The anticipation builds

A reader wrote that my post on the Oscars inspired her to have an Oscar party this year. One has to let go of one’s individual sensitivities here and not mind that an invitation was not forthcoming. Keeping a blog reader happy is far more important that attending to one’s own social needs. Let me show my generous spirit and pass on a few tips to make her evening a complete success:

1. don’t hand out ballots and ask people to vote. The winner will make a complete idiot of her/himself. They will regret their behavior the next day and you will regret having had them over: a lose-lose situation;
2. don’t serve dinner beforehand. Many people like the preshow more than they like the Awards. You’ll be serving goat cheese soufflé as an appetizer and half your guests will already be glued to the TV;
3. don’t invite people who really are into the ceremonies: they’ll keep telling everyone to be quiet and a quiet party is no one's idea of a success;
4. don’t withdraw into yourself and read legal briefs so that everyone can see how cool and, ergo, bored you are with the ceremonies; that kind of boredom is contagious and you’ll soon have yourself a slumber party.

Oh, I could go on. Fact is, these parties are far less fun than seeing people in a non-TV context. But, if you must spice up your own viewing pleasure, go for it. And don’t invite me. I’m already committed. I’m baking up a soufflé, I have a stack of briefs to read – the whole bit.

Spring fever

As my afternoon went to coaching a group of law students in their moot court competition prep, I missed the chance to grab something for lunch. These events lead me to conclude the following:

1. I am really seriously nuts about my students (not all of them). When I listen to them speak, I see a future that is filled with their talent and humanity. I can’t wait ‘til my generation (and those before) steps aside from the legal profession, to be replaced by these guys.

2. I am really seriously nuts, period. Because I was running so late with everything, I decided to treat myself to a cup of coffee at Ancora. This is an indulgence because I cannot otherwise justify spending $3 for a latte that I can easily make in my office (and I have the fridge, the burner, and the stove-top little moka to do it, too). Since it was such a gorgeously spring-smelling day, I was rather upbeat and chipper in my slow meander toward Ancora (via parking lot, grocery store, post office etc.). At the entry to the coffee shop, a guy was sort of loitering, chatting up various customers as they were coming and going, in the most friendly of ways. Eventually he left, and I remarked to the sellers rather slyly “my, he was excessive!” And they smiled and nodded (sales people will agree with anything you tell them) and I left. And of course it struck me that I should not speak of “excessive” since I had just minutes ago spent a great deal of time explaining to a store clerk the virtues of buying fresh basil in February (he seemed genuinely interested), and telling the postal clerk that the stamps in Poland almost always have great artistry to them and this, in turn, opened the door for a number of other reflections on differences between the two cultures (the Hilldale postal clerks are extraordinarily patient with stories of this nature perhaps due to the fact that the average age of their customer tends to be 94 –prime time for story telling). Okay, it had not gotten to the point where I was accosting virtual strangers with conversational anecdotes, but still, I decided I should be more careful or else my mother’s predictions about the decline in the mental health of all our family members (she exempts herself I believe, which is good: we need to have someone keep the records of our demise) will have turned out to be true.

Movies for the week-end

If you're one of those who has requested email updates of NYT film reviews, you will have gotten the following capsules of what this week-end offers:

Passion of the Christ: After a horror-movie beginning, complete with demons, menacing music and creepy camera moves, Mr. Gibson settles into a long, relentless contemplation of torture, maiming and execution. His stated goal was realism, but the emphatic musical, visual and aural effects — the first nail is driven into Jesus' palms with a sickening thwack that must have required hours of digital tweaking — make the film a melodramatic exercise in high-minded sadomasochism. In spite of concerns about the anti-Semitism of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of the Pharisees, the movie is more grueling and unnerving than outrageous or offensive. For a movie made out of such evident religious conviction, it seems utterly lacking in grace.

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights: This reimagining of the recklessly melodramatic 1987 original is packed with flashy, taffeta silliness, and a desperation for a sweaty PG-13 sexiness so laughable that the cast members deserve Oscar nominations for getting through the picture without cracking up.

Twisted: The greatest mystery in this laborious, nonsensical thriller is why the director Philip Kaufman bothered to lend his talents to such mediocre studio hackwork.

I suppose it is not inconceivable that the producers will try to salvage some good words from those reviews, if only for the future DVD rental market, which is often driven by reviews on boxes. For example, you could truthfully quote (without even changing the meaning much):

Passion of the Christ: “Mr Gibson settles into a long…contemplation. [E]mphatic musical, visual and aural effects.. a melodramatic exercise.. a movie made out of …evident religious conviction.”

Dirty Dancing: HN: “Packed with flashy…sexiness… The cast members deserve Oscar nominations...”

Twisted: “The greatest mystery…thriller… The director Philip Kaufman lend(s) his talents...”

Not exactly catchy slogans, but if you’re a dazed customer who has just spent 3.5 hours staring at countless DVD boxes trying to decide what to rent, it all kind of blurs together anyway.

The senior citizen in the parking lot

How old is my truck?
It is so old that I need a key to open the door (though I never lock it--what for?), but I don’t need a key to start the ignition (I don’t know how this happened but it seems these days I can just turn it on, much like a light switch).
It is so old that I bought one of the first models at the inception of this particular line of trucks, and I am still driving it even though after a long and happy history, the line has been discontinued.
It is so old that no one asks me to pick up prominent visitors at the airport anymore for fear that I will be driving them in THAT TRUCK.
It is so old that I’ve stopped ever going to a drive-through car wash. I’m afraid that the brushes will cause the sides to collapse on me much like a deck of cards and I’ll be devoured by the steely swirling monster bristles.
It is so old that… okay, enough. It is old. But I have no reason to discard it. It starts, it moves, it doesn’t guzzle gas. Can one demand more of a vehicle?

There is the image issue. I remember many years back when I drove some law students to the court house, one said “uh, we always sort of pictured you driving a SAAB.” I felt that to be a complement and it was disturbing to know that I had shattered a classy myth. From there, it is but a small drop to appearing for class in clothes that belong to the last decades, having vinyl furniture in your office, and generally exhibiting a loss of pride in the aesthetic presentation of oneself and one’s surroundings. I’m keeping up with the other stuff so far, but I’m on alert for signs of decline.

I never would have guessed...

The reason we love the Oscars (just bare with me, I realize not everyone loves the Oscars) is that in the end, they are unpredictable. Imagine if they were like political elections: polls indicate that X is the clear frontrunner; exit interviews indicate that Y is leading, the NYT endorses Z. That would be far less interesting.

But the fact is, we really don’t know who the winners will be.

We can weigh the merits of a performance (though even here we typically do not have a consensus), we can factor in such things as “the Academy owes her one” or “he wont get it – he never shows up anyway.” But these factors are rather random. Depending on whom you talk to, you may get bizarrely skewed answers. For example, here’s a little conversation that I bet no one is paying attention to (appearing in some side story in the Times):

"A week ago I would've said it was Sean Penn," said Tony Angellotti, an Oscar campaign expert working for Universal this season. "But at my table at the S.A.G. Awards," he said, referring to the guild ceremony, "we all looked at each other and realized we'd voted for Johnny" for the Oscar. "I'm not sure Johnny Depp is going to win, but he's getting a lot more votes than I suspected," he added.

How seriously are we to consider this? Are there other table-side conversations taking place? Do they offer another intervening force or factor? EVERYONE this year is predicting that Charlize Theron will win ‘Best Actress.’ But is this in itself reason enough to suspect that, therefore, maybe she wont win?

I have not missed an Oscar show since I moved permanently to the States in 1972. Most years I will not have even seen all the movies nominated for best picture. One fancy dress looks the same as the next (though I will try to pick out the DK gloves this year). My memory for names is laughable (and many do seize the opportunity to laugh), and if asked right now, I could not tell you off the top, which film won best picture three years ago. But I am fascinated by this fact of unpredictability. Post-Oscar analyses will offer the missing factors that we all will have neglected to consider. In the mean time, we can but guess and entertain each other with our own foolishness for never being 100% right. Enjoyable? Very much so.

Marrying Omar Sharif

The first time I was seriously considered for marriage was when I was 6 years old. My equally young Polish friend Janek announced, after a momentary critical evaluation: “when I grow up, I will marry Nina.”

You might say that this verged on being an arranged marriage, as his parents were cordially friendly with my parents. The only reason my path crossed Janek’s was because my parents made me spend time with him. Eventually I didn’t much mind, which is how arranged marriages have also been described to me – eventually you may even start liking your spouse.

But Janek and I were never meant to be. My travel to the States pretty much cut him out of my life.
Still, Janek kept in touch with my sister (who lives in Warsaw), and the last time I traveled to Poland, she asked me if I would agree to see him again, just to catch up. She would sit in on the meeting, as would Janek’s wife (idle curiosity, I’m sure).

Before agreeing, I asked my sister how I would find Janek. After all, it’s been 44 years since marriage was suggested, and I haven’t seen (nor thought much about) him since. She looked conspiratorially at me and said: “he looks terrific: 100% like Omar Sharif.”

I was reminded of this exchange today as I listened to NPR on the way home: there was a story on the return of Sharif to the movie scene. Of course, the real Omar Sharif is much older (72), while my “Omar” is my age (see earlier post for an analysis of how YOUNG that is).

Janek-Omar and I did meet over coffee. We eyed each other, his wife eyed me, my sister eyed the entire situation. It wasn’t awkward at all. But one has to wonder, what would have happened had I not left for New York? Would I now be helping him launch a mountain bed and breakfast in southern Poland? Would we eventually have even liked each other? Probably not. I can’t help but see Janek not as Omar but as the little boy in a cowboy suit, with a gleam that spelled trouble. But I did take a photo of us, just to show interested parties back home how close I came to marrying someone who looks now exactly like Omar Sharif.

The politics of age

If the NYTimes told you (through an editorial endorsement) to vote for Kerry but you had been leaning toward Edwards, would you switch? No, probably not. But if the Times told you to vote for Kerry acknowledging that Edwards is a wonderful candidate – perfect for 4 – 8 years from now, would you then switch? Still maybe not? And if the Times admitted that in the past, presidents have come to the White House with pretty empty political resumes, but that was before September 11, would you perhaps give Kerry another glance? Especially if in the same breath the Times portrayed Kerry as a mature, balanced candidate with experience in foreign affairs, while noting that Edwards lacked decisiveness and great depth?

Newspaper endorsements are an odd thing. Most of us would never admit to following a paper’s pointing finger except in instances where we don’t know a thing about the candidate, as for example, in races for county register of deeds. But an endorsement portends of things to come: in Wisconsin it preceded the rush toward Edwards. Or maybe it legitimized it. And that legitimacy influences one’s thought process, doesn’t it? “Well okay, if EVERYONE is going to be voting for him, I might as well too.”

It seems that the loaded term that emerges from the Times endorsement is “experience,” and that the paper has determined that this lies at the base of “electability.” Edwards is given little credit for positions he takes, except that the paper admits that he has populist appeal. It’s fascinating that in the end, age is seen as such a virtue: either political age (meaning number of years on the political scene) or real age. Come to think of it, I don’t remember when this country last elected a president who had not a whole lot of one or the other (though many have squeaked by with only “real age” in their favor). But hey, Edwards only LOOKS young. He’s MY age after all (less than two months younger). Not good enough?

In pursuit of trunks and memorable writing, part 3

For those who read the posts on trunks (yesterday), here is a reprint of the elusive New Yorker article, dated February 13, 1978. I had clipped it and tucked it into the envelope with the note from the author:

(Talk of the Town) Notes and Comment

A letter from a friend home in bed with a cold [nc: authorship stated below]:
This bed is a real mess—mountains of Kleenex, mountains of newspapers. You might say that on an extremely small scale I am fighting for survival, striving to keep from sneezing my precious life away, but between seizures I glance at the papers—especially at stories about Cosmos 954, the Soviet nuclear-reactor satellite that blew a gasket and finally came to rest in the icy reaches of the Canadian north, spreading radioactive contamination over miles and miles—and I wonder if it is worthwhile to shake this cold. I mean, I’ll get over the cold, with aspirins, fluids, bed rest, and the holding of many beautiful thoughts, but I am gripped by the fact that the Soviet Union has at least ten nuclear powered orbs dancing around our skies and that the United States has nine. The newspapers are rather cozy about the matter, some stories saying that it will take six hundred years for one of the orbs to reenter the earth’s atmosphere, and only adding sotto voce that even then the enriched uranium would be extremely radioactive. Another story says that there is nothing to worry about for four hundred years. And another joyously speaks of four thousand years of grace. But aren’t all these figures—six hundred, four hundred, four thousand—mere blinks in the long history of the human race? If so, I’m wondering who gave anybody permission, either orally or in writing, to tamper with the existence of Man, much less set a theoretical cutoff date for worldwide contamination. One of the few things that have sustained me, through happy years and through sad ones, has been the thought that somewhere, sometime, a vigorous, intelligent, progressive, decent, perhaps freckled great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchild would put his or her shoulder to the wheel and roll the heavy stone one inch further up the hill. Have to stop now. Aspirin time.

The writer of this little piece (Philip Hamburger) went on (in the year 2000) to publish a book, about which the following is said:

Philip Hamburger joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1939 and hasn't stopped writing since. He has made something of a specialty of writing about presidential inaugurations, and in his new book, Matters of State: A Political Excursion, he collects ten of those pieces, covering the inaugural celebrations of presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon (both elections), Carter, Reagan (both elections), Bush, and Clinton. Published just as the nation's capital geared up for the first inauguration of the 21st century, Matters of State provided the perfect opportunity to revisit a perceptive observer's half century of quadrennial dispatches from inside the Beltway.

In pursuit of a distant memory (trunks, part 2)

As a post scriptum to the post on trunks (below) let me say that I did proceed to dump the contents of my steamer on the basement floor. At the very bottom (really) I found this (dated March 30, 1978):

Dear Ms Lewandowske [okay, so he wasn’t the best at spelling Polish names],
Your very thoughtful letter to the New Yorker (with reference to the Notes and Comment on the wayward Soviet satellite) has just reached my desk, as I am the man who wrote the piece. Thank you for your kindness. It means a great deal to a writer to receive a letter such as yours. Sincerely yours, Philip Hamburger

So let me rephrase my concluding remark: do get a trunk, keep the contents organized, don’t confuse nuclear arms with nuclear reactor satellites, and let writers know that their work moved you.

If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll reprint the story later tonight. It’s short and quite touching.

The unbearable lightness of bears

A reader chastised me for not linking to the CNN story on green polar bears in the Singapore zoo (sorry – the story ran for 4 hours then was scratched, can’t imagine why…). Her comment is well taken for the following reasons: 1. I have a good friend who lives in Singapore and I NEVER have any occasion to say anything wise or intelligent about that small country, 2. the story is like no other these days: it presents an insignificant problem (green algae growing on the fur of polar bears), it is informative (it explains that polar bears typically have fur without pigment, hence the illusion of whiteness), and it has an easy, happy resolution (the bears are bathed in some Clorox-like liquid which does away with the algae). Oh and 4. it has (had) quite decent photos of a green polar bear.

How often can you read something these days that says so little about so little and still leaves you feeling perfectly content?

A long post promoting the acquisition of a trunk (part 1)

I had a few minutes before class today and I used the time to leaf through the New Yorker (see post below) that came in the mail. I remembered how this was the first magazine I ever subscribed to on my own, back when I was just around 20. Gradually I had stopped reading it – no time, no desire really. I kept up with the cartoons for a while and then, when the family expanded, I cancelled (for a good 15 years). The unread stacks were getting to me.

Today, I remembered one particular article that I did read, back in 1978. It was in the Notes & Comments section, and it talked about the sudden acceleration of the nuclear arms race (I can’t remember the triggering event). The writer had said how he had always imagined that some day, when he’d be long dead and gone, his red-haired children would be running around, and his grandchildren, and other children, all taking his place. This was a great comfort to him, though it was then threatened by the political ferocity of the administration’s so called defense measures. The comment affected me so much that I wrote him a letter explaining that I felt the same way.

All these years I remember fondly that he, this (presumably junior) writer from the New Yorker, wrote back. Tonight I went downstairs to the basement to poke around. I have a trunk there and it has in it a number, a great number of letters from both sides of the ocean, all written during the 1970s.

Of course I found the letter from the New Yorker. I knew it would be there. It said:

Dear Ms. Lewandowska: Thank you for letting us know about how much you liked our February 13th Notes and Comments piece. We’ll see that your reaction is passed along to the writer. Very truly yours, Fred Keefe (Editorial Office).

No, that’s not how I remember it! I heard from the author! Didn’t I? He was so wonderful and responsive. Wasn’t he?

In the trunk I also found a letter from my grandmother in Poland – agrammatical (she never finished elementary school), with good wishes for some new undertaking that I was embarking on (can’t imagine what). I know I probably impulsively (see post below) changed my mind and did something entirely different, but her letter was remarkable and uplifting and full of blind devotion and support.

And, buried underneath a stack of other treasures, there was an unmailed letter that I myself had written to the faculty member at Chicago who was to supervise my dissertation. It included the following sentences: “I received your letter today and I have to say that I am extremely angry at you…What you want is a dissertation of the type that’s never been written…People like you cause me to reconsider the veracity of all those intellectual ideals you claim to uphold. I'm convinced that you see only one road to creating sociology – your road… Aren’t you scared that in ten years you’ll be surrounded by clones of yourself? “ and so on. In the end, I never did send this. Good thing, because the prof is still around and in an indirect way I have contact with him.

Letters. No one these days has trunks, they have email folders. Too bad. And there is no such thing as good mail anymore: the box outside is filled daily with bills, ads and catalogues.

I am certain of this advice: print out the good emails (forget about the rest), stick them in envelopes and put them away in a trunk. Everyone needs a trunk to open at some point.

To choose or not to choose

A sign of acute face-recognition paralysis (where you look at a face and you fail to recognize the person) is when you read an article about an author, wonder if he is the same man who taught you 30 years ago in graduate school, google him to his current university, stare at the clear and large photo and still cannot tell.
Barry Schwartz, once prof at U of C is, I believe, NOT the Barry Schwartz discussed in today’s New Yorker article on making choices. It doesn’t help that he shares the name, age, and field (social psychology) of my former prof, but I believe I am confident in concluding that this is not the man I vaguely recall from my first year soc class (he left Chicago soon after).

It was a fairly interesting article in any event, as it talked of the phenomenon that Schwartz (not MY Schwartz, but Schwartz nonetheless) describes in his newest text – that of mischoosing. From the perspective of an economist (eg Hirschman, who I think is NOT the same guy who taught me economic sociology back at Chicago – no, that was HIRSCH, that’s right. Or was it Herschfeld? No, that was the Nina guy. Okay, sorry) this may be identified in a theory of disappointment, which is described thus:

The world…is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.

Basically, we are horridly indecisive, we waffle, then regret, and rarely are we satisfied with that which we took forever to choose (an example of a car is given). We study intently ads of things we’ve already purchased in the hope of convincing ourselves that we made the right decision and still we are convinced that we failed in our selection.

Yes, that’s right. This just makes people like me – accused of being terribly and regrettably impulsive – look so good! Great article. Yes, definitely, quite accurate. Yep, no doubt, go with that one.

Blogging on flogging

In today’s late afternoon seminar, I treat one of my favorite topics in comparative family law: domestic violence (parent to child and spouse to spouse). This kind of a statement must raise eyebrows, all the more so since I have also spent many years working with law students to provide representation to parents (here in Madison) who abuse their children. What kind of a person likes to talk about violence and enjoys working with abusive parents?

“Enjoys” is perhaps not the best term, though if applied to the process of teaching, then yes, I do enjoy it in this particular field. Rarely are you given the opportunity in teaching law to create so easily a comprehensive diagram where international legal instruments, grass roots efforts, legal activism in the courts, political transformations, etc etc all have their cell, exploding, imploding, exerting influence, being shaped in turn, all in fascinating and not always predictable ways by the others. And, it is all the more captivating (for discussion purposes), because whereas most in class will overtly align themselves on the side that condemns domestic abuse of the spouse to spouse kind, there are always hold-outs (sometimes it’ll be the majority of the class) who believe in slapping the kid who misbehaves. Herein lies an opportunity to bring in the role of historical legal developments that can help explain our confused posture on the topic of physical punishment.

The American legal system has such an idiosyncratic approach to violence, far different than that in Great Britain, which in turn is completely at odds with the Swedish approach. A look at the new Russian Family Code, and its comparison to Swedish or American Family Codes or the South African or Namibian Criminal Codes (the latter two prohibit the physical punishment of juveniles, but only in criminal proceedings) brings a relevance to comparative analyses that makes, one hopes, converts of us all.

For those who are nuts about France and Italy

A reader and a friend (and an accomplished travel writer) is looking for editorial and writing assistance with an adventure guide on Rome and central Italy. It can be a very short term thing, and the writer would get some good free food and accommodations, in exchange for putting together reviews. Interested? Visit her website here for more info. I’d do it myself if I had the time.

But the ‘travel’ book that really grabbed my attention this morning was the one exposing the Michelin rating system of (primarily French) restaurants. It is a spiteful little gem, written by a former reviewer who had been part of the Michelin network for 16 years. A NYT article provides a good summary of the raging battle between the company and the reviewer-turned-writer (Michelin Guides are put together behind a solid wall of self-imposed secrecy; the company was desperate to put a halt to the book’s publication, but the author prevailed).

A confession is, I think, in order: I had always wanted to be a Michelin restaurant critic. People have responded to this with comments such as “yeah, restaurant critic – wouldn’t you just love being on the payroll for the NYT and eating out in the city daily?” The answer is no, I would not. I would love to be the anonymous reviewer who bikes around rural France (that’s my imagery) and tries out hidden, little known brasseries and restaurants, where locals still hang their own personal napkins on a peg in the hallway. There are several impediments to this career choice, and I am working on improving my resume before I send it in (a recent history of restaurant moonlighting and a stack of unpublished travel articles that are just waiting to be edited and sent off to airline magazines should help), but I am concerned that the expose of Michelin will dampen my enthusiasm for this long-term project.

On the other hand, I do think that it is a little bit disingenuous for the critic to collect good money for more than a dozen years from the Guide, and then mock the process itself for being somewhat corrupt. The French are groaning now that they will become the laughingstock for having created this powerful instrument – the Red Guide – only to let it be destroyed from the inside. It’s sad to think that this could be the case. How we do love to laugh at the French for their profound food obsession (yep, from field to table… this is an inside joke as many know that I have used this label to describe my meager organizational efforts on behalf of sustainable agriculture), never mind that we offer as an alternative a total life-long commitment to sitting in front of the TV and working our way each day through several bags of chips and packs of M&Ms –certainly a good substitute for growing and serving the perfect melon or ripening the perfect cheese. Dilettante and dabbler that I am, I have nothing but awe and respect for those who spend years or even generations perfecting their craft. Would it be that I were one of them!

Songs of old

A couple of weeks ago Carole King was in town campaigning on behalf of Kerry. A friend (well, not a complete friend or she would have told me about this BEFORE rather than after the event) let me know that she had attended, thoroughly enjoying Carole King’s impromptu performance of, you guessed it, “I feel the earth move.” That song is primed for a political campaign.

What a month for old music! Beatles, Rolling Stones, Carole King, Stylistics, Beach Boys – it puts me right back to the years where the record player never rested, working the same groove again and again, and the biggest, the only issue was whether the phone would ring with the voice of THAT person, and, when it became clear that HE (the saintly but somewhat oblivious HE) wasn’t calling that night, then it would be time for another ten repetitions of Don’t Worry Baby or whatever else was there, all ready to tear you apart. Life was so dramatic in its simplicity.

It is touching that so many of these songs did jump the ocean, creating (or maybe just accompanying) havoc in matters of the heart here and there (..and everywhere. Beatles, 1966), stirring up the passions, playing to sweaty palms, facilitating pain and sometimes, in moments of magic, GAIN, as it all then would fall into place, seemingly in an endless moment of pure, uncomplicated, profoundly felt love –before it all crashed and put you right by the record player again to relive your pain for a few more rounds.

Songs of old. Simple words with a strong melodic theme, stuck way in the back of your head until the moment when some odd circumstance prompts you to listen again. And again.

Correction needed

Empty house this evening leads me to turn on the evening news. Do I regret it? Indeed I do. The TV announcer talked of the celebratory “doughnut like” pastries sold in Poland at this time of the year. In Milwaukee, they appear to be sold on Mardi Gras, which, of course, always falls on the Tuesday (today) before Ash Wednesday.

Being among the 1% of Poles that are not Catholic, I never quite understood why our own Polish (meaning IN Poland) Mardi Gras wasn’t really on ‘Mardi’ at all, but on ‘Jeudi’, or Thursday and we called it “Fat Thursday” (this year it fell on February 19). Maybe Poles need more than one day in the year to feel fat and happy. I don’t know. But this confusion wasn’t addressed in the news story. All our local broadcast did was show many un-Atkins Polish Americans buying the gloppy pastries today, meaning Tuesday, in celebration of our ‘Polish’ holiday, which, of course, is all wrong in my mind because that fell on last Thursday. But this in itself was not offensive. I am used to religious confusion of this nature.

What bothered me was the anchorman’s enunciation of the word itself. In Poland, we call the pastries “paczki,” pronounced Pawn-chkee. On our local Madison TV station I heard “poon-chkee.” Say it out loud. Laugh-out-loud ridiculous, isn’t it? Correct pronunciation is everything.

Way to go, Newsweek

For once a thoughtful article appeared about a candidate’s spouse. Newsweek describes Ms Edwards as a once spunky law student, a knows-her-own-mind lawyer, an energetic mom (she grew grass – the green kind – on her son’s Halloween costume by misting seeds daily until they sprouted and he and his pals could go out dressed as a golf course), an older parent (her last child was born 3 years ago, when she was 50), a moral person (something tells me she would not be in the predicament of our state AG, who today is on the front page of the local paper with a ticket for drunk driving –how stupid was that, Peg?).

One paragraph about past political spouses did cause me to be concerned. Newsweek states:

Often a presidential contender’s spouse is defined by the way she complements the candidate, and is seen as providing some supposedly missing ingredient: Tipper was Al’s heart,…and Laura tells George what’s in the morning papers. (The story then goes on to say that John and Elizabeth Edwards are very much alike.)

That’s worrisome, isn’t it? Did George fall through the cracks in school? Was he pushed forward? Is he one of the growing number of adults who have managed to conceal the sad fact that they cannot read? It would explain a lot.

How many mistakes can I make in one day?

Calling my mother in Berkeley from my office was a mistake. The thought was: I’m in between tasks, I can take 10 minutes to catch up and see how she is. The reality was: I was late for all other appointments for the rest of the day because the call did NOT take 10 minutes. As my cell phone minutes ticked away at $.45 each, I was entertained by a run through every unhappy event that could be reasonably woven into the conversation, occasionally interspersed with connecting phrases such as “mind you, I’m not complaining.”

And she really wasn’t entirely complaining. But when you are eighty, the stories get longer and more numerous and repeated for added emphasis. I mean, why tell the one about how mental illness is rampant in this country, in her apartment building, in our family, among friends only once when you can repeat it, with abundant illustrations, at an interval of every 5 minutes? A happy spin: I was glad that she was basically okay, and that there were no more hard feelings about my trip to the desert. Moreover, she guessed that I had voted for Edwards and seemed resigned to possibly doing the same, though she was still toying with the idea of casting her vote for Dean since his name would appear on the ticket. I figure I have seven days to convince her that sending a “sympathy card” might have greater therapeutic value for the guy than handing him a useless, solitary “sympathy vote.” Though I suppose her vote might not stand alone: in Berkeley Dean may still win even though he’s not running.

Leaving my ATM card in the ATM machine was a mistake. The thought was: I am so efficient! Watch me drive up to the machine at Hildale and reenter the traffic pattern at virtually the same place – how cool and speedy is that! The reality was: I was so inefficient that I didn’t even notice that I had left my card behind; in fact, I am not sure that it is in the machine. It could be anywhere. The one place it is not is in my wallet, so that later on at the grocery store, I caused a collective gritting of the teeth as I did the classic dumping of purse contents on the counter while everyone waited not-so-patiently behind me. A happy spin: I will get a new card and a new pin number. My old pin was an assortment of the most irrelevant to my life digits you could imagine. For example, it didn’t have a single 4 in it, but for some reason it included such numbers as 7. Everyone knows I have no good vibes around 7.

Day is still young, so many hours to mess with. Stay tuned.

Comings and goings

My office neighbor is packing his files, furniture and toys and leaving (this week) for Seattle to pursue a job opportunity that he felt he couldn’t pass up. A stream of well-wishers has been steadily trickling in, most offering good wishes for a bright (if drizzly) future. One colleague, however, did no such thing. She poked her head in and said to him “don’t worry, you’ll be back.” Being rather nosy and having overheard this, I asked where this prediction was coming from. “No one ever leaves Madison permanently” she stated confidently. She used herself as one example of a person who went elsewhere to teach, but came back with her tail between her legs, taking back the lesser job just to be again in Madison. She listed others who had done the same.

I thought that the premise of this whole discussion was flawed: if you leave and never come back, you will eventually be forgotten and written off. If you do come back, you’re smugly lumped into the returnees camp. Maybe every town has its handful of returnees. Maybe people even go back to Beaver Dam (earlier post: home of the “busy beavers”).

As I was dismantling her assertion in my head, I noticed that my moving office-neighbor had that look that we get when we stare out our windows (our offices look out on Bascom Hill) – a pensive kind of look, taking in the melting snow, the incongruously bright red doors of the Education building – and I have to admit to recognizing in that gaze the seeds of a possible future return.

Waiting in Russia

Driving to the airport yesterday I listened to WBBM radio which, at the time, was broadcasting ‘60 minutes.’ I heard the wonderful story of Valery Gergiev, who is possibly the most audience pleasing conductor since Leonard Bernstein.

It’s not his virtues as a conductor that bring him to mind now. Gergiev is a bit off-center. He often neglects to shave, he is a morose guy in a Russian sort of way (“dad died young, so too will he” – is the mindset, one that I completely understand, even though my dad is still kicking… it’s just a Russian/Eastern European way of looking at things), he drinks vodka at inopportune times (before a concert), and he almost always shows up late for rehearsals. Because he is possibly one of the finest conductors alive, he works his orchestra hard and so rehearsals often continue past the hour of the performance itself. The guests wait outside, sometimes as much as an hour, before they are finally allowed to enter the concert hall.

This performance style does not play well in NY. Gergiev is so beloved that he now holds the position of opening night conductor at the Met. But the rules have been clearly stated: you want to do this, you show up on time, sober and clean-shaven. I think he manages all but the clean-shaven.
What really tugs at me in this story is the willingness of the Russian people to wait, knowing that what they will hear is worth waiting for.

I understand that NY is different. People there (here?) live by a clock that is forever setting the mood, the expectations, the permissible transgressions. Gergiev was told that in NY he could not be the person he is in St Petersburg or elsewhere in Russia.

Fine. But I am, on this one, with the people of St Petersburg. One waits for so much of the irrelevant in life – to have one’s teeth cleaned, to pay for the groceries, to pick up a bagel for lunch. Why not wait for something great, thrilling, genius-driven? We, on this side of the ocean, demand adherence to our standards in the concert hall in the same way that we demand conformity to our way of thinking elsewhere. I can’t comment on the larger issues now, but at least in music, wouldn’t it be fantastic just to let our senses rather than our clocks take charge?