Canadian Goslings on Huron River Drive

There's a family of Canadian geese who've made their home beside Huron River Drive in Ann Arbor, and I get all giddy every time I drive by the little goslings, in all their cuteness. This drive-by cell phone camera photo doesn't really do them justice, but you get the idea.

Umlud initiated me into the delights of Sunday brunch at the Aut bar today. An outdoor patio space so peaceful and lovely with the dappled sunlight under green trees and the sounds of Billie Holiday crooning, I was reminded of lazy Sundays in Budapest. Lots of really darling kids out with their families, in honor of Father's Day. I was grinning despite my intense dislike of the holiday.

Ms Scrumptious has gone home after a delightful almost-week-long visit to Michigan. I always like the quiet self-collected feeling I have after time with a dear old friend. And though it's been rather a rough couple weeks, I mostly have great memories of the time, with my guardian angels K & J keeping me company out at the cottage last weekend, and Alice woven in here and there amidst her prelim craziness.

A lingering legacy of L's visit is a minor obsession with Bones, even despite its terrible science, and a delight in seeing an anthropologist depicted on TV. I wish season 2 were on Hulu, because the low quality of Surf the Channel and the Chinese subtitles there interfere with my viewing pleasure, and they only have the first season on DVD at the video store here. No hope for the library on this one, and it's not worth it to me to start up Netflix again just for this.

I bought lovely herbs, veggies, and perennials this afternoon at the Alexander Farm Market on Whitmore Lake Road, which I'll plant tomorrow after I finish this round of grading for the Central European cinema course. I'll take more photos and identify everything when I do. Below, though, you can spy some salvia, beans, and German chamomile.


It's positively beautiful weather out here, 80 degrees and no humidity, and the intermittent thunderstorms have been keeping the dust down. Stunning. I hope it's like this all summer. It's just about time to start swimming in the lake again, finally.


As I was getting back home today, the son of the older couple next door was clearing some dead needles out of the pine tree in their yard and the ladder broke a foot underneath him. The whole family was out there around him, and several other neighbors were out. We saw him fall almost as if in slow motion. Luckily it wasn't so far, and it was onto a relatively soft patch of grass. Nonetheless I'm concerned . . . They've been visiting all afternoon, though, so I guess he must be all right.

I feel a sense of accomplishment from having finally taken care of a little personal business and, especially, for having tackled the puzzling task of setting up my computer to sync with my Palm Treo 650. Vista doesn't seem to like the device very much, but I managed to get it to work with Bluetooth. Hooray! Now, if only Virgin Mobile or Tracfone would allow the SIM cards for their prepaid service to be used with an unlocked GSM device, I could start using it as a smartphone again, instead of as a Palm pilot and camera.

The fresh hope of spring is finally yielding to the lushness of summer. Not a moment too soon, I think.

Baking bread, breaking bread

Last night I baked my third yeasted loaf since I got out the Tassajara Bread Book again after years of it hiding in my boxes and/or cupboard. This time, since I was running low on almost all the flours, and need to restock, it was a weird hodgepodge of things: buckwheat, spelt, and regular (white) bread flour, 9-grain cereal, and cornmeal, with leftover sweetened condensed milk, a few eggs that needed using, a bit of leftover brown rice, a little lowfat milk, some almond oil, and of course sea salt, yeast, and filtered water, with raw sunflower seeds on top.

I was getting toward the end of the second rising when Katie and John arrived in the evening, so Katie helped me knead and shape a couple of the loaves. And then I baked it, while we sat back and chatted and enjoyed the smell of freshly baking bread. And it came out . . . brilliant! The uncooked cereal and cornmeal gave a great crunchiness throughout the loaf, but the overall texture was soft and delightfully chewy, with a lovely crust that was notably crusty without being "painful" like some crusty breads, as John pointed out. We ate almost a whole round loaf together, straight out of the oven, with organic butter and organic strawberry jam, me and my companions. . . :)

My camera batteries need replacing, but maybe I can get one more shot out of them to add here . . .

It's a small world after all.

I love the small world of the internet. Today I happened to read an internet listserve message of a listserve I happened to find through another listserve, through a course that I found out about through . . . god, the world of coincidence is paved with other coincidences. And there I found that my old friend Sarah, whom I'd lost touch with, is writing for the blog of the Arete Youth Foundation in Bulgaria now. Now all I have to do is put fingers to keys and I'll be back in touch with her. :)

Otherwise, today wasn't such a spectacular day. I was doing a little stretching to try to ease the pain in my neck, which has given me pain fairly consistently for about a year now. (It goes back to a rainy day in the fall last year when a speeding car rammed an SUV into me after I had to stop suddenly in response to congestion ahead, and the impact of the fender-bender brought an immediate headache and then, a few months later, excruciating and puzzling neck pain.)

So, anyway, there I was, doing a forward bend in the grad lounge while chatting with a couple friends in the department about the vagaries and stresses of academic performance evaluation, when -- what is happening? I was there, all the way on the floor, and I had the sense: I shouldn't be sleeping here now. One friend said: "Did you do that on purpose?" And I had to ask: "Do what?"

When I realized I'd fainted, I tried to gather more information: how long had I been out? What had happened? I was confused and a bit upset. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon in the university health center instead of at home grading papers and writing, where I'd planned to be. A kind, dear friend walked me over to ensure I didn't fall over on my way there.

I went, prescription in hand, to the Kroger pharmacy after my UHS excitement (I lay under a white blanket in a quiet, private, white room for a couple hours, reading celebrity gossip rags and National Geographic, listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg variations on my iPod while waiting for the doctor to arrive), only to be told that my health coverage had been cancelled effective 12/31. I was offered the option of buying the drugs for over 100 dollars a pop, and I was less than enthusiastic about this option, so I'll have to wait until Monday when the benefits office opens and I can ask WHY THE ^&*()_ isn't my health insurance card active?

Last night, after a glorious reading from Gary Snyder, a lovely visit with Katie & John, who met up with me at Rackham auditorium to hear the fabulous reading, and a happy, serendipitous visit with my other friend John, who happened to be on his way back to write an abstract after an evening visit to the gym, I arrived to my truck only to discover that I had left my lights on when I moved from one lot to another between administering an exam and going to union contract bargaining, so I had to call AAA to get a jump start.

Thank goodness for weekends. I don't think I could face the world tomorrow if I tried. And tonight, I am hiding away in the comfort of the cottage, eating mac & cheese, internet chatting with friends, and watching Lost and Battlestar Galactica: Razor from the lazy softness of the couch and my own bed, contemplating baking hermit cookies and instead lazily licking sticky, thick blackstrap molasses straight from the spoon.

The Chocolate Cake Doppelgängerin

I am making yogurt, seven-grain bread, and broccoli mushroom quiche, while trying to think of what else besides Fionn Regan, Jenny Owen Youngs, Tricky, and Nouvelle Vague to put on a mix for Katie and John.

It's been quite a lovely weekend, with Friday night dinner with Zac, Alice, and Victoria in Zac's new abode, a cabin in the arboretum, a drink at Bab's with Ms. Isolt, leisurely Saturday brunch at Angelo's with Jeremy and Erika, a visit to K & J's place and an excursion with them to the Detroit Auto Show, perfectly sumptuous mole enchiladas (like I hadn't had since Austin!) at El Barzon restaurant (with an ecstatic private celebration happening next door), then a drink at Baile Corcaigh (I think that was the one, right K&J?). They gave me the most incredibly perfect Irish coffee I've ever had, with thick, sweet Irish cream on top. Gorgeous.

I got back home to the cottage after all the fun and collapsed for a good twelve hours of sleep! Today I've been totally useless, playing around on the internet and considering reading for my course on Material Culture and the Built Environment, and for 101 this week, but not. I finally went grocery shopping at about 9:30, and that was the first I got out of the house at all.

There was something that happened on Saturday night that was so quintessentially of-my-life in that serendipitous way I can never quite fathom, but that always peeks out its head when I'm least expecting it. John asked me just as I was leaving Detroit, "Are you going to blog about that, or are we?" I said that I would. But I don't know that there is a way to capture it that really does it justice. Well, I will try. And John and Katie, you can do too, if you like. ;)

We were just arriving at the pub, settling our coats on the bench as we sat down at our small round tables nestled among the dark wood paneling and stained glass. And a man strode right toward me, saying: "Are you the chocolate cake girl?" I said, "No." He said, "Oh, my goodness, you have a double." And I said, "Can I be the chocolate cake girl?" He told me yes. Katie, John, and I sat, and after a minute or two of giggling about the oddness of this puzzling encounter, we had a lovely, intimate, far-reaching conversation with discussions and stories about life and relationships, work and Middlesex, friends and who knows what-all. We'd completely forgotten about the Chocolate Cake Fellow.

But then, just after we'd paid our bill and zipped and buttoned up our coats and jackets and were about to walk out the door, he came back, walking right toward us with a thick slice of luscious, rich chocolate cake on a plate with three forks. He said, "Wait! Don't you want your chocolate cake??" And we laughed with surprise, and still a good degree of puzzlement, and he said, "Let me wrap it up for you." I thanked him profusely, he disappeared and reappeared a moment later with the cake neatly hidden away in a to-go box, and I introduced myself, and he told me his name was Jeff. We left with the cake, never quite knowing what it was that I'd done to deserve the cake.

This morning, I had chocolate cake for breakfast with my coffee. It is so rich, I hardly made a tiny dent in it.

The eternally surprising discovery that is friendship.

All these years, I'd been misremembering a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre. I'd thought it was "Nous ne sommes riens qu'aux yeux des autres." But no.

« Nous ne sommes nous qu’aux yeux des autres, et c’est à partir du regard des autres que nous nous assumons comme nous » (see?)

(which is, approximately. . .) "We are not ourselves except in the eyes of others, and it's from the gaze of others that we assume the status of ourselves" (I'm a little unsure about this translation; "s'assumer comme quelquechose" is a turn of phrase that is so particular, I did some searching to see if anyone else had translated it, and ended up surfing to an academic article, not too surprisingly, about Simone de Beauvoir. And I found the wonderful passage:

"Now, what specifically defines the situation of woman is that she-a free and autonomous being like all human creatures-nevertheless discovers and chooses herself in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.3 They propose to turn her into an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is for ever to be transcended by another consciousness which is essential and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject-which always posits itself as essential-and the demands of a situation which constitutes her as inessential." (SS, 29; DSa, 31; TA)

Following this characteristically beautiful writing by Beauvoir, Toril Moi offers the following interpretation:

"This is perhaps the single most important passage in The Second Sex, above all because Beauvoir here poses a radically new theory of sexual difference. While we are all split and ambiguous, she argues, women are more split and ambiguous than men. For Simone de Beauvoir, then, women are fundamentally characterized by ambiguity and conflict. The
specific contradiction of women's situation is caused by the conflict between their status as free and autonomous human beings and the fact that they are socialized in a world in which men consistently cast them as Other to their One, as objects to their subjects. The effect is to produce women as subjects painfully torn between freedom and alienation, transcendence and
immanence, subject-being and object-being. This fundamental contradiction, or split, in which the general ontological ambiguity of human beings is repeated and reinforced by the social pressures brought to bear on women, is specific to women underpatriarchy. For Beauvoir, at least initially, there is nothing ahistorical about this: when oppressive power relations cease to
exist, women will be no more split and contradictory than men."

The idea here is deeply suggestive to me about the existential situation of any group facing structural alienation, not only women on the basis of sex in a patriarchy, but also, for instance, the oppressed group in a colonial context. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's leave aside Beauvoir and Moi for the moment. And back to Sartre, which is what I meant to talk about in the first place. And to my life, which was really the starting point for all of this talk in the first place.

Last night was a magical dance of three active minds in the playground of my little cottage in the country, that lasted until past five o'clock in the morning. Katie and John came over sometime around nine or ten, on their way back from Jackson. When I heard they were coming, I pulled myself together a little after feeling rather funky all day long, and put a chocolate sour milk cake in the oven and mulled wine on the stove, with green cardamom, white pepper, cloves, cinnamon, a bay leaf, turbinado sugar, Grand Marnier, and some thinly sliced, succulently ripe Valencia orange. And together, we talked, laughed, ate, drank, read poetry aloud, listened our way through any and every kind of music you could think of, played music on the accordion and the guitar, unearthed old travel photographs hidden away in the vintage suitcase behind my sewing machine, told stories, opened books of anthropologists, womens studies scholars, biographers, and journalists, and ate a 3 am snack of cream of tomato soup with spinach and rye bread with stinky brie. I introduced them to palinka and slivovic, we finished off the fig brandy from Croatia in the plastic bottle I carried back from someone's garage on the southern part of the island of Krk, and we found recesses of the mind and life that, well, at least in my case, hadn't been dusted off or looked at in years.

And so, this morning, seeing their little note of thanks and the neatly folded blankets on my big red couch in the living room, and the thin photographic evidence of this whole experience that we accumulated, I couldn't help but think of Sartre. Because no matter what you imagine yourself to be, whatever layers of experience you accumulate in a lifetime, it never seems to have any meaning until you are yourself with others, and they see you, and you become yourself. So it isn't just hell that is other people. It's also heaven.


For more on this:
Ambiguity and Alienation in The Second Sex by Toril Moi. boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), pp. 96-112. doi:10.2307/303535 Link through jstor if you have institutional access.

A half year of bad hair days

Bah. I miss my old haircut. And my life in Budapest. And my fabulous friends there.

Just blog-surfed my way to Ingrid Michaelson. Like the sound. I really do love most of the music on Grey's Anatomy, so that caught my attention, when I noticed that her songs been featured there. (It's hilarious, too, how many people seem to be devoted to documenting who's being played there It's proven handy to me, though, because it's ultimately what got me hooked on fabulous, fabulous Regina Spektor.) Ingrid Michaelson has a really freaky clown video though. Clown romance. Eep.



My head-fog is very slow in clearing the past couple days. My students yesterday raked me over the coals with questions about their papers, and I still felt rather bewildered at 3:00.

Interesting and appropriate, my tarot card of the day according to Facebook:

(The Fool desires to achieve great things in life, but does not always anticipate the hard work required. Full of curiosity and searching for answers, the Fool symbolizes a new beginning and endless optimism. He must be careful in the decisions he makes, as his lack of experience is often a hindrance. While others may avoid taking on insurmountable odds, The Fool will attempt to accomplish near impossible goals with almost reckless abandon.)

Hier Spricht Radio PMR

While we're at it . . . I'm also incredibly curious about this, a new book by an old friend of mine. To see more of the photographs, (or for the German-speakers among y'all), see the book's website.

Marcell is someone I met years ago in Lisdoonvarna, Ireland, who caught my attention immediately as someone intensely thoughtful and sensitive, who pursued his interest with passion and focus and a refreshing lack of cynicism. He also took photographs that had a way of showing you an entirely new glimpse of something, even if you'd seen it a thousand times, whether it was a face, a metro station, or the old stove you cooked on in your own kitchen. Back then in the mid-'90s, he had penetrating things to say about Yugoslavia and beautiful images to accompany his ideas in one of those rare slideshows you wish would never end. We haven't been in touch in a very long time, but I still follow his career with interest.