Dear little one, we're in a museum... see the color red? It's a painting... 

Over the river…

Holiday food shopping at Grace’s (of Balducci fame): $2.59 for a small bunch of parsley? – I say under my breath. What? – asks a curious rich thing next to me. Oh, nothing, I’m just remarking at the cost of parsley. It’s only $2.59 today, she responds reassuringly.

tight aisles, stuffed shelves, pushy shoppers, great food 

Why not go to the flagship Whole Foods on Columbus Circle? As of Sunday, the wait in line was estimated at an hour minimum.

On the way home, carrying the loaded bags of food for the next days, I am persuaded by two shopping companions to buy another holiday item: a small tree for the NY apartment. Which one? The cheapest, a real loser. The sales guy smiles and tells me : “Charlie Brown ain’t got nothin’ on this one!”

New York: a fifty-third street rhapsody, part 1

Destination for today: west 53rd street. I have such fond memories of west 53rd street. Between the ages of 10 and 13 it was probably the most frequented by me block in the entire city (apart from my home on east 46th and my school on east 70th). When I was not acting cool and walking with my transistor radio through Central Park, I was on west 53rd, spending hours there, mesmerized by the offerings.

A reader, thinking her(him)self to be a savvy New Yroker, is likely to be nodding in agreement (and at my precocity). Yeah -- that Museum of Modern Art is fantastic, isn't it?

In truth, I hardly ever went to MoMA. My place of worship and wonder was the building across the street: a branch of the NY Public Library.

I read every teen voulme on the shelves. It got to the point that the librarian would see me coming and look the other way, knowing that I would be disappointed to find nothing that I hadn't already digested, many times over. Precocious indeed -- in reading teen trash.

Once a Clark Kent, always a Clark Kent

The plane lands, I make my way to the phone booth for the great transformation. Goodbye sweet demeanor, hello metal-twisting, people-punching ms. fast-mouth, pushing her way to the front of the line.

Well, not exactly. First, what's this about a "sweet demeanor?" Not too long ago I was at a restaurant in Madison where my eating companion and I engaged in a joke before a poor, gullible waitress (I didn't start it, I swear!). When she found out that it was a tease, she displayed such hurt and bewilderment that we left with tails between legs, each blaming the other for being the meaner of the two. My only regret? That we didn't fully pull it off. Not too sweet, is it?

As for the metal-twisting, people punching bit-- not true either. When I land at La Guardia I am flooded with such effervescence that the immediate recipients of this ebullience, the cabbies, wish I would just shut up and stare at the decay around me. There's nothing worse than a chippper passenger straight off a flight from the Midwest to make 'em want to slam that little Plexiglas window between the front and the back-seat rider. With a bang.

What I like about being in New York though is this: no one stands out. Everyone is as weird as the next. If I limped along with a reptile wrapped around my neck no one would even notice. Complete anonymity in small doses is a good thing.

“Ah yes, I remember it well…”

I haven’t spent a Thanksgiving in NY since… (before you were born? maybe..) 1977. Back THEN, I went to see my parents who were temporarily residing in the city. My mom was not a turkey person and she liked to do things ‘against the tide,’ so that when the world was sitting down to cranberries and yams, we were most likely at the movies, ‘avoiding the crowds,’ as she would say. NOW I am certain to be cooking for the better part of Thursday, though yams still will not make an appearance at the table. Majority rules.

I haven’t been in NY since before the election…(before you were born? that would be odd). Back THEN, I was on the look out for Kerry signs and symbols of the changes we would surely see if and when he became president. The ‘when’ turned to ‘never’ and so NOW I will try to forget that the next time I face a November 2nd, I’ll still have three more years of…you know who.

Next posting: tomorrow, from New York.

An afternoon conversation with a Texas friend (in town for the turkey and a wedding) during which I learn something about family law

Hey, I am so sorry to be out of town and missing the wedding this week-end [of the off-spring of her husband].
It’s not a big deal. Just family and a few friends.

No, really, I hardly ever go to weddings anymore. I go to more divorces than weddings. So, is there going to be a rabbi or a judge or what?
Actually I am doing the ceremony.

You?? I mean, what do you know about marrying people??
Hey, I’ve been through two of my own weddings, I ought to know something.

And how is it that you are legally entitled to marry anyone? I teach this stuff: you need an officiating person and to my knowledge, you don’t fit the bill.
I’m a lawyer. Lawyers can apply to be Family Court Commissioners for a day so they can marry people.

You mean I could do this on the side? No kidding! I’d get to go to weddings and charge people for my presence! And what are you going to say? Dearly beloved, we are gathered here -- the whole bit?
I called Family Court and asked if there’s like a script or something that I could just read and they said no, I had to write it myself.

I’d go online and see what’s floating around.
Yes, I did that, and it’s all rather dated and old-fashioned and you know, corny. I’m just going to have to make it up as I go along.

Maybe it’s just as well that I can’t be there. I’d probably laugh or cause trouble.

In case you haven't been listening, I am a Varsovian

Further good reasons to be traveling to Warsaw in December:

…I suppose they’ll restore the electricity in Warsaw soon (cause of blackout: unknown)…
And I hear the airport is already open, blizzard notwithstanding…

They speak Polish there, don’t they?

Each year, it takes me a day or so to get used to speaking Polish again when I return there. I just lose the sublte inflection, the rapid fire “tak tak tak tak tak tak tak” that people answer when they want to say “yes” and mean it. So I’m clicking onto Polish newspapers on the Net to get used to it again, and I read the following title of one of the subsections: “Pani Renata …lider branzy cash and carry.” It translates as… well, obviously as “Ms. Renata…leader of the cash and carry branch.” How nice of everyone to stop speaking Polish just because I am coming…

I’m going to post the photo (of Ms. Renata) that accompanies the article (here), because I noticed that it is done by Konrad Pustola, son of a close university-days friend of mine:

Bookish Thoughts

As I was fixing my exciting dinner of scrambled eggs and put-by asparagus from the summer Market, I flicked on the National Book Awards, momentarily forgetting that the Awards were actually presented last Wednesday and this was merely a recap. The confusion became pronounced when they announced the winner for fiction (Lily Tuck) because suddenly I thought, wait a minute, this sounds familiar. Didn’t she win last year? Try last Wednesday, ye of feeble mind and even feebler memory.

But my post is about something else. Several small points were made in the course of the Awards Ceremony and before I turned the whole thing off (how can you take seriously an Awards Ceremony where half-way through, the host, Garrison Keillor, says “and now let’s all get to our dinner here; we’ll get back to the prizes after we’re done eating”), I did take note of the following: only 96 million Americans read any fiction whatsoever. The announcers thought this was tremendous. I thought it was paltry. Another stat: the vast majority of sold books are never read. Fine, I admit I am a sinner here: I covet fresh books like others covet microbrewery beer or a good night’s sleep. And I do not finish a number of them. But is it really the case that most purchased books aren’t even cracked to the first page?

In a sense it is a relief. If I ever write the First Great Novel, I needn’t worry about delivering my message with aplomb. All I need to do is cozy up to someone at Borders and get them to display it at one of the front tables and issue one of those store-people cards that says “hey, like wow! You really need to read this! It was a favorite here among the Café employees and the noon-crowd too!” To fully appreciate the import of such a statement you need only go one day to Borders at around twelve and take a look at the noon crowd.

Overwhelmed

Oscar is complaining about an overcrowded email Inbox. I am sympathetic. Mine has long crossed the 1000-message mark and since I have a separate Eudora program on my home computer, you might as well double that, because whatever folly guides me to preserve email in my office is perniciously at work at home as well.

Yes, I have files. The trouble is most email does not fit into the dozens and dozens of files that are already in place and I am loathe to add more because they are now scrolling off my screen, hence I am likely to forget all about them, let alone their content.

But this is not my point, because it is one Oscar has amply covered.

I just wanted to add that I am similarly beleaguered with regular mail****. A picture tells it all. Below, witness my mail from this week alone, and this is (like with important email) after I pulled out all urgent matters and items that are 100% trash. Of course, as a result of the onslaught of the “ambiguous and difficult to classify” mail, I am loathe to even approach my mailbox each day. And so oftentimes I just ignore it, resulting in the mailbox depicted below as of this morning (it is Sunday and yes, I am okay with the idea that the US Postal Service should not make deliveries on Saturdays and any other days it wants to call "postal holidays"):

****BTW: Last night I went to have dinner with a lovely couple (blogger friend!)***** and all I kept thinking was – I wonder where they hid their mail, because their counter was meticulously barren of a single shred of paper. The last time I myself had friends for dinner I hid my stacks as well (I have my secret hiding spots!) and then promptly forgot about them. Two weeks later, when the lights began to flicker, it struck me that I hadn’t written a check to MG&E recently. I’m not sure it was MG&E giving me the three-flicker notice, but I was grateful that something had jogged my memory to retrieve all that was buried in some forgotten
crawlspace.

***** Do yourself a favor and cook up the salmon chowder I was served (recipe here). Yum! I also wanted to devour (with an embrace!) the children. They don't come any sweeter.

I'll pay someone good money to come and tell me what I should do with all this. 

After I photographed it, I closed it and left it alone. I'll worry about it tomorrow. 

Message to women: speak loudly, but make yourself small in other ways… how sad. How true.

Ann scooped the link that I’d been thinking about all morning – the NYT interview with the Austrian Nobel laureate, Elfriede Jelinek.

Ann’s post highlighted the same paragraphs that sent me spinning (emph. my own):

I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship
between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change. ...

A woman who becomes famous through her work reduces her erotic value. A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression.

(You're suggesting that your achievements, like winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, detract from your overall appeal.)

Certainly! A woman's artistic output makes her monstrous to men if she does not know to make herself small at the same time and present herself as a commodity. At best people are afraid of her.

The interview has other disturbingly vivid assertions that Ann bypassed:

I consider the current presidency to be dangerous to the world. I am really afraid of Bush, actually less of him than of the deputies standing in the shadows behind him. Compared to their activities, even Thomas Pynchon's paranoid conspiracy theories are just children's books.

And finally there is an interesting speculation about the relationship between art and political engagement:

(Why do you suppose European artists are so much more politically engaged than American ones?)

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.

Sunday entertainment: let’s see what the British royalty is up to

Wouldn’t you know it, the Prince of Wales has gotten himself into a pickle, with a statement he issued concerning educational attainment. It seems that he had complained “ about a learning culture based on a child-centered system which admits no failure, that led people to believe they could succeed without work or talent.”

Well naturally he has to apologize. After all, critics right away interpreted the comments as “meaning people could not rise above their station.” So British to worry about stations!

But if I were to bet my shilling, I would say that the Prince was not thinking about station-attainment. Instead, mightn’t he have been following American elections and was now merely commenting on the ascent of our man George (such a British-sounding name, isn’t it?) to positions of leadership (“…people to believe they could succeed without work or talent”)?

And I’m not sure what I think of his rebuttal either. When he says “In my view it is just as great an achievement to be a plumber or a bricklayer as it is to be a lawyer or a doctor,” is he publicly manifesting his disdain for bricklayers and plumbers?

What day are we on anyway?

Another day at the computer, pounding away at a self-imposed assignment. Hours pass and I do not notice. Outdoors, there is a transition from morning dark, to noon light and finally late afternoon dark, but I am oblivious. The only marker I have of the passage of time is in the traffic that I see outside the front window: from neighbors (in their night gear) picking up newspapers (why do people subscribe to the WStJ?), to obsessive yard pruners whacking away at the trees, to a child’s birthday party across the street, with the usual rush of cars dropping off eager attendees and, two hours later, the pick up flood, with parents walking their tired young ones back to the car, bending over them, asking “did you have a good time?” and the kids, wanting to kick the shins of the adults who ripped them out of a good game of “destroy everything in the house,” answering “uh-huh.”

Some people really do prefer to have the snowdrifts and short days and long nights...

For the rest of us, it's always a countdown toward spring.

So why would I choose to travel to the place pictured below in a couple of weeks, when I still have roses blooming in my back yard?

No answers today, just questions.

Madison, November 20 2004 

Warsaw, November 20 2004

Poland is asserting herself and she has the swing votes to make a difference

For the American reader, it’s a small issue really: whether the EU should incorporate a certain patent directive (read here, via FistfulofEuros). But the important thing is that when Poland said “no,” the directive fell short of the needed votes and had to be scrapped.

As I understand it, companies pushing for it suffered a lost opportunity to basically patent any and all computer software. Internet users and innovators who build on existing programming models were the beneficiaries. But what really tickled me was to see Poland championing the public interest. A statement to be proud of:

"The questionable compromise that the EU Council reached in May was the biggest threat ever to our economic growth, and to our freedom of communication," said Wladyslaw Majewski, president of the Internet Society of Poland. "The desire of the patent system and the patent departments of certain large corporations must never prevail over the interests of the economy and society at large."