Japanese canine dreamscape

Heaven is indeed a place on earth. It seems to be somewhere in Japan, but is at any rate wherever Flickr user koumeno-osanpo is taking these amazing photos. Life seems to involve frolicking in a springtime field with longhaired dachshunds (sometimes in Breton-striped shirts!) and a little gray poodle. Also meeting up with other similar lap dogs (including more dachshunds, more poodles) in other bucolic settings. Also visiting Japanese cafés. There are also fluffy cats, kittens, strawberries, sheep. Pasta. A deer. If this all sounds overly cutesy, it's... surprisingly not. It's some kind of aesthetic perfection.

Paris redeems itself

After a coffee and croissant at the High Temple of Invalides with some fellow fire-alarm recipients (and of course I bought more pastry à emporter), then another coffee to go from Anglo-y Coutume (where they do the latte art on a 2-euro macchiato!), then a bunch of grocery shopping at Bon Marché, I'm remembering why Paris is not, in fact, horrible. Even with the crap exchange rate requiring me to remember that all prices are nearly x 1.5, amazing food here is strangely affordable, certainly compared with the options I had in NY. I will drown my exhausted fury at my juvenile-delinquent dorm-mates in Passendale and coeur de rumsteck. I will stay away from sprouts. (Is this a food anyone actively seeks out, as opposed to a disappointing garnish?)

And we even saw a leaping dachshund! As in, a long-haired dachshund that saw a puddle and jumped really high to get over it, then jumped some more adorably for good measure at the other curb. And I'm sufficiently exhausted post-last-night (post-this-morning, really, given that it was light out by the end of it) that I might just be able to return to a normal sleep and thus work schedule.

A dream come true

The sound is mostly traffic, so this is best watched on mute. The takeaway: four of the five dachshunds belong to one man. He's the luckiest guy on the Upper East Side.

Or, let the headband be a message to those considering cutting bangs. 

Trendiness reviewed

Torrisi Italian Specialties: I remembered this as a new sandwich place near campus where the food was Italian but made in the States. I remembered sandwiches in the $4-7 range, and so suggested it as a lunch option. They've shot up to the $10 range, thanks, presumably, to this. That, and the place is this odd mix of table-service (food is brought to your table and dishes are taken away) and order-at-the-counter (and pick up your own water, cutlery, and paper napkins, cafeteria-style), where it's not clear what to do in terms of a tip. I opted to leave one of about 15%, which makes me, I'm convinced, either a miser or a fool.

Super Sad True Love Story: Fellow Stuyvesant grad and longhaired dachshund (and James Franco) aficionado Gary Shteyngart has written another novel, and it's serving as my reintroduction to contemporary fiction, after a deep foray into the parallel universes of 19th C French newspaper fiction and 20th C Fran Fine. A full report would require me having finished the book, but I'm almost there. If the ending changes my view, expect an update. But lord almighty. Do we need another story about the tender yearnings of a nebbishy New Yorker? (Asks this nebbishy New Yorker.) As with The Ask, I like the book, but I feel as though this is not so much a narrator as part of some kind of giant narrator-thing, constant across novels and authors. Genre fiction, for those who don't hold it against a book that ones just like it have been written before. As much as I get a certain insider's kick out of reading about the shame of having a mediocre GPA at unnamed-math-and-science-high-school, I keep cringing. Cringing at the fact that a story set in the future centers on (along with Existential Angst as experienced by Woody Allen 2.0) an older, unattractive man's lust for a younger, universally-agreed-upon-to-be-attractive woman. What makes this woman so special? Well, she's Asian-American, which fits the protagonist's self-proclaimed type (he's a Jew with a thing for non-Jewish women - finally, a novel on that topic!), and she weighs less than 90 pounds. At Jezebel, so many references to a woman's weight would be called "triggering." However, I find the discussion of whether Tiny Asian Love Object weighs 83 or 86 pounds triggering me to wish I had talent in the literary arena, and that I had it in me to write a novel about for god's sake any romantic attraction that has not already been explored on "Seinfeld." What bothers me isn't that the book is set in NYC - it's a giant city, and there are more than enough stories to tell. It's that this story has already been told so so so so so so so many times. If you're a neurotic, high-libido, heterosexual Jewish man in Manhattan or Brooklyn, approaching middle age, think hard, think really hard, before unloading your semi-autobiographical fiction on the reading public.

American Apparel "bamboo" tights: The hipster cashier warned me they were non-returnable. I took this as a good sign - who wants to wear pre-owned tights? They lasted a few hours before a decent-sized hole formed in the toe, probably a lifetime record for shortest lifespan for tights. And these weren't even pantyhose/stockings, but thick tights, the kind that are supposed to be worn for more than five minutes, and that can't be repaired with nail polish. So, readers in search of "sweater" tights, I suggest Nordstrom Rack, which has the same Hue ones as sold at Ricky's, but for half the price. Barring any unforeseen burst of creativity, leading me to write a New York Jewish novel that hasn't already been written, expect a post in the near future on the difficulty of finding so-called "basics" in the clothes-shops of our age.

Best use of an afternoon in the Village

There were a surprising number of apricot poodles at the Dachshund Oktoberfest. And more lovely dachshunds than these pictures convey. WWWWAAAAAANNNNTTTTTT. Soon as the no-dog-apartment lease is up...

Weekend recap

-Old age hit with a vengeance when I realized that going out Thursday and Friday nights was simply too much for me to handle. Of course, the Saturday exhaustion owed something to my decision on Friday that the best procrastination was not, say, 15 minutes reading fashion blogs, but an 8-mile run. Not sure what I was thinking there.

-In mourning for Bouley croissants, Jo and I went to the Union Square-area Joe, which is no Bouley, but which did have one of those giant Doughnut Plant cinnamon buns, which almost made up for it. Speaking of which, does anyone understand the meaning of the following sentence in the "Gone" sign (see below) at Bouley Bakery? "We enjoyed our relationship and learned more about you as a customer." Does this not come across as though Bouley got to know its customers and decided we kind of suck, and thus are not worthy of their pastry? I defer to the experts in coffee-shop signage, ahem, for help:



It's a nice touch that they think croissant-patrons are interested in the $36 prix-fixe. Jo and I have, I'm not kidding, discussed going to Bouley-the-restaurant, which apparently still exists, with our full loyalty stamp-card from the now-defunct Bakery, and requesting the coffee that is our due.

-Saturday post-Joe was the dachshund festival in Washington Square Park. Some highlights:


A dachshund in a bag!


The elusive blond(e) dachshund.


A non-dachshund intruder provokes curiosity.


This dachshund seriously thought it was a person.

-Just got back from seeing The Misfortunates: Think L'Enfant, but Flemings rather than Walloons. The camera angles were very "Rachel Getting Married"-like, which is to say, nausea-inducing. (Oddly enough, it wasn't the scenes with vomit that did it.) While it was a fine movie, it has the potential to incite anti-Flemitism.

Feeding the children

This morning pretty much sucked - attempt # 1,200,000 to get Internet failed miserably, then a book I need somewhat desperately was not in the stacks as the online catalogue claimed, and all sorts of other minor annoyances added up to blech. So I decided the only way to improve matters would be to head out in the rain and get a giant piece of lemon layer cake for lunch. When at a Bleecker Street bakery with my wholesome meal, I overheard a conversation between two mothers of toddlers, chatting about, among other things, not keeping bread at home and ooh the food in France. (Contradiction much?) One was particularly adamant about nutrition in her discussions with her own child, who I'd place at at oldest 3, who was of normal size but wearing a seasonally-premature snowsuit. First, the mom held forth on how "just one" roll was enough with soup, and what exactly was her child thinking, wanting a second one? Then I zoned out for a while, but when I zoned back in, she was explaining to her child that "cake is only for special occasions, like birthdays," and I thought that this was verbatim from one of those NYT-online Health threads, where those who practice especially depressing-sounding extremes of "moderation" preach to the converted.

And then I was trying to figure out what about this was wrong, and maybe I was the problem, sitting in front of young, impressionable children, giving them the mistaken impression that one can eat cake for lunch and not be overweight. (What they couldn't see was that I was too angsty - not to mention too pressed for time - for anything more involved.) After all, in a typical day in NY, one sees all kinds of atrocious behavior of parents and guardians towards their children, everything from soda-and-Fritos being given to them at 7am to "spare the rod, spoil the child"-gone-unambiguously-too-far on a rush-hour subway. So what if this mother wants her child to only have one roll, and to eat cake no more than once in a blue moon? Childhood obesity is, they say, rampant. When I was a kid, I was the sort who had to be actively encouraged to eat, and while this is what I've observed with most young children at meal times, if Frank Bruni's message is to be learned, some kids are just born hungrier than others. Maybe this was one of them.

But at the same time, I remember kids growing up whose mothers couldn't just go on diets of their own, but had to project these diets onto kids who were themselves at most chubby-for-the-Upper-East-Side. And I thought about how, if you want your child not to constantly want cake, you might not want to take your child to a bakery that specializes in just that. How on earth do parents teach their kids good nutrition without coming across as walking Well Blogs? An argument in favor of dachshunds, perhaps.

"She was a little lap dog and a cliché"

Sweet story, but how could anyone not want a dachshund and have to grudgingly come around?

Jewish men, baked Doritos, and more

*This is the inaugural I-have-Internet-at-home post.*

-Perhaps it's because I'm so keenly aware that his mother is the gender historian, but I was sort of shocked to see that A.O. Scott's essay on Jews and Jewish identity in the movies dealt only with Jewish men. But it's understandable - as movies would have it, Jews are Jewish men. And, really, in the Roth-Allen-led world of entertainment by and about Jews, men generally are Jewish men - it's sort of an all-Jewish-men, all-Gentile-women universe. Someone should be the Poet of the other way around, but I'm not volunteering.

-This I find upsetting: "The new policy [banning bakesales in NYC schools] also requires that vending machines, which generate millions of dollars for school sports, be supplied with snacks such as reduced-fat Baked Doritos and low-sugar granola bars." Not to get all Alice Waters' real-food-movement-ish on WWPD's readership, but wouldn't it be better to, I don't know, encourage baking from scratch (if not at home, than somewhere in the school) than to effectively ban doing so in favor of pushing the very sort of 'lite' foods people are known to gorge on thinking they're 'being good' and all that nonsense? I find it hard to believe that one moderately-sized butter-based pastry a day on top of a non-disastrous diet would do most teenagers (or, ahem, 20-somethings) any harm.

-After some butter-based pastry consumption, this is how I spent part of my afternoon:


"Moi, je préfère Camus."


"I could be wrong, but I believe I'm not the only one of my kind!"


"Would you believe what the humidity's done to my ear-fur?"

I'm in love

My eternal quest for the perfect dachshund, led me, indirectly, to the blog of a woman who appears to be an interior designer from the South, whose life is, as I imagine it, a real-life incarnation of the show I watched most during high school. But rather than having a pet pig, ala Suzanne Sugarbaker, she has the absolute cutest dachshund in the history of dachshunds. My escapist fantasy of the moment is that I am no longer a grad student living in a tiny Brooklyn apartment, but instead able to read and write about French Jews and whatnot from somewhere that looks exactly like this.

Hipsters, dachshunds, New Years, buses, and purity

-Make it stop! Gawker has a post about how what a crime it is when ostentatious (read: non-hipster) rich people move to NYC. Bo-ring, except that it culminates in an amusing tale revolving around two NYU ladies with the same name, one of whom is the glamorous daughter of a rock star and the other of whom is simply glamorous. Is it any wonder I find myself getting fashion inspiration from the undergrads?

-Jealous! Well, still jealous, to be precise. OMG dachshund! In fact, I think I might know that dachshund. Not personally, but there's a black-dapple smooth-coat miniature dachshund I see sometimes around NYU that looks a great deal like this one, whose dog-walker is friendly and allowed me to ooh and ahh over her charge. The presence of MUD coffee suggests Agyness & beau can't be too far off.

-It's New Years already? My cold was supposed to be gone in time for this. I'm now torn between going out as planned (an excuse to wear a dress! and to have the DIY haircut photographed!) and staying home to try out milkshakes on the new blender... Decisions, decisions. As for resolutions... study for orals? Gym-going, along with masochistically banning stupid purchases (coffee out, fancy cheese, shiny nail polish, Uniqlo everything), can wait.

-Why DC and not California? A question easily answered.

-And, in recent Ladybloggery, I spend far too many words denouncing 'purity pledges.' Surprisingly, no one has yet commented with a pro-pledge stance. We'll see how long that lasts.

More than an accessory

In a future life, I could imagine worse than to come back as Agyness Deyn. Amazing hair, a glamorous career, but most of all...

It's called a dachshund

The latest contender in the quest to win First World Problem of the Year is of course Alex Kuczynski's choice, announced on the cover of the Times' Sunday Magazine, to hobble around in Louboutins (note the hint of a red sole on the heels she wears on the cover) between yoga classes, while some woman out there in Real America, already struggling with her own real children, has the author's baby. The author's husband, a "very successful investor" of 120 years, with 1,000 children from 1,000,000,000 previous marriages, is despite his years still able to put genetic material into a cup, which is about all we learn about him in his wife's NYT Mag cover story. Although the article itself is only indirectly about race, as in, who but a silly rich white woman..., an accompanying photo reminds readers--who, by the way, are pissed-- that Kuczynski benefits from class and race privilege.

So, the moral of the story? Here's what it isn't: Those (few) who ask that we not judge the author, who note that infertility is serious business and those without personal experience of it shouldn't talk, may have a point, but clearly missed the rules of the game. If Kuczynski didn't want hundreds of total strangers commenting on the most intimate details of her life, she'd have chosen a different venue (say, coffee with friends) to share them. Those who suggest she ought to have gone with "a pedigree puppy" have my sympathy, but clearly missed the recent controversy over the mere possibility that the Obamas would not get their daughters a rescue dog. Had Kuczynski in an unrelated article mentioned a purebred pup, the angry comment mob would have been pissed.

Obama-Dachshund '08?

Nothing in the related article hints at a dachshund, but I'm sure if the soon-to-be First Family saw this picture, their problem would be solved!

Purity turnips

The people have spoken, and they insist that the Obama family's puppy be a rescue dog. Obama himself seems to agree, jokingly making reference to himself being a "mutt."

While this sounds impossible to criticize, a groundbreaking presidency all the way down to concern for fluffy animals, there's a good case for the First Dog being a purebred. (No, not just so it could be a dachshund.) For whatever reason, we humans have an urge to create and promote purity. It's up to us whether we channel this urge into eugenics or organics, to sexual mores or turnips, but it seems unlikely we as a species will kick the purity fixation anytime soon. Better we focus on chiens de race than on some human equivalent. Better we focus on the color of the First Dog than that of the First Family.

That One Won!

The WWPD response, incoherent as always:

1) What kind of puppy will the Obama girls get? You know my vote.

2) Please, please, idiot racists, do not assassinate Barack now that he's been elected. Thinking back on other cases of a member of a country's most-discriminated-against minority group getting to be head of state, the first one I thought of was Leon Blum. Clearly a Jew becoming prime minister of France signaled an end to that country's anti-Semitism. So, here's hoping things work out better this time around.

3) OMG I forgot to go to Starbucks. Or Ben and Jerry's. Oh well. Obama won! I wish I could say I saw it coming, but it's safe to say I absolutely did not.

Assorted excitement

-IFSer Damien tagged me to answer the question, "Why blog?" He asked in French, but I'll answer in English. So, leaving aside the obvious (narcissism, procrastination, graphomania), I started this blog because a college classmate of mine told me to turn my column in the school paper into one. Why I currently blog is something else. As a grad student, one grows used to the idea that one's ideas count for little. This is as it should be, considering how relatively little I know. But writing here, I can try out different ideas without asking anyone to respect mah authoritah. Sometimes these thoughts go somewhere, but it's at any rate all at a different pace and for a different audience than grad-school papers. I put less into the blog, and get less out of it, but it still strikes me as worthwhile, if only because it helps to write and (on a good day) construct some semblance of an argument more than just a few times per semester.

-Speaking of not constructing much of an argument, I reacted to the VP debate.

-But the weekend highlight was the dachshunds. There were puppies. Not getting one was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and I've objectively had to do things that are more difficult.

-Also a highlight: I left Park Slope and went to Williamsburg and Greenpoint with Clementine. Fun but, as I realized traveling back, far. Apparently the hipster dudes (one, anyway) like my years-old Banana Republic scarf. I excel at unintentionally ironic.

-Less successfully, today, Jo 'six-pack' and I went to a (the) Park Slope Belgian bakery, since it was on the way to the IKEA shuttle, only to discover that it (bakery, not IKEA) had been closed by the "Health and Mental Hygiene" folks. We were not shocked, but it meant no croissants till Red Hook, which defines first-world problems. To an extent: we considered brunch in Park Slope, until discovering that the place we were considering charged $4 for a bagel, with egg dishes priced accordingly. The realization that we cannot afford to dine out (not that we'd want to, having reexamined that food inspection site) led us to buy so much at the Fairway pre-IKEA that we could barely carry the stuff home. Which about brings us up to date.

The Ultimate Saturday-Night Blog Post

Jo and I got a bookcase! Well, another bookcase, but the current crop are at capacity. The bookcase, which is huge and usually in the $200-300 range, was $50. Even with schlepping and assembly charges, this came to less than the Ikea equivalent, which would, of course, not be assembled. After a dachshund and a dishwasher, in that order, a bookcase was what the apartment needed most. Now, we will not only be able to clear off the book-mountain that is our coffee table, but we might even be able to get a few more books. Which is good, because I'm not getting shoes any time soon.

I should note that Jo and I both recently turned 25. We're old, allow us these simple pleasures.

Perfection!

Two of my favorite things in the whole world are French macaroons and longhaired dachshunds. This is why I must remember to check Kei's blog more often.

Never thought I'd say this,

but I wish I were Kim Cattrall.