My journalistic niche: the obvious

There's a ground-breaking essay in the Guardian about how, if you live in a city with good public transportation, perhaps a car-sharing service as well, you don't need to own a car. An essay which it's revealed that one of the main reasons for having one is that if you don't, other, richer kids will tell your kids that your family is poor. (Welcome to my not-poor but car-less New York childhood!) I mean, yes, if you're in a big, dense city (and I get that London's spread out a bit differently than New York), a car starts to become an inconvenience and not worth the bother. But living in a city with a reasonable subway system and patting yourself on the back for not owning a car is not unlike living in a tropical climate and congratulating yourself for not owning a fur coat. When I lived in New York (or, for that matter, Chicago), no car. Here in the woods, where there's no public transportation to vaguely near where I live, not even a bus... car, finally, and thank goodness.

In other ground-breaking news, today I made the miraculous discovery that a pair of new (all-cotton! yet non-mom!) jeans that fit just right apart from gaping in the back did not need to be taken in, but rather to go through the dryer for the first time. For the best, given that this was the most I'd spent on jeans by such a long shot, even before the shipping and hemming. Also for the best that I didn't get this done when I got them hemmed - and I had been regretting this - as I now wouldn't be able to close them.

In which I attempt to break free from my own unpaid internship with WWPD Industries

Having completed one of my New Year's resolutions, it's of course time to get moving on the rest. The dissertation plods along, but is in that lull that happens when you get to a document you know would be enough material to submit, but there's just a bit more that would improve it, and that your committee probably expects, so you keep going, but without the same terror as can occur when you're starting with a blank page. And yeah, I still eat a lot of pasta, not too worried about it.

Which leaves pitching articles. If you have suggestions for how to go about this, please comment, and if you've offered suggestions in the past and I've been all, 'but my dissertation,' expect to hear from me soon. I'm past the barrier of getting demoralized if I send something somewhere, quasi-solicited, and never hear back, so this isn't a matter of wanting to know how not to fear rejection. I'm thinking strategy. 

What motivates me, in part, is that there keep being articles in prominent places that are totally posts I've written here. I don't have any reason to think these writers have seen my posts - I can conclude only that these were good ideas more than one of us came up with around the same time. The latest: the neurosis Facebook invented, in the words of Joyce Wadler in the Style section. 

2013 imminent

Oh, there are more, but here are some of the more important ones. OK, readers, hold me to this:

-Dissertation.

-Driver's license.

-Not quite so much pasta. Or at least whole wheat pasta. Something.

-Actually pitch articles, as opposed to blogging some idea, only to see that idea in print, three weeks or years later, written by somebody else. As in, aggressively, none of that 'but I emailed this one editor one time three years ago and never heard back.'

Culinary integration

In France, there have long been rival views of the nation. According to one, the only real French are descendants of the Gauls, or at least white Catholics whose itty bitty bits of Italian heritage don't reveal themselves in a last name. For the other, if you're French above all else identity-wise, if you shun the headscarf, hyphenated identities, and so on, you're in. The latter view is not liberal by American standards, but that is (or at least has been, unless it's changed recently?) where people stand who are more left than right.

In a speech that has a prominent role in the chapter I'm working on, Ernest Renan explains that the Jews of France are, in fact, at least a good number of them, descendants of the Gauls. Not bloody likely, I thought when reading this, but an understandable argument to make at a time (the 1880s) when racial anti-Semitism was just taking hold, when the first of the two views, which would really solidify during the Dreyfus Affair, was stepping into its own. 

Of course, if French Jews are not part of the original terre and sang of Western Europe, what was all of this matzo doing in the 'traditional rustic crackers and cookies' section of the Carrefour?