She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning

"When I received the book as a fourteenth birthday present from a friend, it was, to paraphrase Alan Bennett, as if a hand had come out and taken mine. Lolita was an “exasperating brat” and a sucker for cheesy gift-shops, and she was vindication. Looking back on my own past, I could never quite conjure the requisite image of innocence lost. I conjured loathing, despair, and wanting to shrink until I caved in on myself and would no longer have to think about anything, sure, but I could also remember being an exasperating brat myself. I could remember the initial affection I had for the man who became the first to rather spectacularly betray me, and how hard it was to make sense of that affection in light of what was happening. I could remember, very vividly, fretting over the fact that I had “impaired” his “morals,” in whatever confused internal language was available to me at the time. It didn’t matter that I was seven years old and couldn’t fully grasp what was going on, what mattered were the feelings I had to live with.

Reading Lolita at fourteen, I was only beginning to make sense of my experience. I did know that the ordeal of the title character made me feel pity, but not self-pity. There was nothing sentimental about it, despite, or perhaps because of the sublime prose. More importantly, I was angry on behalf of Lolita and the horrible banality of her situation, and anger, it turned out, was a useful emotion, far preferable to pathos. Humbert’s calculated desire to appear as a victim of Lolita’s frail shoulders and gray eyes was infuriating:

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her — after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever — for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation) — the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again — and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure — all would be shattered.

Here, Nabokov does more than write about a self-contained world of horror in a beautiful way. He also presents a curious way in which the human mind can experience that world of horror. One of the things that always bothered me most was how my awful recollections could come back to me in exquisite wrapping: how I could recall overripe apples thumping to the ground in the night, a shooting star, or Bach being played on the piano in an adjacent room. In attempting to make sense of what happened to me, I seized on those moments as “evidence” of the fact that I “liked” what had occurred. If I could focus on the loveliness of Prelude No. 1 in C Major as something disgusting and illegal was going on, wasn’t I just reveling in that which was disgusting and illegal? I punished myself for a way of thinking that, reading Lolita, was revealed to me as a survival tactic. I realized, for the first time, that there was nothing wrong or strange with how I had been coping, by stepping out of the horror and into the beauty that was running parallel to it."

~Natalia Antonova~

Reader, I married him

"I knew that Jane Eyre would work its magic upon you someday."

~An Education~

If there were one book that both merits favorite status and guides my life path, it would be Jane Eyre. I have read the book multiple times and even wrote my thesis on it...but every time I read it, I'm struck even more to the core how much of a pioneer Charlotte Bronte truly was. It's the creation of Jane, not the spinning of the dark gothic romance between Jane and Mr. Rochester, that is the true feat here. I love the imagery of Jane's passion and desire for liberty as a bird beating against the caged walls of her chest.

I like to think that we've all felt out of place at times-- iconoclastic, yes, but also irreparably alone. I read about Jane sitting obscured by curtains in the Red Room, seeking comfort in a cherished book, and I can identify with the feeling of an interloper, an uncongenial alien finding a moment of refuge (only to have it be interrupted, too soon, by the jarring blow of reality). I too have felt the sensations of passion radiating out of my pores, threatening to inundate me and my surroundings. Like Jane, the restlessness was in my nature; like Jane, I assert my dissatisfaction with tranquility, believe that women do indeed feel just as men feel.

I've had my moments of restless pacing along banisters and rooftops, gazing out at the panorama before me and longing to be a part of it. Jane, in 1847 no less, opened up that cage for us. She allowed us not just to long for liberty but to make it our own. She allowed us to put our powers in play and in force. And she also provided transportation, on the wings of imagination, to English woods on rainy afternoons, comforted by a cup of tea and a warm shawl.

"I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing."

gossamer threads...far from this

Lily I hope you picture me in your dreams

Put down your King James Bible

You don't need no kings

Close your eyes, baby I'll try mine

Echoes through the phone

Far from this

Lily dreams on

Think back to fields of Catherine

You used to play

I swore I heard you laughing

And almost say

Put your marrows down, take away the past

And let the past be gone

Far from this

Lily dreams on

what a beautiful mess it is

I'm so sorry that I've been missing. Today I found that my head was so crowded with unaired thoughts that it was all I could do not to scream them out, inchoate and incomprehensible. Instead I ate a chocolate-cherry Godiva chocolate bar and bought a copy of The Help.

Dearest readers, I love teaching, but lately I find myself to be just exhausted. It takes all of my energy to arise in the morning and even more to remain upright all day (without betraying to my students that, in fact, their teacher is a mess of nerves and stress). I want my life to be Glee, full of teachable moments but without teacher burnout (and with plenty of Mr. Schuester kisses-- I'm in love with a fictional character).

It was my birthday last weekend (well, the weekend before last), and my best friends surprised me with a flight to DC to spend my birthday with my soulmates. We spent nights cuddling and eating delicious food and drinking champagne-- imbibing and thriving. Sunday we went to brunch where they had a dazzling dime-store-variety candy buffet! I'm taking malted milk balls, Pixie Stix, caramels, Tootsie Rolls, Necco Wafers...Eastern Market followed, where my friends bought fresh ravioli and I acquired a chartreuse cocktail ring. On the plane ride home I read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society-- a new favorite! It reminded me of another cherished tome, 84 Charing Cross Road.

With a St. Louis trip having occurred the week before (and being entirely glorious), returning to reality and the work accompanying it has proven...daunting, for lack of a better word. I keep trying to tell myself I'm happy, and overall, I am. It's just that I miss knowing my community, having places where I can settle with a chai latte and a book and stay for hours (Kaldi's even has containers of Red Hots affixed to the wall, and we all know about my love of chandeliers in unexpected places).

I miss creperies and walking from place to place (peripatetic, poetic, and chic) and stately homes behind wrought-iron gates.

"Cause what if I'm a mermaid

In these jeans of his

With her name still on it

Hey, but I don't care

Cause sometimes

I said sometimes

I hear my voice

And it's been here

Silent all these years..."

"Give to me your leather...

Take from me, my lace..."

"Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over."

~lionel shriver, the post-birthday world~

"See us winter walking after the storm

It's chill in the wind

But it's warm in your arms..."

I'll be that fool for you

I remember watching this in 2002 and just being heartsick that Sale and Pelletier lost the gold. The universe righted itself (Sale and Pelletier were eventually granted the co-gold after the judging scandal surfaced), but at the expense of the sport...with this new point system, the artistry seems to have faded and beauty has segued into one big checklist.

Is there anything in our world that is simply beautiful and free of automation?

It seems like we've devolved, and art has suffered...

Can it be that it was all so simple then?

Or has time re-written every line?

If we had the chance to do it all again

Tell me, would we? Could we?

"she was madly in love with Charles Darnay and no other man measured up"

"If you haven’t seen The Philadelphia Story, stop what you are doing, rent it, and watch it. It’s probably overstating the point to say that until you watch it, you will have been living a partial and colorless life. However, it is definitely on the list of perfect things. You know what I mean, the list that includes the starry sky over the desert, grilled cheese sandwiches, The Great Gatsby, the Chrysler building, Ella Fitzgerald singing 'It Don’t Mean a Thing (If You Ain’t Got That Swing),' white peonies, and those little sketches of hands by Leonardo da Vinci.

If you have seen it, then you know there’s a moment when Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord steps from a poolside cabana. She’s got a straight white dream of a dress hanging from her tiny collarbones, a dress fluted and precise as a Greek column but light and full of the motion of smoke. A paradox of a dress, a marriage of opposites that just makes your teeth hurt it’s so exactly right.

I was fourteen when I first saw it. It was three days before Christmas, which in my family’s house meant, means, and will always mean, Yuletide sensory overload: every room stuffed to the gills with garland and holly, the whole place booming with Johnny Mathis, and a monstrosity of a tree towering in the living room, weighed down with ornaments of every description, including dozens defying description that my brothers, sister, and I had made in school over the years.

Fourteen was not a good year for me. I was the latest of late bloomers, of course, about two feet high and scrawny as a cat, still shopping in the children’s department, profoundly allergic to every member of my family, and convinced that nothing could make me happy.

But then my grouchy channel-surfing landed me in the middle of a black-and-white heaven: Tracy, the dress...

I slid my fingers over my face, feeling for Tracy’s winged cheekbones. And when Dexter (Cary Grant) took Tracy to task, saying, 'You’ll never be a first-rate woman or a first-rate human being until you have some regard for human frailty,' I recognized it as wisdom and wondered whether I had it, that kind of regard, and just how to get it if I didn’t.

In college, I took a film studies class subtitled something like 'Turning the Formula on Its Head' in which the professor talked about the trick The Philadelphia Story pulls off. It should never have worked: creating a fantastic love scene between two characters whom you know are not in love with each other, getting you somehow to root for them wholeheartedly during the scene, but then to feel completely satisfied when they end up with other people.

Before you get the wrong impression, you should know that I’m not and never was one of those film people, the kind who argue into the wee hours about the auteur theory and whether Spielberg is the new Capra, or whether John Huston impacts, in unseen ways, every second of American life. I don’t know from camera angles, and I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of pre-World War II German cinema, but I fell a little in love with the film professor when he looked upon us with shining eyes and proclaimed, 'No, it should not work. But work it does!' because he was so passionate and right.

When I heard Mike (Jimmy Stewart) say to Tracy in that tender, marveling voice, 'No, you’re made out of flesh and blood. That’s the blank, unholy surprise of it. You’re the golden girl, Tracy,' I clasped my hands under my pointy chin, prayed that she would run away with him, and swore to God that someday a man would say those words in that voice to me or else I would die. But then, at the movie’s end, my father heard cheering and left water running in the sink to watch his lately distant, disaffected teenage daughter bang her fists on the arms of her chair and turn to him crying, 'with a face as open as a flower' (my dad’s own improbable words), saying breathlessly, 'She’s marrying Dexter, Daddy.'

I’ll admit it. I’ve always been more than a little proud of myself for having been fourteen and deeply benighted about almost everything, but having had the sense to recognize what is surely a universal truth: Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up."

~Love Walked In, Marisa de los Santos~

"oh, I assure you, they exist."

new love: the thinking tank

"My choice is to do something hard and boring or to marry [and] go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz and read and eat good food in nice restaurants and have fun. It's not enough to educate us anymore, Ms. Walters. You've got to tell us why you're doing it."

~An Education~

oh for purple nights and lazy mornings

I squeeze my eyelids shut, tight, and I dwell on infinity and objets d'art and passion...

"As I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It's just as well that one of us should believe in her:

she never did in herself."

~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair~

"She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seem to feel-- that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth."

"Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as

sages and poets."

~George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss~

"I am never quite alone. Members of my family keep turning up and collecting luggage and going away again, but the white

raspberries are ripe."

~Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited~

(photos from a variety of unremembered sources. please credit them in your hearts)

It's the little things we do together

A couple of things that are brightening my day (as I lay on my couch for the second day straight, home sick as a dog...and completely stir crazy)...

These purchases from Target that I picked up this morning on a juice and cold medicine run

I won these on ebay for a steal

This cracks me up. I'm currently watching the entire third season

of How I Met Your Mother (another Target purchase),

since that's what we do whilst ill

And these lyrics to a fantastic song:

They made a statue of us
And it put it on a mountain top
Now tourists come and stare at us
Blow bubbles with their gum
Take photographs have fun, have fun

They'll name a city after us
And later say it's all our fault
Then they'll give us a talking to
Then they'll give us a talking to
Because they've got years of experience
We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
We're living in a den of thieves
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious

We wear our scarves just like a noose
But not 'cause we want eternal sleep
And though our parts are slightly used
New ones are slave labor you can keep

We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
We're living in a den of thieves
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious
And it's contagious

They made a statue of us
They made a statue of us
The tourists come and stare at us
The sculptor's marble sends regards
They made a statue of us
They made a statue of us
Our noses have begun to rust
We're living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages
We're living in a den of thieves...

midnight in marrakesh

We finally did Moroccan.

Morocco, tinted red.

If only it were the real thing.

la vie en rose

I wonder into what category obsessive date-keepers fall. Are they like list-makers? Clean-freaks? Those obsessed with memorizing all the digits of pi?

I keep track of dates so that I can remember what used to be....I like to think that it doesn't prevent me from moving on, but I think that it's more difficult than we could ever imagine to find the balance between honoring the past and dwelling in it.

1/31/09. My heart still has a chip in it. Worst of all are the days I forget you're gone.

I hope you're watching and guiding me. I hope you're proud of me. Miss you.

she loved her flowers...but she loved us best of all.