PurpleFontGirl

Empanada Pie

2012-01-28T13:38:00.006-05:00

Best potluck idea ever? An all-pie meal, appropriately titled Piefest! Guests each bring a savory or sweet pie, and the gluttony will commence. This was my addition to the spread.

I have been craving beef empanadas, those little, meaty hand pies from across Latin America. To stick with the Piefest theme, I decided to modify the presentation to 9" pie plate style. Wikipedia says that this is the preferred presentation in areas of Spain, so I'm not the first to venture there, which was reassuring.

Enough ground beef to fill a pie plate seemed like overkill, so I decided to round out the filling with spiced, diced potatoes. While I was riffing on the empanada filling from Mexican Cooking for Dummies, I kind of made up this recipe as I went. The following is a list of the ingredients for posterity, rather than exact measurements... tweak at your will.

Beef and Potato Empanada Pie
First: steam fry the potatoes

In a frying pan, heat 1 Tbsp olive oil

When hot, add:
1 lb potatoes, chopped into 1/4" cubes (I used baby yellow potatoes from my produce box, but any type should do)
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp spanish smoked paprika
1/4 tsp ancho chili powder

After the onions are soft and potatoes have started to get a crust, add the juice of 1 can of Rotel and 1/4 cup of water, and put on the pan lid to steam. When the potatoes are soft, remove the lid and cook off any remaining liquid. Adjust the flavor to taste with a dash of cayenne, salt and black pepper (and any of the other spices, as desired). The potatoes should be deliciously smoky and spicy, piquant with the acidity of the tomatoes, but mellowed by the cinnamon and cloves. Set aside.

Next, prepare the beef.
Crumble 1.5 lbs of ground beef in the skillet and cook until brown. Drain excess fat, then add:

Reserved tomatoes and chilis from the can of Rotel
1 small onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
3/4 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped black olives
2 Tbsp brown sugar
3 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp spanish paprika

Cook until onions and raisins are soft and flavors are blended. The resulting mixture should be a lovely, warm combination of sweet and savory. When it is flavored to your liking, add the potatoes back in, mixing to combine. Meat and potato mixture can be reserved in the fridge up to 2 days.

To bake the pie:
I'm a cheater and used Pillsbury roll-out pie crust, following the package instructions. But given the many different shells encasing empanadas around the world, I suspect it would be delicious with a cornmeal crust or the doughy crust traditional in the Spanish pie-sized version.

Savory Sweet Potato Bites

2011-11-23T16:15:00.005-05:00

Spiced, roasted disks of sweet potato topped with sweet potato mousse. A delicious one bite appetizer! The mousse would be a great use of leftover mashed sweets, and a great topping for crackers.

2 large sweet potatoes
Salt, cayenne pepper

Bake sweet potatoes for 20 min at 400 degrees, until soft enough to easily cut. Let cool.
Slice the potatoes into 1/2 inch slices, and using a small (1 or 1.5" diameter) cookie cutter, cut small circles. Reserve scraps, peel, and wrap tightly in a foil packet.
Spray a roasting pan w/ pan spray and arrange potato disks in a single layer. Spray top of potatoes, as well. Sprinkle lightly with salt and cayenne pepper.
Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, until slightly brown and crisp. Flip disks and bake for an additional 10 minutes. During these 20 minutes, also bake the scraps in their foil packet.
Remove disks from oven, and turn off the heat. Leave the scraps in the oven for 20 more minutes, or until they are very soft. Cool disks on a piece of paper towel.

Sweet Potato Mousse
One onion, caramelized
1 tsp chopped fresh thyme
2 oz soft goat cheese
zest of one lemon
Roasted sweet potato scraps, from above

Caramelize the onion, adding thyme while the onions cook.
Add goat cheese, lemon zest, and half of sweet potato scraps to warm onions.
Blend with an immersion blender or in a food processor until smooth.
Add salt and pepper to taste, and adjust with more roasted sweet potato, if desired.
Pipe on to cooled potato disks. Enjoy!

Savory, Spicy Monte Cristo

2011-11-08T20:21:00.006-05:00

I had a half an avocado, a box of mixed sprouts and a ton of roasted beets left from my fruit and veggie box this week, and decided to experiment! The resulting sandwich and beet salad turned out great, so I decided to document them.

This sandwich was inspired by the classic Monte Cristo my mom used to make when we were kids, a kind of toasted ham, turkey and Swiss. No jam necessary here-- a spontaneous combination of cream cheese and spiced deli chicken resulted in a tasty sandwich! The beet salad is a fall twist on a summer favorite of my old roommate, Simone. A nice change from my usual walnut-and-goat-cheese preparation. Enjoy!

Savory, Spicy Monte Cristo

2 slices whole wheat bread
2 oz Dietz and Watson Buffalo Style Chicken Breast
1 oz cream cheese
Dijon Mustard
1 egg
Avocado
Thinly sliced white onion
Fresh sprouts--I had a combo of alfalfa and radish
No-stick spray or 1 tsp butter.

Spread one half of bread with a thin layer of cream cheese. Pile on turkey, and close sandwich. Coat both outsides of sandwich with a thin layer of mustard. Melt butter over medium-low heat in a frying pan, or coat with non-stick spray.

Lightly beat egg with dash of water. Quickly dip the outside of the sandwich in egg-- do not let it soak too deeply, or the sandwich will be soggy. Add to pan, cream cheese side on the top.

Cook first side until golden brown, then flip. Remove the top slice of bread, and while the second side cooks, add avocado, salt, pepper, onions and sprouts to the inside of the toasted bread. When the other half is golden brown, reunite the sides. Serve while warm-- delicious! If you're making more than one, keep them crisp and warm in the oven until it's time to serve.

Dill Beet Salad

Roasted beets, peeled
2 Tbsp fat-free plain yogurt
Few dashes rice vinegar
Salt and cayenne pepper, to taste
Fresh dill, chopped, to taste

Slice refrigerated, roasted beets into large chunks. Toss in yogurt and vinegar mixture, add salt and cayenne pepper to taste. Finish with chopped dill.

Disappearing Carrot Bran Bread

2011-11-02T19:05:00.005-05:00

DISAPPEARING CARROT-BRAN BREAD (modified to halve butter and sugar from cooks.com)

6 Tbsp butter, melted
6 Tbsp no-sugar added applesauce
3 eggs

3/4 c. 100% Wheat Bran
1 3/4 c. flour
1/4 c. brown sugar
1/4 c. white sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp each: nutmeg, allspice, cardamom

1 1/2 c. coarsely grated carrots
1/2 c. raisins (or chopped dates)

Wisk butter, applesauce and eggs until blended. Stir in Bran. Let soak 5 minutes.

Combine other dry ingredients. Add to bran mixture. Add carrots and raisins.

Bake in 9"x5" loaf pan at 350 degrees for 50 to 55 minutes. Remove from pan and cool on wire rack.

12 servings: 200 cal (7.5 g fat, 4.1 g sat), 34g carbohydrate, 3 g fiber
38% RDA Vitamin A, 30% Manganese, ~10% Folate, Riboflavin, Selenium, Thiamin

Another one-dish-wonder

2010-07-27T18:55:00.005-05:00

During the summer, I love meals that don't require heating up the oven. I also love throwing random things together. And so this dinner was born, and it's quickly become one of my favorite things to eat on a hot summer night.

At a dinner party awhile back, my friend Deirdre made this great cucumber "salsa," and while I love to scoop it up on chips or eat it by the spoonful out of the container, we decided that the mixed-veggie goodness of it would be great as a salad.

Enter quinoa. I want to love the stuff, since it's so good for you, but I always struggled with it tasting a little too bland. Once I discovered that cooking it in a light broth really jazzes it up, I was hooked. My favorite is Better than Bullion veggie flavor, which comes in a jar rather than as a powder. I use it at about half strength, rather than full.

Finally, my mother makes these really delicious chicken tostada salads. The chicken is poached, and then dressed with a red wine vinaigrette and tossed with some sliced red onion. When I feel like I need a little extra protein, I love to throw this chicken into a salad or, as it turns out, into my cucumber salsa-quinoa-chicken salad. A great one-dish dinner, and equally awesome the next day (or two) as lunch.

Boy, I need to work on the names for these things, huh? That one is certainly a mouthful.

Serves a TON. Two hungry post-gym girls plus four lunch-sized portions. I could cut it in half, I suppose, but I hate having halfed peppers etc sitting around. So I just put some background music on and resolve to chop chop chop.

2 boneless/skinless chicken breasts
Red wine vinegar
Olive Oil

1 cup dried quinoa, cooked to package instructions (or use broth instead of water)

2 medium cucumbers - peeled, seeded, and chopped
2 medium tomatoes (or one pint of grape tomatoes), chopped
1 cup chopped green bell pepper
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
1 small red onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons lime juice
3 Tbsp minced fresh parsley
3 Tbsp minced fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon dried dill weed
1/2 teaspoon salt

Put on the chicken to poach and the quinoa to cook; both will take about 20 minutes once they start to simmer. (Good directions on how to poach chicken can be found here). When each is ready, let it sit and wait; remove chicken from water so that it will be cool enough to shred.

While those are simmering away, chop all the veggies and herbs. This usually takes me about a half hour or forty minutes or so in total. Mix with dried dill, salt, and lime juice in a huge bowl. Add in cooked quinoa and stir. Adjust seasoning with salt or more lime, if needed.

Shred chicken, pulling it apart into bite-sized pieces. Add a small amount of finely chopped red onion, and a little extra jalepeno if you have it. Dress with a mixture of red wine vinegar and olive oil, without drenching (I like a 3-to-1 ratio, but you may have a different preference if you like it less tangy). Serve chicken on top of a bed of the quinoa/veggie salad. I also like to add a bit of cubed feta for a little extra treat. Delicious!

Herb Peel-Away Bread

2010-07-25T21:39:00.007-05:00

My mom baked me an amazing blueberry pie for my birthday last week when I was in California, so when the actual day came around, I was all set on the dessert front. But that didn't mean that I was ready to go without a birthday treat! Tonight, I had friends over for dinner and the star of the show was Herb Peel-Away Bread, one of my family favorites. It was just as delicious as I remember, plus it's got star-power: it looks far more impressive than the simple preparation it takes.

Herb Peel-Away Bread

3 1/2 cups flour, divided
2 packages of Rapid-Rise yeast
1/3 cup sugar
2 Tbsp grated Parmesan cheese
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp dried basil leaves
1 Tbsp dried parsley
1/2 tsp dried dill
1 cup water
1 egg (room temperature)
6 Tbsp butter, divided

Set aside 1 cup flour. Combine 2 1/2 cups flour, yeast, sugar, cheese, salt, and herbs. Heat water and 4 Tbsp butter until hot to touch. Stir into dry mixture. Add the beaten egg and only enough reserved flour to make soft dough. Knead until smooth and elastic, about 4 minutes, incorporating the rest of the flour. Cover, and let rest 10 minutes.

Roll dough into 12-inch square on a lightly floured surface. Brush with remaining 2 Tbsp melted butter. Cut into 25 squares with a pizza cutter. Overlap squares, butter side down, in a greased 12-cup bundt pan.

Cover; let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 30 minutes. Bake at 375 for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown on top. Remove to wire rack or an inverted plate. Best when served warm!

Given the ton of butter in this bread, we ate it with a "thoroughly inoffensive" chilled cucumber soup from Cooking Light that I tried to jazz up with mint, cilantro and a dash of Sriracha, and accompanied by a beautiful salad made by my friend Addy. An eclectic meal, but all-in-all a delicious one.

Randomly Delicious Dinner

2010-07-22T16:35:00.007-05:00

I'll call this one "Summer Succotash Couscous." I desperately needed something to do with the frozen bags of edamame and corn hanging out in my freezer... a little mix-and-match of googled recipes turned out delicious!

I ate this as a main dish, but it would be great as a side dish if you left out the beans. You'll see kidney beans in the picture, as they were what was in the cupboard, but next time I'll use something milder, like cannellini, so that the butter and mint aren't overwhelmed.

1 box of couscous, prepared following box directions
(I used Near East Roasted Garlic and Olive Oil)
1 1/2 Tbsp butter
1/2 small red onion, diced
1 Red bell pepper, diced
2 cups frozen corn
2 cups frozen edamame
1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
2 Tbsp white wine
1 Tbsp rice wine vinegar
Salt to taste
10 leaves of fresh mint, chiffonade

Prepare the box of couscous first. While it is resting, melt butter in a large pan, stir in onion and red pepper and cook until they begin to soften. Add frozen edamame, frozen corn and cannellini beans and stir to coat. Add white wine, rice vinegar and salt and cook until frozen veggies and beans are heated through. Stir in couscous until thoroughly mixed and juices are absorbed. Add mint and stir just before serving

Enjoy!

This moved me

2010-04-13T01:25:00.003-05:00

Good thing Mark Epstein tells stories he's written about in articles, since we weren't allowed pens or paper on retreat...

"I can no longer remember our question, but Ajahn Chah's response still lingers.

Before saying a word, he motioned to a glass at his side. "Do you see this glass?" he asked us. "I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is already broken. When the wind knocks it over or my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious."

Things I've Cooked on Holiday

2009-12-16T21:13:00.005-05:00

Stir-fried Sweet Potatoes with Browned Butter and Sage (Bittman, NYT)
Chocolate (15) Little Layer Cake (New York Times)
Egg Salad Sandwich (101 Cookbooks, plus capers, April 2007)
Kale and Potato Spanish Tortilla (Gourmet, February 2003)
Spanish-style Shrimp with Garlic (NYT, May 2009)
Two-bean Chili (My own recipe)
Simple Cauliflower (101 Cookbooks, May 2009)
Huevos Rancheros with Spinach (My recipe)
Classic Grilled Cheese and Cream of Tomato Soup (America's Test Kitchen, via Smitten Kitchen, November 2006)

Ma Po Tofu

2009-12-06T23:47:00.003-05:00

Modification combining several recipes and to make veggie rather than meaty... delicious!

Mapo Tofu (Modified from The Washington Post and the Gourmet cookbook)
4 to 6 servings

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 chopped scallions (white and light-green parts only)
1 Tbsp minced ginger root
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1/4 cup broadbean paste (I use Lee Kum Kee Chili Bean Sauce)
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
1 tablespoon Shaoxing rice wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup water
12 to 15 ounces (1 package) soft tofu, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
cornstarch for thickening, if needed.
1/2 teaspoon crushed Sichuan peppercorns

Bring a small pot of water to a simmer, add cubed tofu and simmer for 10 minutes, to firm it up.

In a large frying pan over medium-high heat, cook scallions, garlic and ginger 2 minutes. Add broadbean paste and cook 1 minute. Add soy sauce, rice wine and sugar, and stir until dissolved. Add water and simmer until slightly reduced, adding a bit of corn starch for thickening if desired.

Drain simmered tofu and add to sauce, stirring to mix. Allow to meld for about 10 minutes over low heat, adding Sichuan peppercorns near the end.

Serve over rice and stir-fried veggies. Yum!

Thanksgiving Baking: Great Aunt Bun's Sweet Rolls

2008-11-26T09:37:00.003-05:00

Another great family recipe... currently rising in the oven!

2 cakes compressed yeast (you MUST find the "active" yeast bricks next to the butter in the grocery store. Active dry packets do NOT taste the same)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup butter
1 tsp salt

Crumble yeast cakes in a little bowl. Add 1 tsp sugar and a little of the milk (warmed, but not too hot). Cream butter, sugar and salt. Add well-beaten eggs and yeast mixture. Add half of the sifted flour and remaining milk, and beat well. Mix in the rest of the flour with your hands.

Knead gently in bowl until smooth Place in a well-greased bowl, cover, and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size.

Remove dough from bowl to a floured board, and cut in two. Roll out each piece to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut like a pie into 16 pieces. Roll up each into a croissant shape, beginning at wide end of triangle. Roll tightly, and pull each roll out longer by gently tugging on the ends. Let rise about 1/2 hour.

Bake at 400 for 15 minutes. For a tender crust, brush with melted butter when removing from the oven.

Christmas baking: Pfeffernuesse

2008-11-23T20:08:00.010-05:00

After looking all over the web, I haven't found this particular recipe, so I decided to share it after a nice evening of baking. It is my grandmother's recipe, and one of my dad's favorite Christmas cookies. They are very best after they've aged a few weeks (up to a month) in an airtight container... the icing gets really nice and hard, and the cookies are awesome dunked in tea or coffee. They're so good, though, it's hard to make them last that long!

Pfeffernuesse-- Makes about 4 1/2 dozen

1/3 cup unsalted butter, room temp
2 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 eggs

Zest of one lemon
3 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup finely chopped candied lemon peel
1/2 cup finely chopped candied citron
1/4 cup finely chopped candied orange peel
1/2 tsp almond extract

4 cups sifted flour
1 Tbsp cardamom
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ground aniseed
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda

Lemon Icing
1 1/2 cups sifted powdered sugar
4 to 4 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice

Directions

Cream butter in a large bowl, and beat in powdered sugar in small batches. Add eggs and beat until well blended.
Mix together lemon juice, zest, chopped candied fruits, and almond extract. Add butter and egg mixture and stir until well blended.
Sift together flour, spices, salt and soda to evenly distribute spices. Add butter and fruit mixture, and stir until well blended.
Cover and refrigerate for 1 hour. Grease and flour cookie sheets. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Lightly flour hands and roll into 1-inch balls. You can place them fairly close together on the sheet because they don't really spread. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until barely browned but dry.

The icing is the tricky part. It is not icing so much as a thick, opaque white paste. The best way to do it is to put a dab on top of each of the cookies while they're still pretty hot, and then go back and squish it around with your finger. It's indelicate, but it makes a very nice, tangy sugar crust on top.

The Abundance of Books

2008-05-13T22:35:00.003-05:00

I have been on a book buying binge recently. Amazon.com's Amazon Prime is a killer, I tell you!

And I am not alone... talking about which book his book club should read next, a friend explained his dilemma:

Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler describes the "abundance of a bookstore" this way (I put the categories into list format):
1. Books You Haven't Read
2. The Books You Needn't Read
3. The Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
4. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
5. The Books That if You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read but Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
6. The Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First
7. The Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait Till They Are Remaindered
8. The Books Ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
9. Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
10. Books That Everybody's Read So It's as if You Had Read Them, Too

A Thought for Finals

2008-05-09T07:11:00.003-05:00

As painful as this particular retreat was for me, it opened my eyes to the extraordinary amount of time my mind spent in monitoring and evaluating my success or failure, and in making reality match my ideal image of myself. With my newfound awareness, I would notice how there seemed to be an endless tape-loop in my mind that evaluated my progress: "Okay, now I've accomplished this, and this, and this. I'm doing alright." This compulsive internal dialogue is quite normal in a culture that rewards achievement, wealth, beauty and success above all things, and especially in a culture that rewards the achievements of the highly individuated, separate "self under its own power." In this milieu, the internal dialogue is actually a form of self-soothing, of reassuring ourselves that we're really okay. When we can stand back from this compulsive internal dialogue just a bit, we can see the intensity of the craving for solidity and security that drives it.

.Stephen Cope. Yoga and the Search for the True Self.

Delicious

2008-03-10T22:05:00.001-05:00

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder if it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.

.E.M. Forster. Howard's End.

Meditations at Lagunitas

2008-02-20T12:34:00.002-05:00

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

.Robert Hass.

Atonement

2008-01-06T02:33:00.000-05:00

"The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him." Ian McEwan.

I supplemented the widely sweeping pans of the camera during the film with McEwan's lovely prose, nearly from memory. If you can do that, you should see the movie. If you haven't, you should read the novel.

Grad School, Much?

2007-12-10T01:44:00.000-05:00

Coser's analysis of Simmel here is perfectly fitting for so much of first semester of grad school:

"Modern man finds himself in a deeply problematical situation: he is surrounded by a multiplicity of cultural elements, which, although they are not meaningless to him, are not fundamentally meaningful either. They oppress the individual because he cannot fully assimilate them. But he cannot reject them because they belong at least potentially to the sphere of his own cultural development."

See? It's structural! Occasionally, there are flashes of very deep meaning. Even if they come in the form of secondary sources cross-referenced from undergrad.

Question of the Day

2007-10-30T16:37:00.000-05:00

Do you wonder where the self resides
Is it in your head or between your sides?
And who will be the one who will decide
Its true location?

.Andrew Bird. Darkmatter.

Too tired

2007-10-25T22:11:00.000-05:00

to make the link between what we spoke about in Social Stratification today and this cartoon, but it feels apropos.

Home Sweet Home

2007-09-23T23:22:00.000-05:00

There are only two stories. The one about home and the one about leaving home.

.Salman Rushdie.

Sometimes, I question whether they aren't actually one and the same.

It's Turning

2007-09-08T14:44:00.000-05:00

I spent the morning and early afternoon curled in a leather armchair in the back corner of Diesel, reading the novel of the moment and sipping my habitual iced coffee with cream. It is the first weekend that the crowd has included undergrads, and the air reverberated with their early gripes about Virgil and Intro to Electrical Engineering and their hushed gossip. When I rode my bike back home in the mid-afternoon heat, a warm breeze ruffled my skirt and tickled my thighs, yet something felt distinctly different this afternoon from others. It is the feeling of summer's end.

Insignificant

2007-08-23T21:38:00.000-05:00

Back from 3 weeks of vacation, with lots of spectacular nature moments: a break I totally needed. Experiencing such dramatic scenery is so refreshing. Centering. Humbling.

Back safely in my apartment, in this major metropolitan area, I was chatting with a friend about the experience. As I gushed on and on about how much I love the West, I joked that it was time to return East, where nature isn't so breathtaking, and it's easier to feel important. "We have history," he wryly replied, "and tall buildings, to make you feel meaningless."

As I strolled through The Yard on my way to a meeting yesterday morning, these words came back to me. So true.

Julia's a Charmer

2007-07-26T17:26:00.000-05:00

Omelettes are such fun to make when you toss them off, as shown here. A fresh green salad, a glass of white wine, and an omelette make a lunch worth waiting the 30 seconds it takes to make one, and I say fie to those oenophilic spoilsports who insist that wine goes with neither eggs nor salads. Wine is essential with anything! Particularly omelettes for lunch.

.Julia Child. How to Cook.

A link to remember

2007-07-20T16:01:00.000-05:00

The Minimalist Meals in 10 Minutes or Less.

Welcome to Boston

2007-07-12T19:59:00.000-05:00

Today was my first full day in Massachusetts. I spent the morning getting lost again and again by car, while trying to run some errands. But as a result I made peace with the U-turn and bought a box of Jello Pudding Pops with French on it, so it was not all in vain.

After the agitation of driving in circles all morning, this evening, I decided to go for a long walk, and just be. No iPod. No real place to go. I had a scoop of Coconut Butterfinger ice cream at Christina's, and looked in the windows of the billion furniture stores on Mass Ave, and ended up on a bench by the river to finish Philip Roth's Everyman and watch the sunset. As rowers sculled by and the water sparkled in the fading light, I read the following:

"Why do you laugh sometimes at what I say," she asked him the second time he took her out to dinner, "why do you laugh when I'm being perfectly serious?" "Because you charm me so and you're so unaware of your charm." "There's so much to learn," she said while he accompanied her home in the taxi; when he replied softly, without a trace of the urgency he felt, "I'll teach you," she had to cover her face with her hands. "I'm blushing. I blush," she said. "Who doesn't?" he told her, and he believed that she'd blushed because she thought he was referring not to the subject of their conversation--all the art she'd never seen--but to sexual ardor, as indeed he was. He wasn't thinking in the taxi of showing her the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum but of her long fingers and her wide mouth, though soon enough he'd take her not just to the Metropolitan but to the Modern, the Frick, and the Guggenheim. He remembered her removing her bathing suit out of sight in the dunes. He remembered them, later in the afternoon, swimming back together across the bay. He remembered how everything about this candid, unaffected woman was so unpredictably exciting. He remembered the nobility of her straightness. Against her own grain, she sparkled. He recalled telling her, "I can't live without you," and Phoebe's replying, "Nobody has ever said that to me before," and his admitting, "I've never said it before myself."

For a moment, this broke my resolve to just be, because if I am honest, I have to admit--I want that so badly.

2007-07-10T10:15:00.000-05:00

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assur'd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

-- John Donne

Two good things I've read recently

2007-07-07T22:51:00.000-05:00

I've been hitting the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion pretty hard recently... good stuff:

With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan Baker took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is the source from which self-respect springs.

.On Self-Respect.

And, quoted in the preface of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged, Herbert Gans:

The vacuum that is created when no recommendations are attached to a policy proposal can easily be filled by undesirable solutions and the report's conclusions can be conveniently misinterpreted.

Pretty

2007-06-27T00:48:00.000-05:00

There were concert halls in Europe to which Father Booty would soon return, opera houses where music molded entire audiences into a single grieving or celebrating heart, and where the applause rang like a downpour...

But could they feel as they did here? Hanging over the mountain, hearts half empty-half full, longing for beauty, for innocence that now knows. With passion for the beloved or for the wide world or for worlds beyond this one...

and

They were falling back into familiarity, into common ground, into the dirty gray. Just ordinary humans in ordinary opaque boiled-egg light, without grace, without revelation, composite of contradictions, easy principles, arguing about what they half believed in or even what they didn't believe in at all, desiring comfort as much as raw austerity, authenticity as much as playacting, desiring the cosiness of family as much as to abandon it forever. Cheese and chocolate they wanted, but also to kick all these bloody foreign things out. A wild daring love to bicycle them into the sky, but also a rice and dal love blessed by the unexciting feel of everyday, its surprises safely enmeshed in something solidly familiar like marrying the daughter or son of your father's best friend and grumbling about the cost of potatoes, the cost of onions. Every single contraction history or opportunity might make available to them, every contradiction they were heir to, they desired. But only as much, of course, as they desired purity and a lack of contradiction.

.Kiran Desai. The Inheritance of Loss.

Huh.

2007-06-06T09:40:00.001-05:00

On my way to work today, a song I have listened to probably a thousand times played on my iPod... for some reason, though, it seemed like I actually heard the lyrics for the first time:

I guess we're all the same, we walk our days looking for a little more fire
And we all sometimes have to sit on our hands
We try to hold ourselves together
We try to talk about the weather
When all we really want to do is take each other by the throat and say

Won't you dream my dream with me
Don't you leave it here drying on my pillow
Won't you just soak a little up for me
Won't you give it just a safe place to go
It just needs a little safe place to go

.Kris Delmhorst. Moscow Song.

Don't worry, I'm not going to strangle anyone. But this struck me as a particularly pretty sentiment in the unseasonably pretty morning, as I walked past the office buildings and construction sites of the city.

Making faces in the two way mirror

2007-06-05T13:45:00.000-05:00

This is a really interesting paragraph from a generally interesting article (entitled Babes in the Woods) by Catilin Flanagan in this month's Atlantic:

The primary engine of MySpace's stupendous growth isn't the Internet or the additional opportunities for cattiness it provides, but the fathomless narcissism of the young. There's no more ardent devotee of a MySpace profile than its creator, lovingly adjusting the lighting on the perfect self-portrait, changing the song that serenades it, the graphics that surround it. The page can speak broadly to others, but others are almost beside the point; every profile is a sonnet to the self. Today's girls spend hours looking at their MySpace profiles, fiddling and tinkering with them—much as I once sat in front of my vanity mirror, holding my hair up and letting it fall, smiling one way and then the other. For girls, the powerful need to be alone in their bedrooms—dreaming, writing in diaries, looking at themselves in the mirror—is married to a kind of exhibitionism. Why was I trying out my hair so many different ways, if not to calculate its potential effect on others? The Internet makes it possible to combine these two opposed desires: to be alone trying something out and to be exposed in public for everyone to see. A decade from now, a large group of parents may be telling anyone who will listen that this is a very dangerous combination indeed.

In the essay, Flanagan covers everything from Perverted Justice and To Catch a Predator to Myspace and Club Penguin. While the tone is certainly concerned, it's not as hysterical as some treatments of the subject. Worth a read, if you happen to subscribe.

Kindling Flames Posts

2007-02-28T16:37:00.000-05:00

For reference, links to posts on Kindlingflames, my grad program's blog.

Posts:
8/7/2006: Steamy Young Kozol
4/10/2006: Too Esoteric for Words?
3/20/2006: The Teacher/Policymaker Divide
3/15/2006: Marx's Efforts at Amhearst
3/14/2006: The "Right" Take on Higher Ed
3/13/2006: GWU to Ill Student: Withdraw or Face the Consequences
1/22/2006: Reverse Gender Gap, Continued
1/19/2006: I'll Admit, I'm Surprised
1/10/2006: Vocational Education Enigma
10/19/2005: NAEP 4th Grade Data Trends By Race
10/19/2005: Spinning Again, Spinning
9/28/2005: Proud of Their F
9/12/2005: Battle Metaphor: Revisited
8/29/2005: What Does Average Joe Know?
8/26/2005: Focus on HBCUs

Places I left comments:
10/4/2005: Merit Pay for Teachers
11/7/2005: Million Dollar Question
1/3/2006: The Bell Curve Rises Again
1/6/2006: Right Plan, Wrong Reason
1/6/2006: FL Supreme Court Takes Away Choice
2/22/2006: A Different Type of Portfolio Assessment
3/16/2006: Testing and NCLB
5/22/2006: JennyD and NOST: Vouchers and Social Justice
5/24/2006: How Do We Educate Everyone?
12/6/2006: Brown v. Board for the 21st Century
12/17/2006: Tough Choice? You Bet!

Funny in the news

2007-01-22T16:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, so today two "news" articles have made me laugh out loud. First, Slate reports on the "Meatlifting" epidemic. Now that pseudophedrine is behind the pharmacy counter in many states, home meth chefs have been replaced by "aspirational meatlifters" as the scourge of the grocery industry. Who are they? Gainfully employed women between the ages of 35 and 54, who think that every once in awhile they deserve the filet mignon, and are willing to shove it into their purse.

Second, the NYT home and garden section has a hilarious vignette of "MTV’s Real World with a slovenly cast of Democratic power brokers," Rep. George Miller's (D-Calif.) Capitol Hill crash pad. Apparently Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is known to kill rats with his bare hands, but they make Senator Schumer (D-NY) take care of the mice.

Russian Debutante

2006-12-18T11:01:00.000-05:00

Just started reading my first for-fun book of the holiday season... The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm not very far in, but this paragraph, from one of the first pages, portends good things. "Janus-faced sandwich"? Delightful!

Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin-the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.

Home as Art

2006-12-17T23:05:00.000-05:00

Really interesting article in NYT today about Rick Lowe, an artist living in Houston. His work with young single mothers, artists, and low-income renters boarders on urban renewal, and gentrification of a low-income neighborhood is following his work. Will be interesting to see whether the project (and its multi-constiutency coalition) can work to maintain some diversity in the neighborhood in the future. I liked the quote:

“We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” he said. “It’s a choice people have. You don’t have to make houses the way people always have. If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.”

The Sea

2006-11-18T11:18:00.000-05:00

Just read John Banville's The Sea. It was sad, meditative, and truly beautiful. Choice quotes:

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much a matter of accumulation, of taking things--new experiences, new emotions--and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentus change of all?

The Crisis Rages On

2006-07-11T12:28:00.000-05:00

More at the NYT on the boy crisis. Why, I wonder, are they so obsessed with this topic? Good quote from Sara Mead at Education Sector, wondering whether this is a symptom of feminist backlash:

I'm troubled by this tone of crisis. Even if you control for the field they're in, boys right out of college make more money than girls, so at the end of the day, is it grades and honors that matter, or something else the boys may be doing?

Bottom line: being male is still an advantage in the workplace.

How could this be? Oh, I've got it. Just combine the Slacker Boy Phenomenon with the Opt-out Revolution that NYT is equally happy to pump. Boys don't *need* to be high school and college all-stars... they'll still have great jobs, because so many of the well-qualified, high-achieving women simply don't want to work!

I can't wait for the forthcoming article blaming the opt-out women for the slacker boys' choices to play video games 6 hours a day rather than study.

Cannon Beach

2006-07-06T13:19:00.000-05:00

Sharp gusts of wind tugged at the joints of her arms as if they wanted to pull her into the sky, up and away from the Oregon shore where she stood. The clouds were all shades of gray, ranging from pure white to angry, thunderclap dark. Her kite was a lonely patch of bright against the dark of sky, reflecting a bit of light from somewhere unknown as it was pulled here and there in the blustery fall.

The dark sand was cold and firm against her bare toes, and as a bigger gust inflated the u-shaped patch of fabric, she dug deep into her spot, fixing herself to the ground as the kite pulled her arms further up to the sky. For a moment, she felt like a tree, her toe-roots strongly anchoring her to the earth, and her branch-arms reaching upwards, straining away from her body and its center.

It was the kind of kite with two long strings and two yellow plastic handles, the model that professional tricksters can guide into figure-eights and impressive loops. She had tried these tricks at the beginning of the summer, when the kite was new, but it only ended up in a tangled mess crashed into the sand. It took her a long time to untie the knotted strings, and the tip of the kite’s nose was pushed slightly off-center by the impact. Worried that she would wreck her fragile new joy, she decided to stick to a simple, keep-it-in-the-air strategy.

She liked the struggle this way better anyway. It was more primal, a battle-of-the-wills game, as opposed to the finesse required for tricks. She liked to know that it was her strength put her in control. On the beach, it was her against the wind, and the choice was hers: she could stay here, rooted firmly in the sand, or she could allow the powerful gusts to drag her away somewhere up into the sky, away from the earth and its weight.

You're looking at a future piano goddess

2006-06-20T13:54:00.000-05:00

I've been watching too much television. DVR and digital cable are evil, evil tools. The electronic guide makes searching the billion available channels far too simple, and with 300 channels, there's always something on. Luckily for me, the new set of roomies was down with scaling back to the "normal" cable... hopefully this will help me cure my addiction.

Another proven cure: find a new hobby. Enter: piano playing. I have always wanted to learn to play the piano. I played the flute from fifth to tenth grade, and the oboe in 11th, so I'm not a complete musical novice. I just have never had the chance to learn piano.

In a rush of inspiration, I bought a beautiful "electronic piano" (didn't these used to be called keyboards?!), a book of excruciating exercises (like taking your medicine--has to be good for you, right), and found a teacher. He is Russian and was trained at the Moscow Conservatory. We had our first meeting on Sunday, and based on the way that I plowed past Jingle Bells and Mary Had a Little Lamb, I have high hopes that this may be an undiscovered talent!

n+1

2006-06-14T20:49:00.000-05:00

I'm obsessed with n+1. I read the pieces, and I want to talk about them... to spend time with ideas. One of my favorite things to do as an undergraduate (o, idealistic days of yore!) was to sit down to a mediocre dining hall dinner and talk with people about what they had learned or thought about that day... we were always full of ideas. Now, even though I am surrounded by people just as smart, we spend our days thinking about functional things. I should cancel old credit cards I haven't used in awhile. I should call the power company to switch over the bill to my name. I should book a rental car for my trip to California.

I miss the luxurious days filled with thoughts beyond the mundane. Until I can live those again, I'll be a vouyer via n+1.

*This issue, there was an inventory of "American Writing Today." From this, I realized that I am well-versed in short stories, but functionally illiterate in contemporary poetry. So, I have resolved to read more poetry. A start:

SIT-CALM

In the excitement phase
we think we want something
we're made up to seem
exaggeratedly unfit for,
say, touch.

This is the funny part,
but also the dangerous
moment. Right away
we're talked out of it--
no harm done--
by a band of wise-acre friends.

"I don't know
what I'm thinking," we say,
to a spike of merriment.
Here is the warm
human part
which dissipates tension.
-Rae Armantrout

The future of books

2006-05-16T09:07:00.000-05:00

Great (if long) piece in the NYT magazine about the implications of a digital universal library... this still seems very sci-fi to me, but the possibilities for reorganizing knowledge are amazing. What if all books were linked together in a web like the internet? I can imagine that it would be incredibly useful, but also a bit overwhelming. Sometimes, as it is, I get sidetracked from a journal article by the footnotes... imagine what would happen if you could link directly to the books/articles/pages that were referenced! Would I ever be able to finish a complete thought?

iPod at work can inspire

2006-01-27T14:21:00.000-05:00

His goal in life was to be an echo
The type of sound that floats around and then back down
Like a feather
But in the deep chrome canyons of the loudest Manhattans
No one could hear him
Or anything

Wilco. Hummingbird.

Privilege of Being

2006-01-26T09:57:00.000-05:00

Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Guilty of Dust

2006-01-25T15:06:00.000-05:00

Frank Bidart

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R

B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE

BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

*

then I saw the parade of my loves

those PERFORMERS comics actors singers

forgetful of my very self so often I

desired to die to myself to live in them

then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained

SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations

love and guilt and fury and

sweetness for whom

nail spirit yearning to the earth

*

then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS

REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

1984

Maybe It's Peace

2006-01-17T23:20:00.000-05:00

That man he had no resistance in him
Even as they brought him to his death
I resist every moment that I have
I fear the future
I rewrite my past

Maybe it's peace that lies beyond fear and desire
Maybe it's peace that's calling me home
If I pass through the doorway of fear and desire
Maybe it's peace that will welcome me home

I knew there must be a way for the finding
Though I feared it could not be of this world
If I worry or speak ill of you
I'll just say a prayer or two
And my soul will remind me I'm still loving you

Chorus

©2004 Heaton/Marotta

Singing Metro Man

2006-01-06T10:02:00.000-05:00

This morning on the Orange Line train to work, Singing Metro Man made an appearance. If you ride the Orange or the Blue Line, you may know of him...I’ve heard from other passengers that he’s been around for years, though I can only confirm the last three. He’s an elderly Asian gentleman, well-dressed, who steps onto the train right before the doors close. Once the train begins to move, he clears his throat, says a polite but insistent “Excuse me,” and begins to sing a hymn from his songbook.

The effect is eerie. The silent morning train, everyone still half-asleep before their first cup of coffee. The whoosh of the tunnel. The man’s gentle, earnest voice singing a capella (he’s not half bad) about how we should trust in Jesus. As he reached his crescendo this morning, I half expected the train to explode or something—the moment just felt very... cinematic. Luckily, life is not a movie, and after the song was done, he wished us all a good day, exited the train and moved to the next car down, presumably to start all over again.

Despite the bizarre mood this has left me in, I was glad to see Singing Metro Man... I actually was wondering about him just the other day. I had seen him during the past 2 holiday seasons, but hadn’t seen him at all this year. I’m glad to know that he’s okay.

Heaven in a dish

2006-01-05T20:47:00.000-05:00

The most e-mailed article in the NYT for 2 days running? A ruminition on Mac N Cheese, with a couple of recipes. I tried the one for Creamy Macaroni and Cheese tonight-- and Lord! So good. Just to test the recipe, I followed the directions to the letter... it was delicious, though I think I could have easily included about 50% more pasta for all the sauce it made. It was super easy (no yukky white sauce to make/burn, don't need to precook the pasta), and amazing. It probably wouldn't taste that different with lowfat cottage cheese and 1% or skim milk... next time, I'll try that.

And now I understand the hype

2005-11-13T09:59:00.000-05:00

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 permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by the mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death, or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Gyroscope, Reinstalled

2005-11-06T23:15:00.000-05:00

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 whole thing, and spent a significant amount of time in there reading the individual story bits.

I was still thinking about it when I sat down to my computer that night, and so I did a little research about it... the pieces is called Palimpsest. What does that mean?

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. Another motive may have been directed by the desire of Church officials to "convert" pagan Greek script by overlaying it with the word of God.

For poststructuralist literary critics, the palimpsest provides a model for the function of writing. Like Freud's discussion of The Mystic Writing Pad, the palimpsest foregrounds the fact that all writing takes place in the presence of other writings--that it is not people who "speak" language, but language which "speaks" people. Palimpsests subvert the concept of the author as the sole originary source of her work, and thus defer the "meaning" of a work down an endless chain of signification.

That defintion is interesting w/r/t the piece on several levels, but the part about subverting the concept of the author as the sole originator of the work is really apt. We generally think of the artist as the person who "owns" the piece, but in this case, the fact that the building blocks of the installation are the stories of hundreds of other people make it really obvious that the art isn't an isolated creation of one person. At the same time, by conceptualizing and executing the piece, the unattributed stories do in some way belong to the artist... the individual pieces wouldn't have the meaning that they do if they were viewed in isolation. It's as if the author has written her own text over the individual manuscripts, converting the works into a new story. Brilliant!

Knowing this background, I feel like I have to go back and see it again. (Oh-- as an aside, apparently there were also live snails in a jar with some cabbages to eat... I didn't even notice that part, and don't know what to make of it. Maybe on another visit...)

Dowd is outraged.

2005-11-01T17:39:00.000-05:00

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's right that this is a great fear of a lot of my single friends and I.

I was talking to my boss about the article, and she (a very strong, independent woman), assures me that there are a few brave men out there, cause she and her friends are married to some. I guess I haven't been dating the right ones, and I'll have to plod on until find one of these rare creatures.

One paragraph of the essay was scarily spot-on, at least for me, regarding the whole courtship scene. I didn't even realize that I do this until I read it... which I take as some indication that it actually may be a new norm:

These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B.& I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B.& I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.

It's not that I'm saying that I'm super-busy when I'm not to play games... I actually *am* busy. But maybe my uber-scheduled nature is a defense mechanism that makes possible rejection easier to handle?

Anyway, I hope it's not as bad as Dowd makes it out to be. Her political commentary always kind of annoys me because she's so hyperbolic, but for once I'm hoping that she's exaggerating to make a point!

As a semi-topical aside, my favorite dating advice is on DC Nites. The goal of the rules is to allow people to do potentially embarrassing things in the least embarrassing way possible. If everyone would just follow them, life could be a lot easier!

Aw.

2005-10-27T14:09:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I was spurred by the Didion love to go read some stuff I wrote early in college... so cute! Was I ever that young?

Earlier in the evening, she twisted the top off of her first bottle of Bud Light self-consciously, as if everyone was watching. In her mind, this room of strangers just might base their opinions of her on whether or not she could gracefully complete the task. It’s the kind of insecurity that plagues a novice drinker’s mind as she tries to embrace the complicated and nuanced practice of social alcohol consumption.

Judging by the ease with which those around her were rid of their lids, she was obviously surrounded by people who had been acquainted with the process longer than she. A guy across the room, a football player type wearing a muscle shirt, had used the skin of his forearm to grip and twist the cap, a move that both impressed and repulsed her. How many beers did he have to drink in order to learn that one? No doubt, many nights of slovenly drunkenness resulted in his proud party quirk, and she made a mental note-to-self to avoid the kind of man who had mastered it.

Most of the girls in the dirty basement had chosen instead to use the corners of their baby-doll t’s and gently twist, settling into casual patterns of sipping and laughing, pocketing the tops as souvenirs, resting the bottles on their jeans-clad legs. Flirt. Flip hair. Giggle. Sip. Flirt.

Her nervousness with the whole situation must’ve been subconsciously transmitted to her drinking hand, because her bottle was emptied more quickly than the others in the room. She walked over to the guy in the corner, an entirely non-descript boy in a Sig Ep t-shirt and jeans, who happily handed her another. By the time she returned to her girlfriends to open it, a warm haziness had settled into her stomach, and the self-conscious edge started to ever-so-slightly subside. Amazingly, this second lid popped off on the first half-turn, and she sank back on the couch, pleased with her astonishing progress towards sophisticated adulthood.

Goodbye to All That

2005-10-27T12:37:00.000-05:00

So sad-- just realized yesterday that Joan Didion is doing a reading of her new book at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but that it's sold out. I called to see if I could show up for some standing room love, but no dice. I'm hoping that someone will answer my Craigslist ad for a ticket, but something tells me that the bulk of the PEN/Faulkner Society crowd doesn't use CL.

I'm an underliner-- when I'm reading, there are always passages or sentence I want to mark to note... for their beauty, or their truth. When I'm reading Didion, I want to underline everything.

Freshman year in college, in my Women and Memoir class, we read Goodbye to All That, an essay she wrote in her early 30's about living in New York as a young woman. Choice bits below in an homage to Didion, and to being young:

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for awhile. I was late to meet someone, but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bough a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage.

and

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, "new faces." He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. "New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces." It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised "new faces," there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men...

You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

Congratulations, Centennial!

2005-10-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

My elementary school, Centennial Elementary in Mt. Vernon, WA, was featured in the PBS special, Making Schools Work. They were chosen because of pretty incredible increases in student performance as a Success For All school. Eduwonk has an interview with the filmmaker .

A lot has changed at Centennial Elementary since I was a student there. Though Mt. Vernon is a rural community, Centennial had a largely white, middle class student body back in the day. Now, it has a significant population of children of former migrant workers, 35% English Language Learners, and 75% qualifying for free and reduced lunch.

But looking at the school's website, one thing struck me as constant: the teachers. Several of my former teachers were still teaching there: Mrs. Raschko, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Prange, who taught me 4th grade, and Mrs. Moore, who I had in 3rd. Several other teachers also worked in the school when I was a student. I remember these teachers, and the things I learned in their classes. I was lucky to have them--they instilled in me a love of learning and taught me the skills I would need for success.

And now, armed with the new techniques and skills that they have learned, these teachers are doing the same for the kids who are Centennial All Stars these days. I'm so proud of and for them!

Geeking with Data

2005-10-19T21:38:00.000-05:00

New NAEP data out today. NCES doesn't have up any charts of trend data by race, so I used the NAEP Data Explorer to make my own. Posted them, along with some thoughts over on Kindling Flames. Call me a nerd if you like, but man... do you see any improvements since 1990?

Binge Drink Responsibly

2005-10-17T13:56:00.000-05:00

The Times today talks about the "new" popularity of beer pong. Total ridiculousness:

The recent tournament in Philadelphia was sponsored by Bing Bong, a company that sells portable beer pong tables for $150. In the past year, Bing Bong has sold more than 2,000.

"It was something a lot of people needed," said Tom Schmidt, the 27-year-old chief executive. He added that he wanted to turn the game into a socially acceptable barroom sport, like darts.

Now, I love an occasional drinking game as much as the next girl. But one of the main points of these things is that they're completely irrepsonsible. Your future hangover is totally in the hands of fate and the "skill" of increasingly drunk teammates and opponents. Yeah, Schmidt. Beer pong is some good, clean fun--can't wait to transport my Bing Bong table to my next family Thanksgiving.

I also loved Anheuser-Busch sponsoring "Bud Pong" promotions, where they supposedly encourage hosting bars to play the game w/ cups of water, while spectators enjoy a Bud. What?

Introspection

2005-10-13T14:37:00.000-05:00

The arrival of Fall always makes me reassess my life. Maybe it's something about the life cycle of a student--it's the beginning of a new year, and spending some time on self-evaluation and goal-setting is well advised. Or maybe it's that it's starting to get cold out, and all I want to do is sit on the couch and drink cocoa and stare off into space, which gives me plenty of time to think. Either way, I've been in an introspective mood recently. I've come to a few conclusions about my life. Ask me about them, and I'll tell ya.

This mood was assisted by reading Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel. It was great. It was outlandish enough and true enough and sympathetic enough... just right. Highly recommended. I started trying to write a review of it, and realized that it's been WAY too long since I took an English class. And most of what I wanted to say, was said already by Michael Agger in Slate last week, anyway.

I'm not about to become a Democratic Socialist or anything. But I still recommend you read the book.

Great Mysteries Solved

2005-10-11T13:14:00.000-05:00

After attending a brown bag lunch on optimizing Outlook Express, I'm spending some time cleaning out work e-mail this afternoon, and came across this gem, which was prompted by a lunchtime conversation a couple of months ago. I thought it should be saved for posterity:

Baby corn really IS immature corn.
But baby carrots are, as some knew, long skinny carrots chopped into little pieces.

Ask yourself this: how did you ever live without that knowledge?

Constructivist Crap

2005-10-07T16:40:00.000-05:00

Reading this post was like deja vu for me!

I took a class just like this as an undergrad... (surprise, surprise) in the education department. I made it through that semester by taking solace in two facts: (a) I was also taking The Sociology of Education in the soc department, with a professor who actually taught the material and (b) most of us in my little liberal arts bubble wouldn't end up teachers, thus wouldn't have an opportunity to inflict such pedagogical torture on kids who needed to actually learn stuff.

It would appear that Newoldschoolteacher has neither of those to help her out. God save her.

The professor in my class repeatedly insisted that we were a "democratic classroom" and that she wasn't any more of an expert on the material than us. WHAT? I paid good money for that course, money that employed her to teach me. I hope that she was more expert on the material than I was! Also, when I "took responsibility for myself" and said that what would really help me was a little context for the articles we had read, the implication became that I was a lazy learner, wanting to be filled with knowledge like an empty vessel. Too much banking system in my past-- I needed to construct some meaning for myself.

But I was *trying* to construct meaning, thanks. I was just frustrated... my classmates in this course were smart, but you would never know it from the quality of discussions we had. We were wandering lost in the academic woods, with nothing to grab on to but "in my experience" anecdotes. So I learned about people's experiences. A lot about people's experiences. Sometimes interesting, and occasionally even relevant, but will it help me if anyone asks me about Fordham and Ogbu?

Actually, you can ask me all you want about Fordham and Ogbu... I learned about it in Sociology. But what about my classmates, should anyone ever ask *them* about it? Wait, wait, wait... could this be an example parallel to that of privileged children learning "base content" outside of the classroom? Hrm...

Shameless Self-Promotion

2005-10-07T08:21:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, a project I've been working on for the past year released 2 reports. All the hoo-hah around getting it out the door and following up meant that I haven't had time to post about it until now. But it's pretty exciting!

It's titled Who's Left Behind: Immigrant Children in High and Low LEP Schools. We break public elementary schools into 3 categories: those with high concentrations of LEP kids, those with fewer LEP kids, and those with none, and compare across the three types to examine differences in student populations, teacher and principal training, and special services and programs. For a summary of findings, check out the press release, or go to the whole thing. The demographic profile, which was done by the immigration group here, also has really interesting info here.

This project really turned me on to the wonders of the Schools and Staffing Survey. SASS is a Department of Ed data set compiled from a group of nationally-representative surveys from districts, schools, principals, teachers and libraries. It's got nationally and state representative samples for public schools, charter schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and private schools. We just worked with the Public Schools set, and it was complicated to learn how to use, (I applied to and went to an NCES Workshop, though, which was a great training experience... it was free, and the staff was really helpful as I was doing the analysis!) but there are *so many* interesting issues that could be studied with it. Makes me want to go do that darn PhD!

My sister cracks me up!

2005-10-06T19:40:00.000-05:00

Yes, the life of an undergrad. So filled with useless information!

N: there's a cricket somewhere in my room
N: it's loud, and i can't find it
E: it's a male
E: as far as we know, only males sing
E: he's looking for a lovely lady
E: using trills and chirps that make up the calling song
E: with a 5 kHz frequency, and an interchirp rate of 30ms

The Company Cookbook: A Journey Through the Center of the Middle of the Shredded Cheddar Cheese Universe

2005-09-28T13:24:00.000-05:00

Anyone who's ever been to a company potluck should really appreciate this.

The funniest thing is that I find myself making bizarre casseroles and jello salads for these events too, despite the fact that I'm a pretty good cook. What is it about lunch in Conference Room 5A that makes me reach for the cream of mushroom soup?

Taking the Mommy Track to Oblivion?

2005-09-21T09:21:00.000-05:00

The New York Times' most forwarded article today is Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. At its most interesting, the article asks what it means for society when well-trained, smart, and motivated women groomed for positions of leadership and power opt out of the 9-to-5 (or, more realistically, 9-to-6, 7 or 8) workday and take up the full-time work of raising children. The article argues that this is an important question for elite institutions as

The women [these schools] are counting on to lead society are likely to marry
men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be
full-time mothers.

What the article fails to properly acknowledge is that the majority of the "stay at home moms" who come from these high-achieving, privileged backgrounds probably won’t be structuring their days like those of a middle-class 1950s housewife. Instead, most will channel at least some of their hyper-perfectionist, overachieving, multi-tasking energy into community involvement. Is this work not an acceptable definition of leadership?

Implicit in the “social impact of motherhood” question is the noblesse oblige ethos of elite education: social responsibility accompanies privilege. That ethos certainly plays an important part in my life decisions, and I hope that it does in lives of my classmates, too. But I think we’d be wrong to assume that the only way to fulfill this obligation is through high-powered work-for-pay. We shouldn’t devalue the social import of the work of raising good kids or of the volunteer work that makes our schools, charities, churches, and other important organizations run.

I’m 99.9% sure that full-time motherhood is not a choice I’d make for myself, but I don’t think there should be a filter question on Ivy applications to keep out those who would.

Kozol Redux

2005-09-12T16:12:00.000-05:00

Jonathan Kozol has a new book coming out this week, and will be speaking twice in DC to promote it: Politics and Prose on Friday and Blair HS in Silver Spring on Saturday morning.

It's called The Shame of the Nation: Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. I haven't seen a copy yet, but the press release for the Silver Spring event that I saw contained some excerpts, including the following:

'I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,' said President Bush in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. 'It's working. It's making a difference.' Here we have one of those deadly lies that by sheer repetition is at length accepted by surprisingly large numbers of Americans. But it is not the truth; and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the black and brown and poor, and if it is not forcefully resisted it will lead us further in a
very dangerous direction.

and

'There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education. There ought to be; we measure almost everything else that happens to them in their schools. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be? You do not find the answers to these questions in reports about achievement levels, scientific methods of accountability, or structural revisions in the modes of governance.

I saw Kozol speak while I was an undergraduate, and I have to say, I remember his speech bringing me to tears. I was invigorated by what he had to say, ready to be a crusader for social justice. Last year, he was giving an address at Georgetown, and I went to see him again. I was ready to be reminded what it is that I work for.

Kozol railed for 2 hours about how tests are bad, standards are bad, accountability is bad, education researchers in *shudder* "Washington think tanks" are turning elementary school into a factory system, and the world of education is a dispirited, broken place because of efforts to analyze policy decisions and find efficient solutions. I was sorely disappointed, and came out asking "What would you rather we do, barring immediate reversal of America's poverty issues?" I honestly want to know: acknowledging the fact that it's nearly politically impossible to pump more money into education without some proof that it's working, what would you suggest we do instead?

Savage Inequality is still a mesmerizing, heart breaking book. Kozol is at his best when he's revealing the great injustice of economic conditions in our country, especially because his audiences are largely in communities of privilege that are isolated from the harsh reality of urban poverty. But testing didn't cause these conditions, and testing isn't aggravating them either. Once he leaves the realm of anti-poverty cheerleader and stumbles into policy analysis, Kozol's soaring rhetoric falls dramatically short.

I agree with Kozol--our ultimate goal should be that every child loves to learn. But, given all the ground we have to make up by the time they even enter kindergarten (which he so eloquently reveals himself), disadvantaged children have got a lot of hard work ahead of them if that's ever going to happen. It's unfair, I agree. But blame the inequality, not the tests that measure it.

Abstract analysis opens doors!

2005-09-12T15:02:00.000-05:00

Just put a long post over on Kindling Flames. I'm excited about this metaphor-- education entrepreneurs as development NGOs. Fleshed out, I think it has the potential for a really interesting paper! Especially because there's been a lot of talk recently about philanthropy in education, and its impact on the policy process.

Reminds me of this great (if not a little abstract--but I love that stuff!) article I read last year--written by a linguist--about the power of metaphor to restrict or expand your thinking about an issue. From August 2003's TCR: The Matrix, Metaphors, and Re-imagining Education. I think I originally found it because some blog I was reading was mocking it as EduFluff, but the overall point, I think, is a good one. Good abstraction can open new understandings.

Apparently the Feds Watch Reality TV...

2005-09-09T14:38:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help but laugh at this article today. Richard Hatch, the first winner of Survivor, apparently didn't report his prize money to the Feds, and thus didn't pay any taxes on it. Survivor was not only one of the most popular shows on TV, but also launched a cultural phenomenon... you'd think the dude would assume *someone* in IRS-Land watched it!

Back to business in 4 short days

2005-09-02T14:27:00.000-05:00

Obsession with Lists

2005-08-30T09:44:00.000-05:00

The Washington Monthly has long been a critc of the US News and World Report college rankings. Finally, they've come up with an alternative.

The idea of ranking schools based upon "what [they] are doing for the country," is an interesting one... and not just because my alma mater ranks as the number one liberal arts college. In the Monthly's own words:

Imagine, then, what would happen if thousands of schools were suddenly motivated to try to boost their scores on The Washington Monthly College Rankings. They'd start enrolling greater numbers of low-income students and putting great effort into ensuring that these students graduate. They'd encourage more of their students to join the Peace Corps or the military. They'd intensify their focus on producing more Ph.D. graduates in science and engineering. And as a result, we all would benefit from a wealthier, freer, more vibrant, and democratic country.

I think the business of coming up with more meaningful rankings than those of US News is laudable... it's been widely rumored that those rankings are causing schools to game their admissions procedures and focus energy on manipulating statistics that are only of tangental relevance to receiving a good education. For the uber-geek, check out last year's NBER report, A Revealed Preference Ranking for U.S. Colleges and Unviersities. Their rankings pit institutions in "head to head" competitions, surveying students about which colleges they get into and which they ultimately choose. The authors argue that this system both more objectively measures the quality of an instituion's student body and would be harder for schools to rig:

Our method produces a ranking that would be difficult for a college to manipulate. In contrast, it is easy to manipulate the matriculation rate and the admission rate, which are the common measures of preference that receive substantial weight in highly publicized college rating systems. If our ranking were used in place of these measures, the pressure on colleges to practice strategic admissions would be relieved.

This one's also interesting in that it doesn't rank Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges separately.

Advice I Love

2005-08-30T08:58:00.000-05:00

So, all summer I've been obsessively reading Tomato Nation for its fabulously frank advice column The Vine. Honestly, everyone should read a good dose of this advice, though sometimes I wonder if my addiction is starting to make me a little callous.

I find myself saying to people things like "No, I don't think he's in love with you," and "She's being a hosebeast, and you shouldn't have to put up with it." Is it better to be reassuring, even though it's just platitudes, or to give people a dose of reality when they're bordering on delusional? The Vine has convinced me of the latter, I think.

Kindling Flames

2005-08-29T09:18:00.000-05:00

I'll be posting from time to time on my grad program's blog, Kindling Flames. I'm totally excited to have a place to muse about issues of education policy... you should check it out!

Site of the Day

2005-08-26T09:59:00.000-05:00

If you haven't, you must visit Toothpaste for Dinner. Pure brilliance!

Who are you?

2005-08-23T10:15:00.000-05:00

I've always been interested in online communication. I'm not too shy to admit that I was a geeky HS girl who used IRC way back in 1995. I'm sure I'll wax poetic about the things that fascinate me about the medium in the future, but for now, I'll stick to the point. As an undergrad, I did an ethnographic study of online communication on my little liberal arts campus, and as a result, became actively involved in the online community there. I guess that I was a little more notorious than I thought, because every once in awhile, I'll randomly meet someone who went to my school, but who I don't know. It's 2 years later, and still I've heard more than once: "I know you-- you're the Purple Font Girl."

I'm the Purple Font Girl. Now that I'm back to posting online, it only seems fitting.