Savannah Lee

Hi guys. I've been bowled over with emergency deadlines and family doings. I do have some posts in the can, but they're all depressing and I don't want that right now. There's a time to complain that democracy in the age of mass media is an illusion, and there's a time to just shut the hell up. This would be the latter. See you tomorrow.

And I get to sit around asking questions like, "Does Time Run Backward In Other Universes?"

Can you imagine actually getting PAID to think about the things this guy thinks about every day?

Read the article:

--Granted that the universe has been diffusing ever since it began, what explains the fact that it ever needed to diffuse in the first place?

--What makes this seemingly unnatural event (the sudden "togetherness" of the early universe) possible and logical?

--Could it be explained by the existence of parallel universes where time, or process, happens backwards? (Thus making anti-diffusion as natural as diffusion.)

Here's what I would ask him if I could:

--Does this mean there are bloggers at this moment busily back-typing their posts?

--And maybe even speculating about some odd, theoretical other universe where things happen forwards? ("Imagine everything reversed!")

And he'd probably say: Oh, it is so infinitely freakier than that.

Yeah. If I could do math, I would have become a cosmologist.

I like when an article uses a magazine's focus (wine, food, kitchen remodeling) as leverage to talk about something totally different. It's broadening.

There's a clear example of that kind of swerve in this article from Yoga Plus magazine about Sally Jewell Coxe.

Sally Jewell Coxe is the founder of the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, which is devoted to saving these peaceful, gentle animals (it's always the peaceful, gentle animals) from the depredations of man. She also happens to do yoga, making her a suitable profile subject for the magazine...but both she and writer Lorraine Dusky are clearly and rightly far more interested in the plight of our closest living genetic relative. So although we do get testimonials from Coxe as to the importance of yoga in her life, the beating heart of this article belongs to the bonobo.

(Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it's not always the peaceful, gentle animals. We have been just the teensiest bit toxic for the wolves, the sharks and the tigers as well. Okay--it's always the beautiful animals. Mice, cockroaches, pigeons and rats are doin' fine. We're going to end up, I fear, with the wildlife we so richly deserve. The problem is, we're not going to end up with the wildlife the earth deserves. Oh well...)

--Mary Renault's Alexander is a secular Christ figure

--Speaking of Christ: Christ, the cover of Madonna's Hard Candy CD is thick. And I mean with meaning. It's got a message...this being Madonna, a sexual message...for pretty much everyone who walks by. She provides identification/envy for the straight chicks, open legs for the attracted-to-women folks, bondage for the kinksters (the black boxing tape/strap she's pulling on her hand, which also stretches in front of her open mouth--not only furthering the bondage theme but invoking oral sex as well), and an overall attitude of blatant irony for gay men. That is one hard-working picture. And it has deniability! Technically, she's just striking another pose. You could stock this thing at Wal-Mart.

--By the way, that there was more or less an iconographic analysis, essentially the same as what you'd do if confronted in an academic setting with a Giotto. (And now we're three for three on Christ references. I picked this one not because it depicts Christ per se, though, but only because it depicts a single figure, like the image above. Makes comparison easier. To wit: both images are meant to invoke powerful emotions in the viewer and use the vulnerable body of their subject to achieve their impact. But the purpose of each image is of course totally opposite.) (Well, um, actually not, now that I think about it. Both are meant, despite their inherent sadness, to invoke adoration and a kind of ecstasy. But the nature of the adoration, the nature of the ecstasy, and the expected result--purchase versus prayer--that's where the difference lies.)

Anyhow--intellectually conservative academics can't stand the philistine postmodernists wanting to talk about Madonna CD covers in class, but this is exactly why they do--because look what can happen, look how things can bang up against each other in your head in unexpected ways. Culture is not a temple, it's a mosh pit. Well...part of it is a temple. And part of it is a Zen garden, and part of it is a happy park, and part of it is Swan Lake at midnight. But part of it is a mosh pit, where Giotto's Christ and Madonna's candy struggle to save one another.

--You might have noticed that I ran across the Hard Candy image here, at the site All About the Pretty. I've been thinking about her post on this foaming bath oil. Any scented oil that can make people talk about it the way they usually talk about kirtan has got my attention.

--But does that say more about the oil, or the unique psyche of the individual it touched? Different things open the door for different people. In the end, beauty is beauty, whether it's an asana or an eau de parfum.

--Or a near-ancient devotional painting. Or yesterday's wildflowers. Don't you love how they spring up between roads and by overpasses, on those accidental greenspaces no one has figured out how to exploit yet. Or gotten permission to.

--Have a good day.

Don't you feel like you've been there before? Don't you feel like you're standing there now?

It looks like the final expression of the American west in its role as symbol, as metaphor for ceaseless pilgrimage. Pilgrimage with no object but the pilgrimage, where the journey really is the destination; or as Laura Ingalls Wilder's untamed cousin Lena (iirc) says of her family in one of the "Little House" books, "We'll just keep moving west."

Why? Yes.

Or as a Beckettian monk put it in What the Buddha Never Taught, "No reason to go. I'll go."

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Maybe, somehow, despite the evolutionary trail of evidence, we actually do (as I think some have imagined) come from Mars. Its landscape looks familiar because it is our home. And all our ceaseless crossings and re-crossings of this planet are our efforts to return there.

And the American west became the physical symbol it did partly because it so closely resembled that memory we can't quite remember, that past which we think is our future. Or that future which we think is our past.

We'll just keep moving west.

("In the stillness of the morning")

...Yes, fellow Eurythmics geeks, I am indeed referencing "Your Time Will Come," a track from their wildly obscure (at least in the US) first album In The Garden, the title of which, itself, also references "Your Time Will Come." Thus making "Your Time Will Come" essentially the title track. ("In the garden/[in the stillness of the morning]/Your time will come.")

I got "In the Garden" on vinyl in the 80s. Here's what I can tell you: despite promising tracks like "Take Me To Your Heart" and "Never Gonna Cry Again," this thing would have buried any act starting out today. They were only 70% there as far as sound and image and that secret which every band needs to hold at its core. Annie Lennox hadn't fully inhabited her voice yet. No band, as I said, could survive a debut like that now.

Which is horrible, because look what we're losing. We're losing artists, who need time and experimentation to grow into themselves. This can't totally happen in a garage, it needs to be real-world-tested. But I guess that's too troublesome or unpredictable for today's business models.

Okay! On to today's actual post. Which is supposed to be about gardens.

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As we've discussed, I am a cosmologist in my fantasy other life, which means I sit around contemplating the nature of alternate universes for a living.

Since no one in their right mind would ever want to take a break from such speculation, I always put in a couple of hours after dinner, and I do it in the moon garden that takes up the whole fantasy back yard in my fantasy other life.

Of course, when you think about it, my fantasy other life holds hands with my real one. I already spend a lot of time contemplating the nature of alternate universes. Just in a different way.

Still working on the garden, though. Maybe someday.

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My favorite part of that second moon-garden link is "Let the light climb," where they talk about planting white flowers that can grow up along a trellis. They, like the delightful Manolo At Home of the first link, mention sombreuil roses, which, as you can see, are explosively beautiful--and such a delightful challenge to say.

'Sombreuil,' as you might have guessed, is a French word. I couldn't find it in the online French-English dictionary I consulted (one run by British people too, so you know it's serious), so either it's extremely obscure or it was made up just for the rose. But it's full of good solid French parts and functions like any other French word. Basically, you'd say it "som-BROY." That's the basic idea. But there are subtleties. Despite the fact that you need to emphasize the last syllable--French is a very headlong language, often leaning forward into the ends of its words--you have to handle the actual formation of the sound with great delicacy. The "eui" construction is one of the trickiest ones to say right (along with "ueil" and any word that has both "eu" and "ou" in it).

Take 'feuillet' for example. You have to start out like "FOY-yay," but pull back hard, so the middle of it is gutted and it's more like "FEUH-yay" or "FEYY-yay." Now, because of the "r" in 'sombreuil" and because the "euil" is the final sound and thus needs a bit more authority and follow-through, you can't pull back as far as you do in 'feuillet.' But you have to be intending to. If that makes any sense. So it's like "som-BREUHy." (See that little "y" on the end? You gotta hit that. "Som-BREUHyy.")

Sounds like a lot of trouble, doesn't it? It is. French is hard. I find that the mouth has to be almost unpleasantly tense in order to form French words properly.

Now this is completely different from German. German feels fantastic in your mouth. Speaking German is the most fun you can have with your mouth that you don't need to get a room for.

French, by contrast, sounds gorgeous, but does not give the same pleasure when it comes to forming the words. The pleasure in speaking French comes from actually getting it right, from approximating the sound a native speaker can make. The grim effort pays off!

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That must be what attracts people to gardening. All that mulching in the hot sun. The grim effort pays off.

In the garden, your time will come.

I just now googled "Big Brown loses Belmont" and the top hit was this article reported as being from five hours ago. Though wisely titled "Nothing's for sure at Belmont Stakes," it still says, "It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which Big Brown loses today's Belmont Stakes."

Well, he managed. Thoroughly, in fact. He didn't just lose. He completely collapsed.

I hope his jockey and trainer are aware of the wise words of Charles Baudelaire on genius: "Just as the successes of genius are greater than those of other men, so the failures of genius are greater than the failures of other men."

That's a paraphrase, but the idea is clear: when you've got a genius on your hands, you're in for the full ride. Smooth, consistent, predictable success is actually a danger sign of mediocrity. Well, not mediocrity, but...competence, with all its gifts but all its limits as well.

But when there are stunning highs and equally stunning lows, when there are inexplicable blocks and difficulties, when there are riddles of fate, when there are failures greater than the failures of other men, then you just might have a genius on your hands.

Big Brown, in my eyes, proved his greatness today by losing the Belmont every bit as spectacularly and indeed mysteriously as he won the Derby and Preakness.

That mercurial quality--that's the stuff of greatness.

It cuts both ways. It has to. Otherwise it wouldn't be what it is.

Big Brown's connections (his people) shouldn't feel bad. They've got a great horse there. They really do. It's just that that's not the sweetness and light they seemed to feel it should be. They've suffered. They forgot, I'm afraid, that Big Brown has to suffer too.

That voice, that voice, that VOOOOOIIIIIICE!!!!!!!!

Truly one of the great artists of our time.

Here's more! Because we need more. We need more women who eat real food, sing real songs, and date real women. We need more VOICES, in every sense of the word. We need more thick middle fingers in the face of the Man. Fingers of goddam peace, goddam love, and goddam beauty. Fingers of spirit. Hallelujah.

Since posting about sombreuil roses, I've been wandering around just missing French and everything to do with it.

This morning I had one of those "D'oh!" moments.

Given that the family has a resident technophile, we have satellite radio. That means I can listen to French radio! Le rawk! Le rol!

Back in high school, our French teacher sometimes played French popular music for us. I felt like the artists were both trying to copy and yet also trying to rebel against the British/American formula. Rather than being a fruitful sort of tension, it was destructive. In my opinion, it created somewhat watered-down music that lacked a strong sense of its own identity. Sort of Wham! meets Edith Piaf, which actually could have been great (that's what solo George Michael is, after all; listen to "Moment With You"), except in this case the collision brought out the worst rather than the best in each other.

The French music I'm hearing now is a lot more confident. They seem to have decided once and for all to copy the Anglo style rather than rebel--but copy really damn well, to the point where they own it. With that new feeling of authority, French pop's inimitable Frenchness (a certain lightness, and always a more philosophical stance) can speak to foreigners in a whole new way. I think that if they keep going, they'll beat Anglo pop on its own turf.

God, the British will just DIE.

Check out this essay on the perils of multitasking. Basically: multitasking depletes us, and, though we don't realize it, we start getting stupid as a result. Our judgment suffers.

Read the article--researchers have actually measured this. Busy people who don't get recharged start making poor judgments.

In the study, one group was mentally depleted by means of a tricky focusing exercise, then asked to make a choice involving good judgment (correctly assessing which of three apartments would be a better choice to live in given its size and location relative to a theoretical workplace). They flunked abysmally. The other group was mentally depleted, then given a sugared drink to recharge their batteries and put through the same test. They did much better.

(This, by the way, could partly explain our national obsession with sugar. It could be that our insane lust for super-mega sodas and cinnamon buns might be our system's desperate efforts to keep us ahead of our schedules, cognition-wise.)

(If that is the case, then all the exhortations to eat healthy food might just be some kind of nefarious plot to take away from us the one tool that could help us outthink our masters.)

Anyhow. None of this should be particularly surprising: tired, depleted people don't think as well as non-tired, non-depleted people.

The thing is...we're ALL tired, depleted people now. The article asks us to "Imagine [emphasis mine] that you are trying to simultaneously quit smoking, hold your temper with your foolish boss, plan a wedding and finish a complex deadline project while helping your kid with his algebra."

Imagine!? IMAGINE!? Honey.

You forgot "And get dinner on the table and run some errands while straightening up the house, changing Grandma's colostomy bag, and doing leg lifts," because, of course, it is NEVER EVER EVER TRUE that we "don't have time" to work out. That is JUST AN EXCUSE.

Sigh.

I'm going to go eat some fruit now (sugar!). Because I think I need it.

Like Phyllis Chesler, I am deeply grieved to read of Rebecca Walker's public and, thus far, one-sided argument with her mother Alice ("The Color Purple").

Rebecca Walker feels fundamentally wronged by Alice Walker and has decided to return the favor.

As a daughter and a mother myself, I feel hurt to see such a key, intimate relationship go wrong--to see a chain shattered.

But even more, it hurts to see confession happen in what looks an awful lot like the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong way. It hurts to see the improper use of pain.

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I don't know what's driving Rebecca Walker. I do know, having lived with a severely damaged person and his silences, that I don't feel comfortable with people who are eager to tell strangers all about the worst things that happened to them.

(ED. What I mean by that is: My experience, and not just with this one family member, is that people with serious damage tend to want to protect it rather than expose it. Someone who chooses to publicly describe what people did to him/her, and particularly to describe in detail how it made him/her feel, is someone in a very different place from the hurt people I've known. Each of whom, I can tell you right now, would have "rubbed shit in their hair and run naked down Seventh Avenue"--in Anthony Bourdain's memorable words--before they'd do that. It's something that I don't understand.)

But that is neither here nor there.

In going public with her pain through a tell-all memoir, Rebecca Walker did not, in my opinion, just lash out at her mother. In my opinion, she also lashed out at herself. She set herself up to be dragged into what Jonathan Shay ("Achilles in Vietnam") calls a "hierarchy of suffering."

That's when somebody who had it worse than you decides to pull victim rank on you.

(Jonathan Shay rightly decries the hierarchy of suffering, pointing out that everyone's pain is their own and cannot be compared to anyone else's. I agree with that. But right now it's still an ideal. Hierarchies of suffering are still widely accepted in our world, and Rebecca Walker...well, walked...right into them.)

Then there's the karma of it. In her Salon article, Phyllis Chesler calls it "dangerous" to "[expose] your mother's nakedness in public." Even if your mother exposed your nakedness in public, two wounds don't make a healing.

Still, it would be a lonelier world if the wounded didn't speak.

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And this is why God invented fiction. He invented it for the proper use of pain.

Anne Lamott once famously said she believes in writing for revenge--but with a veil. She used the example of a student whose mother used to deliberately burn his hand on the stove. She had him fictionalize her [ED.: And I mean thoroughly--no romans-a-clef], then told him to cry, havoc! and let slip the dogs of war.

Why is that first step important?

It's important because your pain is bigger than you.

Your pain doesn't even belong to you. It belongs to the pain that generated it and to the pain you yourself, against your own will (or with your complicit denial) will generate. It belongs to the whole stinking fucking world; it belongs to that person right now who is trying so hard not to cry.

May we all make our pain into a gift for them.

Washed of night but not yet filled with day, the sky is colorless against the trees.

"Don't draw the objects," she taught me, "but the spaces in between them."

The other teacher, watching the dancers, said "It's not the moves. It's what happens in between them."

The man in the article wrote, "Point yourself towards the spaces in between your breaths."

The man by the piano said, "She can hear the silences in between the notes."

Washed of night but not yet filled with day.

A couple of posts ago, I blogged about the silences of pain in people I had known, contrasted with one writer's seeming need to display her wounds before the world.

And along comes an article about exactly that subject: Theodore Dalrymple's "The Pains of Memory," about an old professor and her lifetime of protective silence.

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There was a Damage Summit one time in my kitchen: my family member and a friend. In the world's unspoken 'hierarchy of suffering' (see other post), those two could pull victim rank on probably about 85% of the postwar industrialized world.

The friend was talking about a job interview he'd recently had.

"The interviewer," he said, "asked me to describe the worst thing that had ever happened to me."

The cats arched their backs and swiveled their ears. The cracked old linoleum itself seemed to send a ripple across the segmented pattern which would resemble a bug's eye if you pulled back far enough.

The friend leveled his gaze across his listeners, the animals with their instincts, the room with its secret eye, me with my willingness to respect what I did not understand.

But most of all, the one sitting across from him, the one who would hear into his next words so completely that their brevity would be enough and enough and more than enough. The one who would therefore need to ask no questions, neither for clarification nor sympathy nor the healing which neither one of them believed in; the one with whom it was therefore safe to say:

"So I told him."

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"And he said, 'I'm sorry I asked.'

"I said, 'You should be. Think about it next time.'"

That's all the book that he would ever write.

For what it's worth, I'd just like to mention one of those facts which is so obvious that most of the time we can't even see it, like a tumor that's too big for the scanners:

The Man is dragging us back to the 1200s.

Not just by redistributing income upward, sending all our decent jobs overseas, let's just say failing to facilitate union membership and living wage campaigns, cutting education funding everywhere, buying up all the pretty (and gating us off from it), and distracting us with foreign wars, but by working us so long and hard that we turn stupid.

(I blogged about that the other day. The mental effort of multitasking exhausts us to the point where we start making objectively poor choices without being able to realize it.)

The end of that induced-stupidity article says, "Something...probably has to give. It's just a matter of what."

He was talking about the lives of individuals, but the lives of individuals are the life of this country.

I'm going to turn this over to someone who saw that very plainly, in fact who saw it so plainly and horribly that his final tragic act must have been a part of that cursed vision. He warned us over and over again what he saw, but we kept thinking he was just writing pop songs.

From that unacknowledged prophet, Michael Hutchence:

"Here comes the world with a look in its eye/Future uncertain, but certainly slight/Look at the faces, listen to the bells/It's hard to believe we need a place called hell."

Or as he put it in a different song: "Whether it's God or a bomb, it's just the same, and it's only fear under another name."

Look. Look at that.

Then at this again (last paragraph): "Maybe we're all too busy at work to notice what's happening to us or too nervous about the economic downturn to protest."

Do you see?

The other day was very odd. Somehow I couldn't type nearly as fast as usual, and made three times the mistakes. Getting up out of chairs was like climbing a mountain. In everything I did, I felt like I was swimming through an ocean no one else could see.

And I was thirsty. So, so thirsty.

After sleeping seventeen and a half hours the next night, I finally figured out that I had something.

Acute exhaustion? An otherwise asymptomatic virus of some kind? A cold or flu or infection which has yet to hit me full force? (Many infections begin with a period of intense exhaustion, followed only days later by the actual symptoms.)

This has happened before. Very often, in fact, when I'm coming down with something, I don't not-feel-good. No, that would be too simple. I just start to have great difficulty mustering myself through my normal activities, while being totally unable to figure out what's going on.

Sigh.

...Or, Father's Day chez nous.

We were having tea while the cookies baked. Our resident nine-year-old was spreading boursin on some leftover baguette. It all just sounds painfully civilized, doesn't it?

Ah, but if you pulled the camera of your eye back from the table, you'd see the boxes on the floor, the junkmail shred pile from 2003, and...

...the head of our household, our breadwinner, our figure of traditional masculine gravitas and probity, shirtless and singing his own personal version of the Beatles' "Let It Be:"

"Let me pee, let me pee

Let me pee, let me pee

Allow my micturition

Let me pee"

"THANK youuuuu," said our resident nine-year-old, taking herself and her leftover baguette elsewhere.

My thoroughly aggrieved husband spread his bare arms. "Come on, it's got 'micturition' in it! It's an intellectual pee joke! How many intellectual pee jokes are you going to hear in your life?"

I know a question for the ages when I hear one.

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Here's to the dads. Who sheltered us, who by and large provided for us, who got up at 1am when we were throwing up, and who generally managed not to shoot our boyfriends in the face (if we were girls), exert caveman law on our impressionable girlfriends (if we were guys), or freak out beyond repair (if we were gay).

And who, if we were very lucky, told us pee jokes that were overflowing with four-syllable words, cultural references, and just wave after wave of significance.

Thanks guys.

It would appear that people are beginning, slowly, haltingly, to realize that William Shatner won his Emmys for a reason.

The standard line used to be that Shatner 'couldn't act.' If you thought otherwise, you were wise to keep it to yourself.

My dad taught acting. Sometimes did it himself.

So I grew up with it all. "Play against the dominant emotion." "Interiorize." "You're never talking to the other character, you're always talking to the audience." A thousand other teachings that wouldn't even make sense for me to repeat because they were in the moment. ("Turn just a little bit. There. Yes.") I know what those teachings are aiming at, the liberation, the moment when an actor is most in control and most in abandon. And I know that moment when I see it. I grew up watching actors work, from amateurs to students to professionals.

I know my shit here.

And I never for one minute questioned William Shatner's chops when I first started watching "Star Trek" in reruns as a child.

The article above says "This is not a man known for subtlety, but he should be." I about had an aneurysm. That one gets the "no shit" of the ages. Does anyone remember that bit of business in "Wrath of Khan" where he realizes his glasses are cracked, and tosses them aside? Hel...LOOOOO. He underplayed that thing to the point of throwing it away, and it's only the central defining moment of the entire film. (One of the great crimes of Americans towards their own movies is they think only Frenchmen make the kind of film where its whole meaning is that the glasses are cracked. Yeah, no, we do that too. It's just we do it in science fiction movies with explosions.)

And one of the great crimes of Americans towards their own actors (and yes, I know Shatner is Canadian, eh) is to squelch and suppress our operatic talents, seeking to deny them their full range, their size, their scope...the room they need to move, the scale they need to do their full work. Which, thank you, includes subtlety. Much more so than the tinny little talents who merely condense.

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The people who thought Shatner couldn't act either weren't paying attention, didn't understand what they were looking at--or were embarrassed and ashamed that a guy in a space uniform could make them feel.

Now that he's put on a suit and started playing a lawyer, it's somehow more okay to see what we see when we watch him.

Well, that's fine. My hat is off to the king of the American third act. Lord knows we need one now.

This is one of the most original pop observations I have ever run across. Michael Dirda, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes of a certain well-known character:

“He lives beyond good and evil, outside the confining strictures of the biblical commandments. Like the medieval figure called Vice or the Renaissance Lord of Misrule, [this figure] turns the world upside down. He sounds an ‘everlasting no’ to the smugly arrogant and powerful, cocks a snook, as the British say, at those full of messianic ardor and contempt for ordinary human beings. …Only when it’s too late do [these villains] realize that [he] isn’t just an [ordinary enemy]…; he is Siva, destroyer of worlds, bringer of chaos.”

Who is Dirda talking about?

James Bond.

Isn’t that brilliant? It explains everything! He is Shiva.

I’d never been particularly interested in James Bond, although I made sure my husband received the DVD of “Casino Royale” for Christmas—all out of sheer altruism, of course, with the prospect of getting to watch Daniel Craig having absolutely nothing to do with it.

(Yeah, no, if you hit those links expecting the Speedo pics, I'm sorry. See, I respect Mr. Craig as an actor, and plus, it's really all about the face for me anyhow. Well, and the hands, but try finding a still of Daniel Craig's or Harrison Ford's mitts.)

Okay! James Bond. Right.

Ordinarily, I’m a Quiller girl. Though Quiller and Bond share a deep fear and mistrust of being psychologized, they are otherwise complete opposites. The difference is best summed up with the fact that Quiller eschews guns, whereas James Bond IS a gun. (Quiller disdains guns as props; if Bond were to address this issue, he’d no doubt raise an eyebrow and say “Precisely.” And the two ships would majestically pass each other in the night.)

James Bond has gadgets. Quiller has brains. Bond has martinis; Quiller has years of arduous training in martial arts and vaguely yogic mind-body disciplines. Bond works in casinos and estates; Quiller in grubby safehouses and crushingly cold wildernesses.

Though the Quiller series became baroque, as they all do, the hardscrabble espion at its core won my heart in a way that James Bond never could. Despite his nondescript appearance, Quiller is warm and R/romantic (both capital-r Romantic AND small-r romantic) in ways that James Bond was never meant to be. (In “Casino Royale,” you can hear the seams creaking in dangerous ways as they ask us to believe that Bond is in love, like actual love, with Vesper Whateverthehell.)

Of course, Quiller would never fall in love like that either; he resolutely projects his ardor onto the bleakness of the landscape, the loneliness of fate, and death itself. The latter category extends to women who are dying, or so fleeting that they might as well be. His women, though idealized, are not “pornulated,” in Twisty’s inimitable phrasing. At least not compared to creatures named Pussy Galore.

So I always preferred Quiller. But now, with that one sentence by Michael Dirda, I see that I was judging Bond by the wrong yardstick. “He is Siva, destroyer of worlds, bringer of chaos.” He is Stormbringer.

Of course he’s a prince to Quiller’s ruffian. Quiller is mortal. Bond is god.

When it comes to makeup, I prefer bare skin.

I prefer it for precisely the reason many women fear and abhor it: the variations in its tone.

Yeah—that stuff you’re trying to “even out”? That is what is interesting about your faces, ladies. You know what makes a great painting? Part of it is the amount of color an artist can pack into a moment, often in ways you don't even perceive. You just think "what a gorgeous red," without even seeing that it's fifteen different kinds of red plus threads of brown, silver, green, ochre, and god knows what all.

Well, our natural faces do that all on their own. They have a density and subtlety of color that would make Picasso impale himself on his brush. The play of our skin tone cannot be approached by any makeup. Even if a bare face is not as ‘pretty’ as a made-up face, it is always more beautiful. Take an art appreciation class—you will learn in a hurry that beautiful is the direct opposite of perfect.

In fact, if we didn't have our collective dominant-culture head shoved so far up our collective dominant-culture ass, we would think that old women with trowel-deep wrinkles, age spots and spider veins on their faces were the most beautiful women of all.

Why?

Because THERE IS SO MUCH MORE FOR THE EYE TO SEE. If an old woman's face was presented as a landscape portrait, we'd follow each line in it like pilgrims follow a riverbed. We'd gasp at the delicacy of its subterranean red threads, trailing off like distant branches on a winter sky. We'd be endlessly fascinated by the evolutions and revolutions of tone, so subtle, across the rough grain of her skin.

The smoothness of youth is a LACK. An ABSENCE. Makeup, properly understood, is an attempt to MAKE UP FOR THE LACK on younger peoples' faces by GIVING US SOMETHING TO LOOK AT.

But then, right when peoples' faces finally become interesting on their own, we recoil. In this specific arena and this one alone, we break the true rules of beauty for our eye.

There are logical reasons for this; youth=health and vitality and all. It's fresh milk.

But age--and rosacea and laugh lines and crow's feet and "uneven skin tone" and all the rest of it--is what actually gives us something to look at. Age is art.

Imperfection, roughness, crackedness, unevenness, softness, pittedness, complexity, multifariousness, depth, tension, breakage, STRUGGLE, is art.

Age is art.

Though I wish she hadn't made that detour through the thickets of the 2008 presidential campaign, Lillian Rubin's speech at this year's UC-Berkeley Sociology Commencement is the one I wish I'd heard at my own commencement.

Rubin manages to be optimistic without denying reality, a trap into which almost all other commencement speeches fall.

Notable recent examples: J.K. Rowling's sprawling FAILURE-GOOD-EMPATHY-BETTER thing at Harvard and Barack Obama's effort to make us feel like People Have The Power when his own example actually proves the opposite.

Want details on that one? I got 'em for ya.

Obama said:

"We are a people whose destiny has never been written for us, but by us – by generations of men and women, young and old, who have always believed that their story and the American story are not separate, but shared."

He then goes on to 'prove' this with the example of his community organizing job in Chicago. People! Together! Making a difference! Making the country up as it goes along!

But wait.

Read the fine print.

Obama worked in "neighborhoods that had been devastated by steel plant closings."

Devastated by what now? That would be the arbitrary and self-serving act of a larger and more powerful entity over which these neighborhoods quite obviously had zero control.

If people REALLY had power, they would have just stopped the plants from closing in the first place. Or demanded and been assigned new jobs in the same area at the same level of income and benefits.

Then they would not have needed organizers to come in and start cleaning up the mess. OBAMA'S KEY CREDENTIAL CONSTITUTES THE REFUTATION OF HIS PREMISE that Americans co-create their national destiny. As the "steel plant closings" example illustrates, we barely even create our private destinies. We just roll with the punches. We call that "taking control" because it makes us feel better.

Rowling feeds the same fantasy:

"The way you vote, the way you live...the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders."

If that was even halfway true, there never would have been an Iraq War. Why do commencement speakers keep churning out this feel-good crap?

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Brad Pitt once referred to himself as having been "lottery lucky" in life. Once again, our much-maligned entertainment stars prove they are far smarter and more in touch with reality than our politicians and, apparently, our authors. They may act out, but consider the possibility that they do so because they are LESS narcissistically deluded than others, not more. You just might start screaming at people about water bottles too if you really knew, as Patrick Swayze put it in "Dirty Dancing," that you were "balancing on [nothing]."

Obama and Rowling do not seem fully aware that, like Pitt, they won a certain kind of lottery. From the way they speak, it seems like they're still inside their own experience in a way that this much-ridiculed ex-hunk is not. (And he's less educated than them! Shame. Shame.)

Well, Lillian Rubin gave a Brad Pitt speech. She fully acknowledged the power of forces beyond our control in all of our lives. (And I mean she REALLY did, in detail, not like Rowling's knee-jerk acknowledgment of "the caprices of Fate.") This contexts her paeans to collective action, which were always specific and historically grounded, making them meaningful rather than fanciful.

And then, she went on to give substance, real substance:

"Stop and think about what it means that in the last century we've gained 30 years of life—an increase that's greater than in all the preceding 5,000 years. That's more than a cold statistic. It adds up to a whole new stage of life, one that never existed before. ...This single demographic fact ricochets around our society like a shot fired in an echo chamber...Everything changes when we live so long. The question is not just when we die, but how we live..."

What more could any graduate ask for than a commencement speech that makes them do more of the only thing that offers any hope--thinking?

I've been looking beyond red lipstick, at last. Do you think lipstick is red or nothing? I used to, too. But I've been reading books like Victoria Jackson's "Make Up Your Life" and Bobbi Brown's "Bobbi Brown Beauty." They expanded my horizons.

At first, I tried a brown. I got Chocolate Truffle from L'Oreal. I do like dark, dramatic lipsticks...in theory. I've never been able to get them to work on me. Chocolate Truffle was no exception. It looked like dirt on me.

So I moved over to the naturals and got Silk. It matched my lips exactly--when I asked my husband if he liked my new lipstick, he said "What lipstick?" Even when he peered in close, he couldn't see it.

That's good, in a way, but the color didn't do anything for me, it didn't give any lift or light or life. I kept searching.

I bought Golden Splendor. It did the whole lift/light/life thing, but was too...well...golden. It looked a bit brassy on me.

Then I tried Revlon's Chocolate Velvet. Chocolate Velvet was my last gasp as far as a dark-and-dramatic. It wasn't bad, for once--but it wasn't good. I had to concede that the Golden Splendor type of lipstick was just better for me. I needed something light and brightening, just without the extra edge.

In search of that, I decided to cross the final frontier and go for a peach tone. I got Revlon's Apricot Fantasy.

Like Golden Splendor, it was a bit too loud around the edges on me, but more vital and uplifting in the center than anything else I'd tried. I knew that I was on the right track at last.

So last night, I went for it. I went to Target and got a fistful of peachy lipsticks: Revlon's Baby Peach, Rimmel's Crush, and NYC's Rose Gold.

I also took one last stab at a Golden Splendor-style yellow, going for the paleness without the brassy edge, and got Rimmel's Frosted.

So here's the verdict:

I liked Frosted, but it was too shiny. Crush, I think, is my favorite color, and plus, the Rimmels smell fantastic. But Revlon's Baby Peach feels the best. And has, perhaps, a depth that Crush lacks.

I haven't tried the Rose Gold yet.

I'll be playing with these puppies for a while to see what has legs. I might get a lip brush and blend two or more of the colors on my lips. One of these days I want to try MAC's Tanarama.

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Next I think I'm going to blog about perfume. My hold on Perfumes: The Guide came in, and it was everything I hoped it would be and more. I'm desperately hoping to try out White Linen, 31 Rue Cambon, Iris Silver Mist, Dune, Black, Amouage, and L'Air Du Desert Marocain. I gather from the reviews that some of these fabulously-named creatures have adventures and some travel inward; some are happy and some are sad. Each one promises to be a universe as separate and mysterious as a psyche. I can't wait to discover them.

I think perfumes may be the last true novels left.

I try to blog ahead; I really try. Sometimes I succeed. More often, though, what I've got is five or six drafts that trail along towards completion day by day, interlaced with posts born on the spot. It usually takes me a couple of hours per day to get it done. Some days, I just don't have those hours. This would be one of them.

So, I will see you later today or tomorrow.

In what seems like another life, I subscribed to Vegetarian Times magazine, and I remember them as having a recipe for sukiyaki which describes it as "a little of everything," a kind of Japanese chili.

Herewith, a little of everything:

--So Vanity Fair does this "Proust questionnaire" thing, where they give a set series of questions to various celebrities. Emma Thompson's is delightful--it somehow makes you feel exactly like you're watching her in a movie. It conveys her onscreen essence--wry, serious, erudite, a great sense of "the human adventure."

--That phrase, "the human adventure," is a George Carlin phrase, as in "I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago." I guess you could say that, yesterday, the human adventure returned the favor. Mr. Carlin has, I am sure without regrets, left the building. We will miss him like we miss Kurt Vonnegut.

--We have caught evolution in the act.

--You can co-host a party (point 2, "Two heads are better than one"). This is one of those incredibly obvious things that I had just never considered before. If you have to have a party, you can throw it with a friend! That makes it sound so much less horrific! The next time I have a nightmare that I have to host a party, I can imagine teaming up with my darling friend Louisa.

--Here's Mark Simpson wittily skewering psychobiology on "gay brains." Here's more.

--In full in-your-face mode, Rick Shenkman here confronts the bitter harvest of civil ignorance in this country. You know the drill--"Only two in 10 know we have 100 U.S. Senators. Only four in 10 know we have three branches of government and can name them." That's from the post "The Dumbing Down of Voters," which I don't seem to be able to link directly to.

As he puts it, "The harsh truth is that ignorant voters are sitting ducks for wily politicians."

But I don't blame voters for this. Look at all the other crap we have to stay on top of--jobs with punishingly long hours, extended families, our health (which we are all supposed to "take control" of and be endlessly informed about), our money (ditto), our houses (yep), technology. If schools aren't going to be All Civics All The Time, relentlessly pounding it into our heads hour after hour and day after day how this works and why it matters (which will never happen because telling anything like the truth about that stuff would offend all Republicans everywhere), then voter ignorance is the inevitable outcome.

In one of the Star Wars prequels, Natalie Portman's Padme Amidala mourns, "This is how liberty dies--to the sound of thunderous applause." No, THIS is how liberty dies--unintentionally trampled underfoot as we drag our 200-pound lives towards "that undiscovered country."

--I should end with something cheerful.

--Yes I should.

--Um...

--Yay! Here's Anthony Bourdain's blog! Dyspeptic yet cheery. A perfect blend.

Because I found this (George Carlin's last interview, and well worth reading), I found this.

The essay, by Peter Kramer, is about a study which was done on mice. (Of course. It's always mice. One day they're going to rise up and put us in the mazes.) The researchers took a bunch of small mice and exposed them to intimidation at the hands paws of bigger mice. Then the bastards made the victims live next to the perpetrators, presumably so that their tiny mouse brains will not forget what happened to them.

The essay tells us that this kind of thing usually changes a mouse's life. The traumatized rodents shrink from everyone, even their former friends. And this is not just for show. The mice are literally scarred--just where you can't see. Certain genes in their brains change form, which then replace themselves with other changed genes. "The early experience appears to mark the brain forever," writes Kramer.

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Except there are always a few mice who don't get the message. They bounce back. They exhibit "resilience."

Under any other circumstances, resilience would be a horrible trait--people would stick their hand in the fire a second, third, fifth, twentieth time.

But the social world isn't a fire. Well, maybe it is. Yes, it is. But even so, the rules are different. Here, it is actually a good idea to keep breezing forward, confident and equal, even if your experience has taught you otherwise. We admiringly call the individuals who do this "resilient."

So the researchers in this essay took the resilient mice and did a bunch of tests on their brains to try to figure out what made them impervious to reality resilient.

If I am understanding this part of the essay correctly, they found something ("HDAC inhibitors"), isolated it in the lab, and "infused" the brains of traumatized mice with it.

The traumatized mice healed.

Their genes changed back to normal and they became "ordinarily bold" again.

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Kramer writes, "The research...points toward a medically exciting, if ethically complex, future in which traumatized people might be restored to the neurobiological state of their resilient twins."

There's little doubt in my mind that Kramer wants that future. And you know, so do I. If "social harm" (as he puts it) really does "reach inside the brain and scar the gene within the nerve cell," then that's a physical injury, and no one should have to live with that any more than they should have to live with an untreated broken leg.

I think, in the past, we've romanticized injuries to the emotions because we've had no other choice. But if injuries to the soul leave traces in the body which then cause further problems for the soul...and we can identify that and maybe even someday do something about it...then what are we waiting for?

I'm actually just now able to sit down and blog today. I will try to post something in the next few hours.

(NOTE: Whereas I am still committed to eating Food That Is Too Good For You To Taste Good, there are moments in every woman's life when it is necessary to sit down and eat too many cookies. I am having one of those moments.)

...in contemplation of Perfumes: The Guide. I love this book. It brings me joy. It brings me utter joy to see the passion of these two critics who have smelled, written about, argued about, re-smelled, re-written about, argued about some more, and had so much fun with so many perfumes.

I want to experience as many of their 5-star perfumes as I can, just to see if I smell what they smell.

Which is a whole adventure in itself. On page 48, the authors tackle the question "How can we judge perfume if we all smell things differently?"

Their answer:

"Mostly, we don't smell things differently--we interpret and describe them differently. ...For the most part, the raw data you get are mostly the same as everyone else's, but the interpretations your mind makes (would you describe it as nice? nasty? a bit like soap? lemons? candy? floor wax?) may make it seem otherwise."

This is like Hawaiian names.

Two Hawaiian families can give their children the exact same name...yet within each family, that name has a different meaning.

No lie, as they say in that beautiful land.

Why is this? Because the Hawaiian language is extraordinarily sensitive to nuance and connotation. A word like "ku" can mean standing, surveying, seeing far...and because leaders often do those things, "ku" can also mean chiefly, princely, uplifted...and because those are good things to be, "ku" can also mean approved, acceptable, chosen.

In everyday language, things get boiled down a little more. But with names, which are the realm of poetry, all those meanings come into play, so each family picks the connotation that's most meaningful to them. So the exact same name can have very different meanings to different families.

And so, just as perfumes are like Hawaiian names...Hawaiian names are like perfumes. We all smell the same things, but the meaning of those scents, the experience of them, is different for everyone.

So when Tania Sanchez writes, of L'Air du Desert Marocain, "Wear this fragrance and feel the cloudless sky rush far away above you," she may be going someplace I can't follow. For me, if I'm ever lucky enough to spray some on my wrist, it might be a journey down into the earth like the ripples from the heartbeat of a doe. I don't know.

But I do know, from the way it moved her, that it will be something. Something that defies our usual perception of time, something that challenges our usual priorities.

Like an abstract art.

Turin and Sanchez argue mightily that perfume is art; I hope that somewhere in their book (I read scattershot and sideways, so I haven't covered all of it yet), they clarify that perfume is an abstract art.

That's how it can communicate everything Turin and Sanchez say it can, that's how it can make you "feel the cloudless sky rush far away above you." The same way this does. (That's a Miro, "Bleu II.")

I don't know if that particular perfume will do that for me...but I know one of 'em will. Just gotta find it.

Heh. Scent pilgrims.

Because this works.

Yeah, it's only one little village. But the world could do this.

And maybe even in time to do some good.

Fingers crossed, everyone.

You should have seen my husband's face last night when I waved the sample card of Dior's Dune in front of him.

I mean seriously. It was a look of horror. I almost returned the perfume.

My daughter, however, begged me. She had loved it at first sniff. Quite unlike Turin and Sanchez, who see it as "a strong contender for Bleakest Beauty in all of perfumery," a "disenchanted...gem" and "unsmiling from top to bottom," she was smiling like she hadn't all day. She seemed to feel that Dune was a secret message from an even-more-secret source, the details of which she would not divulge except for her glow.

At the time, I was not entirely sure why this would be so. In his writeup of Dune, Luca Turin says that it's "flesh-toned in the creepy way of artificial limbs." Unfortunately, I could smell exactly what he meant. Yikes. I was seriously nervous about whether I would be able to live with this thing. Especially given the price tag (generously footed, by the way, by a visiting relative who was in a gift-giving mood). And then there was my poor husband to consider.

Really, I told my girl, we'd better bring it back.

She was horrified. No!! No, this was the most wonderful perfume she'd ever smelled! (And we have not one but two baskets of samples in our house.)

So, since my dear one had manfully said "I don't care what you smell like," I brought Bleak Beauty home.

And my daughter was right.

Maybe the sample bottle they had was old or had been open too long. Maybe it's just different on skin versus paper (and I mean really different). Whatever, I smell all of the good and none of the bad. Or the bad has been transformed by my faith. Or was all just a misunderstanding.

The beautiful bottle now sits proudly by a homeless CD and a dirty wine glass (something about the way the dregs have crusted fascinates me) on my desk. Front and center in my world.

Along with my little girl, who is wearing it. And smiling.

Intrepid Slate writer Emily Yoffe just did two weeks in a day care center to see if she could stand up to the punishment of being a childcare worker. Then she discussed her experience here.

I started writing a post about this, and before I knew it, that post was longer than any post has ever been in the history of blogging. So I broke it up into four chunks, most of which consider the vexed intersection of "meniality" and childcare.

It seems to be taken for granted that childcare is "low-level" work. Here's how the thinking goes: You don't need an engineering degree to change a diaper, or a psychology degree to comfort a crying toddler (although it's entirely possible you might need a psychology degree to comfort a crying toddler well, i.e. with a real understanding of the often not-at-all-obvious aspects of his developmental stage), so it must be a waste of time for anyone with brains. (This is the whole "you're wasting your education" meme.)

Therefore, proceeds this shining piece of "logic," childcare should be fobbed off on others (who we CLAIM deserve respect, but who somehow, oh-so-curiously, do not feel like they actually get any from us) while we go off and "use our minds."

Ahem.

If you go eye-to-eye with a baby, with its curiosity, its delight, its striving, and you still think it's the functional equivalent of a vegetative nursing home patient (only easier to put in the stroller) (and by no means am I suggesting that taking care of a vegetative nursing home patient does not require brains or insight--I'm talking metaphor here)...then you better take another look at who's "low-level." Hint: It just might be you.

(DISCLAIMER: The above DOES NOT MEAN I think everyone should stay at home with their babies. Obviously, it is not the right choice for everyone. It is not even, unfortunately, a possible choice for everyone, whether they want it to be or not. Nor do I think taking care of a baby or small child is fun and games. It's not. But: I think people who see it as "menial"--see below--have missed the point so badly that they should look into repeating sixth grade. Onward:)

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In that Yoffe discussion, scroll down to the comment from "Maryland," the self-described mother of a four-month-old.

Maryland announces her discovery that "the bulk of the tasks involved in caring for him are entirely menial, requiring not one jot of education or training, just common sense, endurance and love."

As I'm sure is already abundantly clear, I am never in a forgiving mood for comments like this.

Maryland, here's the deal:

1) That statement makes you come off as uninformed. Seriously.

Do you know anything about babies' brains?

Do you realize that, every time you speak to your baby, his brain is picking out patterns in your speech that will help him learn language?

That every time you engage his eyes, you're pre-socializing him and forging his understanding of relationships?

That every time you answer his cries, you're teaching him how to trust the world?

That every time you cuddle him and tell him you love him, you're increasing the love in his own heart?

That every time you take that extra minute to grin with him, to encourage his delight, you're teaching him how to be happy?

That every time he waves his little arms, he's strengthening himself and increasing his motor control?

That every time he touches or grips or tastes something, he's doing science?

Your baby's existence is one of maximum stakes and heroic, determined effort. Just because he does most of it while gurgling doesn't mean it isn't serious. A lot of stuff is happening in your baby's mind, body and emotions every second. Impressions are being formed that will never be un-formed. Babies imprint everything, whether you're aware of it or not.

What you do for your son may well be simple. But it is by no means simplistic. If you knew the significance of your interactions with him, I bet you wouldn't find them so "menial."

2) And even if they were...

'JUST common sense, endurance and love'? JUST!? JUST!?!!

Fortunately, Emily Yoffe is equal to the challenge Maryland presents.

In her genteel, ladylike reply to Maryland, Yoffe says:

"Common sense, endurance and love are [indeed] the hallmark qualities of a good day care worker. And you're right, those aren't necessarily the qualities of highly educated professionals."

HA! Thank you, Emily.

Although, I will say, they are the qualities of good highly educated professionals.

More "meniality" tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. Soon.

Yesterday, we began my complete obsession with response to the vague yet pervasive meme out there that childcare is "low-level" work unworthy of a higher degree (or them what possess 'em). So unworthy, in fact, that if you choose to do it, you are "wasting your education" and practically committing crimes of omission against humanity.

This entire field of dangerous misconception was crystallized for me by a comment I read out there on Teh Intarwebs which said that childcare was "entirely menial." This comment was by someone calling herself Maryland, who participated in a Q&A conducted by Slate's Emily Yoffe regarding her recent foray into day care work.

In my first post, I argued against Maryland's point on the grounds that every interaction you have with a baby is crucially important because your baby's brain is forming. Every caregiving action, therefore, has a significance beyond what it seems on the surface.

In other words, I basically argued that childcare only looks simple to the ignorant.

Today, let's slice what Maryland said another way.

Granted that everything you do for a baby has an invisible significance that renders each task worthy of being approached the way Thomas Keller approaches cooking. This does not change the fact that most of the tasks are repetitive. Which I'm sure was at the root of much of Maryland's complaints.

So let's look at that.

First, let's note that in that admiring article about Thomas Keller above, he is praised for choosing a profession where the "toil [of its members] is rarely applauded, [but] they live vicariously through [the] enjoyment that they create for others."

Um, sound like any other job you've heard of? Makes you wonder where the magazine covers for SAHMs and childcare workers are, doesn't it?

Just to widen the double standard to a Grand Canyon-level chasm...do you know what makes Keller's achievement in his glamorous field so exciting? It's a certain quality that he brings to his cooking.

What is that quality?

(Fifth paragraph, now.)

"Repetition."

Yep. Thomas Keller is teh awesome because he is repetitive. Because he executes the same task the same way (perfectly) every time, over and over again. All day. For a living.

How come that's great for a chef, but a source of stigma for childcare workers?

I mean, if cooking agnolotti repetitively is all that, then meeting the needs of a little human being repetitively should be:

ALL THAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT.

Right? I mean, if we honor the making of a perfect plate of food, we should H.O.N.O.R. with Oak-Leaf Cluster the nurturing of a little soul.

The problem is not with childcare. The problem is with how we see it.

...More tomorrow, or soon in any event...

(1) We all know, or think we know, that portion sizes at restaurants have drifted out of control in recent years. But do we understand HOW out of control it's gone?

Look at this set of antique Coke tumblers. If you click on the "details" button, it will take you to a page which informs you that these "drug store soda fountain glasses" from the 1950s hold SIX OUNCES of liquid.

I don't think, in the United States today, that you can buy a six-ounce drink in a restaurant.

This is on my mind because my husband and I were watching TV one night and there was yet another show on Food Network propping diners. And the plates they were carrying by...I looked at my husband and said "This is beyond indulgent. This is beyond excessive. This is clinically disturbed." The portions were that huge.

Dutifully googling "pictures of giant restaurant portions," I found this guide to "eight purveyors of really giant eats."

"Yeah, we know, Americans are getting bigger and restaurant portions are partly to blame," breezes the teaser. "But we still stand in awe of these eight purveyors of really giant eats."

Me too, but probably not quite in the way they mean.

(2) Traditional British pubs, called "boozers," are closing.

The author portrays this as a problem for storytelling because British soap operas used to rely heavily on the boozer to develop their plots. "Where else...do different ages, classes and cultures combine on equal footing and communicate, sharing a story, gripe or joke?"

I felt like saying "Forget the soap operas, what's going to happen to British culture once these places are gone?" What's going to happen to democracy? Democracy is We the People. If there are fewer and fewer places where We the People (of any country) can meet on common ground, then...well, we're in trouble.

(3) Were you "born with a love of names"? Do you find yourself murmuring Oneonta, Cheektowaga, Storm Lake, Broken Bow, Paragonah, Mustique, Paramaribo (some of my favorite place names) as you drive to the grocery store? Read this article about George Rippey Stewart's "Names on the Land."

Back to the childcare series tomorrow, probably.