Socially Distant Cuisine

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Minimalist Meals in 10 Minutes or Less .

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." ...

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...

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...

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 w...

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.

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 ...

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...

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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 stud...