On (not) wearing the same thing every day

The above shots are my attempts at making the most of the clothing I have with me this summer. Notice a pattern? Basically, since I arbitrarily made the decision that my jeans were too dirty for continued pre-laundry wear, it's been the same pair of black pants every day, plus a t-shirt or tank top in either black, gray, or white. It's a look I like, and I thank Uniqlo and H&M for making it possible, but enough was enough.

To remedy the situation, today I purchased a dress from Esprit, the library here being dangerously close to the main shopping street. (As if that makes for a change, but whatever.) I hesitated, because the price tag claimed an equal numerical cost in euros and dollars, suggesting I should wait until being back in the States, but according to the website Esprit doesn't have kids clothes in the US. Indeed, the dress is for kids. After seeing it in the store, I looked it up on the site, and realized this did not help me get a sense of how I might look in it. Not that I look like models generally, but I could not look less like this one. Voila:



Turns out the look works, or so I've told myself, on post-pubescent Semites as well.

In other shopping news, today, post-dress-purchase, I found the street where all the used or otherwise appealing bookstores are. This includes books in French and English. Luckily, however, the library permits reading without paying, whereas I'd imagine Esprit frowns upon wearing and returning. So, once again, no regrets.

Exotic rabbi, stereotypical situation

This image and caption alone should be the encyclopedia entry for Bad For The Jews. Good grief.

The article this accompanies - about a corruption scandal involving some Syrian-community rabbis - is sort of bizarre. I get that not everyone hears 'Sephardic' and immediately knows what this refers to, but the amount of background seems... excessive. To understand that this community is upset that its rabbis stand accused of some stereotype-fulfilling what-have-you, is it really necessary to know that "Sephardim, unlike the ultra-Orthodox who live at a remove from American society, attend public schools in the lower grades and are encouraged to succeed in business." That The Sephardim own Century 21? That they can't intermarry? That they're behind Jordache jeans? (Do Jordache jeans still exist?) All interesting tidbits, but how does any of this relate to the corruption scandal? Why not just stop here: "Sephardic Jews trace their ancestry to Spain and various parts of North Africa and the Middle East, as distinct from the Ashkenazic Jews from Eastern Europe"? (Not that Ashkenazi Jews necessarily come from Eastern Europe - how about Germany, Alsace... but most in America do come from E Eur, so, close enough.)

So, why all the ethnographic detail? To make the story more compelling? To hit a word count? To spare the reputation of other American Jews, the Ashkenazi majority, who are (by implication, and by internal-Ashkenazi stereotype) less business-oriented and insular than the Sephardic communities? If there's bigotry to be had, perhaps, by making very clear which Jews are involved here, The Jews will not be insulted? (As if that's ever worked.) Because all news stories are about people, and people, as a rule, have some cultural background. Again, granted that this particular background is unfamiliar to many, but the article just stopped short of explaining which seasonings go into couscous dishes traditional to this set.

I guess what got to me was that it ended up reading as though all the cultural information was meant as a background to explain (in the best of cases) why the community's upset, or (in the worst) how the corruption came about. If the latter seems like a possibility, it's in part because why wouldn't a community be miffed in this situation, but it could be because of the heavy emphasis from the journalist on how ambitious and money-hungry this community tends to be, juxtaposed with the inevitable quotes from insiders about how radically money-laundering conflicts with the values they hold dear.

Adventures in Eiskaffee

As European countries go, Germany is not known for having a cuisine worth crossing the Atlantic for. But I'm about to put German cuisine above all others on account of one food alone: Eiskaffee. Yes, that, with no help (ok, spaetzles are quite nice), puts German cuisine in my mind above Italian, French, etc.

Let me explain.

Pretty much since arriving, I've passed a wood-paneled coffee place that looked so enticing, I was scared to go in. The sign reading "Eiskaffee" didn't hurt. Adding to the intimidation factor: one of my housemates had in fact entered, and was told that because they were so busy, it was black coffee or nothing. Hmm.

But I was determined! And other housemates, also anglophones, had claimed success. So, having finished reading another list-book earlier than expected, I decided that today was the day. Jo taught me my line, which I had memorized: Ich moechte einen Eiskaffee ohne sahne, bitte. After some hesitation, I entered and said my piece. Because I am fluent in all languages when it comes to understanding things said about foods I wish to consume, I understood quite well when the man behind the counter explained, in German, that the drink never comes with cream, anyway.

Missing from all this was a menu. There was a list of the prices of roasted coffee beans, but no sign of what coffee drinks were available, what was in them, or what they cost. Which was in a sense for the best, because had I known the price (4.90; yesterday's had been 3.40, and that was on a main street in town) before ordering, I might not have done so, but upon tasting the beverage/dessert/whatever it is, I was prepared to hand over my checking account and first-born.

How to even begin... It came in a tall, chilled-seeming, conical glass, with a straw as well as a long spoon. On top was cappuccino-type foam, but sweet. Below was a layered mix of espresso and what I'm guessing was some kind of brownie-dough ice cream. The way it all came together was just beautiful. Yesterday's Eiskaffee had been a mix of vanilla ice cream and espresso more delicious by far than any coffee-and-ice-cream concoction I'd ever attempted at home, but this...

Clearly the exchange rate will have to change dramatically if this is to be a post-book treat, rather than a post-list one (with 15 books, give or take, per list), but what can I say? I regret nothing.

Where everybody knows your name

Is this a joke? The only places where I've ever been a regular are muffin-and-coffee establishments, so no maitre'd tipping was involved. OK, I'm also a regular at Chelsea Thai, but when food comes on a tray, and when a get-one-free stamp card is involved, presumably being a regular really does just mean showing up often and, you know, paying for the food.

Also confusing: people want to be regulars at restaurants? I can't say I'm delighted that the man at Chelsea Thai gives me a knowing glance when I order the Pad Gra Prow, vegetarian, no mushrooms, nor was it so fantastic in high school when, at Downtown Delicious, the cranberry muffin would appear on the counter, it seemed, as soon as my friends and I were in earshot. If it were up to me, I'd rather be anonymous in these situations, my face not immediately associated with particular foodstuffs, but the thing is, once you find a place you like, returning is by far the more convenient option.

Perhaps it's different with upscale restaurants? The whole experience is less directly about the food, so 'they know me' is presumably less about connecting you to your preferences as about the staff knowing, in some deeper way, who you are, or at the very least connecting your face to the name on your credit card. Still, if the motivation is to get the occasional free drink or dessert, but to get to that point you need to spend thousands of dollars convincing the staff to remember your name, I'm not seeing the point.

Joke or sincere, the message of the article is clearly to not eat in restaurants. Doing so is, by the standards of the piece, either too expensive (for those who can't afford to tip - in gifts and cash - 400% of the price of their meal) or too agonizing. The piece is tailor-made for those whose liberal guilt causes them to think it tragic that another human being is carrying them their food, but who for whatever reason continue even after this epiphany to eat in restaurants. This mindset leads to the bizarre belief that being a good customer means not only politeness and a reasonable tip (i.e. respect), but also learning the names and life stories of the entire waitstaff, treating the restaurant trip as a charitable donation to food-service workers.

Falafel etc.

Comment #131 of 131 on a Bitten post about canned beans: "125+ comments about the edibility of canned beans. Seriously? Please tell me that this is some kind of internet-based performance art exposing foodie ridiculousness."

Speaking of chickpeas, Jo and I just had some truly excellent German falafel. As in, falafel in Germany, not some German-cuisine interpretation thereof. The portions were a bit small, though, so we had to head to the eis parlor afterwards, where an eiskaffee was, at long last, mine. This was also the reward for finishing another 500-pager. Given how many books on these lists remain, looks like eiskaffee will be the word of the summer.

Tocqueville manquée, renversée

One of the great mysteries about Western Europe, as far as I'm concerned, is the apparent obsession many women here seem to have with ridding themselves of cellulite. You can walk for miles (or kilometers; whatever) looking for a coffee, a bookstore, a band aid, a pair of socks, but all you'll find will be the notorious European pharmacies-that-aren't, places with the aseptic look of Health, but that are not so much tiny Duane Reades or Rite Aids as shops selling ridiculously expensive and gratuitous-seeming beauty products. While some of these are geared towards hair, the main concern really does seem to be cellulite. Granted, I doubt if many American women wish they had more cellulite than is currently the case, but it is possible to walk more than a block even in looks-conscious areas of Manhattan without being inundated with ads for ways to rid one's self of all upper-leg lumpiness. My sense is that vanity is more geared towards facial acne-then-wrinkles and overall shape. But I can't say I've researched this extensively.

Another major difference between the US and Old Europe: upon reaching a certain age, 35 give or take, every woman in Europe (and Israel, whatever that implies) crops her hair short and dyes it dark red. American women do not do this, whereas women here seem obligated by law to do so. Obviously the look works for some better than for others, but I do wonder how the idea came about that all women need to go this route. It's particularly startling on women who clearly (given the appearances of their children) would have long, straight blond hair if they just left it alone, needing only a touch of yellow dye to keep things as they were. Isn't that the beauty ideal in the Western world, if not beyond? What is happening?

Possible explanations for the cellulite-obsessiveness discrepancy:

1) European women are thinner than American women, and thus can 'afford' to worry about perfection. At 400 pounds, a woman is probably more concerned with reaching 300 than with the exact texture of every square inch of flesh. Then again European women are catching up and then some. So...

2) American women, coming from pioneer stock, culturally if not biologically, are less vain. This is so blatantly false I will not analyze it further.

3) American women have more children and worse child-care options than European women, and thus less time to spend looking in mirrors at parts of the body better left unexamined.

4) Europe's all free and naked, and all this nudity is less than freeing for women with thigh-related anxiety.

5) European women do not actually care a whit about cellulite; the ads are attempts by evil American corporations to get them to do so.

Possible explanations for the dark-red crop:

No clue. Really. Any takers?

Käse etc.

Now that I know my way around a bit more, things are going much more smoothly. I'm plowing through various 500-page readings, and even managed a trip to the market. It could be that this market is one that only looks like a farmers' market (the apricots? French.) but there were more options than at the supermarket, and who doesn't like shopping outdoors in a quaint Markt? I'm very curious about some Austrian cheese I just bought a sliver of. We shall see.

So that was study break number one. As for the next, I keep mentally dangling this eiskaffe (sp?) in front of myself, as Zola's Verite plods along in the way that novels do that, though useful for various academic reasons, are not the most compelling as novels. Once this and another novel are finished, a mix of coffee and vanilla ice cream (assuming that is, in fact, what this eiskaffe consists of - here's hoping) will be mine. Mmm...

Never mind! All is well.

Round two, with a map, went much, much better. This time, I found what I'm thinking is the discount supermarket, so now I have not only salad but also oil, vinegar, and salt to put on this salad. Other finds: French wine and cheese, a beergarden I may have to check out at some point in the not-so-distant post-Zola future, a café serving icecaffe, that amazing espresso-and-vanilla-iced-cream concoction that will be my next study break, and (OK, this was during the previous trip) a theater playing Brüno. Yippee!

In which I am the idiot American abroad

The plan for Germany, Day 1, was to spend the morning in the library, then go buy groceries, then come back to the room and do reading that can be done without a library. All began quite well - got to the library just after it opened, post-coffee and pastry, ready to get to work. I'd confirmed ahead of time that a) the library was open to me, and b) that it had books I need, and so headed confidently to the... where? And the online catalog, in German or English, mystified me. Yes, books were available, but in which library? And what happened to all those friendly DS135Fs and PQ2000s? After finding the right area and paying the 2-euro (!) mandatory locker fee (so much for bringing the laptop), I found a whole lot of stacks arranged in no way thematically - by year, I was told - and felt for the first time this summer like ye olde American abroad, complaining about how wrong things are done in every other country. A frustrating library experience will do that. But eventually, after extensive research, I found Zola's complete works - in French this time, having already found some German Zola I wouldn't much know what to do with.

This occupied me until I was hungry for lunch, then another hour after that, since I realized I should make the most of the locker while I had it. Finding a grocery store was painless enough - I'd passed one along the way - and I felt all set from this, as I had a tote bag in my backpack for the occasion. But! I did not have enough cash on me for the groceries, and they only take "German" cards. A trip to a nearby ATM sorted this out, and I was on my way.

But on my way where? I'd found the library easily enough, but finding my way back was made more difficult by the fact that the only map I had was in Firefox, I did not have wireless access at the library, and so, when my computer picked that window of time in which to crash, I was, I realized, map-less. But I'd bought the groceries figuring I knew my way. Which I did, almost - I proceeded for about two and a half hours to walk in circles around the house I was looking for. Unlike the Netherlands, where people will speak English unprompted, even to those with slightly different Dutch-language accents, here it's probably best to know the language of the land. Also useful to know: the name of the street where you're staying. I remembered some letters, some sounds... and that the street is a tiny one our cab driver had never heard of. I tried to ask one woman for directions, but between her not speaking English (or not wishing to speak it with strange people on the street) and my not quite knowing what to ask, the wandering continued. The suburban-type streets looked to my untrained eye each one just like the next. Things that had seemed like landmarks - some bee-attracting flowers, a particular Ausgang sign - were, of course, on every street.

Long, very long story short, I found a bank or similar and went in and must have seemed pathetic, with all these groceries and no clue. A man came in and joined the discussion - where was I, and where was I trying to get? My botched attempts at saying what I remembered the street name to be led the man to point on a map to a street in a far-off suburb. I tried to explain that I had the info in my email, and that if I could get online we could solve this instantly, but I could see that this was not going to be an option. Luckily, although I have apparently no sense of direction while on foot, looking at the map I found the (unlabeled) street in no time. The man, who knew the area well, announced what it was. I'd totally misremembered - once he said it, I saw on just how many syllables I'd gone wrong. And needless to say, I was just down the block from where I needed to be, and had past the very street shortly before, without noticing it.

I'm now back and ready to do round 2 of the grocery shopping (round one effectively being my somewhat delayed lunch), this time at a store closer to the house, and with the map at the ready. Then, back to the books!

If jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge were given an elegant Italian name, would you jump?

Here, in one post, is what's wrong with the food movement. I so want to be a full movement participant, but things like this keep pushing me away.

On Bitten, Edward Schneider extols the deliciousness of - wait for it - raw pork. But not just any raw pork - "honestly raised, wonderful, full-flavored pork." It is his belief - albeit not, he admits, one founded on science - that pork can be eaten raw so long as the pig in question was either a) happy, or b) European. While in Italy, he had some raw-pork sausage and lived to tell about it. Says Schneider:

Now, when I described this to a friend, she kindly said that I seemed like a sane man and wondered whether I would worry about eating raw pork. Sure, I’d worry about eating some raw pork, but not the raw — though slightly, minimally cured — pork they fed me in Italy or the raw pork in my own house. I am, very obviously to anyone who knows me, not a scientist of any description; I just cook. And I cook based largely on precedent, tradition and my own experience.

Precedent and tradition are in favor of eating this raw sausage (neither restaurant that served it to us was blazing any kind of gastronomic trail; quite the contrary), but prudence dictates some personal context as well, and the pork I use comes from a New York state farm that Jackie and I have visited and whose pigs (and owners) we have met. And my gut feeling is that pork from that source is as safe to eat in any state of doneness as the pork we were served in Italy and which gave rise to no illness.

Where to begin?

First, we need to get past the notion that food-borne illness is unique to modern times and to processed foods, industrial agriculture, etc. People have been saying, 'Must've been something I ate' since the dawn of time. While industrialization leads to some dangers, it prevents others - apparently in the case of the all-mighty pig, an animal raised in a way that gets the food-movement seal of approval is also one less safe to eat raw. Should dangers in the way food today is produced be exposed and corrected? Yes. But that shouldn't mean assuming all foods eaten by our or someone else's distant ancestors were inherently safe. That people in some locale have eaten something for years reveals only that it didn't kill off enough of these people prior to reproductive age to off that community altogether. "Precedent and tradition" are in favor of all kinds of behaviors that do not contribute to contemporary ideals of reaching 100 with minimal physical discomfort along the way. If someone wants to reject what they consider bourgeois/American/unaesthetic modern-day ideas of Health and live off raw-milk cheese and raw oysters, more power to them, but that's not what Schneider - or the food movement more broadly - is about.

Next, we need to get past the idea that food is better because it was consumed in Europe. One gets the sense that if Schneider had been offered a local Kentucky specialty called Raw-Pork Breakfast Links, rather than "salsiccia cruda" served "at the trattoria Antiche Sere (9 via Cenischia, Turin; +39 011 385 4347), where the nice-weather dining room out back was over-canopied with grape vines, and where for part of the evening the electricity repeatedly and somehow charmingly gave out," he might not have dug in with such gusto.

If the food movement finds itself accused of snootiness, it could be because of the way too many of its members evoke Europe as this magical place where nobody snacks between meals, worries about their weight, or eats food that came from a plastic package. Or if such phenomena exist, then it's the fault of the US.

But while no doubt some American companies - and European imitations thereof - have contributed to food-related mess in the US and abroad, encouraging American self-flagellation ignores the (diverse) realities of how Europeans actually eat and, more to the point, suggests to those not yet convinced that there's a problem with how we (Americans, but not only) eat that the movement is not about health, the environment, or even pleasure, so much as about a certain set of upper-class pretensions. Food-based Europhilia is not in itself nonsense - with the exception of certain whole-wheat rolls in the Netherlands, the bread really is better on this continent - 20 (euro) cent supermarket white-flour rolls even here are better than that from New York's finest bakeries. I can't figure out why. But the food movement in America should not depend on Europhilia, any more than it should on nostalgia or on a love of nature.

Things that blow my mind

Donatella Versace buys her lingerie next door from where I get my sub-$3 bagel-sandwich lunches during the schoolyear. For some reason, this amazes me, whereas I've never found it particularly shocking that the actor who plays Mr. Big lives either on or across from that block, or that the NYU area in general is packed with celebrities. I just picture leaving Bagel Bob's with my sesame bagel with Muenster cheese just as Donatella Versace steps out of La Petite Coquette with a new set of lacy underwear, and the image of this amuses me to no end.

North Sea, Red Hook

Mrs. Richards: I expect to be able to see the sea.
Basil Fawlty: You can see the sea. It's over there between the land and the sky.
MR: I would need a telescope to see that!
BF: Might I suggest you move to a hotel closer to the sea! Or preferably in it. - Fawlty Towers

I just jogged to the sea, from a hotel that, according to the map, looked reasonably near to it - 5.8 km each way, which wouldn't include the various times I got lost in what were probably private residential complexes. The return trip was a walk, if that, culminating in the purchase of bread and water (what else?) at a supermarket. (The other possible end point of the run, the HEMA, was ruled out because it's too early for the HEMA to be open, and nothing is sadder than a closed shop full of cheap-chic Dutch housewares and pajama pants.) Because Dutch street names are impossible to remember (exception: Wassenaarseweg), I wrote down the streets that led towards the sea, finding only some of them, but impressing myself with a sense of direction that did ultimately get me to a beach. (I also followed the yellow-haired families on bicycles, figuring that was probably where they were headed.)

During the adventure, I of course was armed with soothingly English-language podcasts. On Fresh Air, Terri Gross was interviewing Joseph O'Neill, the author of Netherland. I'd been curious about the novel, plus it seemed appropriate. O'Neill was describing a scene from the book based on his own experience, and let's just say it sounded familiar to me as well: failing one's driving test at the Red Hook, Brooklyn site after driving around the block just fine, for reasons that are never quite established. While my second fail was definitively about hitting the curb while parking, the first...?

According to O'Neill, immigrants to NY who arrive after having driven "without incident" their whole adult lives in their home countries regularly fail at the Red Hook location. The answer, he explained, is to go take your test in the suburbs - Rita's suggestion, and, I've now learned in an unexpected way, a feasible one. Still, it was very, very strange to be in such an unfamiliar place - and the Netherlands really does not seem like anywhere I've ever been, at all - listening to someone hold forth at length about the utter humiliation of driving around that block in Red Hook and not getting a license out of it. On the very remote off-chance that the author of a book read publicly by Obama ever finds this post, I'll just add that they enjoy failing native New Yorkers there as well.

Hallo up there

I'm now in the Netherlands, reading for orals met koffie while Jo attends a conference. Things here are almost too serene - the only places I associate with schoolwork are Hyde Park, Chicago and lower Manhattan, so sitting with a book by a canal just seemed bizarre, but in a good way. Although tomorrow I may have to turn the two-mile (each way) walk to the center into a jog, to up the reading-to-sightseeing ratio. It is truly lovely here (and not just because of the giant HEMA, to which I will no doubt return...), so it should be a good week.

You knew this was coming: I keep looking for clues in the food here as to why people here are ridiculously tall, even, it seems, compared to Belgians. Last night, upon arrival, Jo and I had some truly awful hamburgers that many Dutch people seemed to be enjoying (an acquired taste?) at a fast food place that specializes in sustainability, and has pictures of cows on the walls. There were so many cows staring at us that between those pictures, the (real-) cow-filled pasture next to the conference hotel, and the horribleness of the aforementioned hamburgers, I'm considering vegetarianism. Then again, the muesli cereal I bought to compensate: also verging on inedible.

The lunch I assembled for myself via the supermarket - gouda on a couple of wheat rolls - tasted very... nutritious. Not the gouda - that just tasted like gouda in the States, only fresher - but the roll. It had this vitamin-y aftertaste that prevented me from finishing the second roll. (No tragedy - I'd prepared for the possible failure of the sandwich with additional purchases of fruit and chocolate). But perhaps the aftertaste comes from the mysterious height-inducing substance? I did eat most of the two rolls, so we shall see.

Linguistically, the Dutch-Flemish thing is confusing me to no end. When Jo speaks his native language here, even at length, people reply in English. Is it that they've heard us speaking English? Sometimes, but not always. That Jo has brown rather than blond hair, and is 6'2" rather than 7'2", as is usual here? Perhaps. Other possibilities include the tendency for store and café signs, even in places I can't imagine cater to tourists or other international types, to be in English - perhaps all formal interaction with people who even might not be Dutch takes place in English? Or is Flemish really that different from Dutch? The sound of the two languages (two accents?) is noticeably different to me, someone who at this point understands some Flemish, just about no Dutch, and can only express coffee-related concerns in either, while despite knowing French, I'm still not convinced I'd hear any difference between the French in Paris and in Brussels.

That's enough of that. Now, back to 1870 Paris, where no doubt people were closer to my size.

Summer adventures

Still here! Kind of - 'here' is Belgium, not Brooklyn. Before that was Italy - there will soon be a post on Cheapness Studies about the futility that is attempting to purchase food in that country while not Italian. Hint: never, ever eat in a restaurant. Now, back to the reading extravaganza, with perhaps some moments of blogging thrown in.

Moving day(s)

After two years in Park Slope and another two in an adjacent area only realtors refer to as such, I'm ready for a change. After some very glamorous time abroad, my boyfriend and I will move to Manhattan, where, thanks to the recession, the Police Building - the whole of it - will be available to rent at less than the price we'd paid per month to live in an alleged one-bedroom located far, far too close to the Food Co-op. Or, failing that, we'll move to a studio within walking distance of NYU. Or failing that, Queens, Wyoming... whatever.

Here are some of the things I've learned while moving, that could potentially be of use to others.

Dos

-Pack what you actually use first. Clothes you never wear and extra wine glasses for that dinner party you'd always meant to host (when at the only party you actually hosted, dinner was not served and plastic cups were the order of the day) should not be boxed before the coffee maker, muffin tin, rain boots...

-Pack everything before the movers arrive, accepting that their combined strength and truck-ownership beats your strength plus the Brooklyn public bus. On our post-movers 'one last thing' trips on the bus, we had the same driver four times. He seemed amused.

-Do get rid of as much as you possibly can before shoving all that you plan to keep, first meticulously and, 12 hours later, haphazardly, into boxes. In my own case, this would have been easier if the neighborhood thrift store hadn't just closed, but luckily most of what needed getting rid of was more a question of whether it went in the trash bin or the recycling.

-If your move takes you anywhere near Brooklyn Heights (ours barely did, but I was determined), be sure to stop at Tazza somewhere along the way, and to splurge on an iced cappuccino (which I reserve for such occasions) and an Italian jelly-donut-type pastry whose name I've since forgotten. I've already decided that, if by some miracle we do live within walking distance of school next year, I will nevertheless return to Brooklyn for the occasional Tazza-Sahadi's run.

-A final Do: Do try to put a positive spin on everything horrible about moving day, including its inability to really just be a one-day event. The best way to do this is to think of the whole thing as one giant trip to the gym. If you live on the top floor of a walk-up and find yourself taking the stairs, with heavy items, more or less continuously for hours on end, this is particularly straightforward: If female, pretend that this is an innovative cellulite cure - perhaps it is just that. And if male, think about how huge your arms will be by the end of it.

Don'ts

-When exhausted at the very thought of the packing to come, or perhaps from having returned full-backpack-plus-bursting-tote-bag loads of library books via the subway, do not attempt to send emails in languages that are not your own. Accustomed to sending emails in French mainly to my adviser, who is female, I was about to send an email to another professor, who is male, beginning with Chere, rather than Cher. Caught it just in time. Argh.

-Not sure if this counts as a 'don't', but bear in mind: very cheap storage is that way for a reason. Booking a 10x10 storage space does not actually allot you a 10x10 space, or anything close. The only way to get something closer is to ask to see all the allegedly 10X10 spaces, and to get known as The Bitch by the entire storage-space staff (because apparently not everyone complains when "10x10" is actually 6x6 with a column in the middle). Or maybe it's just this storage space - one of the place's rules is that you can't live in your box, but it's clear enough when you visit the building that those not living in their boxes are in the minority.

-Do not stay up till 5am packing when your movers are scheduled for 8:30am, particularly when you've hired these movers before, and you thus know that their 8:30 is closer to 7:45.

-Moving requires food, and home-cooked meals are not an option when the dishes must be packed. Still, when you read on the Health Department website that your otherwise fine local Chinese restaurant has an insect problem, don't figure, you're tired, it's nearby, all buildings in NY have bugs, whatever, if you don't want to risk a live (non-flying-type) one emerging from the dish when you're midway through, swimming through the grease that makes vegetarian beef with broccoli so palatable. (That insect is to be distinguished from the many buzzing around our meals - these are a fact of life and not to be complained about.)

"Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?"

I can't explain why, but this headline cracks me up. I'm sure it's a serious issue and everything, but... yeah. If it weren't for various DIY moving extravaganzas, my back would be in fine shape indeed.

Beyond French Jews

Modern European Jewish history is German Jewish history, it seems, and to a lesser extent, given books available in New York, at least, American, but for whatever reason, I'm only now catching up where non-French Jewish histories are concerned. While I'm fairly confident that my professors have done their best to make sure I know about Frenchmen other than Jews (and I'm getting there, although I'm still shaky on the Protestants), learning about Jews other than the French sort is something I'm piecing together more on my own - with the help of professors, of course, but for a change this time I get to tell myself not to be so parochial. The problem with fighting the parochialism within is that it could go all over the place. Everything's really interesting, particularly things that deal with populations neither French nor Jewish. The Uighurs, for instance, what's their story? And indigenous Scandinavians? Aren't nearly all Scandinavians supposed to be indigenous to Scandinavia? I am so confused.

Anyhow, for the time being, I need to know who the 19th century German and American Jews were, in order to figure out what did, or didn't, make the French ones unique. What makes figuring out the specificities of each case all the more confusing is that scholars of each group - often, not always - begin their books by explaining how French/German/American Jews were the most assimilated/integrated/fascinating/ahead-of-their-time of all Jews the world over. I tended to believe the French case 'won' when reading almost exclusively about that community, and there's a point to be made - the French Revolution emancipated French Jews and shook things up for Jews worldwide. But there were like five French Jews, ever, with the exception of the present day. German Jewish culture was obviously somewhat more influential - reading about German Jewry I'm often struck by how much the German-Jewish 'way' influenced my own upbringing, amongst indirectly-German-influenced New York Jews of Eastern European origin. And beyond the personal, there's Freud, Marx, Einstein, and so on, and so on. But then there are American Jews, who never had to go through the whole emancipation process in quite the same way, and who, because they were never the U.S.'s favorite minority group to oppress, had a chance to be a whole lot closer to 'just a religion' than in other countries (ahem, France) that are in fact less historically friendly to multiculturalism. (I just spent the day reading about slave-owning Southern Jews, which really drives the point home.)

So I still don't know what made Bildung (education; or, the ideology embraced by, among others, German Jews, that through cultivation, learning, and self-improvement, anyone of any birth could become a real German) any different from regeneration (rebirth; or, the ideology embraced by, among others, French Jews, that through cultivation, learning, and self-improvement, anyone of any birth could become a real Frenchman), or what made either of these, in the Jewish context, so terribly different from American liberalism or anti-nativism.

Long story short, I need to read a bit more comparative Jewish history, beyond the few books I've read in the last couple weeks, and the few others I'd read before starting grad school. Recommendations? (I'd also love to read something that settled the Bildung-regeneration question once and for all, or else I'll have to go and write that myself, and I doubt if my German reading skills are up to the task.)

That was close!

In the course of readings, I just found what I thought was my dissertation, already written. If the book were at the NYU library, I'd have long since had this panic, but of course it's not, so this required further investigation. Turns out, although the book will be useful, it's about something else entirely. Woohoo!

In less delightful library news, if you have to whisper aloud to yourself to read, or study, or whatever it is this girl sitting near me is doing, perhaps libraries are not for you.

Back to the farm

The Well running blog makes me want to start my own running blog, but seeing as I blog more than I run as it is, probably not the way to go. But I did go running yesterday, setting out to go twice around the Prospect Park 3.4-ish mile loop... but then, somewhere towards the end of the massive hill by the exit, I decided that I felt physically capable of going seven miles, but not mentally prepared to see the leafy scenery of the park once more. While I get that this will infuriate running purists (who are intense, by the way - note the comments telling the Bittman father-daughter pair, both experienced runners, how to hold their arms when they jog), my ideal run is through the city (yes, on asphalt), with a podcast (Dan Savage preferred; NPR will do) for background entertainment, and is preceded by an iced coffee. I'm convinced that once I find a sufficiently interesting and not too car-heavy route, I could reach my one-time distance limit of eight or nine miles, and if I were not in the midst of a packing-and-moving extravaganza, I just might give it a go.

For whatever reason, it's assumed that exercise implies a love of nature, that the only alternative is to suffer in a gym (but what part of watching cable while you work out is suffering?). Real exercise, good exercise, takes place in, if not the wild, than in some urban approximation thereof. But as someone whose running career got going alongside the West Side Highway, during high school track practice, and who still seems to be breathing OK, I just can't fully embrace that ideal. Sure, this means the occasional whiff of car exhaust, but there are enough dangers in life that working out under sub-optimal conditions (assuming you're not running down the West Side Highway) seems a risk worth taking.

If the health-and-nature assumption hits runners hard, it's still more dramatic when it comes to the local-sustainable food movement. It's not enough to care about both health (your own, your family's, and that of the general public) and the environment. You have to be moved by pastoral scenes, to feel personally enriched by all contact with farmers, from whom you can get a vicarious taste of the land. OK, it's not that you have to do this, but that's how local-sustainable is marketed. Knowing where your food comes from - the Alice Waters mantra - means not only knowing cows were not tortured in the process, but also taking the time to get a sense of what food production looks like, the idea being that the problem with how we eat today is not merely that we eat crap, but also that we've been in cities and suburbs too long and have forgotten where vegetables come from.

This view goes beyond thinking kids should learn Biology 101. It's an aesthetic preference, a belief that food will honest-to-goodness taste better if it came with a bit of dirt on it, and perhaps a few bugs nesting in it, often regardless of whether the food in question has, in fact, just been plucked.

Example, from Frank Bruni's review of Braeburn, a Manhattan restaurant where, according to the review, entrees are "$18 to $32":

Restaurants that have opened in downtown Manhattan over the last decade tend to fall into one of two categories. There are those that worship in the Church of Carrie Bradshaw. And those that honor Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Braeburn, named for an apple, is Rebecca almost all the way, with maybe half of a heel of a Manolo thrown in. You’re going to be stunned to hear this, but along some walls are horizontal panels of what looks like reclaimed barn wood, the genre’s inevitable rustic flourish. (It’s actually — even better! — from a tobacco shed.) Many servers dress in checked or plaid shirts: corn-pone chic. And what defines the otherwise plain main dining room is a painting of a white house with a red barn and fleecy sheep, the livestock color-coordinated with the domicile. Apparently all of us who make ruinous housing payments to be a part of Warhol’s city really dream of Wyeth’s world, at least when dinnertime rolls around. We want not only farm-fresh ingredients but also farm-evocative décor.

While I haven't seen this Braeburn (again, note the entree prices), I can affirm that even less formal establishments - groceries and cafés - now go this route.

What I'd like to see, then, is a separating-out of what's rustic and what's needed for public health, for the environment, and, in terms of taste, for food to be fresh. It's not that it's necessarily racist or nativist to appreciate rustic and artisanal - historically, there's some overlap, but today's flannel-clad urbanites are typically another matter - but instead that it shouldn't be necessary to care emotionally about nature or farm life (not that farm life is 'nature', but the two are plenty linked in the urban mind) in order to be a card-carrying food-movement participant. There are enough highly-convincing, rational arguments for moving away from our current food system that irrational nostalgia for The Land need not enter into it. While granted this nostalgia helps push some in the right direction, the potential for this line of thought to be embraced for all the wrong reasons suggests we'd be better off just going with the health-environment-taste reasoning.

Recalling his own farm childhood, Nicholas Kristof writes, "Over the years, though, I’ve become nostalgic for an occasional bug in my salad, for an apple that feels as if it were designed by God rather than by a committee." My point is, that's fine that that works for Kristof, but it's important to remember that you can be a committee person more than a God person and still think Americans eat crap, and that something should be done about it. Some people will always find some or (in my own case) all politicized appeals to Nature off-putting, and there should be room for such people in the food movement.

(I've never read anything by Isaiah Berlin, but having learned that Berlin "went so far as to declare a positive dislike of nature, suggesting that love of sublime landscapes was linked with reactionary romanticism," that puts him right at the top of my post-orals reading list.)

"[Michael Pollan's] chief criticism of Chicken McNuggets is that they are insufficiently delicious. (Has he tried them with the hot-mustard sauce?)"

UPDATED

In the course of orals readings today, I came upon an article that proves, proves, my BA thesis was way off. French Jews at the time of the Dreyfus Affair were not, in fact... I promise if you're not one of three people working on this, you don't care, and even if you are, you've got better things to do, so I'll stop while I'm ahead.

That failure makes me all the more delighted that another theory I'd been tossing around for some time has, if not been proven right, turned up in infinitely-better-expressed-than-I-could-do-it form in the New Yorker.

For a while now, I've been suggesting that there's some connection between the new, artisanal-food, back-to-the-farm movement and the sort of nativism that got Maurice Barrès-types all worked up, back in the good old days of shamelessly racist European nationalism. Let me be clear: it's not that Waters/Pollan/etc. are racists or nativists, but that rejecting the foreign - which is what any pro-local movement does - lends itself to, well, rejecting the foreign, rejecting modernity, etc., etc. Sarah Palin's Real America might dig in at Denny's, but suspicion of cities and of the way things are done in far-off lands brings the ickier aspects of the right together with aspects of the left that, if silly-sounding, have the potential (if not taken over-the-top) to save both lives and the environment.

Anyhow. In the latest New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh explains how the artisanal-food and "very small business" movements have the potential to get a bit... iffy, in the way that rejections of modernity often do. Women, for instance, don't come out so great, nor does, in a larger sense, the feminine:

For [PhD turned motorcycle repairman] Crawford, offices are profoundly feminized places. Reading a study about the sneaky ways in which managers assert their authority, he compares office life to "being part of a clique of girls," with a brutal hierarchy hidden beneath "the forms and manners of sisterhood."

And then of course there's the question of ferners:

An antipathy, however mild, to foreignness is indispensable to the creed of localism, which seeks to make our economic worlds more intelligible by shrinking them. When Pollan visited some of the industrial-scale organic farms that Gene Kahn works with, the first surprise was the workers: he confessed that he hadn’t expected to see “migrant labor crews” on an organic farm.

Hmm. Why might someone who's studied (perhaps more than one should - at least I now know what really went on during the Dreyfus Affair) late 19th and early 20th century European rejections of modernity find anything off-putting about where this might lead?

Part of the appeal of the localist-artisanal creed, for certain liberals and conservatives alike, is precisely that it’s anti-cosmopolitan, anti-corporate, anti-progress—an alternative to the creative destruction of capitalism. It tugs against the shared assumptions of most Democrats and Republicans: that America’s future is bright; that change is good.

But let me back up a moment in his story. Without entering into the European tradition of land-worship (aside from mentioning Slow Food's Italian roots) Sanneh brings up the question that should be on all of our minds - why are mass-produced cheeseburgers assumed to the food of conservatism, and garden-fresh arugula for liberals alone?

Agrarianism, like environmentalism, hasn’t always been considered a progressive cause, and there’s nothing inherently liberal about artisanal cheese, or artisanal bikes—and, just as important, nothing inherently conservative about multinational corporations. Rod Dreher, a National Review contributor and the author of “Crunchy Cons,” is ardently pro-organic and ardently anti-gay marriage. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of “Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea,” is also the author of “Mexifornia,” about the dangers posed by immigration.

As I see it, what holds back the food movement from going down xenophobia road is that it is primarily a product of the left - that there's a PC insistence upon caring about local/seasonal but also about what's consumed in the inner city, that cosmopolitan types (i.e. city-dwellers, PhDs, Francophiles, Jews) loom large in the movement's ranks, these things really do owe something to the cause starting, at least, as a liberal one. It's not that conservatism is always racist and liberalism never that way. It's just that the scary bits tend to come from the most progressive types on the left, and the most anti-progress ones on the right, so it's probably for the best that the pro-farmer sorts making the news are also the ones the least likely to hold forth on what they really think about Mexicans. Of course local/seasonal could be conservatism, we - even most conservatives among us - should just be glad that it's not.

UPDATE, via.

Food politics roundup

Dowd:

Mr. Obama ostentatiously treats himself to fries and burgers to beef up his average-Joe image (even though he’s anything but). Yet maybe when Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer come next week to broadcast a special on health care from inside the White House, the president should forgo the photo-op of the grease-stained bovine bag and take the TV stars out for what he really wants and America really needs: some steamed fish with a side of snap peas.

Bittman:

In fact, and sadly, the list of fish that I don’t eat is much longer than the list of fish that I do. One could argue, as I sometimes do (mostly to myself), that one shouldn’t eat fish at all, fearing that if fish lovers begin consuming those few remaining species that are not in trouble — sardines, mackerel, squid — we might just make quick work of them, too. But though that may be the easiest argument to phrase, it isn’t likely to be popular, nor will it help the cods and flounders.

Good grief:

Both parents left feeling they were being pushed out of P.S. 9, which they perceive as exhausted by Ms. Roth’s intense lobbying for, among other things, permission slips for any food not on the official lunch menu. It would not be the first time: The Roths previously lived in Millburn, N.J., where, after Ms. Roth waged war on the bagels and Pringles meal served to kids at lunch, received e-mail from one member of the P.T.A. that said, “Please, consider moving.” That was in 2006, and P.S. 9 has been hearing about its transgressions against healthy eating pretty much ever since.

(See also.)

Stars, studs, and more

Blogging's been pathetic here lately, because I've been preoccupied by a not-that-long-looming oral exam, and a very imminent second driving test. But, in the interests of not letting WWPD completely slide...

-What is going on in Wallonia? The (highly implausible) story of a lost-in-translation encounter with a tattoo artist reminds me why I stopped going to an otherwise fine hairdresser with whom I shared no language - sometimes communication is key. Not that the haircut I gave myself is so spectacular, and language barriers were clearly not the problem.

-These have made me reconsider my aversion to crafts. Want!

-Highly recommended.

-Story of my life.

-Highly depressing. For some reason the piece's subhead - "The author is ending her marriage. Isn’t it time you did the same?" - reminds me of Tara Parker-Pope's announcement that not only is she going to go from couch-potato to marathon-runner, but you should, too! Not that a marathon is a divorce, but both are (or so I've heard, having experienced neither first-hand) painful but necessary for some, painful and unnecessary for others, and not the sort of thing that should be encouraged, even in jest, for all. If the piece is depressing, it could be because of bits like this: "Some of us stay married because along with fancy schools, tae kwan do lessons, and home-cooked organic food, the two-parent marriage is another impressive—and rare—attainment to bestow on our fragile, gifted children." Does this mythical demographic not spend enough time gazing into its navel and spinning whatever it finds in there into tales for the national press? Or is the piece a let-down because it already existed in the form of a TV show and movie that famously made arranged marriage look like the way to go - four forty-ish women get together and speak of nothing but men, all the while alienating the actual men in their lives, after which one of the four writes an article about it. Perhaps this is the influence of anti-monogamy advice columnist Dan Savage talking, but I can't help think how much better it would have been for the author's kids if she and her husband would have arranged a (discreet) open marriage, stayed together officially, and (most importantly) given her no reason to spill all to a major publication. But I shouldn't say this, because that would be judging her, and the number one rule of the overshare is that no one's allowed to judge - the appropriate response is to praise the author for her (and alas, it is typically her) honesty.

The what?

Approximately every ten minutes, a broker comes by to show the apartment. This has made me regret my plans to work at home, where all my books are, and where I can make lunch without having to leave and go fetch it, blah blah. It's necessary but yes, kind of annoying - while I'm happy to answer questions along the lines of if there've been any major problems, just because I happen to be home doesn't mean I've prepared a 15-minute monologue about my emotions towards this apartment over the past two years. Is the place small for two people? Um, yes, obviously, but the place we'll head to next will in all likelihood be smaller. Is the fire escape a balcony? This could certainly give brokers ideas, but no, it's not. And yes, the bathroom is huge in proportion to the rest of the apartment, but I've never figured out whether that's supposed to be a selling point. In what's either good news in terms of our fall apartment search or just plain evil, the visitors have informed us just how much lower the rent they'll have to pay is than what we'd spent the last year, even the previous one. Gar.

Anyhow. A broker just came by and told a potential renter about the dishwasher in the kitchen. The dishwasher. In the kitchen. So I was like, the what? Apparently the apartment downstairs is identical in every way, except that it has a dishwasher under the sink, so the broker had just assumed... (No news on whether one's being installed, but we're moving either way, and if they do decide to install one, I don't want to know.) Armed with that information, the woman looking at the apartment quickly apologized for interrupting my lunch and ducked out, allowing me to do the dishes from lunch in some semblance of peace.

In racism today

-Is there seriously a discussion going on about whether the Democrats or the Republicans are the real racists? Hasn't it long since been settled that evils specific to modernity come from the worst bits of the left and the right? And, more to the point, isn't the important thing that neither major political party is eager to claim credit for racist violence?

-"[T]here’s a racial component, which I’m not sure I understand," writes Timothy Egan about the Amanda Knox trial, which he's been covering from a thinly-veiled pro-Knox angle. Something about these two posts about the now-notorious Italian murder case just seems... off. I guess I'm confused. Is Egan trying to claim that an all-American (read: white, delicate-featured, blonde-and-blue-eyed, athletic, not-too-worldly, middle-class, college-partier) young woman is incapable of murder? He denies this in the second post, but it's not hard to see how people read this in the first, in which he brushes aside all the legitimate reasons Knox is on trial, in favor of a portrait of her wholesome naivete. Or is it just that he happens to be from the same city as the accused, and to have a daughter who's on paper much like her? If so, couldn't he have made that clear, and not held forth on her sportive Christian background as though this proved anything one way or the other? Is there something sinister about the fact that Egan's daughter used the pretext of this gruesome murder case (and, one guesses, nepotism, although that alone is expected and, if annoying, not sinister) to get an op-ed in the Times, complaining about how being from the same town as the accused is making her own study-abroad experience less delightful than it otherwise might have been?

But back to the father. Isn't it a bit odd that he claims to come to the case with neutrality ("I have no agenda. I came to this story cold."), after writing earlier: "In Seattle, where I live, I see a familiar kind of Northwestern girl in Amanda Knox [...]" How "cold" is that? During the Dreyfus Affair, French Jews famously made a point to not assume, on account of shared background, that their coreligionist was innocent, at least until this became too obvious to deny. But I suppose this is a sense of restraint specific to members of minority groups, if not turn-of-the-century French Jews. At least Egan does not seem any less loyal an American for sticking up for Knox, because for better or worse, Knox is being presented - by Egan and by her detractors - as pure Americana.

And this, from his own self-defense, in the second post. Argh:

I’d like to comment on some of the general points made by readers to the post. First, the headline: “An Innocent Abroad.” Many people took this to mean that I believe she is innocent. I’m not sure what happened to Kercher, but I do know there so many holes in the prosecutor’s case as to raise reasonable doubt, at the least. The headline was supposed to be vague in a literary way — an allusion to Mark Twain’s book, “Innocents Abroad.” Maybe I should stay away from literary allusions, particularly when they can get lost in translation.

Ah, so it's all about a failure to pick up on literary allusions (particularly, he seems to imply, on the part of foreigners, presumably, given who was commenting, Italians), and not that Egan argued - in the post title and the post itself - not only that the accused should be assumed innocent unless proven otherwise, but that this much was certain. As if, if Italians only improved their English and read Twain, they'd get the ambiguities Egan intended. Is he serious?

From what I've read, it seems ample evidence, including DNA, suggests Knox should at least be tried. But I agree with Egan, and with all reasonable people, that it's tragic when people are jailed for crimes they didn't commit, and do not assume that someone who's shown evidence of fairly extreme racism, anti-Semitism, and general coldness towards her roommate's death is necessarily guilty of murder - one can be unpleasant and not a murderer... or for all I know, reading this from thousands of miles away, she's actually a lovely person. But I don't think it should matter - the trial will, I'd imagine/hope, be about whether Knox killed someone, not whether she'd be fun to spend time with otherwise. The issue here is Egan's piece, not Knox.

So I disagree both with those who think that her white privilege is such that arresting her somehow makes things 'even' for people of color/people with less deer-in-headlights mugshots who were/are in prison unfairly - better all should get the pretty-blonde treatment than the other way around - as well as with Egan, when he suggests that this young woman being spacey and athletic and not-so-worldly somehow proves her innocence. And the fact that she worked to save up for her study-abroad experience? I've never heard of any college student not working to save up for studying abroad. It's hardly a sign of great financial hardship. Nor is it clear to me why it matters, for the purposes of this case, whether Knox was a scholarship student or a trustifarian - the murder did not, it sounds like, have anything to do with money. But I digress.

I don't know. It's all very reminiscent of the death of Rachel Corrie, another photogenic young blonde from Washington State (where I've never been, but which if the press is to be believed is where Real America intersects with Well-Meaning Liberal America) whose behavior abroad was frequently interpreted as naive for reasons that, I tend to think, have more to do with continued societal notions of blondness-as-purity than with any particular ignorance on the part of either the pro-Palestinian activist or the woman now on trial in Italy.

Even in this day and age, hair color (when assumed to be natural) has such significance, it's kind of insane. In this, although Italians are typically both white and Christian, the racial angle to the case that Egan claims not to understand is not only about how Knox falsely accused a black man of the murder for which she's on trial, or that the woman who was killed was of mixed race, but is also about the ancient North-South Europe divide. Because we in America are so used to seeing racism as about blacks and whites, because that's typically how it manifests itself in our country, it can be easy to miss this other variant, especially when Americans are the ones engaging in it.

In the interests of universalism, I'd like to think this frustrates me both as someone who's never, not even as a child, been blonde, and, even more so, as someone against bigotry who also happens to have dark brown or black hair, depending the light I'm standing in.

Anyhow. In the interests of not making this post even longer, I'll leave it at that.

The Bobst Dining Commons

I could have a whole separate blog on disgusting behaviors of my fellow library-goers, but because Cheapness Studies is already underway, and because I'm neglecting WWPD in favor of such things as the Franco-Prussian War and running long distances ending at pastry shops, this may have to wait. But, ugh. While I've yet to witness at NYU the horrors of the NYPL, let alone the UChicago all-time best (nail-clipping under a table in a reading room), there are still some good ones.

Eating in the library... I understand why people do this. Leaving is a pain, and options very close to the library, for people not on the Subway bandwagon, are limited. But if you are a scrawny post-adolescent boy who absolutely must have a steady stream of calories all day, maybe pick an artificial-cheese-based snack that doesn't make a heard-across-the-whole-floor crunchy sound? The crunching makes it hard for those near you to concentrate about the Franco-Prussian War. Or, if you're that set on having a caramel-centered candy bar, maybe check every so often that a three-inch-long string of what is either caramel or spittle is not hanging from your mouth? And (last gripe, for now) if you do bring a pungent lunch, and finish the pungent lunch, do you really have to get up from where you're sitting and take the bag with the garbage left by your pungent lunch and place it right there in the (uncovered) trash can where an innocent fellow library patron is trying to take notes on what exactly Zola thought about women?

Yes, I have become that grad student. But I'm hoping continued breaks centered around running and pastry will mellow me out before it gets worse, or at least make me too tired/content to care.

Technicalities

An article sure to rile up every last hipster and 'look-I'm-poor (but-really-I'm-not)' poseur, about how Williamsburg's 20-something residents can no longer look to their parents for help with rent, is based on a mistaken premise: the article's title, "Parents Pulling the Plugs on Williamsburg Trust-Funders", gives a clue as to what that mistake might be. Aren't young adults with trust funds people who don't rely on their parents' whim past 18, whose 'family money' is their own? Now, these people may also be 'suffering' during the recession, but it's because their stocks aren't worth what they used to be, not because their parents have cut them off. Those relying on their parents might be the children of the rich, or they might be the offspring of the manipulative middle classes - parents with some money but not tons, who use whatever they can afford of their kids' rent money as a way to make sure their kids behave, into adulthood, according to their nutty rules, ala the notorious ex-Stanford mom.

But whatever. Screw those trustafarians! Keep it real! Yeah! Anyway. I am super impressed that the NYT reporter managed to get members of the Williamsbourgeoisie to admit that they are or were supported by their parents - I thought the first rule of living in that neighborhood was that you had to deny having family money, while living in such a way that you pretty much have to have some.

Note: This post almost made it to Cheapness Studies, but I'd rather wait and have a full post on faux-poverty chic up there another time.

Jews, wooers, and shoes

-A commenter to Nicholas Kristof's latest column asks, "Why should real Americans be like Asians or Jews?" I didn't realize there was still unselfconscious use of the adjective "real" in reference to some Americans and not others, but we have, perhaps, the anonymity of the Internet to thank. (And since when do "real Americans" know how to play ice hockey? Doesn't the commenter mean real Canadians?)

-Goodness. The featured NYT wedding this week resulted from the woman proposing to the man. Alert the presses! (Although I guess technically, the presses have been alerted.) How did it all happen?

"She said she thought that it was undignified to drop hints to get him to propose, and she doubted that he would volunteer to be legally bridled. So she decided it was time for some rule-breaking of her own, and it was Ms. Emerson who got down on one knee as they hiked in the Catskills last April."

Hmm. On the one hand, good for her. On the other, it's worth pointing out that even here, the assumption is first that the man will propose, and only once that's ruled out as a possibility does the woman take the initiative, as a last resort.

-For some reason, probably the corrupting influence of fashion blogs, I've become fixated on the idea of 'nude'-colored shoes. These, for instance. Yes? No?

Cheapness, studied

Miss Self-Important beat me to it, but consider this the second official announcement of the Cheapness Studies Blog.

Obama and schwarma

Am I the only one who found the headline, "Obama Calls for Alliances With Muslims", if technically true, somewhat misleading? The headline suggests that Obama has unilaterally decided to change where America stands in the great East and West divide (such as it is). It will also suggest, to whatever loony-right elements remain and read the NYT, that OMG Obama is a Muslim, after all! From reading the article (and as much of his speech as I could, until the call to pizza grew too strong), one learns this is not the case at all, but rather that he's trying to get peace in the Middle East. Is he less pro-Israel than this particular Zionist blogger? Sure. But I don't think his suggestions sounded outrageous. If he were calling for a one-state 'solution' with a Palestinian right-of-return, then there'd be cause for concern, and perhaps a sudden drop in enrollment in French departments, and increased enrollment in the IDF. Jerusalem... will be tough. I'm not Israeli, and perhaps because of this am not sure if turning the city into something like the Vatican but for whichever religions want in would be such a disaster. But NOTHING BETTER HAPPEN TO TEL AVIV. It must remain the mecca (er, so to speak) for top-notch falafel, beautiful gay men, blended iced coffee, and tanned-and-toned non-self-hating Jewry of Muscle it is today.

Cleaning the apartment, one page at a time

Now that jury duty and the semester are over, my days are spent going through the great mass of library books I've managed to accumulate over the months, years... nearly all of which are or might be on my orals lists, and every last one of which will, sniff sniff, have to go back to Bobst within the month, before I leave the city, at which point presumably someone with the exact same interests as I have (because these people are everywhere) would, if I hadn't returned them, recall them all in one go.

So I've been reading more, as the post below indicates, about The Jewess and whatnot, and it occurred to me that in a recent post, in which I laid the blame for the negative media image of Jewish women on hostile Jewish men (not all Jewish men, just the Roth-Allen sort), I totally missed the point. OK, not totally, but I did miss a big part of what's going on, one I really should have picked up on.

As we all learned in intro college classes or elsewhere, way back when, in the great Then revered by social conservatives and at which social liberals stand aghast, sexuality was divided into that which society recognized but that had not been freely chosen, and that which society didn't sanction, but could often be done, in today's parlance, on the down-low. There was no 'coming out' as gay, there was no introducing the family to a partner, of either sex, you just happened to meet at a bar, whose cultural and religious heritage was radically different from your own. There also wasn't any assumption that the official Spouse was also the person you found most sexually desirable at all times, if ever. (Oversimplification I realize, and some counterarguments have already come to mind, but bear with me.)

Anyway. It was back during Then that all sorts of non-blonde women came to be considered the hottest of hot in parts of the West where there was a good chance any given man would have a blonde wife, sister, mother... Call it Orientalization, or better yet, call it exoticization, so as to include non-'Oriental' women who also fell into this category. Whatever. The point is, the times white European men got all hot and bothered en masse by the dark-complexioned Other coincided with the first time they had the chance to meet or at least learn about that Other, but before the historical union of Madonna and Whore, before the expectation that the passionate-sex mistress and the mother-of-your-children, meet-the-parents wife would come all rolled up in the same woman.

Today, the wife is also, ideally, the lover. One is expected to find hot the same person that one deems appropriate. This has some pretty fantastic benefits in terms of female sexuality - thanks to this development plus the Pill, a woman need not choose one or the other category - but it has (and I believe Foucault has something to say about this - also on The List) to some extent stifled sexuality overall. Thus the left's anti-gay-marriage argument: once gay marriage is legal, gays will be pushed into the same conventional channels as straights, and will be chastised for not marrying and moving to the suburbs.

So when it comes to The Jewess, or any other once-exoticized woman, there is no longer a need to look beyond the appropriate, socially-sanctioned partner for the fantasy. OK, there may be a need in some cases, but not to the degree there once was, or at any rate, the assumption is you also happen to be attracted to the appropriate partner, and that it shouldn't be any great torture to repress whatever other attractions, to the inappropriate, may occur. While there still men out there (and women, I suppose) who seek out the exotic, the phenomenon isn't what it used to be. And in many cases thus classified - Jewish man with WASP woman, WASP man with Asian-American woman, etc. - the 'exotic' element may, when it comes down to it, be exceedingly slight. There may be a bit of, 'ooh, she sure doesn't look like my mother!', but all told, you're often looking at two people with equivalent levels of education, or at any rate, at a couple that can, without worrying what the parents will think, take the other person home to visit.

So, PG, other people I rely on to keep me (relatively) sharp: any of this make sense?

Sephora the Cheapskate

According to turn-of-the-century Alsatian-Jewish critic Moses Debré, the most unflattering portrait of a 'Jewess' in all of 19th C French literature is of a woman whose father is Belgian-Catholic. The woman is, it seems, something of a cheapskate. It gets better. Her first name? Sephora. I don't know what this means, but it did just revive the guilt I felt at spending $18 (before tax) on concealer at that chain.

Nikes and lentils

The thread following Mark Bittman's post about how rice and beans is a cheaper meal than fast food hits the predictable points: Some commenters ask (in a reliably insensitive tone) why the poor are said not to be able to purchase good food, when they can afford beer/cigarettes/Nikes/babies/lottery tickets/acrylic nails. Others enter into an authenticity contest centered around what poverty really means, with an interest less in sorting out whether it's actually a problem that Americans are overweight and eat junk, and if so, what to do about it; than in declaring as many people as possible out-of-touch trust-fund brats.

The question of who 'counts' as poor for the purposes of the Great Food Debate is nevertheless worth having, even if the posturing it inevitably elicits is tiresome. 'Poor' in this context, some point out, is not about a temporary lack of funds - a college student who's 'broke' the day before his parents transfer him his allowance, a recent college grad with a low-paid but educational or do-gooder job, these are not The Poor. In a sort of intermediary category would be, say, over-educated adjuncts subsisting on poverty wages, living in crummy neighborhoods, without family money, but with class aspirations or what-have-you. As would be those recent immigrant families, however poor and however uneducated the parents, whose children are on a path towards middle-class status, and whose eating habits have not yet been Americanized, and whose children can thus skip relatively quickly from 'traditional' meals to Whole Foods, with maybe a brief period of McDonalds consumption during high school.

Then at last there are the 'real' poor, the unambiguous cases, and it's in discussing this set that the discussion heads towards either the patronizing, the offensive, or both. If the issue was simply, 'how does one eat well for not much money?', the answer would be easy enough: lots of pasta, lentils, oatmeal, etc., with much smaller amounts of more expensive, perhaps more difficult to acquire, foods - not caviar, but, say, $13/lb. cheese, fresh or frozen berries, etc., without which the bulk foods can start to feel a bit like they belong in a farm animal's trough.

But the question is clearly not whether it is possible to feed one's self on very little money, but what the Alice Waters-ite should do when she sees a 400-pound mother on the subway feeding her kids, who are also overweight, cans of Pringles and non-diet Coke. What's at stake has something to do with money, health, and the environment, but it's just as much about class, race, aesthetic preferences, and liberal guilt at judging Them.

Every generation since god knows when has had it's Poor People's Health and Hygiene dilemmas, in which poverty is conflated with unhealthiness. With real-versus-fast-foods as with previous incarnations of this discussion, part of what's going on has to do with actual health, as in, illness-prevention and lifespan-extension, or, for this generation, the health of the environment, but another, tough-to-separate part is about what happens to be trendy at any given time in the upper classes. Local-seasonal is now a trend. Thinness beyond what's necessary for health is now a trend. The visceral response of the Waters-ite to her fellow subway riders might be an altruistic concern for the obesity-related illnesses the mother and children might face and for the carbon footprint of Pringles production, or it could be an 'ick' reaction to rolls of fat and artificial ranch flavoring. But it's most likely a bit of both, although people do tend to fall into categories of tactless or patronizing, so it will be tough to find the same person admitting to both responses.

It can feel as if there's no way to address health (and environmental) concerns without risking the external, snobbish factors from at least seeming present. And there would certainly be no way for the Waters-ite to intervene at that moment, on the subway, without being an ass. It would help if the Waters-ites were to recognize that it's patronizing to say, 'Now, now, that's just what They eat, we shouldn't judge,' but that it's also patronizing to suggest that anyone who's spent money on any luxury (in Waters's own example, Nike sneakers) rather than local-seasonal-organic farmers-market produce is a fool.

On a similar note, while it would be insane to begrudge the Obamas a fancy night-on-the-town in New York, or a night off, period,I cringed when I read about their clearly-symbolic choice of a restaurant specializing in local-seasonal foods... after arriving in the city via an airplane and a helicopter. I get that there are huge security concerns, and that this is kind of an Al Gore-riding-airplanes-during-'An Inconvenient Truth' scenario - the positive of getting the word out could exceed the carbon footprint of doing so - but the evening's much-publicized itinerary risks reinforcing the belief that local-seasonal is something for the exceptionally privileged, that consuming food from local farms is somehow tied up with what would be, for anyone but the Obamas, extravagance.

So, after heaps of my locally-grown cynicism, I'll end on a positive note: Today I saw a group of schoolkids - racially diverse ('diverse' as in 'not all one race', not as a euphemism for every-last-one-was-black) - getting a tour of the Union Square Greenmarket, learning about what grows near New York, what's in season, etc. It looked like much more fun than any of my own school trips (with the exception of the 9th grade trip to a Hindu temple in Queens), was far more health-promoting than staying inside to watch some Lifetime-esque film about eating disorders, and was an introduction to a major NYC institution that probably some students already knew and others did not, and inasmuch was no more or less patronizing than a field trip to, say, the Met. So, uh, more stuff like that, please.

Dunkle Materie

Ich bin very impressed!

Oh the misogyny

I just finished Paula Hyman's fantastic Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History. Although this was technically orals-lists reading, it ended up having more immediate relevance: helping to understand why all three of the sample Jewish jokes in a NYMag feature on the End of Jewish humor are less about Jewish self-deprecation than about hatred of Jewish women. As someone who's appreciated much of what the Roth-Allen monster has created over the years, that I should be insulted by it doesn't, for me, disqualify a joke. But these particular jokes are not winners. Joke 1: The Jewish wife would rather let her husband die than give him a blow job. Joke 2: Marginally more clever than the previous. The Jewish husband wishes to extend his wife's jail sentence, so as to get rid of her. Joke 3: Makes the previous two look brilliant. The punch line is that an elderly woman has saggy breasts.

As Hyman explains it (and of course I'm oversimplifying), mid-20th-century anti-Semitism led to Jewish men being perceived of as feminine by the dominant culture. Frustrated by this, they turned on the Jewish woman, who by definition represented both the feminine (understood as a flaw) and the Jewish (given the role, considered admirable in earlier generations, of Jewish women as, in some contexts, guardians against assimilation). So the common explanations for the Portnoy-era Jewish male dislike of Jewish women - no man wants a woman like his mother, or, Jewish women were less likely to meet conventional standards of beauty in a 1960 Connecticut-country-club-type setting - tell part of the story, but the fact that anti-Semitism had a gendered dimension is what actually explains the phenomenon.

What this also explains is how radically different images of 'the Jewess' were at times when Jews had negligible influence on popular culture (or the 'popular culture' equivalent in mid-19th century France) than when Jews - men in particular - have been the main ones providing the representations of Jewish women that are available to the general public. This isn't about 'Jews controlling the media', but about the fact that of those in the entertainment industry, it's only natural that Jews should be writing more often than others about their own group.

Anyhow. It would be interesting to analyze what influence 20th century Jewish male depictions of Jewish women have had on the way non-Jewish writers, filmmakers, etc. portray 'the Jewish woman' in their work. Examples that come to mind: 'The Brothers McMullen', or Gilles by Drieu la Rochelle. One might be a 1990s American movie and the other a 1930s French novel, but in both, the Jewish woman is presented exactly as in the internal-Jewish stereotype. Now, one approach would be to say, Jewish women are just like that, and perceived of as such by men, regardless of their backgrounds. But another possibility is that some non-Jewish men - artists or otherwise - have adopted the clichés Jewish men created of 'the Jewish woman.'

Racists, carbon monoxide, and other unpleasantness

The powers that be clearly, clearly do not want me to ever finish up my last semester of coursework. I'm a few edits away from done with my last term project of grad school, so of course the jury duty gods should pick this as the time to drag me to downtown Brooklyn. Which isn't so bad. What is so bad is the mysterious carbon monoxide presence in my apartment. Dashing firefighters aside, not fun.

There was going to be a weekend roundup of crazy racists reported about in the Times - the segregated prom in Georgia (in which white racists worry about whatever might happen if their pure, innocent daughters - some of whom look remarkably like Vegas showgirls - were permitted to attend a formal dance with black male classmates) and the American Girl Jewish doll that has to have light brown rather than dark brown hair because apparently to give a Jewish doll dark brown hair is akin to posing it hunched over, grasping for a coin with a claw-like hand, so harmful and stereotyping it is to depict an Ashkenazi Jew with the coloring they themselves admit is typical of Ashkenazi Jewry... but that's all the roundup I can muster. People=big racists. My apartment=bad news. Jury duty=at least near some good grocery shopping.

Best search leading to this blog, to date:

'phoebe college wild parties', no-quotes.

More running do's and don't's

Do: end your run at Bouley Bakery's new, spacious Tribeca café, the one with mysteriously reasonable prices (and pitchers of iced water and cups just sitting there, for your post-run hydration). But beware the no-lock restroom. A blonde Eastern European woman very near caught me trying to extract the cash I'd brought (to pay for my pain au chocolat) from my running shorts' weird inner pocket. I hope she recovers.

Don't: follow up with a trip to the Whole Foods nearby, where summer fruit has just arrived, and where, in your post-run state, buying a checking-account's worth of plumcots, apricots, and whatever other -cots they're selling seems like a good idea. (I want to swim in a sea of these plumcots, so I suppose I don't totally regret the purchase.)

Do: run from one borough to another - it provides a nice, arbitrary sense of accomplishment without the need to run 26.2 miles.

Don't: take the Brooklyn Bridge. It has two lanes, one for elementary school field trips and slow-moving Northern European tourists, the other for racing bicyclists, and only those two. You can try to create a third lane in the middle, but in vain.

Do: get one of those stupid-looking early 1990s fabric headbands to keep your hair back during the run.

Don't: exit the train besides a woman you recognize from your department but don't know well, but know to be French, and whose French well-dressed-ness makes your 1991-aerobics-instructor look appear all the more ridiculous.

There are no words...

...to describe the amazingness of these photos. (Wait a moment after clicking on the link for the right page to load. You'll know when it has.)

The Fitness Flâneur

Recently, an unnamed European and I were discussing how it used to be the case that Americans looked upon Europeans as the epitome of unhealthiness - favoring cigarettes over advances in dentistry, wine over Aspartame, meandering from café to café rather than jogging in place in treadmill... and yet now, Americans look to Europe (and not only France, with its famous Paradox) as the health capital of the developed world. Europe! Where food is always local (except when it isn't), and where no one ever has to worry about weight.

While I mock Europhilia, I share in it to some extent. The great flaw of the American approach to health-consciousness is that it is all-or-nothing: you either Care, or you've Given Up. Once an American admits that he does drink/smoke/eat sugar-coated fried dough, these activities might as well be engaged in as continuously as one's job and need for sleep allow. If we Americans don't go for moderation, it's not because we're gleeful, guiltless over-consumers, but because we believe once the line has been crossed, there's no difference between one glass of wine and eight. That is, until New Years, the unofficial start of a Gwyneth Paltrow-inspired regimen of soy-kale smoothies and over-exercising, one that will last for a week at most, except when it succeeds, culminating in one or another of the various eating disorders. But in most cases, it's back to the couch and the sleeve-having blanket.

This is what struck me about Tara Parker-Pope's "Well" post, which reads like just that sort of New Years Resolution. She intends to get herself from completely out-of-shape to running a marathon in under five months. Although her goal is no doubt realistic, in the sense that someone with legs or equivalent can, history has shown, make it 26-plus miles without vehicular assistance, it's unclear what about the plan is a good idea. (Obviously, people should do what they want, but she's explicitly offering her own choice as a model for others looking to get in shape.) If Parker-Pope's goal is fitness, not a tearful 'I did it!' followed by decades on the couch (a bit like 'training' for one's wedding photos), wouldn't a better approach be to, say, run 2 miles at a time, several times a week, and, if this seems to easy, to keep increasing mileage until reaching a reasonable distance for a near-daily run?

While 'marathon' sounds more noble as a goal than 'Gwyneth Paltrow's thighs', both amount to the same thing: possible with sufficient time/money/obsessiveness, but not worth the bother, and detrimental to the goal of getting from where you're at to a similar but improved place. Which is what I like about Mark Bittman's approach to veganism. (Yes, still starstruck.) He acknowledges that for most of us, swearing off animal products is too radical a move, and so suggests simply cutting back on meat and the like. Along those lines, why not run rather than sit, without claiming that that run will take you some epic length we've arbitrarily decided is worthwhile?

All of this interests me as an on-again, off-again runner myself, a former member in good-enough standing of my high school and middle school track teams, who's in an on-again phase since the end of the semester and of an endless winter, and whose longest run ever was 8 or 9 miles, ending where all runs of that length should. It doesn't exactly qualify me to give fitness advice, but they say anything's better than our current national fitness level, so now, without further ado, the tips! (Not medical advice, obvs, lest some poor soul think an MA in French Studies has anything remotely in common with an MD, or confuses me with one of the many Drs. Maltz.)

-A big iced coffee before, a big iced coffee (pastry optional) after. This is key.

-All that advice to run on soft surfaces? Forget it. Soft surfaces are more tiring to run on, and, more importantly, tend to be more boring to run on, because they tend not to correlate with window-shopping, people-watching, and other activities cherished by the fitness flâneur. Whatever marginal benefit on your knees running through a great open field might have, the boredom of running through a great open field surely cancels out.

-However interesting your surroundings (and you want interesting, but not, as I learned today the hard way, a Canal Street level of congestion), you will need a good podcast, preferably one that goes a good hour, but if you're not one of those crazed runners who refuses to stop for two seconds because that will ruin who knows what, you can always stop or slow down a moment to move to a new one. I highly recommend the Savage Love podcast, and guarantee that you will not be thinking about running while a caller is defending pig fetishes or whatever the one I just listened to was about.

-For those who think of running as a time for quiet contemplation in nature, not cable TV if at the gym or podcasts and urban life if outside, you are people I fundamentally don't understand, at least on this issue. Quiet contemplation of paper topics and whatnot is for the shower after the run. The run itself is about not thinking about the run, which is what you will be thinking about if running alone, podcast-free, through an open field.

-Accept that running will not make you lose weight, and may well do the opposite. Just as they say that living in France makes Americans lose weight, yet I spent three months in Paris and left the heaviest I'd ever been thanks to flan with a side order of flan, I have found that running makes food more appealing, and causes me to eat more of it. Running will get your body more 'fit' (whatever that means - varies person to person), and is, within reason, good for your health, but it is primarily a socially-acceptable way to take time off from more productive activities. Accept that, and enjoy.