Adventures at the French-themed food court

When I read that a Bon Marché-type French food hall would be coming to lower Manhattan, I was (I, ahem, may have mentioned this on Facebook), torn. Part of me was like, where was this I lived in Battery Park City? Another part of me thought this sounded like some bizarre, Vegas-style recreation of Paris, as well as the final step in a finance-ification of what is, yes, the Financial District, but still. It's an area I knew quite well before 9/11, given its proximity to my high school; avoided (for obvious reasons) for a while after; then ended up living in through one of those flukes of New York real estate where affordable-for-grad-students apartments pop up in unexpected locales.

Because of course, Le District is located exactly where there used to be that sneaker store that gave discounts to bankers. Those were, it turns out, the relatively simple days. In the time since I was there last - which was maybe last summer? - the rest of the Financial Center mall became super-high-end. No more Banana Republic, Starbucks, and Ciao Bella. (It was never exactly shabby.) Now it's Hermes, Gucci, and others of that ilk. The relatively-accessible options are (another "of course") J.Crew and Lululemon. Lululemon had a woman - as in, a real woman - stretching in the display window. When I say "a real woman," I don't mean in the sense in which "real" is used to distinguish regular women from those who are or resemble models.

Le District itself is, apart from a really nice cheese shop tucked away within, kind of a mess. I'd been expecting a market (and a companion who shall remain nameless had been expecting a chocolate mousse bar), but these things don't seem to have opened yet. Existing dessert items were a bit all over the place price- and quality-wise. (A chocolate mousse cake was something like $3 and apparently really good; a Liège waffle was $5 and... not.) The main thing about the place was how polished-and-finance the people there looked. Even by new New York standards. It didn't help that I was still in my I-work-from-home clothes, featuring gingham flannel. (Heritage-chic? Pajamas? You be the judge.) The place seemed to be an after-work finance-sort hangout. Which, fine, but then maybe it wasn't quite the NJ-Transit-worthy replica-of-Paris destination I'd imagined it would be.

But despite all the intimidating spiffiness, the prices themselves weren't all that high. Or maybe they were, but I was expecting them to be so much higher. We ended up having kind of a big meal unintentionally - an attempt at getting a post-dessert-as-dinner snack at a wine bar (the more casual of the two dinner options) led to a variety of service mishaps (not 'the waiter didn't smile' - more like we didn't get our food, then saw the fur-coat-wearing woman next to us who'd arrived later receiving part of our order), which we didn't actually complain about, but a waiter who eventually asked about our order felt bad about this, and suddenly appeared with extra food on the house. That, plus the (large, and also unsolicited) cheese samples the cheese place was handing out meant this was arguably one of the most affordable feasts in New York, although, again, for reasons unlikely to replicate themselves.

Will I return? Perhaps - it's trip into the city that doesn't involve Penn Station, or even going outside. (NJ Transit to Newark, then the PATH, leading to an underpass, then there it is.) But seeing as they also sell cheese in New Jersey, I can't imagine I'll be heading back any time soon.

Small town living

A new cafe-and-store opened a while back, selling, among other things, cheese. Excitement! But although there's a cheese selection, and an excellent one, it's not entirely clear that the cheese is available for purchase. The staff hasn't quite been trained in (sorry) cutting the cheese. Or ringing it up, although they've recently made the bold-for-this-town move of putting price-per-pound on each cheese. Getting cheese at this establishment is a tremendous production, involving what starts to seem like a dismantling of their decor. (The price tags helpfully confirm that it isn't just decorative, and make me feel less guilty for inconveniencing the would-be cheese-cutters.) It's still a bit of an adventure, and one risks being sold a significantly different amount of cheese one came in for. (One time I ended up with enough for an entire Romance Languages department party, I exaggerate only slightly.) But it's well-priced, excellent cheese. What are you going to do? And it does seem to be improving. Each time I go, it's a notch less Pythonesque.

A week ago, I bought cheese at the place, went through the whole rigamarole, which I keenly remember involved two 0.28 lb. pieces of cheese being cut. I purchased one of them. A week had gone by, and back I was. I wanted more of the same delicious cheese. First a man behind the counter was about to cut some, but then his supervisor remembered that they sometimes keep smaller pieces in some other fridge, and lo and behold, the other 0.28 lb. piece and I were reunited after all.

Two thoughts of course crossed my mind: 1) that I really ought to have just bought the .56 lb. piece last week and saved the trip, and 2) how long small pieces of cheese are kept in the hidden fridge - a subset of the larger question, which is whether it makes sense to buy perishable goods from a place where you appear to be the only customer. But it's cheese, and I'm a captive audience.

Biohazard

Breaking with a long policy of I-don't-bring-food-to-class, I, yes, brought food to class. But nothing I, like, baked. It was for vaguely pedagogical reasons (on mange du fromage, mais on aime le fromage - a point I'd been droning on about for a while, and I figured maybe some actual fromage would drive the point home) but the main issue with it was that boy oh boy did it stink. I chose a camembert very quickly at Murray's on the way to class, thinking it was a classic French cheese, one I knew was good, and one students might not have tried (i.e. not brie). I teach in a basement classroom. I am an idiot. I rarely let class out even a few minutes early, but it had to be done.

"Not gay bars, Ma. Zabar's."*

Every so often, I have to go to the Zabar's cheese department. Forces beyond my control compel it. When it was something I theoretically had access to, as in, when I lived a bus or subway ride away from it, I don't think I properly appreciated it. Now, it's a quasi-religious pilgrimage, involving hours upon hours of transportation, and not really justifiable unless I'm in the city for some other reason. It's far enough from where I usually need/want to go in NY that it basically means throwing up my hands and accepting that I will be that woman carrying cheese across state lines, devoting an entire afternoon to figuring out how many jumbo containers of Amora mustard can be comfortably carried on the subway, two trains, and a 30-minute nature walk. (The answer, I've learned the hard way, is one, if I intend to carry - sorry, shlep - back anything else as well.)

On some level, I realize this is a waste of precious time in the city, and that even if I now live in the woods, there is a comparable establishment a mere 40-minute bike ride away. But the prices are significantly higher, and more to the point, there isn't that sense of infinite possibility, just a carefully-curated cheese selection and a bunch of relocated Europeans who can't believe their luck, finding this in a New Jersey strip mall. (There are, however, at both establishments, agitated local women several times my age and strength, prepared to shove.) For a place that's famous, touristy, and gourmet, the prices in the cheese section of Zabar's (if not the rest of the store) are startlingly low. A kid in a candy shop, except not a kid (in the frank words of my grandmother's cleaning woman earlier in the day, "28 is not young"), and while there is indeed candy just past the cheese, it just seems redundant.

I restrained myself, shopping-wise, insofar as I didn't get the $7.29 tiny piece of aged goat cheese (Chabichou, and it looked amazing), or didn't, in that I ended up with three different kinds of cheese, making that a grand total of eight varieties currently in the cheese drawer. Already had: Mozzarella (for pizza, doesn't count!), Pecorino, Ricotta Salata, the smallest possible but still embarrassingly pricey wedge of Humboldt Fog, Passendale. Now added: Valdeon (a Spanish blue cheese I'd never tried before), Camembert, and smoked mozzarella bocconcini. These, concerned reader(s), are not the entire contents of my kitchen. There are also fruits and vegetables (fresh, frozen, and in the case of more tomatoes than is reasonable, canned), as well as pantries full of pasta and dried legumes. But the cheese collection is by far the most impressive, so much so that it almost seems as if I should be hosting an academic reception, as opposed to merely stuffing my face. But it's a truly impressive array. Where's my Into The Gloss?

*Apologies to "The Nanny."

Belgdar

For a Jew, I have no Jewdar. For a native New Yorker and longtime student of French, I have no gaydar. What I do have, however, is Belgdar.

This afternoon, I decided to make the best of needing to go allll the way to Rite-Aid (success, at last!), up the various hills on the bike, and stop by Bon Appetit, which is in the same mawl as the Rite-Aid, to get more Dutch sprinkles, maybe check out the Passendale selection.

And sure enough, at the cheese counter, I see a man who I immediately put together must be the Belgian responsible for the pervasive Belgian-ness of the ostensibly Franco-gourmet establishment. Was it the glasses? The accent? The proximity of Passendale? Whatever the case, I figured if anyone in any shop in the U.S. would know where to find Sirop de Liège, the elusive Belgian syrup Jo and I are always bringing back in our luggage, this was the guy.

He of course knew immediately what I was talking about, and they'd apparently stocked it there for years, but it's no longer exported to the U.S. What they have now, he explained, is the Dutch version, which instead of being apple and pear, is just pear. There was something in his tone that told me that the Dutch version would be adequate but a disappointment. This, in turn, confirmed for me that the establishment's Low Countries influence is indeed Belgian, rather than Dutch. Further confirmation. Further still.

There is probably no skill in this world more useless than the ability to spot a Belgian, and please, save the cracks about getting a PhD in the humanities. But this is, it seems, a skill I have.

I will not operate

-It's good to know that if I ever do churn the rest of this massive document out, and if it is approve by a French department, I can go around calling myself "doctor" and insinuating medical expertise. My teaching field for my qualifying exams may have been "Religion and Family," but I minored in "House."

-Tiny, tiny, yet not really that tiny Bisou is too small to have gotten all her shots at once, so we still need to wait three weeks before she is officially free to meet and greet, as in, obedience classes. But she can unofficially begin to do so in the next day or two, assuming she's not attacked by a raccoon. When the vet said this, I thought, what are the chances, but then of course saw a raccoon on the way to the tennis court. Dead frogs, deer dead and alive, and now a raccoon.

-Yes, the tennis court. Other than Bisou, dissertation, food shopping, and a great deal of might I add not at all humbly incredibly successful cooking, this weekend has been about tennis and fine gin. Just call me Muffy, like they do at the club.

There was a social/work event for the geniuses, but as a spouse/partner, I was allowed in, despite my mediocre brain skillz, rendered all the more mediocre by my remembering that I once (age 22 or 23, so not last week) liked martinis, and thinking maybe I'd take them up on the  35% (random!) discount at this event and try one made of the gin the bartender recommended. It had been so long since I'd had anything made with hard liquor that I wasn't sure what gin normally tastes like, although I supposed this tasted better than I remembered gin tasting. More relevant: given my preference for food (and nail polish, and premium hair conditioner, and books about anti-Semitism, watch as I confirm stereotypes) over wine or beer when it comes to shlepping things back, whatever ability to tolerate wine I may have built up living in Paris is long since kaput.

The martini was a generous but not "Bravo" reality show-sized portion, and I had it after a large dinner, and with maybe half a pound of cheese and olives that the geniuses themselves were neglecting. And I didn't even finish it. Yet I still woke up feeling as though the previous night had been something of a partay, which was not so much the case. This, in turn, upped the ante on my already upped-because-of-Bisou-sleep-situation coffee consumption, which, in turn, improved my ability to run after the tennis ball, as opposed to just watching it pass me by, as I had in my more BYU-friendly state the day before. Between the gin, the tennis, and the wildlife, the New York Jew is being squeezed out of me.

Princetondale

In Park Slope, there was a store we referred to as "The Man," one that unlike the nearby Co-op was extraordinarily hierarchical, the chief being one of the older men who worked there, "the man." The store was The Man, even if the man himself wasn't around, although he was almost always there. It sold tiny expensive morsels of gourmet-ness - as in pre-foodie, pre-food-movement imported delicacies - and was both pretentious and wonderful. Atmosphere-wise, I prefer a supermarket, but it's not right to complain about the proximity of good cheese, and unless you live next to a Fairway (or, uh, Monoprix), you're not getting the cheese without the 'tude.

In Princeton, store after store after store has a The Man-like quality times a thousand. Purveyors of all kinds of things I thought I'd need to order online (the pizza peel somehow lost in the move, for instance), which is great, but with this requisite faux-folksy chit-chat and a hefty mark-up. At one shop, an overenthusiastic/over-pedagogic 'monger asked a customer who'd just tasted a cheese, "Why do you like the Manchego?" It was at that moment that I turned around and left.

But today was an exciting (and traffic-wise, bad-exciting) bike adventure to the Princeton Shopping Center, which I'd passed by on shuttle but never actually entered. (Bike lanes are a great idea, but it helps if cars acknowledge them.) The main purpose of the trip was to return with non-spoiled milk and "accident" pads for Bisou - missions accomplished! - but this store called "Bon Appetit" caught my eye, probably not unrelated to the fact that after the ride there I was famished. At first glance it seemed like every other home-of-cutesy, but it was past my lunchtime and I was not going to leave it at one glance. Good thing too - it's chock full of all kinds of Dutch and Belgian (and French, gourmet, etc.) products, including the chocolate sprinkles Nederlandophone-types put on bread, speculaas, and... Passendale! The cheese that was so tough to find in Paris (only at Bon Marché's food hall), and that I didn't think could be found at all in the States. Just as at The Man, there were all these random not-so-chic German products interspersed with the Fancy, here there must be some Dutch connection or other, but this was truly fantastic, and not just because I'd spent the previous half-hour staring slack-jawed at seemingly indistinguishable chew toys and canine shampoos.

Research, write, pamper, repeat

Now that the soldes are just about over, study breaks must be of the non-sartorial variety. What with the euro, full-priced is not so much an option, plus how many Petit Bateau t-shirts should one person with free laundry down the hall own?

So, after a heck of a week of BNF, with a whole series of beautiful Jewesses living in an anachronistic amalgam of biblical times, medieval Spain, and nineteenth century France all blending into one, I decided that I would take some time off today to have a pain au chocolat and read (another 19th C Juive, alas, but not far enough into the novel yet to learn if she's belle) in the most amazing place in the world, then to buy groceries, and to meander around some shrines to Frenchwoman skincare. In reverse order...

Unable to get myself to follow Glowing Gwyneth's lead and buy a skincare product whose purpose I could not ascertain, but intrigued and at any rate looking for something less cakey to deal with the undereye circles that come from having to contend with heaping stacks of interchangeable belle-Juive tales, and looking for a fun way to incorporate sunscreen into my routine in the season when the sun isn't reminder enough to take heed of the fact that pallor and skin cancer both run in my family, I ended up with La Roche-Posay sunscreen/foundation gunk, in a color that the pharmacist assured me would be paler than pale. (I was embarrassed to ask this of someone dealing with The Medical, but this is the only way you can see the tester, and the place was not exactly overrun.) And, at least in the so-so light of my dorm room, this stuff is kind of amazing, airbrushing in real life.

Groceries! I went to the touristy Rue Cler, because it happens to be near the bakery to end all bakeries, and because tourist demand is what keeps fromageries thriving. Bethmale vache, Chabichou de Poitou, and there's a slight chance I'll eat 9 euros worth of (not even that expensive) cheese in the course of the day, but whatever it takes to get this chapter done...

OK, so, the best place in the world. This would be the Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur. I would continue to return there even if it were overrun by Jew-baiting fashion designers, but fortunately, that's not so much the clientele. They are, instead, a mix of beautiful Frenchwomen of all ages one cannot look away from; their scarf-arrangement-champion boyfriends or husbands; tourists who've accidentally stumbled upon what they think will be on every street-corner but no such luck; and these tiny, adorable, impeccably-behaved children, who don't know how lucky they are. (When I was your age, little child wrapped up in a scarf like a present, my after-school treat was a NutRageous.) All are served by a staff of strapping young men whose combination of hunkiness and ability to produce the most stellar baked goods in all of Paris if not the world makes them not detract from the overall atmosphere. Au Bonheur des Dames, indeed.

The atmosphere is one that, though pretty, is not precious, stuffy, or otherwise off-putting, the way salons-de-thé tend to be. Because it isn't really a salon-de-thé, but more of a regular bakery that happens to have tables. Accordingly, the prices are dangerously reasonable. Slightly higher to-stay than to-go, one could nevertheless, on a grad student budget, spend an entire afternoon there, chain-eating berry tarts, eclairs, pains au chocolat...

While I will admit to having gone yesterday as well - to show the place to a fellow female and fruit-tart-appreciating grad student after we'd put in some serious hours at the BNF - I kind of had to return today, because yesterday's strawberry-raspberry tart and Mariage Frères earl gray tea, though impeccable, had me craving my "usual" - a croissant or pain au chocolat and a café crème. The place was packed, and where I was sitting was sort of hidden by the line of to-go customers. By the time I was served, there was some kind of problem with the coffee set-up, so tea it was. It was still an exquisite experience. After my pain au chocolat, I had to decide what would come next. I opted for "next" to be bread and a dessert for later. "Bread," such a pedestrian word, so inadequate to describe the pain au figues, shaped like a fig, that I purchased (and, having just tried it, will purchase again - sort of like a dream version of a cinnamon-raisin bagel). Dessert will be a lemon tart. (Is it dessert hour yet?) So fine, I live in a cell of sorts, but I will probably never eat this well again in my life and I intend to enjoy that aspect of Paris to the fullest.

Let them eat Chabichou

I love that a commenter refers to the U.S. government's plan to promote cheese as "Reminiscent of the worst excesses of the French Revolution."

How to eliminate fun from your life entirely

Is nothing sacred?

Oops

Just spent the last several hours writing (finishing! aside from a final proofread) a paper. Forgot to eat lunch. This evening is a department party, and I vowed that this one I would not spend (exclusively) stuffing my face with cheese. Alas, maybe in the Spring...

She should eat a sandwich

Celebrities are constantly being advised to eat sandwiches. Today I decided to make the most of time off and live as much like a celebrity as a grad-school budget allows, which is to say, I managed to get my hair cut at a place where I was able to avoid compromising my principles, checking account, or hair. Whee! Much improved. How does this relate to sandwiches? I figured since I was living the life of a woman of leisure, I might as well stop in, pre-haircut, at the Italian sandwich shop next door. Both the sandwich place and the hair salon were cash-only, which made it really, tangibly obvious that the two trips cost close to the same amount. But what a sandwich! Who knew mozzarella, arugula, and artichokes combined so well?

The moral of the story is, Sullivan Street is one of the greatest places in New York. And if we'd been more amenable to the offer of a woman on Craigslist to take over her lease, so long as we bought $2,000 (!) worth of her furniture (one hopes this came with a sandwich), Jo and I might be living on Sullivan, and not in Park Slope, at this very moment.

Am I permitted one comment about Park Slope? It's not about strollers. It's about the danger of taking slogans too literally. The 'going green' trend need not involve replacing one's pre-trend t-shirts with green ones, and using a green tote bag to do one's shopping. You will walk around Park Slope and discover that everything you see is green-the-color, because apparently a tote bag in any other color signals a cold-hearted disregard for future generations. [Disclaimer: I've even got one--my mother got it free somewhere, and hasn't asked for it back (do you want it, by the way?) so I'm guessing she's as enthusiastic about the look as I am.]

"My body will not tolerate it"

An old Woody Allen monologue covers the subject of how Allen is incapable of drinking or using drugs because his body, he explains, will not tolerate it. This of course fits with his nebbishy persona, but it turns out that "There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews—fifty per cent, in one estimate—carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol." This explains so much. I've been known to drink one beer and wake up with a headache. The way around this is usually to combine that one drink my body can (barely) tolerate with some kind of food, typically cheese, as photos on the NYU French Department website will confirm. Low tolerance doesn't, in my case, equal none at all. But now it turns out fromage is out as well: another article, about an amazing-sounding place in Israel called Himmelfarb Goat Farm (any relation?), notes, "We may all be lactose-intolerant Heebs, yet dairy has remained king in the land of milk and honey." This is not something I'd ever heard before, that Jews get ill from dairy, but unlike the New Yorker revelation, this one does not ring true.

A break from Twix

As I do each semester, yesterday I posed for the French Department cameras with a wee bit of Camembert. Scroll down for evidence. (Along with evidence, it seems, that I am three feet shorter than my boyfriend, which I promise is not the case.) I'll have you believe that the piece of cheese you see is all the cheese I consumed over the course of the evening...

The "end of the year" party is a bit of a misnomer, since nearly everyone in the pictures is either in the process of writing final papers or will, once they're turned in, be grading those same assignments. But a little bit of wine and cheese cannot possibly impede one's ability to understand French literature. Clearly the wine and cheese are integral.

Spring has broken

Thank goodness the Spitzer stuff has gotten old. I've finally gotten some uninterrupted work done! I'm not sure which was more of an achievement, finding what I was looking for at the JTS and NYPL, or finally sorting the mess of papers into primary sources (in one massive "binder clip") and recent-ish articles (in another). I'm inclined towards living in a big pile of papers, so the latter accomplishment is far more surprising.

I've also loaded my bag up with library books that have "contemporary" or "twentieth century" in the title, now that I'm focusing on the 19th century for two of my three final papers. If you have NYU library access and are studying contemporary French Jews, tomorrow's your big day. Or whatever the turnaround is, what with shelving and all. (From shelving at the Reg, I'm well aware that this is not an instantaneous process.) I'm less concerned with "bookshelf etiquette" (our shelves are at capacity) and more worried about being able to walk across the living room without tripping over a tower of library books... only to stumble onto another pile of library books.

And... I passed the halfway mark with Drieu la Rochelle (whom I cannot stop calling Drieu de la Rochelle, which sounds so much better). Gilles is as readable a 700-page fascist novel as I've ever come across, and I have to give it points for fascist consistency--if my presentation on the book were on what makes it fascist, I could underline just about anything. Cult of youth and health? Check. Jews as symbols of decadent modernity? Check. General assholishness in the model of what one with no prior academic study of fascism would expect from that ideology? Mais bien sur!

So Spring Break was productive enough after all. Between visits to JStor and Gallica, I also managed to see some friends, buy (and consume) Camembert, make (and consume) muffins, and meet a lovely, stuffed-animal-like black Pomeranian. The owner of said Pomeranian, a fellow thrift-store shopper, though far more chic than that description implies, serenaded Jo with Jacques Brel's "Les Flamandes." So yes, it was an action-packed Spring Break after all.

Samedi, the photos

The photos from last weekend's French Department conference are online. To be an inconspicuous moderator, I decided to dress how I imagined a moderator at a French conference should dress, and I think it worked. There's also an unflattering photo of me eating cheese, surrounded by grad students from three different European countries--the 'Phoebe with cheese' photo has now become a Maison party grad student tradition, but I'll try to look a bit less enthusiastic next time. I do not just come for the cheese! But the cheese was, might I add, most excellent.

Enhancement

Professional athletes are not allowed to use performance-enhancing drugs, although it's clear these drugs, well, enhance their performance. The latest "cycle" of America's Next Top Model was an officially non-smoking one, and even included a "competition" to see which "model" could pose best for an anti-smoking ad, thus removing the one common feature the participants might have had with real-life fashion models.

If models can't smoke and athletes can't use steroids, what can't grad students do during finals? After the latkes and gnocchi of last week turned me into quite the potato, I was shooting for not overdoing it at the end-of-semester parties. By overdoing it I mean cheese. And there's evidence that I have gone overboard with the cheese at past events, but to be fair, NYU's French Department serves some very fine cheeses, and the parties always seem to occur at just that not-quite-dinner time when, try as we might to be sophisticated, we still believe dinner ought to be consumed. It all seemed hopeful enough until I arrived at the holiday party to see that this was among the possibilities. Rationalizing that paper-writing requires copious cheese consumption, especially if the papers in question are all about France, I dug in. Hope the models and athletes have more willpower.

Bourdieu UPDATED

How did it come to pass that my tastes in so many ways overlap with those of the French peasantry?

UPDATE

After an anonymous Belgian reader pointed out to me that this post didn't really make sense, I realized I should say outright what I was getting at. The most striking thing about (re)reading Bourdieu's Distinction as an American is how even the consumption patterns and food preferences of working-class and farming French folk sound upper-class and sophisticated. Bread, cheese, and wine are the classic end to academic talks--not just in the French Department--and are mainstays at highbrow events of all kinds. Any French restaurant is by definition posh; the more obscure, regional, and peasanty-sounding a dish, the more likely it is people will be willing to pay $23 for it at dinner at Le Somethingorother. Apparently what well-off French people eat--lean fish and meat, fresh fruits and vegetables--is a six-pack of Diet Coke away from wealthy Americans. (Meanwhile, if TV commercials are to be believed, the newest in lowbrow American cuisine, at several different fast-food chains, is some kind of sandwich or wrap containing meat, oozing cheese, and no vegetables whatsoever.)

Answer me this

Why are we supposed to care about the 'quality' of the clothing we purchase? Short of items that fall apart when washed or worn a lot (something that is at least as true of delicate designer items as of those purchased at Ye Olde Navy), how durable must clothing be? When realistically it is all once drip of pizza grease away from imperfection. And I know from personal experience that clothing in the Gap price range lasts for years; given that sizes and styles change, what's the use in clothing lasting for decades? Or is quality about fit? That is probably too case-by-case, and some women may well fit best into H&M. Or is it knowing that a garment was hand-stitched? Is a slight difference in texture that you alone can detect worth paying so many times the price of the knockoff or equivalent? Would one shade of denim or length of handbag handle be subtly better than another if the opposite shade/length was the one possessed by the more costly item? In other words, it could be that 'quality' is just a hoax that convinces clothes-shoppers that they are doing something other than tossing away money that could have gone to something useful, including one Forever 21 outfit and, say, a house. But if it brings the consumer pleasure to believe she has the 'best' of whatever item exists, and that this is for a reason that goes beyond a superficial preference, so be it.

I know Rita also questions the concept of clothing as an "investment." But Julie Fredrickson and Amber Taylor argue in favor of investing in--as opposed to just buying because it's nice-- the occasional purse. Amber gives some concrete examples of poor quality, but these strike me as easily avoidable if you purchase clothing in a store rather than online, and give it a good once-over before heading to the register.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why quality matters in other areas of life. Poor food or water quality and you're left with at best a bad taste in your mouth and at worst a stomach issue. And high-quality cheese is a different food from processed. In fact, it is entirely possible that I only understand quality when it comes to cheese.

Knowledge acquisition

Among so much else, the rest of which was actually important (i.e. how to teach), today I learned the following:

1) "Combien de temps a-t-elle à vivre?" sounds EXACTLY like "Combien de temps à Tel Aviv?" Not exactly, but the first time I heard this sentence in a video I watched for teacher-training I thought the sad faces were about terrorism or some such, which seemed out of context. The thing is that I secretly imagine the rest of the world is obsessed with all things French-Israeli. Yet the evidence otherwise keeps growing.

2) At least two of my classmates claim they read this blog, who up till now I had no idea read it. Making a mental note not to repeat anecdotes to these two that I may have put on the blog, so as not to make the same (fascinating, always) observations twice.

3) The Italian House at NYU has a chef. And amazing food. Oh yes. I think I may have just discovered an interest in Italian culture, and will have to go to a lot of talks at the Casa Italiana...