Faculty advisors

UChicago's in the news all the time! Is this what comes of having up and become a super-elite college? First there's Katie Dries of Jezebel, reporting on the school's issues with sexual assault on campus. (Upsetting but not, I must admit, surprising.) Then there's Dan Savage getting accused of a "hate crime" by a language-policing student. While I have, I promise, oh so many thoughts on all of this, here's the part of Savage's post that jumped out at me for personal reasons:

But I do want to quote one piece at The Maroon—which has written numerous pieces about my alleged "hate crime," the demand by QUIP for an apology from the IOP (which the IOP, to its credit, refused to cough up) and QUIP's demand that the IOP promise to "censor" all future IOP guests who might use "hate speech" (not gonna happen, says IOP)—all without bothering to contact me for my side of the story. (That's not how we do journalism out here in the real world,Maroon. Please consult your faculty advisors. You do have faculty advisors, right?) 

In my time at the Maroon, I don't remember there being faculty advisors. Faculty who wanted to publish articles in the Maroon and got in a tizzy if not permitted to do so, yes, that would happen. (It was like, guys, send your thing to a real newspaper and they'll probably publish it! Not so for us undergrads!) But advisors? It's not a university with a journalism school or program, so I'm not sure where these advisors would be coming from. The Maroon wasn't a class or an apprenticeship. It was (although I suspect this has changed) a smoke-filled, hamburger-grease-coated basement office where the blind led the blind.

In any case, as someone with some insights into how that paper is (well, was) run, my first guess was, they didn't contact Savage because they didn't think in a million years he'd get back to them. It's one thing to aggressively interview school administrators, but visiting famous speakers? People an undergrad wouldn't think could possibly care what's written about them in the school paper? But now I see they did manage to get a statement from the other famous speaker, so, who knows.

The straw family of privilege

Reading UChicago senior Lynda Lopez's Maroon op-ed about being a first-generation college student, I was struck by two things. First, that before even reading it, I had an intuitive (and anecdotal) sense that her argument would be sound, i.e. that low-income and first-generation students have a tougher time of it, and that, to put bluntly what she put delicately, rich kids can be assholes.

Second, though, was that nearly all of Lopez's examples of things rich kids did effortlessly but that she struggled with are ones that everyone struggles with. Despite my parents' extensive educations, despite going to an elite public high school and a fancy private school K-8, despite all of this copious ambient fanciness (albeit not the tutoring or helicoptering; I'm too old to be of that generation), I, too "didn’t know how to ask professors or TAs for help or how to pick the right classes." My high school workload also wasn't comparable with that of college, nor was it at all the same sort of work expected. I never really figured out how to write a Sosc paper.

Anyway, my point, to be clear, isn't that she and I entered college on a level playing field. Rather, it's that we quite clearly did not, but not for many of the reasons she gives. The more relevant factors - which she also discusses - would be things like the ability to pay for college or figure out financial aid, the sense that you simply must graduate from college, and the feeling that you personally don't belong, something quite different from thinking that college life is overwhelming and new and impossible, which, again, just about everybody experiences.

But I find this often in discussions of privilege, that there's a sort of assumed experience that constitutes "privilege," thought to be shared by all who aren't not privileged. Intellectual discussions at the dinner table. Family connections with which to get a job. In-depth life-planning conversations with parents and other unearned mentors. Everything made easier every step of the way. While this sort of family does - as much as one can ever tell - seem to exist, it's not the uniform experience it's been made out to be. Most of the rich-kids-at-college did not, I suspect, have that childhood.

To re-reiterate, my point certainly isn't that all backgrounds are one, or that everything's subjective so socioeconomic class doesn't matter. Nor is it that I'd expect this particular author to know that this isn't how it goes. Rather, it's that those trying to sort out these issues to find remedies should be clear on exactly what it is that does matter, at where the unfairness does come from.

8%

Like many women past the age of, say, 25, I'm inclined to want to look younger. But now, all the more so. In the last decade, "The University of Chicago’s [acceptance] rate plummeted to a little over 8 percent, from more than 40 percent." I'll want to pass as someone who went in the 8% years, not who just made it in back in the 40% era. This is, I suspect, futile - while I was carded recently at Trader Joe's, I've been ma'am'd enough to know I don't pass for 17. I am now accepting recommendations for a facial moisturizer, one containing SPF.

Apart from that, what to make of the school's new status as super-selective, as vs. self-selecting? "Self-selecting," oh, that expression, probably on some level a euphemism for not-that-hard-to-get-into, but the school did seem to attract a specific sort of person. I remember a lot of blazers with elbow patches. People who'd read (like, to themselves, silently) at parties, or host "parties" with one or two guests. It wasn't that people didn't drink - this is, I get the sense, what's imagined when one hears that a school is notoriously un-fun - but there was no particular rah-rah, school pride culture. It wasn't a school where you'd see people in shirts with the school logo. There was a normal-college subculture, the handful of students involved in Greek life. And then I remember learning that more than half of my fellow undergrads had majored in economics - and I'd met very few econ majors in college, so there must have been a whole world I never interacted with. The people I did know tended to see themselves as future PhD students, whether they ended up going that route or not.

And so goes my longwinded way of saying that something's bound to change about the school's culture, for better or worse. I mean, this could be the end of the That Guy in one's Hum class - I don't see That Guy sorts making the cut.

So, fellow alums who may still read this thing: thoughts?

Jews' "sheer sexiness," and the insist-too-much paradox

At various points in the gargantuan stack of paper called my dissertation, I needed to cite something to do with modern-day intermarriage panic. Because the way it works, in academic writing, is that the fact that I know from living and breathing that the American Jewish community has long concerned itself with this topic isn't sufficient. That's not how scholarship works, nor should it. You can't footnote 'Take my word for it.' So in the process, I ended up finding that the whole 'intermarriage finishes what Hitler started' line comes up more often in references to anti-intermarriage sentiment (such as) than in the anti-intermarriage articles themselves. It's not that there isn't panic, just that it's often less hysterical than its more hysterical extremes.

In any case, if only I'd seen this sooner. I've now read Jack Wertheimer's essays and a couple of the others, but will need to read the lot of it. Mosaic Magazine (which... how had I just found this?) has an very useful array of the range of standard Jewish opinion on the matter, albeit the most informed and intelligent array one is likely to find. (And hey, a UChicago student is among the participants!) 

I have, as you might imagine, exactly ten trillion things to say in response even just to the parts of this series I have read, and maybe five trillion ideas of ways and places to pitch whichever aspect of my response doesn't get channeled into the academic version of this that I'm also working on. And I suppose, Petey, I also have thoughts on the new finding that Jews are actually Northern Italian, although this is really a single thought, one I'd already expressed on Facebook, which is that this explains why my apartment is basically the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, Casa Della Bisou. But in the interest of not blathering on altogether forever, I'm going to narrow this post down to the awkward question that always comes up with this topic: How, or really if, Jews who oppose intermarriage should try to eroticize endogamy.

Sylvia Barack Fishman, probably the leading scholar in the field of contemporary Jewish intermarriage, writes: "Individuals, families, and communities need to show, by example and by word, why Jewishness matters—to create in sons and daughters an appreciation of the appeal, and the sheer sexiness, of Jewish men and women." This came up on my Birthright trip as well, when the group leader asked the young men in the auditorium to behold the beauty of Jewish women. The first part - "why Jewishness matters" makes sense, but the second? There's nothing like a well-meaning authority figure telling you that someone - or some group - should do something for you erotically for that not to happen. While I personally have no trouble believing Jewish men can be good-looking, somehow the statement that I, as a Jewish woman, ought to think this summons the image of Brian Krakow - the guy you know you should like, but can't get yourself to. 

Which brings us to the problem with addressing intermarriage with more outreach along existing lines. As it stands, Jewish events aimed at the maybe-not-yet-married age demographic are virtually always thinly-veiled attempts at matchmaking. College students are invited to attend Jewish "singles" events, as though one can be an urban American single at 19. What if you just wanted to see an Israeli movie, or learn about the Dreyfus Affair, and if you happened to be unattached and met someone romantically, so be it? Why couldn't it all be a bit more casual? College itself, for instance, doesn't feel, while you're there, like an elaborate plot to mate you off to someone on a similar socioeconomic path.

Mostly, I'm just skeptical that unless we return to an era of something drastically less casual - arranged or quasi-arranged marriages, or unless all Jews up and moved to Israel, any sort of large-scale change in this area could occur. Points of contact among Jews can be increased, but without a full-on secession from the mainstream community, socialization will continue between Jews and non-Jews. And if every time Jews are placed in close proximity, there needs to be this overt now go mate vibe, a certain number of Jews with an interest in Jewish culture end up not going to what they fear will be a meat market. 

It would be much simpler to say (as used to be said) that marriage is about reproducing the community, forging allegiances between families, and whether or not you find your spouse "sexy" is irrelevant. But once spouses are to be chosen on the basis of individual desire - which is to say, once a baseline of chemistry needs to be there before either party even considers compatibility in other areas, not that chemistry trumps incompatibility - it's only natural that the conversation about how to stop intermarriage would veer towards the ill-fated project of asking Jews to find one another hot. 

Yom Kippur assortment

-UChicago's grand tradition of producing graduate students, confirmed.

-Unlike apparently everyone else on Goodreads, but like the friend who recommended it to me in the first place, I really enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. I'd read and liked Middlesex a while back, but don't remember it well enough to compare the two. What inspired me to read it now was how often "the marriage plot" came up in my dissertation defense, and it started to occur to me that I had only the most general sense of what that meant. (Jane Austen, etc.)

What I hadn't known - and what may have made me like the book slightly less - was how much of the thing would be set, like, right where I was sitting as I read most of it. No, not just in the same town. The same academic community's housing. I hadn't had any idea that Eugenides lived in this town, but knowing that he does, it makes much more sense. What's the opposite of 'escapist'? Is it time for me to discover science fiction?

-Given that at least one of my readers comes here for lipstick discussions, let me state for the record that the Bite Beauty lipstick in Pomegranate is the perfect red. Less because of the shade - they all look more or less alike - than because of the texture. Goes on great, but more importantly, fades to a tint, rather than to bits of red lipstick clumping on chapped-ness you hadn't known you had, and that might well have been created by the lipstick itself. And blended with the dark 1990s red, becomes the perfect Carrie Brownstein shade. 

On being young and with-it

To the people who keep referring to the traitor-hero exile who looks just like the political-science prof... to the people who keep referring to dude as "a young kid" and the like, I thank you. He is 29. I am 29. 29, so young! Practically a child! The approach of 30 brings with it the list-of-things-I-will-now-hope-to-have-done-by-35-which-just-doesn't-sound-as-impressive. (Also decrepitude, but we women get used to being told we're over the hill from drinking-age on, so that I'm not so worried about.) So please, keep calling Snowden a little boy. For my sake.

Also flattering: I'm reading Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: the American version, and loving his enthusiasm for the University of Chicago, which he attended. I must drop my college's name more often. (Less fond of his take on American Francophiles, and on Americans who marry Europeans - but whevs, if you marry a Belgian, and buy that person a deep-fryer as an anniversary gift-that-keeps-on-giving, you get Belgian fries, at home, so it's Epstein's loss.)

But more surprising - and thus more flattering - is his insistence, in chapter after chapter, that there's some cachet to living in Princeton, New Jersey. Not to being affiliated with Princeton University - that's not hard to imagine. But with just living there. Not there, here. Princeton, according to Epstein, is one of a handful of "with-it" American cities. Right there on page 229 (or just in the version available at the Princeton Public Library?) It's... I hadn't even realized it was a city. What about the deer? The ticks? The turtles? But we are soon going to get a second independent coffee shop, which is something. And we do have better sushi than New York - not sure how that came to be, but there it is. And the beer-ice-cream. Could be worse.

A walk down memory lane

I did some work for my undergraduate university, and the tax form required info about whether I'd been employed there before (yup) and when (huh?). You know how everyone makes a big deal about children who go to college and don't even know how to do their own laundry? Well, that you figure out after one red item goes into the whites, problem solved. So you have some pink towels. As a parent, what I would teach my children is to keep meticulous records of what work you do for whom, on which exact days, and what you were paid for it, and do so starting from the age at which this doesn't even seem relevant. (Here's one problem being an unpaid intern solves.)

Email tends to answer such questions, but I only got gmail in, what, 2004? And all email from my undergraduate account (including a couple from someone who's now a NYT columnist! waa!) is now in the abyss. Or [insert predictable NSA joke here]. Whatever.

Anyway, while this information is surely also in tax forms I don't have in front of me/in my apartment, period, I figured that it was probably elsewhere as well. Like, say, in an old resume. But what I needed to find was the information about my book-shelving job. This is something I had apparently removed from the resume fairly early on in my post-college job search, and had evidently not passed along to grad-school recommenders. Probably at the advice of the career office, although in retrospect, maybe I ought to have kept it on. Did my contributions to the Chicago Criterion (does that even still exist?) merit a whole line?

Searching, searching, then, found it! It was in a resume, but one I'd prepared especially for... Petit Bateau, the French t-shirt store. I had evidently applied to work there in 2005, and a great many other places along those lines that I'm almost entirely sure never got back to me. Things were evidently not so rosy pre-recession, either.

Burying the lede

There's a new Rufus Wainwright music video, for "Out of the Game." In it, three Rufuses make out at a library, with one another. Now, I've spent a lot of time in libraries in my day, and never did I see so much as one Rufus just passing by, let alone three Rufuses getting it on. Anyway, the Daily Mail Online thinks the story here is that the video also includes a moment of Helena Bonham Carter in a bustier.

"'It's going to feel like up north now.'"

These are words I never thought I'd read: "University of Chicago bought the former Borders bookstore at 1539 E. 53rd St. in Hyde Park. Trendy clothing chain Akira will set up shop in the space this fall." Consider my mind blown: I think it means that these shoes will soon be available for purchase in Hyde Park, Chicago. Yes, the neighborhood around the University of Chicago. I have just learned (via) that Hyde Park - yes, that Hyde Park - is undergoing some kind of transformation, and is on the verge of becoming... pleasant. Yes, gentrification, yes, how tragic for the U of C brand, that the neighborhood will now god forbid include options beyond bookstores and Walgreens. (I now live somewhere where the only store worth going to is a bookstore, but for quite the opposite reason. There is a Kate Spade, a Lilly Pulitzer, a lacrosse-gear shop...) I mean, OMG shoes! Shiny, space-age shoes! You could go admire them on a study break (even if it's too cold and icy to wear them)! And with this, expect applications for Paris study abroad to drop exponentially.

"Whenever a non-Jew uses the word 'goyim' to describe Jewish attitudes to Gentiles, look out."

A thousand years ago, for a publication that may or may not still exist, I wrote up something about the Walt-Mearsheimer book. You know, the one whose admirers insist that anyone who thinks the work is anti-Semitic clearly never read it. Every last thread, W-M's critics are accused of having devoted insufficient attention to this fine entry into their collective oeuvre. Well, I did read it, and that was the conclusion I came to, from the book itself, as in the actual text contained within. Not from a sense that anything accused of anti-Semitism is automatically guilty. No, from the unequivocally anti-Semitic, classically anti-Semitic, book I sat down and read. I mean, the thing's not Ulysses. It does not include an early scene involving a madeleine, and meander from there.

For reasons I no longer remember, it took more time than expected for this to go to print, and my article received exactly one comment on the site itself: "Wow, this review is on the cutting edge of 10 months ago." Insightful dude was, it turns out, not as clever as all that. It turns out that Walt and Mearsheimer's "lobby" argument hasn't gone anywhere, and has in fact infiltrated the discourse about Jews in America. It only gets more relevant with time.

In Tablet, Adam Kirsch explains:

[I]f The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis … and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.

The proper academic term for this is "yowza."

Kirsch also might have mentioned that Dan Savage - an otherwise progressive and brilliant sort who seems to have bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that the tiny Jewish minority has quite the grasp on American politics. Granted, Savage uses this as an example of how he wishes things went for America's LGBT minority, but I'm not sure what that changes.

The way the W-M book (that I surely didn't read, because I found it to be incredibly, nauseatingly, anti-Semitic) is written, it alternates between saying 'we of course aren't saying X,' and... saying X. It's sort of as if the expression, 'I'm not an anti-Semite, but' were expanded into book-length form. That's how they get around the accusation. The miracle for them is that most people just kind of nod along to that. But not Kirsch:

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression.

This thing I'm writing here, it isn't a blog post, per se.

But this is where Kirsch really, really gets at the problem. This is his main argument, and what's worth taking away:

One of the central premises of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is that it takes unusual courage to oppose the Jews, since they use their power to ruthlessly suppress dissent in both the political world and the media.

This! This is what has become socially acceptable in recent years. Anything negative one says about Jews is OK, no, heroic, because after all, it only serves to cancel out their stranglehold. Never mind that not all Jews support the Republican approach when it comes to Israel policy. Never mind that most Jews don't even vote Republican. Never mind that, by this calculus, Jews who go on having the left-leaning politics Jews have always had are in fact heroically sticking it to The Jews. Once this notion is accepted, it becomes impervious to reason.

Here's where the debate after the book went astray. People - W-M's defenders, but also, to some extent, their critics - have acted as though the book's controversial angle was that it dared question the sacred friendship between the U.S. and Israel, thus ruffling feathers, thus shattering a taboo. When in fact, if that had been the point of the book, it's not a book we'd have heard of, unless we were political science majors. Contrary to how they present it, it wouldn't have been the biggest deal in the world to question U.S. Israel policy, if done in a way that didn't seek to explain current policy in terms of basically a massive claw. Maybe a few fringe types still would have cried anti-Semitism, but otherwise? There'd have been a vigorous but level-headed debate in seminar rooms and journals among the Dry Topics Analysis contingent, and a good deal of support among the various Jews - including plenty of, ahem, Zionists - who wonder whether American aid as it currently exists is the best thing for American, but also for Israel, for American Jewry. No, the reason we know about the book is the Jewish-conspiracy angle. But the authors successfully managed to spin their controversy into a 'not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism' story. When, ugh, that's both true and quite beside the point.

"Incredibly unattractive men"

In a comment below, Britta raises two important questions, important, that is, to anyone concerned with the pressing issue of male beauty.*

1) When I say that looks matter in partner-selection, and that women should not be afraid to admit this when selecting, pursuing, and rejecting potential dates, what I mean is that it's important to be with someone who's appealing to you. Not that a "7" must be with a "7," a "3" with a "3," or some such nonsense - again, these things are subjective. But if we're speaking of beauty as subjective, do we have any leeway in terms of observing that, in whichever setting (or in society at large), there are many couples in which the woman is far better-looking than the man? Are we able to comment on this at all, or must we assume that because looks are subjective, the Gisele clone dating a not-cleaned-up-for-TV version of Newman on "Seinfeld" could well be evenly matched in this regard? This is a tough one that I'll throw out to my readers, of whom 90% at this point appear to be a spambot trying to sell pharmaceuticals via my archives.

2) Is it insulting, as a woman, to be hit on by "incredibly unattractive men"? Without re-asking the subjectivity question above (maybe some women would find Mr. Ogre hot), the question then becomes, insulting how? Is it an insult to one's vanity - does this "2" think I'm a "2"? Or - and this is where I'm leaning - is it insulting insofar as it's sexist, insofar as it's about male entitlement? Dude can't be bothered to sort out his facial hair, to put on clothes his mother didn't buy him when he was in 10th grade (and he's now 38 and no longer 120 lbs), yet he expects the woman he's with to have whichever mix of natural beauty and put-together-ness? Or, to take this further, the woman's thought process here will be, "What does dude think is so great about him - and thus so unimpressive about me - that makes up for the obvious asymmetry in our appearances?" Assuming the answer is not something obvious - aka he has yacht-loads of money - it's always going to be an "ahem" moment. Does he think he's smarter/funnier? Does he think it's really that much more impressive to have gone to Swarthmore than Skidmore? Does he think that the fact that he's 15 years older makes him superior, and will this translate into some kind of super-obnoxious relationship based on condescension, in which the female role is conflated with a child-role, and all kinds of blah ensues?

Maybe a common thread to both of these is that while attraction is subjective, it tends to be so within far broader and not fixed levels, dare I say, of appearance. So not the dreaded 1-10 scale, but maybe three categories: within-normal-limits, which would include the vast majority of us; near-universally-thought-unfortunate-looking, which would include very few; and again very few at the Jon Hamm, no-dissenters level. Or maybe the answer is that there's on the one hand looks-as-subjective, on the other an awareness of a parallel "objective" scale, a scale women are aware men care about not because Bar Refaeli is everyone's ideal, but because a woman who looks like that confers status onto the man. Something I attempted to figure out before, here. The existence of Bar Refaeli-Newman-type couples, the way a Bar Refaeli feels if a Newman asks her out... these are, I assure you, major questions of our age.

*Britta also asks about UChicago specifically: "While there are definitely some unattractive women, I'd say on the whole women are better looking than the men here, and I see plenty of relationships where the woman is (IMO) 'settling' in the looks dept. Of course, she might have different ideas of beauty than I do, but it gets really demoralizing after awhile." I don't remember anything like that at Chicago - if anything, it was so socially unacceptable (for those not in sororities, of which there were few) to primp and shop that the undergrad norm elsewhere of guys looking like slobs, women looking super-put-together, didn't hold. There was this one subset of undergrads who'd come from NYC private schools and attempted to out-cool everyone else in front of Cobb, but even though they were wealthy, the women dressed very Olsen-twin-in-rag-phase. Everyone looked scruffy, because if you didn't, that was evidence you spent time not being an intellectual. But on the bright side, it was very socially acceptable to pick partners based on what you, subjectively, preferred, meaning that there was a lot of fun to be had even by men and women who would not have so enjoyed themselves at many other colleges. So - maybe the grad school experience is different?

Chicago, ten years later

Today's theme is "disorientation," because I keep getting confused about my own whereabouts. I just moved, but immediately after making sure everything we needed got from NY to NJ, flew to Chicago to attempt to show around my husband, who was there for a conference. I kept thinking the move had been to Chicago, given how little food/sleep I was on upon arrival, making the time between when the movers left and when I landed in Chicago quite a daze. Chicago seemed a plausible enough town for me to arrive home to.

I'd arrived in Chicago exactly a decade prior (as 9/11 news stories reminded me, because given that I was still in NY at the time, that stands out in my memory a good bit more than my first week of college), but mostly remembered Hyde Park. This time, I was staying in Evanston, so a hoped-for trip back to campus was out. I hadn't been back to the city at all since college, so there would be surprises wherever we went.

I first saw a friend from college who's now back for law school, and, with him, finally saw this "Logan Square" I'd heard so much about, but always deemed too far from Hyde Park to explore. It was a fine place to start, because the "Breakfast Brioche Bread Pudding" with a side of chicken-sage sausage and a cold-brewed Intelligensia was the perfect combination of hipster-food and hearty Midwestern feast. It was as though all my energy lost during the move-then-travel returned. Meanwhile, in further disorientation, our waitress was someone my friend and I had been in the dorm with my first year.

We then walked a bit around Logan Square, likely missing the main drag of it, but passing by a French bakery I'd read about but, what with the meal I'd just eaten, was not so curious about at that moment. Then, thanks to my friend who has more than a vague knowledge of the city (as well as an iPhone), we ended up on Armitage, a street I'd maybe seen before, maybe not, but at any rate that's apparently where the fun clothes-shopping happens. For those who have not just moved into apartments where they and their husbands are to share one closet.

Next after that was North/Clybourne, where we saw a little boy spit off the railing of a truly immense and shiny Whole Foods, from the café area down to dangerously near the baguettes, if not hitting customers as well. I will not recount the entire scene, but my friend, who saw this (my back was to the scene) spoke up, and the child's mother asked him to apologize to my friend, leading me to point out that it was really the people on the level below he might want to address.

Next up, Evanston, which is lovely but far from even the northern parts of the city - something I hadn't realized in college, when I'd assumed that Northwestern students experienced Chicago in the way that NYU students enjoy NY. So, lots of trains, but the Saturday market in Evanston was pretty great - not too surprisingly, the Heartland is good at producing food. Everything was far more geared to drivers and large families than you'd find at the Greenmarkets in NY - a "small" container of peaches was some kind of massive basket, the assumption being you'd get a barrel-full - but for the carless weekend visitor, raspberries in an only somewhat massive container and a massive-but-I'm-not-complaining cinnamon bun were on offer. And this market was right there, in the parking lot across from the hotel! I stopped myself from buying greens, because that's not something you do on a weekend a flight away from home, but am now sitting in this vegetable-less apartment, far from any groceries, and still without air in those bike tires...

This being my husband's first trip to Chicago, our first non-Evanston stop was to be Michigan Avenue. I of course screwed this up by getting us into one of those underground-parking areas below the city itself, where we proceeded to spend the part of the day it wasn't raining. We began with Fox and Obel, where I was reunited with the Caesar salad that for some reason made quite the impression years ago. It was fine. Then we headed over to the beach, but it wasn't quite admire-a-beach-that's-OMG-right-in-a-city-we-don't-have-things-like-this-in-NY-isn't-this-amazing? weather, so the Museum of Contemporary Art saw us a bit earlier than planned, definitely the way to go. It's a thing in Chicago, it seems, for white brides, grooms, and their wedding parties to take their photographers to museums, and to pose for photos amidst the art that, in this case, represented the artist's sociopolitical take on being black and gay in America.

Next was indeed Michigan Ave., which I will remember for future reference is much more exciting if you've been missing big-city bustle and had long since forgotten what it was like to go to a Gap, but which is nevertheless not half bad when you get down to the river. Next, Belmont, where I knew Intelligensia should be, but if it were not for kind locals, no way I would have found it. I remembered one big avenue with stuff on it, when in fact there are something like five, and the correct one isn't all that near the train. It was about then that I started to get the point of smart-phones. I'd also misremembered Intelligensia as a student "coffice," when it's in fact a pickup spot for middle-aged gay men. For the best, considering we weren't there to study in silence, and not surprising, in retrospect, given the locale. The coffee itself was as good as I remembered.

Then came some complicated CTA-stravaganza that involved considering and ultimately rejecting a restaurant Gwyneth Paltrow recommended in her guide to Chicago for people unlikely to be in Chicago in the first place (but in the process, learning that there is indeed a part of Chicago filled with could-be-supermodels, and it ain't Hyde Park). Then more CTA, then more Evanston, and eventually some grocery shopping at an Evanston Whole Foods - yes, an Evanston, IL Whole Foods - because we now live in a part of NJ so bucolic that that was, for the time being, our best bet for groceries.

Ding!

Dear libraries I have used or may one day use:

The book I "never returned," I did return it. Yup. I may not be the neatest of all people - clean, but not neat - but I always keep library books apart, in their own neat mini-universe, apart from the general chaos that is whichever space I'm inhabiting.

Here's what I know did happen. You know that "ding" that's supposed to happen when the scanner and barcode meet? It never happened. Either the staff member whose job it is to do this didn't at all, or, more likely, it didn't register. (I used to love scanning when my job at the library was shelving, probably because scanning wasn't shelving - variety!)

Either way, I get it, it's so obviously my fault, I obviously keep my library books under a pile of unfinished baguettes, the dorm mouse-or-is-it-a-small-rat using them to build a scale replica of the Osama McMansion. But yes, I will go look for the book, even if you're a library with a bizarre call number system and many gratuitous flights of stairs, and a rule that only those physically incapable of taking stairs can use the elevator, which would at any rate only cover some of the many flights involved. I will accept it when you express surprise that I had, in fact, returned the book a couple days before and, what, there it is! On the stacks! Or, if need be, I'll walk the miles upon miles across a certain vertigo-inducing research library because the problem was that the "ding" needs to happen with my card, not just the book, and my card being on my person, I myself have to show up even once it's been established that the book is in, thus, despite being fern,* not my fault!

*I may have called "un millefeuille" "une millefeuille," thinking "feuille" but thinking wrong, and yes, I may have seriously considered eating said item on the street around 7pm, but I'm not a barbarian! Not when it comes to library books.

La culpabilité

It would be lovely if, when you "took out" documents (i.e. took them to a table a few feet away), the person whose job it is to scan them* as "servi" actually did so. And, better yet, if when you returned the documents, making a note of the fact that three were in the same bubble-wrap envelope, all three got scanned as rendu. This is now the second day in a row that I've been falsely accused of having a document out that I'd returned. Today, as yesterday, this was cleared up quickly, but there's no guarantee things will run so smoothly next time (and there will be a next time). The presumption of guilt will always be on me, as a library patron, as an American who doesn't know how to say "bubble-wrap" in French, and as someone with no way of proving that my deepest desire isn't to abscond with a 19th C pamphlet that wasn't even useful for my project anyway.

*As a former library-book scanner myself, one sympathetic to the difficulties and drudgeries of the job, I reserve the right to criticize others' job performance in this area.

Paris accomplishments thus far

-Got BNF card (had the interview, paid the fee, NYPL nostalgia ensued).
-Purchased appropriate Metro tickets. (Why must the monthly begin on the first of the month? Metrocard nostalgia, of all things, ensued.)
-Attended a French-Jewish student (and grown-up) rally-slash-movie-premiere. I'd arrived the morning of, and so was only truly awake for the rally part. More on that later.
-Ate one and a half baguettes (in installments!). No, it's not so bad here, really it isn't.
-Ate flan #1 of I don't want to think about it. The woman who sold it to me referred to it as "petit," which was nice but inaccurate.
-Inadvertently happened upon the conveyor sushi place I was obsessed with in 2003. As quick, 5-euro lunches go, not bad! Is it a wise idea to eat raw fish that's been rotating probably since noon at 3pm? So far so good.
-With the help of a mall's wireless and (more helpful still) running into my former office-mate in that mall, I tracked down NYU in Paris, which is hidden away like one of those fake speakeasies. Note the following parallel: NYU's Paris location is on a street lined with a mix of mass-market and charming boutiques, many of which sell beautiful shoes, while UChicago's Paris site is... next to the giant library and nothing else. (This mall, however, was good for wireless and wireless alone. A GAP, an H&M, a Starbucks...)
-Convinced my bank that I am indeed myself, and so will not need to survive three months on the ~25 euros currently in my wallet.
-Speaking of which, there was a Petit Bateau in Passy that bien sûr took AmEx. This is mine. This is up next.
-Spoke a decent amount of French.
-Was thought to be a local by a woman in Petit Bateau, who was flabbergasted that I wasn't her vendeuse, and by a lost American family in the Chatelet metro station, whose son used his best French on me to ask directions, only to hear back, in New Yorkease, that I had no idea where it was, whatever it was they were looking for.

Still to do:

-Research! I decided to allow myself one day for bureaucracy, although I suspect parts of other days will go that route as well. The process of getting to look at a book - a book, not an archival document - at the library is, I hope, significantly less involved than it now seems. I've "reserved" 12 hours of Saturday, the first available day, for this, but walk-ins are apparently OK in the afternoons?
-Socialize with (as opposed to buy flan from) Parisians.
-Buy, or (more likely) ogle, clothes and shoes extensively. I'd forgotten this about Paris, but apparel here is like food is in Belgium - even the unexciting places are amazing. I walked down the equivalent (for New Yorkers) of Second Avenue in the 80s, or (for Chicagoans) whatever the non-main shopping street is in Lincoln Park, and one store after the next had me drooling. Part of me thinks this is a bit circular - nice clothes are defined as that-which-is-worn-in-Paris, and so Parisians seem well-dressed. But they don't, as a rule - I think many, particularly the younger ones, find the shiny ballet flats and such too bourgeois, and so prefer a pilling-oversize-black-sweatshirt-and-inevitable-scarf (keffiyah preferred) look. Meanwhile, those who want to look bourgeois dress very conservatively (think preppy minus the pastels), and don't really experiment with all the possibilities shiny ballet flats have to offer. It's more that, as raw material, the clothing in the window of Parisian stores cannot be beat.

The unreturnability of library books

After the last book saga, I was not delighted to see that the library believes I'm still borrowing many of the books from my orals lists, books that I most definitely returned at the end of last semester. After failed attempts at dealing with this with two different people at circulation (the first seemed to be new at the job, and the second just seemed annoyed and told me to fill out an unrelated form), a third employee seemed to get the issue. He took down the relevant call numbers, and asked me if I'd by any chance returned these books in December. As it happened, I had. Well! Turns out that there was this one day in December when the system crashed, and none of the data from that day got saved. The day happened to coincide with the one I chose for the Great Post-Orals Book Return - one of the major rounds of it, at any rate.

The next step is that someone will go into the stacks to see if the books I allegedly still have are there, which might be reassuring if books were where their call numbers might have you believe they'd be, not just in that general area. (No, "DS" doesn't just go with "DS".) And yes, having been a book-shelver during college gives me the autoritah to fuss about this.

'Silence!' she screamed

It's all well and good to give the undergrads a tour of the library along with an explanation of its rules. But when doing so, it might make sense not to shout an in-depth explanation of these rules in the middle of the day, in a quiet and student-full part of the library, where certain frugal graduate students trying to spend less at the bookstore have books out on two-hour reserve - whole books meant to be consumed and critically analyzed in two hours - and would like nothing more than to be left in peace. Or if you're going to do so, at least pretend to acknowledge to collective glare the students you've interrupted are tossing in your direction.

In other, less hater-ish news, I'm tempted to give kale another try after reading this (possibly ripped off, according to commenters) recipe. I'm assuming that if all the regular salad greens at the Tribeca Whole Foods look pathetic, that's probably the case city-wide, and I'll have to expand my horizons. And with enough olive oil and ricotta salata, my horizons are, I'd imagine, infinite.

From the dept. of Plus ça change

Library, Twix, diet Coke. A texte in need of immediate explicating. If I were looking out on swastika-shaped carrels, and not Washington Square Park, this would be 2005.

Ways to make the (first) world a better place

-Recipes that bother with calorie counts should also include the calories burned preparing the dish. Sure, there's a stick of butter in these (purely theoretical) muffins, but smashing it up into bits must do something, right? Also worth including: calories spent hand-washing all relevant materials and cleaning all implicated surfaces. And, the as-yet-unstarted No Dishwasher Cookbook gets one new idea.

-There should be just one currency, at least in the US and EU. I'm sure this would have all kinds of economic (or is it financial?) implications my humanities-and-vacation-addled brain can't get around, but it would at least mean buying discounted CK, DKNY, and other acronymic underwear at Century 21 would not mean getting coughed on and/or trampled by the whole of Western Europe. I've found a kind I like, but am afraid to go back because Hans and Lars and Nicolas are all in the lingerie section accompanying their ladyfriends, who are just as excited as NYC women about cheap socks and bras, but who are only here for one week, and must buy them all at once.

-This one is NYU-specific: The library must find a way to allow you to leave with books you've taken out, without having to show each and every one to the student or guard whose job it is to make sure there's a stamp in each. Other schools seem to have figured this out. Why not NYU? It's all well and good if you've got this one book you took out this one time, and you can go daintily show it to the guard; retrieve it; place it in your ironic hipster mini-purse and go about your day. But if you're a grad student with a backpack full of 'em, you have to take each book out and, because the library's just that well-designed, return them to your bag one by one while standing in the way of the exit, because there's really nowhere else to do this. And all the while, as you're filling up the bag once more (less efficiently than you did in the stacks, because you're rushing because you're being trampled, this time by fellow students rather than European tourists), it occurs to you that you've renewed all your books online five times anyway, so the stamp the guard is allegedly 'checking' provides no relevant information. You could just be walking out with any book from the library, provided it had, at one point or another, been stamped. Can't something just beep if you've taken a book you weren't supposed to? Is there something I'm missing?

Truth to power

-Rita gets it right about the HP.

-Vindication! Someone arrived at this very blog by Googling (no-quotes): "cinematography in rachel's wedding nauseated me."

-The NYT Style "T Magazine" made the courageous choice to focus its latest issue on Paris, a city apparently known for its fashion. Highlights include a piece about how hard it is to find a good pedicurist (and hairstylist, and boutique, and chiropractor, and acupuncturist, and masseuse, and personal wiper--OK, not that last one) in the French capital. Before someone says, "First World Problem du Jour," let me just say that I have a theory about articles like this. They are designed to make even the wealthiest, most pampered readers feel like Joe Six-Pack the Plumber. If you've ever had a problem more dire than 'accidentally' paying $600 for a haircut, or if you don't require "a team of people" including "an acupuncturist, a masseuse, a trainer, a shrink, [and] a facialist" to get through the day, then you're down-to-earth. Relative, at least, to (the journalistic persona of) Janine Di Giovanni, the woman who wrote this article.