Socially Distant Cuisine

Everyone talks about The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it's one of those novels that's considered a character trait. What I mean is that, if a writer gives his character The Unbearable Lightness as a favorite novel, we're supposed to understand something profound about the character. Anyway, I've finally gotten around to reading it, and I understand the hype. It's beautiful. This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem "novelistic" to you, and I'm willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a perma...

Today was gorgeous... I took a long walk down around The Mall this afternoon, and it was incredible. I took my parents down there, and they went to the Museum of the American Indian and the Botanical Gardens, while I went to the Hirshhorn. I love the Hirshhorn. Their "Gyroscope" exhibition of the permanent collection is always changing, and the Fall 2005 presentation recently went up. There was an Ann Hamilton installation piece that is new since the last time I was there; it was pretty amazing. It consisted of a room papered floor to ceiling in probably a thousand little pieces of parchment paper, each covered in writing... snippets of story, little confessonal memoir bits. Each one was attached to the wall by a pushpin at the top, and the paper kind of rustled and fluttered because a fan was set up to blow across the room. The floor was similarly tiled with the pieces, though these were under a layer of beeswax, and couldn't be read. I was just really moved by the...

In the past 2 days, I've had probably 5 different people forward me Maureen Dowd's Sunday piece from the NYT. I think she's partly doing the thing that the NYT is wont to do in their social commentary--they see a few instances of something and take it as a broader trend. Did you read the piece she refers to about Ivy League women wanting to be mothers? The reporter interviewed three Yale roommates for that one. I question whether it's really a trend... I talked about it with several friends from college, and we don't think it was at Wellesley. We are certainly concerned about how we're going to balance work and family, but I didn't know many who outright wanted to get married to a rich man and stay home with the kids all day. Maybe Wellesley's not the norm on that one, though. That said, I think the stuff she says about dating is interesting... she's written a lot in the last year about how men only want passive, unaccomplished women, and she...