should add that I do quite like a lot of mystery series (although there are piles I dislike, too, usually ones with overly complicated plots, although I made an exception for Lawrence Block burglar series, as the rest of his writing is funny enough to make up for it). Mysteries are the fluff I read when I want something light and thought-free, so I'm much less critical of them when it comes to writing/plot holes/etc.

If I were recommending mystery series or authors, I would also recommend:

Dick Francis: lovely, and very British, but in a good way. He writes mysteries based in some way around the world of horse-racing, having been the Queen's jockey for a while. There are three or four of his that I dislike, and on the order of 30 I like. Also, they can be read in any order.

Dana Stabenow: the Kate Shugak series. Set in Alaska, these feature a female Aleut protagonist, without getting all hokey about American Indians (something that, growing up in Montana, I got plenty of to last me). They're funny in spots, and the stories are about the right complication. You can often guess the who or the why but because the story is often more about how to prove it, or how to confirm it, than who did it. I like that, as it means she doesn't have to write ridiculous curve-ball plots to keep you stumped. These ought to be read in order.

Tony Hillerman: oddly, more Indian mysteries. These are set on the Big Res, the huge Indian reservation that sits at the four corners where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado meet. These do get a bit hokey at times, but only when it informs the plot (you have to deal with Navajo beliefs about ghosts, for instance, if you're investigating a murder on a res.) The reason these are interesting, to me, is that they delve into the cultures of the Indians who live there (not just Navajo, but also the Hopi and some Lakota and others), and they also examine the way our law enforcement system works there. The Indians govern themselves, to a point, and have their own local cops, but the feds can also come in in some cases--it's a mess. These should be read in approximate order, although they aren't so intertwined that if you miss one or two you'll kill the story.

(Upon reflection, I like mysteries as much for the light they shed on their setting as the stories themselves.)

Charlene Harris also wrote a set of mysteries that all start out "Shakespeare's something-or-other," which I thought were good, but somewhat grim. Her female protagonist is not in a light-and-fluffy place.

And of course, there's Janet Evanovitch, so fluffy they're barely novels. I enjoyed the first few, and found them funny, and am not so interested anymore. But they're a favorite of lots of people.

T is for Tedious

2009-05-12T21:46:00.001-06:00

A little over a week ago, M. and I drove to Ithaca. Being in Ithaca is wonderful, but getting there is another matter altogether. Before Melanie was fatally bitten by the knitting bug, the trip could be an intolerable bore. Now that she has something to keep her hands busy (mine are on the steering wheel), we had to find something to keep our minds occupied for the six hour drive. Commercial mass market radio is obviously insufficient, and NPR fades out past Worcester. Given six extra hours, both of us would choose to read, so we chose to have the CD player read to us.

M. surveyed the Boston Public Library's audiobooks section and found that it is predominantly populated by Bibles and Bible spinoffs, self-help, and mystery. We went for the last: Sue Grafton's T is for Trespass. Twelve hours, ten CDs, plenty enough to get us there and back.

The best I can say for the book is that it was not the worst audiobook I've ever heard. (That would be Nobelist Jose Saramago's Blindness, which is pretentious crap, not even well written at the technical or stylistic level. It's shallow moralizing dressed up as sci-fi by a writer who has probably never read a sci-fi novel, let alone developed an appreciation of it. The best sci-fi takes technological and scientific speculation and lets it lead the way towards social criticism; the worst gets it the wrong way round.)

T is for Trespass was our introduction to PI Kinsey Milhone of Santa Teresa, CA, and for me, the acquaintance will remain brief. This particular yarn (identity thief posing as a nurse loots the elderly man, Kinsey's neighbor, for whom she's supposed to be providing home care) wasn't bad, but neither was it good. The story dragged on for ten CDs when it could have been told in six. If plot twists and clues couldn't be seen a mile away with the naked eye, the author put a telescope or ten in the reader's hands. There were lots of short, declarative sentences and a revolting action scene, so Grafton has certainly been reading the standard mystery how-to books, but the unfolding of the climax and denouement was sloppy and incredible. That being said, we did listen all the way to the end, so there must be something to the books. As I'm now three-quarters of the way through Susan Jacoby's indictment of American dumbness, I'm more inclined to credit my declining taste than some je ne sais quoi of Grafton's writing.

A Chorus to Listen to This Weekend

2009-05-12T21:17:00.001-06:00

If you live in Boston, go to Sunday's Coro Allegro concert. Coro Allegro is the fabulous chorus Erik and I have been following since we met two of its members this past fall while canvassing for Obama. I'm a huge fan of Coro Allegro not just 'cause Tom and John have become such dear friends of mine, but because it is a really, really fantastic chorus with an amazing classical music repertoire performed by outstanding voices. The singers are, for a large part, professional musicians or have been singing choral music for a long time. The discovery of this group has certainly been one of our Boston highlights, and I'm very much looking forward to this week's performance of contemporary composer Ronald Perera's Why I Wake Early. See you there!

Stuff (White) Parisians Like

2009-05-12T20:56:00.001-06:00

I was very happy to come across this little blog: Stuff Parisians Like. I haven't read very many entries yet, but surely appreciated the one on Wearing Black. Those of you who've known me 3+ years: do you remember the days when all I wore was black? Last weekend I cleaned out my closet, and I noticed I hardly have any black left. Does this make me less of a potential Parisian? Mon Dieu!

Burger of the Month Club

2009-05-05T21:07:00.001-06:00

Inre: my previous post, the New York Times has an article out today about the Burger of the Month Club in NYC.

One Monday a month for the last four years, they have sampled a burger — bacon-cheddar whenever available — at a different New York restaurant.

They do not just eat the burgers, they rank them, compiling the averages on a Web site, burgerrankings.com, and competing through the year to see whose restaurant choice will wind up as the best-loved burger (winner gets ... nothing).

At first, each member rated each place -2 to +4 on each of 13 factors, including cheese, bun, manageability, fries, shake, service and décor. That got replaced by an A-F report card-style scale in eight categories, including taste, value and returnability. By the end of the first year, the group had scratched all that and just ranked each burger against all the other burgers, constantly refining their individual and collective lists, which Brett Weiss meticulously compiles.

“We came down to the point, why are we ranking service, why are we ranking décor, why are we ranking the bun and the fries when they really have nothing to do with the burger?” Mr. Weiss explained. “I think at this point if you put us on a picnic table in the middle of Central Park and brought us the burger, I think we’d all be happy.”

And the money quote:

“Vegetables are to be eaten by rabbits and liberals,” wrote Mr. Weiss, a lawyer who lives on the Upper West Side, “and the only form they should take is the fourth ingredient in a condiment.”

The club's top ten are listed at the end of the article. Their culinary focus is a bit too single-minded for my taste, but I admire the work they do.

Blog Debts

2009-05-04T11:28:00.001-06:00

The weekend before last we were culturally and socially so active I meant to write several short blog posts. Since I had Grad School Doom hanging over my head (in form of a colloquium on May Day), I never got around writing them. Now that I aced the colloquium (yessssssss), it's time to deliver at least a short summary of the weekend.

Thursday: We went to see the recording of This American Life (episode 379, which aired this past weekend. If you didn't catch it, download the podcast, and do it this week, while it's free!). We weren't actually in NYC, where host Ira Glass and his guests performed, but saw a live screening/streaming (whatchamacallit?) of the event here in a movie theater in Boston (in Revere, to be precise), together with our friends Minh and Jerrel. The show was great. I was particularly excited to see sex columnist Dan Savage again.

Friday: We went to the BLO to see Don Giovanni--one of my all-time favorite operas. (Another one being Carmen, which happens to be on the BLO's calendar next season.) Erik first had his reservations about the stage setting that evoked the 1950s rather than the late 18th century, but I think the production was overall a great success. I'm not going to say much about the performers (who were great, period. The singers, the musicians, the conductor--everyone was great. Susanna Phillips, Heather Johnson, Christopher Schaldenbrand--great great great), but instead complain about the audience and their lack of appropriate attire. I'd love for the BLO to enforce a dress code: I just don't think jeans and tennis shoes are acceptable! Argh.

Sunday: Erik's friends from the golden CAM days happened to be in Boston for the day, and we had brunch with Lisa and Jesus, Eve and Johnny, and Marcel at Aquitaine (really good food and worth the long wait). We really like the Back Bay area, and our little group spent all afternoon exploring it as well as walking to and around the Commons, which was extra-lovely because it was the first warm day we've had this year.

Ballard

2009-04-28T21:10:00.002-06:00

J. G. Ballard died last week. I've only read a couple of his books, but I would list him among the contemporary authors I find most interesting. The WWII semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun is an excellent book, probably the one he'll be remembered for, and Cocaine Nights is odd and intriguing, with curious, pathological characters, not least the narrator. Much of his writing dwells on the sociopathology of wealth, a topic that seems apropos; all of his writing I've encountered has been first rate.

If you prefer celluloid, or even if you prefer cellulose, Spielberg's movie adaptation is worth seeing and stars Christian Bale at the peak of his expressive powers.

Ballard will be missed. He was an interesting guy.

Wine update

2009-04-26T18:02:00.001-06:00

We've been trying a few more reasonably priced wines, all from TJ's:

The epicuro line of reds is quite good, all $6 a bottle. In increasing order of approval:

Beneventano Aglianico 2007 (silver label) IGT
Sicilia Nero D'Avola 2007 IGT (blue label) IGT
Salice Salentino (gold label) riserva 2005 DOC

We were introduced to the Nero D'avola by our friends John and Kurana, and we are quite grateful. It's replaced Three Knights for us, and just in time, as that wine seems to have disappeared from TJ's shelves.

We made a misstep with Napa River Chaise Selection Syrah Napa County 2008: nothing to write home about there, though I think it edges out Penfolds Koonunga Hills by a nose.

Our best find, though, is one with name that piques my professional interest, Dynamic Sauvignon Blanc, Lake County California 2008.

It's 97% Sauvignon Blanc, 3% Gewürtztraminer, Certified Biodynamic. The extra Gewürtztraminer adds a great twist to what would (in this particular incarnation; other vintner’s may have more skill with what can be a bland grape). The label deserves quotation in full:

Our Vineyards are grown and certified Biodynami cby Demeter which adheres to the DYNAMIC farming methods established in the early 1920s by Rudolf Steiner. The Biodynamic Tower on our property is where, during cycles of the year, homeopathic teas are prepared to enhance and regulate plant growth and soil fertility which brings forward the unique qualities that this wine demonstrates. This is our commitment to you…think DYNAMIC!

They must be transplants from Ithaca. I can't speak to the efficacy of the tea treaments, but it's a good wine. Give it a try -- Think DYNAMIC!

Boston Burgers

2009-04-26T17:28:00.001-06:00

We took a break from blogging a couple of weeks ago to host Melanie's German cousins, Ines and Kersten, over the weekend (the one before last) and to empty our pockets for Uncle Sam. The visit from Germany was a lot of fun, though relatively quiet: the girls were in transit from NYC to PEI and used the Beantown stopover to sleep late, read books and watch movies. (Sounds like the perfect weekend to me.) We'll blog about that later; first, a brief update on our gustatory and bibitory adventures.

"Adventure" might be stretching it: our fine dining experiences have been limited to sampling a few burger joints. All are better than any national franchise I've tried, but none really competes with homemade. (We cook burgers often enough at home, and I'd say that homemade is tastier than store bought as a general rule.* Burger restaurants are about convenience, not outstanding food. The ingredients are easy to come by and cooking techniques are masterable in minutes. And now that spring has sprung, or is at least making a noble attempt, I'm looking forward to grilling in the summertime!)

Uburger has two stores near my office and the gym, so it gets points for convenience. The burgers are pretty big and cooked well, the ingredients are pretty fresh, and the fries are pretty good. The standard topping variations are available (mushroom & swiss, BBQ, etc.), and for those who go low-carb, there's the surprisingly decent Uburger salad, which is basically a burger minus the bun on a bed of lettuce. I can report only two serious annoyances with Uburger: lettuce and tomato are not automatically included toppings, and both locations are overrun with high school and college students.

Mr. Bartley's in Harvard Square is good. Like most simple restaurants that manage to persist for decades, its draw seems based on reliability and nostalgia -- a plain, tasty burger and plain, tasty fries served in an atmosphere (so the fantasy goes) unchanged from the golden 60s. The burgers and fries are indeed yummy, as are their accompaniments: the lime rickeys and frappes are delicious. The variety of burger permutations is quite large, as well, totaling over twenty. Indeed, the only deviation from the standard nostalgic playbook is the regular updates of names for the burger varieties: while the Michelle Obama may be the modern counterpart of, say, the Jackie-O burger, I can't imagine what The Facebook was once titled.

The restaurant is conveniently located next door to our second or third favorite area bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore (not to be confused with the The Harvard Coop, which is not one of our favorite bookstores, though I do enjoy thumbing through the green and red volumes of their Loeb Classic Library display, not something you can do in your typical corner bookshop.), which has an excellent remainder section, essential for bibliophiles during hard times. If the line's too long at Bartley's -- and it's often stretching out the door towards the corner of the block -- you might as well browse the bookstore as you wait for the rush to pass. Crowd control and order management is highly efficient; the waits for seating and for food are rather short. The only downer is the price: lunch for two can run to $30 or $40, depending on chosen accoutrements.

And then there's Charlie's Kitchen, just around a couple of corners from Mr. Bartley's. Based on one data point, it's not particularly good. The burgers are a step and a half down from Uburger, the fries three. The waitstaff were in desperate need of direction and detox (not to say tattoo removal, but that's a pet peeve of mine), stumbling around addled and aimless, forgetting to actual wait on us. Relatively speaking, lame. And pricey: it cost just as much as Bartley's. Take a pass on this one, unless you're a Harvard faux countercultural pseudohipster (not redundant) with no place else grimy enough to hang out.

* The exception, perhaps. Certainly one of the best things about England.

Persimmons

2009-04-23T07:12:00.003-06:00

I don't know that this needs much introduction, but: I run a poem-of-the-day list, which is mostly a chance for me to go through old favorites and share them with (or push them on, depending how you see it) my friends. I've been doing it for long enough that some poems get a second go-around. This is one of my very favorites, and worthy of sending out twice. It's long (by the standards of our current three-second-attention-span world) but clean, and evocative.

"Persimmons"
by Li-Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang. The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father would stay up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He's so happy that I've come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

Matisse Mousepad

2009-04-19T12:17:00.002-06:00

Before it slips my mind: One of the items I gave Melanie for her birthday was a replacement for the hideous Dell mousepad she'd been using (refuse from work). The old mouse pad didn't just present a repulsive clash of species (we are irrevocably Macophilic), but it uglified Melanie's otherwise lovely workspace, a glass-topped IKEA desk with various colorful amulets and souvenirs aesthetically distributed beneath the pane. This required quick remedy, so I bought her a “custom” mousepad emblazoned with an image from her favorite artist (Matisse -- jot that down for next February). Similar pieces by all your favorite (fine, comic book, poster) artists are available from Art's Not Dead at a reasonable price. It's worth taking a look.

Unique By The Millions

2009-04-12T14:08:00.001-06:00

Hello, it's me. I'm a white person. I am pretty predictable. You probably know exactly what I do and don't like.

If not, check out the blog Christian Lander has been writing for a bit more than a year now. "Stuff White People Like" includes, as of this month, the TV show Mad Men. [Funny how I declared my love for MM last week.]

Erik's been fussing about SWPL for a while, but since I often ignore what he fusses about, I just recently discovered Lander's book that lists the 100 top things of what white people like. The discovery happened while I was in the dressing room of Urban Outfitters (think H&M, but more fashionably trashy), waiting for my (younger and female) cousins from Germany. While they were trying on every item in the store (looking terribly cute in those little t-shirts sized XS), I lounged on the leather sofa in the dressing room area. I greatly appreciated that UO put a sofa there; better even was the couch table full of books, ranging from a guide on how to make artisanal cup cakes in the shape of dogs (check it out here) to Lander's compilation.

No matter what page I turned to, I found something that describes my likes: buying organic, living in Seattle, bilingual education for our kids, the name Sebastian, Whole Foods, the New Yorker, NPR, the Ivy League and an arts degree, Obama, the TV series The Wire, cooking gadgets, not having a car (since there's bicycling) or cable TV (since there's Netflix), bicycling & Netflix, art museums, David Sedaris, recycling, architecture, public transportation that's not a bus. Out of the 100 items, I identified with 78 or so.

Erik's been teasing me all weekend about how lily-white I am. I'm so white I'm see-through transparent.

Me and my two last names (stuff white people like # 22) are going knitting now. Knitting is not listed. Not yet anyway. Just wait.

:-)

2009-04-08T19:54:00.002-06:00

It's been lots of fun browsing your page. You two sound like you're having lots of fun together! I esp. enjoyed checking out your book titles and reading list. But...a question...just WHY isn't Sigrid Lavransdatter on the list, hm??? :-) Just wondering :-)
Thanks for the link,
Sandra

Re: 30-Somethings

2009-04-07T15:41:00.001-06:00

Since Melanie posted her list of 32 books, I thought I'd add mine. As she mentioned, I have a predilection for lists--I've compiled many "Top n" lists over the years, and corralled my friends into doing so as well. Book lists, however, are tricky--should the list consist of personal favorites? greats? books you re-read often/ever (depending on your re-reading philosophy)? This list doesn't have a very precise set of parameters--it's just a list of 30 books I enjoyed. Some I love dearly, some were thought-provoking, some have beautiful writing. I did throw a few poets on my list, as a sort of post-script. However, I'm sadly under-read when it comes to essays, nonfiction, and classics, so those are underrepresented on this list.

Like Melanie, once I made the list I thought of things that I should have added. However, in the interest of something resembling brevity, here's the original, unedited list.

From the "books I loved when I was..." category (although I still very much love them):
1. The Lord of the Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
2. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein
3. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -- Robert Heinlein
4. Watership Down -- Richard Adams
5. A Town Like Alice -- Nevil Shute
6. Round the Bend -- Nevil Shute
7. The Stand -- Stephen King
8. The Bachman Books -- Stephen King
9. Enders Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenophobia -- Orson Scott Card
10. Skinny Legs and All -- Tom Robbins
11. The Danger -- Dick Francis
12. The Hobbit -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Books more recently discovered (say, last 10 years) that I LOVE:
1. Plainsong -- Kent Haruf
2. The Power of One -- Bryce Courtenay
3. The Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
4. Hawaii -- James Michener
5. We Need to Talk about Kevin -- Lionel Shriver

Also recent discoveries, just good stuff:
1. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
2. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman
3. The Sandman Series (graphic novels) -- Neil Gaiman
4. Gilead -- Marilynne Robinson
5. The Whistling Season -- Ivan Doig
6. The Calligrapher -- Edward Docx
7. The Source -- James Michener
8. The Naked and the Dead -- Norman Mailer

Nonfiction
1. For Common Things -- Jedidiah Purdy
2. The Polysyllabic Spree/Housekeeping vs. the Dirt/Shakespeare Wrote for the Money -- Nick Hornby
3. On Writing-- Stephen King
4. Being America -- Jedidiah Purdy
5. Song Book -- Nick Hornby

Poets
1. Edna St. Vincent Millay
2. Wendy Cope
3. Billy Collins

....other favorite poets include Tony Hoagland, X. J. Kennedy, Li-Young Lee, and Leonard Cohen.

One Mad Man on Revolutionary Road

2009-04-07T14:05:00.001-06:00

Because I have a crush on Kate Winslet and watch every movie of hers, I wanted to prepare for Revolutionary Road by reading Richard Yates' 1961 novel of the same title. (Here's the New Yorker's 2008 review of a collected-stories-by-Yates book that includes the novel.)

The novel's so good, I actually haven't seen the movie yet, 'cause I'm afraid it will be disappointing. In fact, the novel's so brilliant, I made Erik read it over Christmas break, forced it on Emma and Norah, and will mention it to anyone who's asking me for a good read.

And why is it such a good read? The prose is beautiful, that's for sure. Yates describes a world of male anxiety that I can only imagine, while at the same time brushing over sexual discrimination that I can imagine all too well, judging by the male behavior Yates portrays. The plot is relatively simple: It's 1955. There's the young couple, April and Frank Wheeler, who leave New York City to find a family paradise but instead end up living the suburban nightmare of boredom. Frank is a paper shuffler in the city, where his mistress lives, and April attends to house and children, of whom there are two, in the suburbs. To escape their fate, April plans to move the family to Paris, so that Frank can fulfill his dream of becoming a writer, while April will join the workforce to support them. However, Frank's talk of wanting to write lacks any real ambition, as he now becomes painfully aware, and his wife's determination to work threatens to the core his identity as the breadwinning, successful male. Needless to say, they never make it to Paris.

Although Yates makes Frank the victim of the suburban prison and of middle-class conventions, it is April who suffers, doing so quietly, in contrast to the vocal egomaniac Frank. Yates doesn't tell her side of the story, but he provides enough room for us to imagine it.

With the same attentive care to padded foam-rubber bras as Yates, AMC's series Mad Men tells the story of both the competitive men in the 1960s advertising world of Madison Avenue and the housewives who care for their domestic (and suburban) happiness. In addition, it looks at the Mad Men's secretaries who, in search of a successful husband and with the dream of trading the city for a colonial-style 3BR house in the suburbs as soon as they have found him, vie for the attention of their bosses, who readily abuse that affection for their own sexual gratification. Like Frank, many of the Mad Men have enormous egos (that poorly cover their anxieties), especially regarding their literary aspirations, and gamble with their wives' well-being to fulfill their ambitions. Apart from the story line that focuses on advertising genius and ladies' man Don Draper and the women in his life (the wife, the mistress, and a business client), the images themselves are captivating: the colors, the fashion, the interior design... The show is true eye candy. (Although bad for your health: with all the smoking going on in the show, it hurts my lungs just watching.)

We haven't made it past two discs of Mad Men, but if the show is as good all the way through the current season, it may become a favorite.

And now I will rent Revolutionary Road, the movie, and hope it's as visually appealing as Mad Men and somewhat faithful to Yates' novel.