Savannah Lee

One time, someone was complaining about Hitchcock's "The Birds" to my dad.

This, as you may remember, is the movie where birds mysteriously and relentlessly start attacking the residents of a little town.

It gets bad. Oh yes, very bad.

The person, though, thought he saw the flaw in the whole design. He demanded, "Why didn't everyone just go to the next town?"

My dad looked at actually, fixed his pale eyes on this guy. (I take that for granted about him, so I neglect sometimes to make it clear. About his stare. His washed-out stare.)

He said, "Because in the next town, it's the kid at the gas station."

My library hold, that is. On the book Perfumes: The Guide, enticingly written up here by Jim Lewis.

I read the Amazon excerpt, and Lewis is right: this is going to be another paradigm-shifter, in the way of Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts and Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon's A General Theory of Love.

My favorite quote:

"Perfumes have ideas: there are surprising textures, moods, tensions, harmonies, juxtapositions. Perfumes seem to come in various weights and sizes, to have different personalities, to wear different clothes, to worship different deities. Some perfumes are facile and some are complicated; some are representative, some abstract. Above all, some are better than others."

And why?

Because

"perfume really is an art, not a science. Tocade is not a better fragrance than Dior Addict because it better approximates the mix of odors released by a fertile female. Tocade is better than Dior Addict because it's more beautiful."

Tocade is better than Dior Addict because it's more beautiful.

Isn't that...beautiful? I can't wait to find out more.

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There's just one thing, though. The authors lament the fact that perfume has, until now, never been taken seriously as an art, blaming the perfume industry itself and its "unbroken tradition of self-defeating behavior." They yearn for perfume to acquire the status of wine and food. I hope that, by the end of the book, they come to their senses. Would the cause of perfume really be served if we had "Top Nose"? ("Today's challenge: You must make a signature scent for guest judge Pink out of a garden hose, an old shoe, a vial of water collected from a New York City drainpipe, and these bags of random leaves from the rainforest. It has to be raw and real, yet feminine and upscale. You have two hours.")

Even if that didn't happen, the artistry of perfume still might not be furthered by making it self-conscious. The best films America ever made were cranked out factory-style in the studio system of the 1930s and 40s by people who were entirely unburdened by any notion that they were making "art." This freed them to make something much better: film.

Of course film is art, but you don't make art by setting out to Make Art. You make art by making film, or paintings, or perfume, or patterns on the floor with your feet, and happening to be good at it.

I understand why the authors lament the obscurity in which the world's best noses work, and I share their sense of injustice, but I suspect that this obscurity might be protective as well as shabby.

Camouflage, after all, is by definition never glamorous.

But it's how you survive.

The huz (h/t Tenaya Darlington for that term) and I had an aesthetic disagreement the other day.

I sent him this link to a post about the serene beauty of white floors. (I have blogged before about my esteem for white as a color for interiors.)

"See how the white paint emphasizes the texture and lines of the floor?" I wrote. "See how we could maybe have that in our home? The texture of the painted floorboards would pop, the white color would carry light all around, and it would be *so beautiful* and tranquil," I babbled.

He wrote back, "I'm sorry, but those look really ugly to me. It's all washed out and monotonous. Yuck."

My husband is a John Coltrane aficionado who helped me amass, given our budget, quite a decent little collection of modernist and abstract-expressionist art from a local gallery (which has heartbreakingly since moved). If these interiors bothered him, it's not because he didn't get the concept.

It made me wonder: if he didn't like it, how come I did? I wanted to explain it to him if I could, since with understanding so often comes appreciation.

No question like that can ever be answered fully, but in my case, something specific did filter up.

It was the memory of a fourth-grade classmate of mine standing in an outside location and staring at a hook suspended from the end of a chain.

With an intensity that suggested way too much of the wrong kind of television, he demanded "Did they use this to hang people?" Determined to find out, he grabbed the hook and chinned himself on it.

Our teacher was disgusted. "Have you not been listening at all? The Shakers were a peaceful group! Why are you talking about hanging people?"

That is my sole specific memory of our class field trip to a Shaker village.

I do have a general one, though, of interiors of unparalleled austerity and unity. To put it pejoratively--monotony. But I had seen it as nirvana, as oneness, as alpha kissing omega.

I googled "Shaker style" and rapidly bombarded my poor husband with more images:

Look at those uncompromisingly bare floors and plain setups and unity of color and texture. Even in the bedroom they don't relent. In fact, especially in the bedroom they don't relent.

(These images from a company, Shaker Style, which hand-makes and sells furniture in the Shaker aesthetic.)

This, indirectly, is where my love of white floors comes from. It comes from having been imprinted by Shaker interiors. Somehow they stuck with me as the ultimate--which of course they are, the ultimate in western zen. The ultimate in inner direction through outer focus.

It's a short step from there to here.

(Also, painted wood is apparently part of the historical New England aesthetic, so I'm primed for it that way too, since that's where I'm from.)

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That boy who was so eager to imagine cruel Shaker executions. I remember his name, though I won't tell you here. I remember he had on a striped shirt--blue and red, I think, alternating with white. I remember his dark brown hair. His pale, thick fingers tight on the iron hook as he grimaced out his mock-death.

I remember wondering what would become of him.

You never know what's going to stay with you.

So I just watched the Kentucky Derby, which will go down in history as the ultimate in triumph and tragedy--Big Brown redeeming the incredible suffering of his trainer and jockey with an inspired, beautiful run...

...and Eight Belles, the filly, giving her life to a run that smoked the rest of the field and trailed only Big Brown.

After the race, she collapsed, was found to have broken both her front ankles, and was put down on the spot.

Shades of Ruffian, the steel-nerved filly who ran herself to death in 1975 despite the efforts of her jockey to pull her up.

They'll have a lot to say to each other tonight, these sisters who wouldn't stop.

What are they, about seven? Eight? Yeah. Little girls playing on the jungle gym in the back yard of the luckier one.

The one who lives in a house instead of an apartment. The one into whose life certain kinds of trouble didn't come. Who didn't have to move. Far away.

That's still in the future right now. Don't lean over them with its shadows. They're playing.

In those days, it was still considered safe for kids to run around. When the girls get bored of the jungle gym, they crash through the bushes limiting the yard, cut across a neighbor's driveway, and run up a short hill to a wooden fence which is split open in one spot. They squeeze through and across another driveway/alley into a vast, vast yard between two properties that belong to the local college. You can really run around there. And they do.

One of the girls is delicate and the other is strong. One of them is soft and retiring, while the other is take-charge and strategically mean. One of them is dreamy while the other is watchful.

Neither of them care what other people think, although for different reasons.

After lapping and zigzagging the big yard for a while, they decide to run onward. They crash the bushes on the far side, once again bursting through the lines and limits that their world keeps trying to put on them.

It's a blessing that they're not aware of time, or else they'd believe that it would always be this way.

I have a number of drafts I've been working on.

None of them will let me drag them to the scheduler. They are all digging in their heels and crying.

So my reluctant children and I will just stay home today.

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That reminds me of a friend's worst memory.

It's from when she had an office job, the only office job she ever worked.

One of the women in the office had a young son. He had to go to day care, and did not love it.

One morning, this woman, late, came in with her son to pick something up or drop something off before bringing him to day care.

He was in full crisis the whole time, clinging to her and sobbing "I don't want to go, Mommy! I'm scared! I'm scared!"

The woman started to cry too.

My friend got up and went to them. "[Name], go home. Just go. I'll cover for you."

The woman, crying harder now, went.

When my friend told me this, she said, "So I covered for her, like I said.

"But you can't cover for someone every day."

She would have if she could have.

She's haunted by those tears. The tears of the boy who had to go someplace he feared and hated day after day when he was too young to even understand why. The far more bitter tears of the mother who had to make him do it.

I wish there was an answer. I really do.

Something about being warm makes it tender, the air.

It's gracious and soft, like southern manners. The trees outside my window nod and bow for it. All slowly. No hurry.

Where do these long drifts and tiny eddies go in the winter? Do we just not notice them because they make no headway against the stiffer, frozen boughs? Or does the cold change them into blows and daggers?

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Air makes me sick at the same time as it keeps me alive. I live by my poison.

It's manageable. HEPA filters, shots, sprays, we've done it all. And it helps (especially the steroid sprays). But when you're fighting the air, you do get that sense of man's insignificance in the vastness of the universe which other people have to get by going to Yosemite. And the sense of futility for which other people have to read Camus. And the cheery fatalism that goes with both.

You also develop an inevitable watchfulness, a connoisseurship, towards this invisible beauty that touches you with such a complex hand.

You watch its fingers ruffle the leaves, and you think, it's so different in the spring.

And this seems remarkable to you, and you realize it shouldn't. Warmth and tenderness should go hand in hand.

But spring is the season when the air, to you, is most harsh.

So you watch it waltz the branches like silk (do the branches, prisoners by nature, ever envy the wind its legs? When the wind is gentle, is it sharing its freedom? When it's hard, is it taunting the captives or even beating them?)...

...you watch it waltz the branches and wonder why it should be worst when it's at its best.

Ah, where did Blondie go? No, that's not what I mean. Where did the world go that built them, that knew what to do with them. That was the world I was born to and, if only it had lasted a little longer, would have grown up in. I still look for it every now and then, forgetting that it didn't come to its fruition. That the Keatons somehow took over.

Did I just blog about Madonna? Yes, I said that she was my secret mommy when I was young.

But only because Debbie Harry, smarter, realer and way more dangerous, left the field.

Perhaps that's for the best.

Actually no it's not. When I think of who I'd rather have my daughter look up to, I'd pick Amy Winehouse over the Pussycat Dolls any damn day. (No offense, by the way, to the Dolls; "Dont'cha" is an irresistible song, whose soullessness is its triumph.)

Madonna has fully earned her legend by now--but I'm talking about how it was along the way. And although she was nowhere near as 'bad' as PCD, she was nowhere near as good as the scary goddesses that the world creates and then drops in fear.

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Um, this was actually supposed to be a deeply unserious post about the resorts I wish I could visit. I was going to post positively edible links.

Let's stop mourning lost worlds and get on with it, shall we?

Reality has absolutely nothing to do with this list, by the way. This is strictly "wouldn't it be nice." I'm not even sure I'd know what to do with myself at a resort. But when I have a few extra minutes, I like to visit these websites and look at the gorgeous pictures. In the case of family-owned places, there's also the haunting sense of looking at someone's heart--their life, their dream.

Like Blackberry Farm. The first thing I noticed about this website was "Hey...I like the music." Nine times out of ten, when a website starts playing music at me, I knock things over in my rush to get at the "off" button. Not here. Somehow it hit me right. Funny how that makes you feel like they're talking to you. "Yes...I do know what you want. Come."

When I'm in a slightly more angular mood, I like to virtually visit the Post Ranch Inn, an elegant collision of the bohemian and the avant-garde which seems to rise and fall from the landscape. I imagine what it would be like to fly out across the ocean, as so many of their vistas make it seem.

But then there are those moments of wanting to be cozy. I would cheerfully go back to my home state to cocoon at the Mayflower Inn.

When I want ultimate fantasy, I mosey south to the Caribbean and check out the villa showcase on the website of Mustique.

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And...and try very hard not to wonder what shadows they would fear. The people who could pay the "tariffs" on these palaces in all but name. I try not to wonder how many times a day they'd look over their shoulder.

Alexander had a dagger for his pillow.

I'd like to thank journalist Johann Hari for doing what I, at least, would never do: take a "smart drug" to see what happens.

Frighteningly enough, a great deal happens.

Worse, all of it is good.

Hari basically becomes perfect: brilliant and lucid without end. He writes reams of elevated prose as he reads complicated books, cleans his apartment ("freakishly" no less) and eats like a Puritan.

I kept waiting to turn out to be reading the cleverly-disguised first installment of a Stephen King novel.

Perhaps the final proof of the drug's terrifying effectiveness is that Hari himself started to think that way too. Pre-smart-drug, his attitude was "Are you mad? You become cleverer and thinner? I whipped out my Visa card immediately." After he's taken it for a while, we get "Our lack of knowledge about what it does to your brain was, in the end, a deal-breaker for me."

Arguably, the drug helped make him smart enough to stop using it.

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I've never wanted what drugs have to offer. From cocaine to Paxil, I've never been remotely tempted, even when I should have been.

Until now.

When Hari writes "I was overcome with the urge to write an article...It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. ...[This drug] makes every day into that kind of day," it made me cry. Do I want that? HELL to the yes. I hate the ebb-and-flow of thought-work, the fact that I have to pay for one "on" day with two or more off days on either side. I want to be able to just go and go and go and go without ever ever stopping. The idea that I could actually do that, that I could "fly" all the time...oh.my.god.

But. But.

"Everything good must be paid for [with suffering]," says Mary Renault's Alexander, "either before or after."

Ursula K. LeGuin:

Only in silence the word. Only in dark the light. Only in dying life: Bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.

Properly understood, the "off" days are on-days too. They are the dark which gives light the contrast that allows it to exist. They are the silence that defines speech. They are the death which creates life. They are the sky.

The drug Hari took was originally developed for narcolepsy, a condition in which dark and light (sleep and waking) within a human being have gone out of balance. The drug's job was to restore that balance, to throw the light against the dark, to set the hawk free on the sky.

Using the drug on normal people to drown out the dark, to silence silence, to rape the sky, cannot be done without a price.

Yet I know millions will be lining up to pay.

As an expert told Hari: "The age of cosmetic neurology is coming."

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I suppose we could always take refuge in a hippie commune.

There are still some of those left.

I think.

Ah hell. Here. Here's another link to a spa, this one the most luxurious one in the world they say, written up here as well. Enjoy it. Enjoy it while you still know yourself.

I would like to quote Susie's Spa Blog from the SpaFinder website. Emphasis mine.

"Last year I experienced what I considered to be one of the most perfectly choreographed spa treatments I had ever had...a 2-hour treatment superbly executed. Later I found out that they had worked on this particular treatment for five years in order to reach this level of perfection!"

She continues,

"Well, now I feel that I have experienced the most perfectly designed resort suite. ...And sure enough...I found out that [the general manager] had spent almost ten years thinking about and finally designing and perfecting this room."

Isn't it interesting that the spa industry, which people see as frivolous, is nurturing the slow development which alone can produce something serious.

Do you see the light in me with the light in you? Or with the darkness?

Do I see the light in you with the light in me? Or with the darkness?

When you see the word "darkness," do you think "evil" or "badness," or do you think "night" and "stillness" and "receptivity"? Is the dark within you a safe place?

If not, to whom is it a danger? Yourself? Or others?

In the silence between us, do the answers speak?

To all who, in the words of Mr. Rogers, have "loved us into being."

My special, deeply personal thanks to my own mother, who made me chicken soup and homemade spaghetti with meat sauce to take to school for lunch, who went on picnics with me where we had chocolate cupcakes with strawberry icing, who sat up at night making soy blueberry muffins with me and watching "The A-Team," and who now shares all her advice and perspective with me on my own mothering journey.

P.S. Happy birthday, Dad.

"It doesn't matter what I say. Because the hook"

and not my spirit or my heart or my soul or my memories or possibilities or even anything to do with me at all, in a rather ironic twist given the alleged narcissism of my field and my probable motives for joining it...is what

"brings you back."

Or, in other words:

"HIT ME, baby.

One. More. Time."

I just realized something.

If I choose to look at myself in the mirror, I have the same concerns as a woman from 1960, from 1660, from 1360. I want my lips to be soft and my nails to be strong and my skin to be clear.

(This is assuming that the ability to care has not been disrupted by some outside force like illness, addiction, depression, trauma, fanatical ideology. We're talking the "normal" woman. She has those bedrock concerns no matter where or when she lives.)

Almost nothing else is the same from the years that I mentioned. Take a London woman from 1960, 1660 and 1360 and put each of them in a room together and they would barely even be able to talk to each other. The versions of English they'd speak would be that different. Language has changed more than beauty!

Love has changed more than beauty. Assuming our 1960, 1660 and 1360 Londoners could understand each other well enough to talk about love, they'd find big differences in their understanding of what it was and the role it played or ought to play in their lives.

Motherhood has changed more than beauty. You'd get arrested these days if you tried to parent by some of the standards they had in the middle ages.

Clothes, fashions, customs...always changing.

But looking in the mirror and hoping to see smoothness, softness, radiance, clarity; this has not changed. In all that time.

Nor has the effort to GET those qualities ever changed. Mirrors, oils, creams. Paints, powders, kohl. These tools were time out of mind by 1360.

Nothing has ever disrupted them. Every country and every culture, all the way back, has had these tools and these rituals. Empires, languages, and religions have come and gone. That has stayed the same.

Kind of like dance. Kind of like music. Kind of like story.

Kind of like that.

I learned some Very Important things from Blogthings recently.

1) The time of day to which I correspond.

You Are Midnight

You are more than a little eccentric, and you're apt to keep very unusual habits. Whether you're a nightowl, living in a commune, or taking a vow of silence - you like to experiment with your lifestyle. Expressing your individuality is important to you, and you often lie awake in bed thinking about the world and your place in it. You enjoy staying home, but that doesn't mean you're a hermit. You also appreciate quality time with family and close friends.

2.) The type of weather to which I correspond.

You Are Rain

You can be warm and sexy. Or cold and unwelcoming. Either way, you slowly bring out the beauty around you. You are best known for: your touch Your dominant state: changing

3.) The element of my body.

Your Body's Element is Air

You are competitive, assertive, and dominant. You live to win, and it really makes you angry if you lose. You are brilliant and competent. No matter what you're doing, you now your stuff. People tend to be intimidated by your intelligence. It's hard to measure up to you. Your energy tends to be: ebbing and flowing Your power color is: white

You'll notice that the writeups contradict each other: now I'm eccentric, now I'm competitive.

The pictures are pretty though.

Midnight, rain and air.

Heh. Sounds like a poem.

That pretty much says it all. Neo-opsis Fourteen is out, with, among other fine entries, my story "Kinship."

Here's where/how to buy if you are interested, and a bit more about Neo-opsis.

You know "mission creep"?

I'm having indulgence creep.

A long time ago, a friend of mine was telling me about the fantastic new house her sister just bought. (An interesting situation, by the way. This friend was basically starving for her art, determinedly following her bliss, while the sister had money from a high-powered job. The thing is...I know this sounds loathsomely Victorian and sentimental, but my penniless friend was happy and her sister was miserable.)

Anyhow! So my poor-but-happy-because-she-was-following-her-bliss friend was telling me about her highpowered-but-miserable sister's new luxury house.

It had a dedicated tea faucet.

I did not know what that was. My friend explained to me that her sister could decide "I want some tea...NOW," march up to the kitchen sink, hit the tea faucet, and get instant hot water set to the perfect temperature for Earl Grey. (Or chai, or rooibos, or whatever you drink.)

My mind boggled at this. It seemed, not only decadent in and of itself, but worse, pointlessly so. Why couldn't she just put on a teakettle?

Well...now that I drink tea (this is a recent development), I'll tell you why.

Because when you work upstairs, there's no way you can hear the whistle, and when your work involves complete uninterrupted concentration, there's no way you'll remember to get up and check on your own after twenty minutes. You'll be too busy thinking "Okay, should I describe this aspect of Topic A before that one? Which would make more sense? Which would set us up better for the conclusion? Which..."

And so, an hour later, you'll go downstairs for some other reason and discover that you're lucky you haven't ruined the kettle and possibly set the house on fire.

Yes, I could get a portable timer...which we haven't had in years, because our stoves and microwaves do the job themselves (but I can't hear them from upstairs).

Or I could just not have tea, which is what I'm currently doing.

And wish for a decadent luxury which somehow, now, no longer seems like one at all.

Indulgence creep.

It doesn't take long to shatter something. A cathedral. A psyche. A country.

It takes years to put it back together. And it may never be what it once was, or might have been.

It might not even be grateful you tried. In fact, it might even kill you. Or more precisely, its damage might.

Brokenness defends itself, you know. With its sharp edges.

Depression, pain, fragmentation, these things are self-perpetuating. Once they get a host which they can break down into shards and splinters--into themselves--they want to keep it.

And the grinning agents of their transmission, loud or quiet, with sledgehammers visible or secret, still walk the world.

See you either this evening or tomorrow.

Here are some amazing things I've discovered:

1) There's such a thing as nail cream. And it works!

2) Having a laundry day, as so many home-ec experts say, really is a good idea! You do end up doing less!

3) Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is, in fact, possible to get organized enough to carry out Step 2! (You need to be motivated, though. By which I mean, slightly crazed.)

4) Chilean Carmenere is very good. It's the first red wine I've actually liked. If you're in the same boat, you might want to give it a try.

5) If you have bathroom miscellaneous that you'd like to keep available in lidded jars, get kitchen jars. They tend to be both bigger and proportionally cheaper than the tiny little cotton-ball-holders for sale in the bath department.

6) That old advice to "shop the perimeter" of the grocery store, both for health and financial reasons, seems to work. I'm not sure why, and your mileage may vary, but severely reducing foods with added sugar and simple carbs is (so far) saving us money. Laura Moser reported the same phenomenon, in the article which convinced me to cut way back on sugar for health reasons.

7) This account of cooking tripe is Hi. Larious.

Andrew Sullivan, a writer with whom I practically always disagree, posted to his website an excerpt from an essay he wrote about gay marriage. (This is one of the areas where we do agree. Our mutual stance in a nutshell: HELL yeah!)

But here's the thing. In describing his sexuality-driven isolation as a teenager...

...Sullivan gives straight teens way too much credit. Here he is, comparing his teenage conduct unfavorably to theirs: "I shut myself in my room with my books night after night while my peers developed the skills needed to form real relationships and loves."

WHAT!? "Developed the skills"!? Straight teenagers!? Did he go to school on planet Earth?

Straight teenagers may be doing a lot of things with their socially-sanctioned carrying-on, Mr. Sullivan, but "develop[ing] the skills needed to form real relationships and loves" is not among them.

Here's me at the blackboard one day at school doing math problems. I had one Girl With A Social Life on my left and another Girl With A Social Life on my right. Here is what they said, across me:

LEFT GIRL: I had an experience with 'Kirk' last night.

RIGHT GIRL: Everything with two legs and a crack between 'em had an experience with Kirk last night.

Bear in mind that I attended a Catholic girls' school. A strict one. With uniforms and everything.

I would go on about the stories of drunken nights and three-ways in the parking lot, but it's kind of a blur. It's summed up in my head by a single moment. One girl, having held court with a tale of vomiting in her parents' driveway at three AM after prom, turned chagrined. She expressed this to the group by eyeing me (at the edge of the table) and saying, with a sad irony worthy of Oscar Wilde, "See what you missed, Savannah?"

See what you missed, Andrew?

I frankly think Sullivan's solitary devotion to his books was far better relationship-training than he would have gotten had he liked girls. If nothing else, he learned patience and how to stick with something no matter what.

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But then, I was alone in my room with my books too. So I have to think there could be something good about it. But sometimes I wonder.

Generally, I think that if people avoid spewing in the driveway at 3 am at eighteen, that's probably a good thing. But the trade-offs tend to be pretty serious. Life tends to be a total package. You're on a path or you're not. I wasn't involved with my school's drunken prom because I wasn't involved with anything to do with my school or its social world. Either/or. That's that. Or as Brian Dennehy put it in Tommy Boy, "A business is either growing or dying, there ain't no third direction." Well, a teenager is either spewing or hiding. Ain't no third direction.

This, I think, is why all those unbearable moralists wish we could step into an Anne of Green Gables book. Their fond hope is that, if the public social limits are tight enough, the spewers won't be able to get themselves in too much trouble.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. When social limits are extreme, the spewers get in more trouble than ever. They either go down the tubes or set up victims to take the fall for them.

Don't believe me? A friend of mine grew up in a small town in the midwest in the 1940s and 50s. She shared with me her most important memory:

"The town doctor, thank God, was understanding. He did all the abortions for the girls."

Yeah, suck on that, Family Values Crowd: ALL. THE. ABORTIONS. FOR. THE. GIRLS. Those clean-scrubbed, apple-cheeked, small-town girls-next-door of the 40s and 50s. The ones you all think were saving it for after the wedding. Turns out they were only saving it for after the taffy pull. But in this town, they were lucky, because there was a decent, humane doctor who helped them.

And how drunk were most of them, do you think, when they got in trouble in the first place? Back then, given the risk and the fear, I'd have to say 'very.' Wouldn't you?

So the elusive middle, where you're engaged with your world and have a date but there are limits and it's wholesome, is largely a myth. Teenagers are either out there killing themselves loudly, or they're behind closed doors quietly dying. Those are the choices. Active/passive. Assertive/withdrawn.

Those who missed the drama, that's good. But the reason WHY they missed the drama is almost certainly bad.

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If Sullivan had looked carefully, therefore, he would have seen that plenty of his straight brothers and sisters were sitting in the empty room with him. (And no, there's no contradiction there. No matter how crowded that room gets--it's always empty.) When he writes:

"I couldn't see a future...I withdrew, became neurotic, depressed, at times almost suicidal. I shut myself in my room with my books night after night...It's too late for me to undo my past."

He's talking about me. And very possibly you. And a whole lot of us.

See what you missed. Or wish you had.

(The Shakers lived it.)

Via the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily, I found this review by Benjamin Schwarz of David Kynaston's book 'Austerity Britain.'

'Austerity Britain' chronicles the postwar rationing years in Britain, otherwise known as "The years when it would have been more fun to live in Yugoslavia." Seriously--all the American railing against the drab, pinched, conformist Soviet Menace looks a little hypocritical in light of the fact that our biggest ally of the time was like this:

"...the shabby frocks, the sallow faces, the grubby train compartments, the dreary meals (“all winter greens and root vegetables and hamburgers made of grated potato and oatmeal and just a little meat,” the food writer Marguerite Patten recalled). ...the dismal general atmosphere...the massive red-brick factories and the smoke in the valleys...the 'heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs'..."

And let's not forget, oh yes, the ambitious social engineering:

"[British people wanted to live in] a small suburban house with a garden. The planners and reformers would have none of it. ...they wouldn't let the preferences of the public vitiate their glorious designs...'It's no good your jeering; it is going to be done.'"

And "it"--stuffing the British people en masse and over their jeers (and tears) into council flats--was.

Sounds pretty grim. And it was. Maddeningly, there was an upside:

"Again and again [Kynaston] reminds readers that the working class, which made up 75 percent of the country, had never had it so good: its standard of living was 10 percent higher in 1948 than a decade earlier, even as that of the middle class declined by 20 percent. And for unskilled workers and the unemployed, the mandated fairness of rationing ensured adequate food. Moreover, the drab but calculat­edly nutritious rationed diet gave Britain the healthiest people in its history. In fact children ate more healthfully under rationing than they did in the 1990s—a fact “to gladden any puritan’s heart: a shortage of money and of choice was positively beneficial.”"

Don'tcha just hate that?

Those children, of course, did have their revenge--they're the ones who grew up to be the Sex Pistols.

Forced into virtue and conformity, they exploded into licentiousness and individuality. Too bad there was in fact a baby in the bathwater.

The austerity of the Orwellian boot is ugly. But the austerity of plainness, of simplicity, of zen, is beautiful.

#

I wonder, sixty years from now, how our time period's David Kynaston will assess us. We let the poor and the working class down, that's for sure. They traded regimentation for chaos...not a happy or a meaningful exchange.

Can't there be a way to have it all? To have a prosperous working class and at least a secure SOL class without the dictatorship of the moralists? To have "the healthiest children in our history" without the tweed coats and scratchy underwear and chilblains and damp communal spaces pungent with disinfectant and misery?

To have both public services and private life?

Relatives have been in town and, since I've been feeling pretty good, I have relaxed my former vigilance on the health food front.

It has not gone as well as my inner hedonist would have hoped.

Instead, I have been insanely fatigued and distinctly bloated.

I fail to understand why this should be the case. It's not like I've been chowing stuffed-crust pizza and Blizzards. I have eaten modest portions of real food at mostly locally-owned restaurants. By most people's standards--heck, by my own former standards--I've done well.

But not well enough, it seems, for my suddenly very picky body. "We want the kind of food Benny Hill used to make jokes about," she seems to be informing me.

(I had a near-fatal childhood laughing incident over a Hill skit where he played all the members of a dimwitted family. Everyone's at breakfast except the mother, who is determinedly scrubbing pots and pans. All of a sudden she looks down at her scrubber and says "Hey, this is shredded wheat. Who stole my Brillo pad?" The son's eyes bug out.)

I wonder if they have that on YouTube. Hold on, let me check. No, an admittedly brief search does not yield anything that looks right. Shame.

But anyhow, yeah, the bod wants to eat foods which an enterprising British comedian could skit-bash with steel wool.

And it appears to be quite serious about this.

SIGH.

I refer you all to one of the simplest, most appropriate pieces of pop analysis I have ever read.

Of the Rolling Stones, British media analyst Mark Simpson says:

"Watching footage of them from the mid-Sixties today the most shocking thing about them is how modern they look; how much the world around them has changed and how little they have."

Having read that, doesn't it feel like you've always known it?

You have, of course, because the visual information is there in your brain. Simpson just put words to it.

Yes; "how much the world around them has changed and how little they have." The world has finally (almost) caught up with them.

So they were emissaries, then, gone back to the sixties from a darker future. This one, or possibly even one that lies ahead. Maybe that's why

"they appear surprisingly lacking in insight or interest either in their own phenomenon or the world they have forced to fellate them--and who thanks them for the privilege."

The Four Horsemen, after all, never speak. They just ride on.

Remember "Celebrity Jeopardy" from SNL? The recurring sketch in which 'celebrities' proved themselves so inept at playing "Jeopardy" that Will Ferrell (as Alex Trebek) had to give them categories like "Horsies"?

Remember how, as the 'celebrities' got stupider, Ferrell grew increasingly shellshocked?

At one point, perfectly glazed over, he delivered the final word: "AND the show has reached a new low."

That moment passed before my eyes the other day. Why? Because I hit the Rude Pundit (over-twenty-one alert, by the way, on this) and discovered that we are drugging immigrants before deporting them.

What do you even say.

I mean really. Gitmo. Abu Ghraib. Katrina. The complete destruction of Iraq. And now, forcibly drugging immigrants before deporting them? The show...has reached...a new...low.

That's what the RP's essay was about, by the way...that glazed, stunned inability to feel shock at an atrocity because you've been zapped too many times in that part of your brain. All you can do is just stare. And think of morbidly apposite moments from late-night TV.

The RP is hoping that this can change. "One of the greatest goods an Obama administration could do," he yearns, "would be to lead us back to a place where we can feel again, where we can rightly and righteously be angered into action."

Yeah. That would be nice.

But.

Assuming Barack Obama attains the White House (which is by no means the foregone conclusion that it seems to be), does anybody remember a little decade called the 1990s? People back then had this idea that, once Bill Clinton took office, he'd be able to go right on ahead with his agenda. Remember that? Didn't that turn out to be hysterically naive? Dare one say, quaint? Yep. It sure did.

Clinton spent approximately 170% of his time in office fending off the factory's worth of legal and PR spaghetti that the Republican machine threw at him to see what would stick.

If Barack Obama becomes president, the exact same thing will happen to him, and anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a dream world. It doesn't matter if Republicans get voted out of every single elected office in the United States except for dogcatcher. They will use the extra time on their hands to think up more ways to challenge Obama. His presidency, should he actually attain it, will become a rear-guard action to make Clinton look like Reagan (legislative-agenda-ly speaking). And that will be the best case scenario.

Being whole enough to feel outrage again? We're not going to be there for a long time. A long time.

(1) I'd heard, before I read Johann Hari's take on it, that the banana supply was going to die out soon. Turns out I wasn't hallucinating. Our familiar Cavendish banana--itself the successor to the Gros Michel, which was gone by the 1960s--is on the way out. Why? Blight. Really why? Corporate mismanagement. Of everything, including entire nations. Turns out they're called "banana republics" for a reason. Read it and weep. (Oh, the "acid banana" reference? That's what we're probably going to be stuck with after the Cavendish succumbs. A "crunchier and tangier" number called, alarmingly enough, the Goldfinger.)

(2) Buried in this review of Teach for America's nearly twenty-year history is the salient point. Reviewer Sara Mosle goes on and on about the excellent training, resources and follow-up that Teach for America provides not just for its volunteers but for itself, exhaustively studying which teachers perform best in order to figure out what sort of qualities to look for. Somewhere in there, Mosle tallies up the cost per capita of all this (about $20K) and blandly remarks, "TFA isn't achieving its successes on the cheap. It takes a significant [financial] investment in teachers...to boost achievement in woefully underperforming schools."

My fellow children of the 80s. Is there a "duh" big enough for that statement? Personally, I'm afraid that if I go for one of that magnitude, I might have a seizure. Proceed at your own risk.

Seriously, though: how come nobody can admit that the problem with underperforming schools in America comes down to money? TFA teachers do well because TFA spends M.O.N.E.Y. following up on its hires, chopping the resultant data every conceivable way to figure out what works and what doesn't, steering their organization towards the former, and supporting their people. That...is how...it goes. You get...what...you pay for. "Tax and spend" should be a compliment, not a curse.

I think conservatives know this perfectly well. I think the reason they're strangling public spending is because, for some unfathomable reason, they WANT there to be a vast, immiserated, semi-literate or completely illiterate underclass. Don't ask me why. I think it's a horrible idea. Have these allegedly western-civilization-loving nimrods heard of the French Revolution? The Russian? The Cuban? The Chinese? Well, they probably think THEY will be able to keep the lid on. They probably like to read about the Weaver's Rebellion (hint: it ended poorly for the weavers). They probably wish they could have lived in Franco's Spain. Not that they would ever think of themselves as fascists. It's just that Those Others (you know, Not Us) are AFTER US!! and plainly uncontrollable except by brute force.

If you think my description of the mindset of our brothers and sisters on the right may be slightly exaggerated, I cordially invite you to read this surreal essay in City Journal by Myron Magnet.

You would not think that someone could take such a basic premise (under-policed, crime-ridden streets are bad) and go so incredibly wrong with it (by which I mean the digression about sexuality, criminality and the African-American penis which takes place around paragraphs 19-22, except it's not a digression, it's his central point).

Which brings me to (3) the one problem with Arts and Letters Daily: they don't warn you when they're linking to something so right-wing it will burn your eyebrows off.

Let's just say that I'd managed not to have heard of City Journal before when I clicked on that link. I didn't know what it was all about.

And now...I do.

In my fantasy life, we'll be serving grilled chicken and corn on the cob on the harvest table (scroll down slightly) that we carried outside and put under the big oak.

In this vision, everyone is here, so Tutu is making her special potato salad, Nana is doing her blueberry pie with the orange-zest nut crust, and Grampy is working on the homemade ice cream. (Papa is helping Daddy at the grill.) I'm stirring up a pitcher of iced tea and some cucumber salad, and slicing baguette for people to eat with boursin. Good thing the old-wood country kitchen, open to the front and the back, is big enough for all this to go on at once.

Coming up the hill, walking quietly, we have a guest. We don't know him, but that's okay; in another way, we always have. He wears a uniform, or not, as he chooses. He tells us his name, or not, as he decides. If he has stories to share, he shares them; if he'd rather just eat chicken and drink iced tea in the shade of an oak tree, then that's what he does.

I like to think of him as happy, even if it's a solemn kind of happiness. I like to think of him as having a peace that overrides whatever wounds, personal or national, may remain.

He'll be here with us tonight; we'll set a symbolic place and light a candle, and share the considerably less magnificent fare that we actually will be eating. In the considerably smaller and less romantic suburban kitchen where we will be eating it. No rambling yard, no oak tree.

But still America.

Happy Memorial Day.

Here's a humorous response to the California gay marriage decision--Annabelle Gurwitch says be careful what you wish for.

It's the usual married person's lament--oh dear gawd, now I'm stuck with him/her. And it is indeed funny, but Gurwitch also clearly means it to be kind of serious; she brings in stats about weight gain and high blood pressure. And divorce:

"[T]he latest census data indicate that singles now outnumber married people in the US, with fewer couples reaching that twenty-five-year milestone, all of which seems to confirm that people are just unwilling to settle for being unhappy."

It's always amusing to me when liberals tilt so far to the left that they touch the right. In my opinion, that's what Gurwitch has done by calling divorce the act of those who are "unwilling to settle for being unhappy." That makes it sound like the result of a rational cost-benefit analysis.

I've never been divorced, but I've known some people who are. Some have chosen to speak with me about it in detail, and I can assure you that there's no "I simply wasn't happy enough with Gerald" going on.

Generally, folks seem to feel that they were minding their own business and surfing along like everyone else--except nobody told them that they were on the North Shore. In the danger season. So they weren't ready when that twenty-footer up and slammed into them. Now they're paddling around choking and spitting and getting whacked in the temple by pieces of broken board. They're not sure if they're actually still here or if the undertow deposited them in Australia. Mostly they're just glad to be alive.

The wave can be many things, many types of stresses and shocks. In no case is it something people seem to feel was positive or beneficial or wanted in their life. It's always something they're moving on from. I've never had someone talk to me about their divorce the way they talk to me about cutting carbs or bicycling or their Nia practice or other things that people actually do do for their happiness.

I don't see people who made a choice not to 'settle.' I see people who are dealing with circumstances. Just like everyone else.

Even my old friend who ended her own, otherwise happy marriage because she converted to Catholicism and her divorced husband wouldn't get his first marriage annulled--that's as close as I've seen to a "chosen" divorce, and believe me, it had nothing to do with anyone's happiness. My friend thought her marriage was sinful in the eyes of God. Which meant she was a fornicator (which is a mortal sin, remember) and would remain so unless the annullment happened or she got a divorce. She felt as though her back was to the wall. You and I might think that was crazy, but her agonies were real to her.

And her reward for getting through those agonies as best she could was: more agony! Because, near as I can tell, here's what happens when you get a divorce: you have to start over.

You lose all the years you put into the old relationship. You probably have to move. You might have to engage in extended wrangling over custody arrangements. You probably have some wounds to your heart and your pride. You've almost certainly taken a financial hit. You have to think about finding a new partner--or the decision not to.

This is not where a person wants to be in any stage of life. You want to be moving forward, not picking up pieces--and certainly not with the memory of dashed hopes and demolition behind you.

And the kind of person who would be excited about dating again now that she's ten years older and has three kids is the kind of person who would be excited about having a drinking problem because it sounds so cool to go to rehab.

You're right! That person doesn't exist.

I think people who imagine that divorce is an "onward and upward" type of thing either (a) aren't divorced themselves or (b) are twenty-year-olds without kids who lost their minds eight months ago, married a 42-year-old alcoholic, and now they've woken up. For those folks, I'm sure, divorce is about being "unwilling to settle for being unhappy." And more power to them.

For everyone else, I think it's just one more thing to survive.

So there we were at REI.

And I was looking at the deluxe sleeping bags and the hard-cases for your iPod and the tents that appear to actually think for you.

I thought, "If the modern campsite evolves any further, it's going to turn into a house and a yard."

And I thought...DAMN. Yeah. A house and a yard is a campsite. A permanent campsite.

The specific thing that triggered this thought was the small chemical heat pack available for your sleeping bag. It reminded me of hot-water bottles. I thought of cold, primitive houses and people shivering in their beds, glad for their hot-water bottles. Somehow I saw those centuries-old houses as being halfway between a tent and a modern house. And it all became a chain of evolution for me. Houses = evolved campsites.

We don't need to go camping. We are camping. Right here in our houses.

(I realize that that statement misses the point spectacularly. Hey, it's a thought experiment.)

Fortunately my family came and interrupted me right about then. Sometimes I think too much.

People who know me have watched me burrow like an enterprising mouse into every system of thought that I could get my hands on.

I have explained the skandhas to them. There was a time when I knew what it meant to be a pre-millenial dispensationalist.

I've studied the Enneagram. (It's way better than Myers-Briggs imho. Much clearer, more practical and more elegant. YMMV.)

I have read books on clinical narcissism, BPD, neurosis, character disorder, intrapsychic humanism (the fancy name for this stuff--and I think their concept of learned unhappiness explains A LOT).

I have been a vegetarian. I have been a vegan. I was almost a pagan.

When I took the What Color Is Your Personality quiz, I got "green," the spirit who wanders through life with no thought whatever except to grok its is-ness. Another way to put this is "typical artist." (Because of course, we can't keep it to ourselves. We have to share. The battles in the sky! The light within a raindrop! The way he looked at me just now.)

It was only a matter of time before such a person as myself stumbled onto Ayurveda. Imagine my excitement to find a whole new paradigm to master, simple yet deep: the doshas! Imagine my further delight to find that it was a three-based system, just like the Enneagram: there are three doshas!

The doshas refer to a person's constitution. Vata is the "air/space" dosha, pitta is the "fire/heat" dosha, and kapha is the "water/earth" dosha. We each have all three, but in every individual, one or two doshas generally predominate. (There are examples of tri-doshic people, but this is said to be very rare.)

The idea of Ayurveda is to (a) figure out which dosha or doshas predominate within you and then (b) take action to "balance" or support those doshas, mainly by eating certain foods.

This may sound airy-fairy to you, but stop and think: our bodies do literally contain air, water and heat. And most illnesses seem to express imbalances of those forces. Think about edema, inflammation, asthma. An Ayurvedic practitioner would see those ailments as reflecting imbalance in kapha (the water element), pitta (the heat/fire element) and vata (the air/space element) respectively. (Mental/emotional disturbances such as anxiety and insomnia go under vata as well.)

NOTE: THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH DOES NOT, REPEAT NOT, MEAN THAT I THINK YOU SHOULD DROP EVERYTHING AND DO AYURVEDA. I do not mean to endorse it as a way of life for all mankind. Or for you personally. I know nothing about you and what would work for you. That's up to you. I'm just saying: I find the assertions of ayurvedic philosophy congruent to my own understandings of How Things Work.

'Kay? 'Kay. Let's move on.

Ayurveda uses food as a main line of attack against these problems. It classifies all foods into one of six "tastes:" sweet, sour, salty, pungent, astringent and bitter. Ideally, a person should get all six tastes in one meal--but, not necessarily in equal portions. Particularly for those trying to heal a suspected systemic imbalance (which would be pretty much every westerner known to man), the predominant tastes should be those which support the individual's dosha.

Each dosha has three tastes which support it and three which attack it. Vata is helped by sweet, sour and salty tastes but aggravated by pungent, astringent and bitter tastes. Pitta is helped by sweet, astringent and bitter tastes but aggravated by pungent, sour and salty tastes. Kapha is helped by pungent, astringent and bitter tastes but aggravated by sweet, sour and salty tastes.

You probably at this point have a mental image of ancient office workers in a meeting. "Okay, we have to divide up the tastes." "Um...let's give 'sweet' and 'salty' to the vata people." In other words, you're probably thinking this sounds arbitrary.

But it's not. Take astringent foods. What are some of the astringent foods? Legumes, rye, pomegranates, persimmons, red wine and black tea. Hmmm. Why are they astringent? What makes them astringent? Well, explains this site, they have tannins. (Last sentence, second paragraph.)

We look up tannins. Hmmm!! Yeah, tannins do dry things out. And if you look under the "medical uses" section, they're currently being investigated for "antiviral, antibacterial and antiparasitic effects"--which I found rather interesting. Since I was sick this winter, I have been eating, what now? Why yes, split pea soup! And rye wafers! And gallons and gallons of black tea! And smaller but still way-more-than-ever-before portions of red wine! All of which turn out to be astringent, tannin-laden, phenolic foods with anti-everything-infectious properties!

I had never liked the taste of any of those things before, but since late March, I have lurved them with great and primal lurve. Here was my body, vastly smarter than me, disinfecting itself after illness. I had no idea! (Thank god my parents raised me to shut up and go along. They always taught me to listen to my body, to 'hear' my appetite and my tiredness and all those other things. Thank you, guys. Thank you.)

Let's take a look at the Ayurvedic division of the tastes again. Who gets to eat astringent foods? Pitta, oily, hot, and fiery. Kapha, wet and slimy. Makes sense. Who is (ordinarily, when not besieged by infectious agents) supposed to avoid astringent foods? Vata, the 'air' dosha, the one that's already 'dry.'

(Near as I can tell from answering about fifty billion dosha quizzes, I'm a vata--small, restless eyes, delicate bones, prominent joints, and I have a number of 'vata' complaints like insomnia and anxiety.)

So anyhow, this is all very logical, and doesn't involve anything crazy like eating only fruit, so I figured I might as well give it a try. I got an Ayurvedic cookbook out of the library and we'll see how it goes.

Thank you, Mr. Korman, for all the nights in my childhood that my mother and I got to sit in front of the TV and laugh together.

I may be the most extremely lapsed art historian on earth, but it still did my heart good to see this simple yet stirring first line from Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker's UU World article "This Present Paradise:"

"Images of Jesus's Crucifixion did not appear in churches until the tenth century."

In that simple visual, art historical fact lies an ocean of meaning.

In a nutshell: "the early church affirmed life in this world as the place of salvation." It had little interest in the death and/or resurrection of Jesus, but rather, in his worldly teachings such as "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." Images of "paradise" as a happy, bountiful earth predominated. Oddly, the most appropriate expression of this theology can probably be found in a Belinda Carlisle song: "They say in heaven love comes first/We'll make heaven a place on earth/Ooh, heaven is a place on earth."

Well, we always kinda knew the early Christians were the New Agers of their day :)

Sadly, report Brock and Parker, things took a turn for the worse once Christianity found its way to power and the age of empire and forced conversions began. Images of suffering and death began to predominate, and heaven was moved firmly offstage to the hereafter. It was nearly another thousand years before the peaceful, worldly-in-a-good-way strain of Christianity began to reappear. It's still struggling towards the light.

There is definitely a place for the Suffering Christ in all of our hearts--but not as a justification for empire or slavery.

Thank you to Brock and Parker for noticing the visual record, seeing into its implications, and letting it speak, in hopes that paradise will one day seduce humanity's darker dreams.