Old 3-D entertainment

I still have my old Viewmaster. I can't say it's in everyday use, but I do like to look at those old 3-D pictures every once in a while.

Free snow

Old bowl

This bowl has been in almost daily use for at least 55+ years. Here it is in 1953 or 1954:

That is me in the top of the cupboard, my brother Norbert standing (just barely), and our neighbors Kathy and Barbie. The bowl is on the floor behind us. I used that bowl almost every day in high school, when I came home and made myself a big salad. (I never ate lunch in the cafeteria, mostly due to shyness. Lunch was the most terrifying period of the day in high school.)

Here is the bowl today, still in almost daily use:

Snow shroud

Looking toward center city this afternoon, during a little snow flurry. Usually we can see the Comcast building, Liberty towers, etc., but today they were ghostly.

Sticky snow

The photography of Vivian Maier

This is such a great story - and the photographs are astonishing. What a find!

The trees bear their winter burdens patiently.

Me, not so much. The trees don't need to commute.

My mother walks five miles each Sunday to attend church

Catholic Campus Ministry
Stockton College
Pomona, New Jersey
October 7, 2007


Tonight I am attending a Sunday evening mass at my husband’s workplace – after he left the Presbyterian ministry to become Catholic, he was offered a job at the campus ministry center at Stockton College. He facilitates a Newman Club on campus, and assists the priest assigned to the center, who presides at a mass on Sunday evenings.

The Catholic Campus Ministry is housed in a very attractive new building on the outskirts of the Stockton campus. When Neil first came to work there, the priest was an older man who had multiple health issues and was in a wheelchair. Not, you might think, the most obvious choice for campus ministry. He was quite energetic in spite of his physical limitations, though, and was especially interested in redecorating the building. Even though it was almost new, he had lots of stuff done – repainting, new furniture, and quite a bit of new art on the walls. The services are held in a largish room with folding chairs, seating about 50-75 people. Father Pat ordered lots of framed pictures of the Virgin and Child for this room, in addition to a good bit of other religious art. The interesting thing about the Virgin pictures is that each depicts Mary as of a different nationality – there’s a Vietnamese Virgin, an African Virgin, a Mexican Virgin, a Native American Virgin, etc. There’s a Jewish Virgin fleeing World War II concentration camps, attempting to save a little endangered Holy Child from the ovens.

I think these pictures are really interesting, and most of them are quite lovely. The Vietnamese Mary is stunning. Neil doesn’t like them as much as I do, because he says that they make it seem as though Mary is just a general idea of Motherhood rather than a particular, real person of a particular place and time. Actually, this seems to me like another version of the common tension between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of people’s actual experience.

At any rate, Father Pat eventually became too ill to continue, and the Diocese of South Jersey brought in an African priest, Father Grace, to take over his duties. This is another thing I’ve been noticing a lot about the American Catholic Church. In many of the churches I have attended the priest is a foreigner – often Vietnamese, Filipino, or African. It seems as though the Catholic Church in this country has at least one thing in common with some other employers – they have to bring in foreigners to do the work Americans don’t want to do.

Father Grace is Ugandan, and very, very nice. He tells me about his mother, who walks five hours each Sunday to attend mass – two and a half hours each way. It seems there is a shortage of priests in Uganda, too. (Do you know of any Americans who would walk five hours each Sunday if that were the only way they could attend mass? There must be some, but I bet there aren’t very many.) Father Grace is eager to see snow for the first time, and I think he will get his wish this winter.

The mass is attended by some local folks, a few faculty members, and a small number of students. It’s very quick; the sermon is good but quite brief (about 5 minutes), and it doesn’t take long to administer the sacraments to 70-75 people.

Later Father Grace loaned me a videotape of a service in Uganda. It was a big gathering – I think for the installation of a bishop. The service took hours – much longer than the three hours or so they got on videotape, and included lots and lots of singing and dancing. The participants seem to be having an absolutely fantastic time.

I’m sure it’s not a typical African service, but even if normal African masses are just one-sixteenth as enthusiastic as the one on the tape, Father Grace must think that we Americans are the dullest people on earth.

Sewing kits from hotels of the world

A few years ago I picked up a box at a yard sale; someone had been saving those little sewing kits you get in hotel rooms - someone who traveled to Istanbul, Australia, and Europe.

I don't stay in very many hotels, but since then I've been looking for these little sewing kits when I do visit a hotel, to add to the collection. Some of these are quite nice, I think. The Sheraton Towers Istanbul (the beige one in the photo below) even comes in a little hardshell plastic case, and the one above that comes with its own little mirror.

Luxuries

A very welcome luxury on a cold winter morning: coffee made in the Nespresso I received as a Christmas/birthday present.

With a little cinnamon and sugar sprinkled over the foam. Mmmmmm.

The stations of the commute

Once again I am riding SEPTA regional rail to and from Philadelphia most weekdays. I enjoy the ride, for the most part. It's good reading time.

Recently I began taking photos at each station stop. My first thought was, well these won't turn out well. The windows of the train through which I shoot are usually somewhat smeared or scratched. Reflections from inside the car are sometimes easier to see than whatever is outside the windows. The places I shoot are rather arbitrary - depending on what car I'm in, and what stop we're at, I may have a view of the station or of weeds along the track, or of a fence. The sun in the morning and late afternoon is often blinding. I have only a minute or so to point and click, and I'm not much a photographer anyway.

I like the photos anyway, probably because of all these flaws.

Willow Grove

Sometimes I need to leave rather early in the morning. The station glows golden against a dark blue sky.

Battered, ragtag newspaper machines offer slightly stale news, looking just a bit shamefaced, as though they sense that most of the commuters who walk by them every day are carrying those newfangled laptops and iPads and smart phones. I have never seen anyone purchase a newspaper from the machines (someone must buy them). However, the free newspaper (the Metro) is rather popular.

Crestmont

Crestmont station is very, very tiny. It doesn't have a real station, just a little structure like a bus stop shelter, and on some runs the conductor asks if anyone wants to get off at Crestmont, because if no one speaks up they will just shoot by without stopping (unless they see someone waiting on the little platform).

This is a late afternoon/early evening shot of Crestmont Station. Most of the time I am sitting by a window with no view of the actual station, since it is so small that only one rail car will be near it.

Roslyn

Roslyn is next, and in this photo you can see the inside of the train car (and the book in my lap) superimposed against the walkway leading up to the platform.

Ardsley

Giant hands!

This late afternoon shot of the other side of the Ardsley station catches the sun through that scratched plastic.

 
Glenside
 
 

Glenside station is interesting because a small building of rowhomes is directly across the street from the tracks. And for some reason they were all built with big picture windows facing the train tracks. I've never seen any of them with open shades.

Jenkintown-Wyncote 

  Temple
The students who attend Temple University head off into the sunrise at this station.

 

Market East

It's an underground station, but you can see the trees up on Market Street through the windows.

Suburban Station



Suburban is the only station that receives no outside lighting. It is always filled with a murky, greenish light. The name seems ironic, since Suburban is in the heart of the city, but it refers to the fact that when it was originally built it was the station for folks arriving from the burbs.

30th Street Station

My destination. From here I can walk to the office (about 8 blocks), take a trolley, or take the Lucy (a small bus that takes people further west).

Alain de Botton

Love this guy. I'm going to reread his How Proust Can Change Your Life.

In the meantime, for some quick hits:

http://favstar.fm/users/alaindebotton

June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day


David Lehman


This is poem 76 from the Library of Congress Poetry 180 project, and I saw a comment about the lack of punctuation, which made me look at this more closely.

Poets pay attention to every aspect of language, including punctuation, and any time a poet abandons punctuation it's a good idea to assume he or she did this for a reason. Often that reason is to indicate excitement (Stevie Smith's "Not Waving but Drowning"), stream of consciousness, etc.

This poem seems to me pretty clearly a stream-of-consciousness meditation on the subject of birthdays, and the feeling I get from it is inchoate longing (emptiness) and desire, particularly the poet's desire to return to a comfortable past - the past of lazy hammocks, cool swims, old songs, and comfort food.

Whenever a specific song is mentioned in a poem, it's a good idea to check out the lyrics. "I've Got You Under My Skin" is a Cole Porter classic, of course, and the part just after the trombone solo has these memorable lines: "Why not use your mentality/ Get up, wake up to reality?"

Then those sudden thoughts about being in a foreign country, feeling vaguely cheated  (one measly ice cube) and misunderstood, and bringing in another poet, Larkin, to express the idea that travel is all well and good, but most of the time we would rather be comfortably at home.

Overall, this seems like a meditation on mortality and on the discomfort of being forced to travel ever farther into an increasingly foreign land (away from our past). But a low-key meditation, appropriate for musing in a hammock.

Then again, maybe not.

Pemaquid Point

Just wanted to post one of the best photos ever - my son Tim, age five, sitting on the rocks at Pemaquid Point, Maine.

Winter 1952

My mother holding me in the back yard of our house in Lake Villa, Illinois. I well remember the hickory tree in the background, except that it was much, much larger.

Old table

Old and beat up. This is a child's table. It was mine when I was little, and at one time there were at least two chairs to match. They have been gone for a long time. This little table has been in continuous use for more than fifty years, mostly as a place to pile things. It's kind of ugly, and sort of wobbly, and I really, really like it.

Not such a bad trade?

From Chrystia Freeland's article, "TheRise of the New Global Elite," in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly:

 "The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world's largest hedge funds told me that his firm's investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today's economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleauges had argued that the hollowing out of the American middle class didn't really matter. 'His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that's not such a bad trade,' the CEO recalled."

The larger point is that the US, as well as the entire world, is trending toward only two classes - the economically fragile and the super-wealthy. That doesn't sound stable or good to me - but on the other hand, I have a hard time arguing philosophically that the statement above by the "senior colleague" is wrong in some way. I don't work ten times harder than a Chinese farmer or factory worker; I'm fairly sure that I work about twenty times less hard. Why should have so much more than that hard-working foreigner?

But I don't want to have less. Dropping out of the middle class is hard; I feel as though I spent a long time clawing my way into it, and now I'm slipping back out of it. If I'm going to have less, at least I'd like to choose to do so on my own.

A kind of motel room

Subject, Verb, Object


I is not ego, not the sum
of your unique experiences,
just, democratically,
whoever’s talking,
a kind of motel room,
yours till the end –
that is, of the sentence.


The language, actually,
doesn’t think I’s important,
stressing, even in
grandiose utterances –
eg, I came
I saw I conquered –
the other syllables.

Oh, it’s a technical problem,
sure, the rhyme
on so-so-open
lie, cry, I
harder to stitch tight
than the ozone hole in the sky.

But worst is its plodding insistence –
I, I, I –
somebody huffing uphill,
face red as a stop sign,
scared by a doctor
or some He She It
surprised in the mirror.


James Richardson

Old sheet

I was making the bed the other day, and suddenly realized that the sheet I was using is at least thirty years old. Not so old for a sheet, I guess, but old enough. It's still in great shape, and I remember buying it because it was the first set of sheets I ever bought for a king-size bed. The color scheme (pink and blue) and pattern also bring back the era of the 1980s for me.

I don't think I have any older sheets than this one. It made me think about what kinds of things I have around the house that are oldish - not in the sense of being antiques, but in the sense of being ordinary, everyday things that have been in use for at least a quarter of a century. This sounds like a project!

Sugar scrub

Now is the time of year when I really, really appreciate something I wish I had learned about sooner - sugar scrubs and salt scrubs. They are fantastic for dry, itchy winter skin. Use correct technique - in the shower, make sure you have first finished with your hair (shampoo, conditioner) before opening the jar of scrub - because if you touch your hair after rubbing the scrub on your body, your hair will be oily all day. Also, with a salt scrub, never rub it on newly-shaved legs. This would seem to be common sense, but you never know . . . .

Not only will your skin by soft and comfy all day, but it will smell great, too. LOVE this stuff.

Baby formula in the 1950s

What did bottle-fed babies eat before corporations began manufacturing baby formula?

I know what I ate - the breakfast of champions, apparently. Evaporated milk and Karo syrup. Also, my mother seems to have been encouraged to start cereal much too soon!

Red sky at morning

. . . sailors take warning?

Whatever, this was the sky this morning, and tonight we have our snow storm.

We live in a universe where terrible things happen.

Tragedy in Arizona, a post from Megan McArdle - this seems like balanced, thoughtful reflection on recent horrific events.

The silent solemnity of his inertia

Finally, another update on the Trollope project. I finished his second novel, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, a couple months ago.

It's difficult to believe that this is only his second novel. His first novel, The MacDermotts of Ballycloran, is okay, but seems much more obviously the work of a beginner. If that were all he had written, we would never had heard of him. (Actually, if he had only written these two, he would also be forgotten, no doubt, but anyone reading the second novel might think that it's a shame such a good Victorian writer hadn't written more.)

The Kellys uses the double plot technique, and is full of the great characters I associate with Trollope. That great Victorian topic, the puzzling relationship between economic and romantic interests in marriage, is explored explicitly and fully.

This description of Lord Cashel reminded me of the depiction of Sir Leicester Dedlock in Dicken's Bleak House: 

As my lord went from breakfast-room to book-room, from book-room to dressing-room, and from dressing-room to book-room, his footsteps creaked with a sound more deadly than that of a death-watch. The book-room itself had caught a darker gloom; the backs of the books seemd to have lost their gilding, and the mahogany furniture its French polish. There, like a god, Lord Cashel sate alone, throned amid clouds of awful dulness, ruling the world of nothingness around by the silent solemnity of his inertia.

Lord Cashel is dull, but the novel is not. Now, on to La Vendee.

Faces in the strangest places

At work:

I just knew they didn't work!

Ha!

The best novels you've never read

The Best Novels You’ve Never Read – 61 critics reveal their favorite underrated book of the past decade.

So far I've tried two of their picks - Seminary Boy and The Last Novel. Both excellent.

And because of the wonderful library system in Pennsylvania, all I have to do is log on to my local library's website and request the book I want. I get an email when it has been delivered to the library. This is like a dream come true - better than amazon.com, because the books are all free!

I will be slowly working my way through the list at that website in months to come.

Hap Birth E

Because my birthday is so close to Christmas, birthday celebrations often take place later, at a more convenient time. This is nice, because I never know when the party will be. Now, birthday celebrations at work are not exactly huge parties, but they do make a nice break in the routine. My colleagues brought cake, bagels, doughnuts, etc. to work today for my birthday, and I do appreciate it. There was even cake left over to bring home - and it arrived in pretty good shape, only a little bit shifted from its commute via Septa regional rail.

Another sockdolager

A couple years ago I discovered a great new way to read books - I get a little passage every day, in my email. I just read that little bit and wait till the next day for the next passage. Or, if I can't wait, I can also request the next installment immediately, and in this way read as much as I want. It sounds a bit awkward, but it turned out to be an ideal way for me to read lots of things. This system seems excellent for an author such as Dickens, whose works were originally published in installments. I've read several books this way, and most recently completed Huckleberry Finn.

Perhaps it is the effect of reading little bits and paying more attention to them because they are isolated, or perhaps it is just because I am so much older than the last time I read the book, but what really struck me this time is the nature description. Huck has a fine sense of natural beauty.

Example one

It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest--FST! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs--where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.

"Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot corn-bread."

Example two - description of daybreak on the Mississippi

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line--that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away--trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks --rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see--just solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the axe flash and come down --you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the K'CHUNK!--it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness.

Example three - storm on the Mississippi
My souls, how the wind did scream along! And every second or two there'd come a glare that lit up the white-caps for a half a mile around, and you'd see the islands looking dusty through the rain, and the trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a H-WHACK!--bum! bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-bum-bum--and the thunder would go rumbling and grumbling away, and quit--and then RIP comes another flash and another sockdolager. The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind. We didn't have no trouble about snags; the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or that and miss them.

If you would like to read books in installments via email (many are free), go to the Daily Lit website. http://www.dailylit.com/

Currently I'm reading Swann's Way via Daily Lit, and enjoying it immensely. I've actually read all the books that comprise Remembrance of Time Past, but that was about thirty years ago, and I'm not sure I would have the ambition to tackle them again in hard copy. My Trollope reading project is enough paper for me right now. But somehow the Daily Lit system transforms the reading of long works into something strange and new and very, very enjoyable.

I'm wearing Frozen Pond today.

From Demeter Fragrance, who describe the scent this way: "Dazzling and transparent, Frozen Pond is a lovely year round scent evoking the quiet chill of a Winter morning just before dawn."

I've tried several of their fragrances, including their signature scent, Dirt, which is also excellent.

Smitty's

This photo of a winning local women's bowling team sponsored by Smitty's Tavern was taken for a local newspaper. Neil's grandmother, Gertrude Strang, is on the far left in the back row. It's quite possible that some of the other lovely ladies in the photo are grandmothers of my high school classmates - but there are no names on the back, so I don't know who they are. At any rate, they look happy!

I'm the most recent in a long line of not very good impersonators of myself.

For the new year, thoughts from a neurobiologist:

I read about neural stem cells and think about how different I am from even a few years ago, and I get the weird feeling that I was right when I was little, that I'm the most recent in a long line of not very good impersonators of myself. Science (science!) confirms that parts of me are here now that weren't there even a little while ago (and that parts of me that were there before are gone forever). In other words: one night someone else went to sleep and woke up as me. I do a lot of the same things as him but I know that I'm not the one who came up with them. I like a lot of the same things as him but I know I didn't discover them. Otherwise I act in ways that he wouldn't have thought of and found new stuff to like that he wouldn't have recognized. I've taken that poor bastard's place and he barely even realized it was happening. It's awesome.

The new year is a good time to look back on one's past and reflect on all the different kinds of persons one has been - and I suspect I'm not alone in thinking that I have been very, very different kinds of me at different times in my life.

So, looking ahead to 2011 - who will I be this year? I've made four resolutions for the new year, which I am not going to reveal unless I actually keep them. But if I do keep them, I will be a different person on January 1, 2012. And if I don't keep them, I will still be a different person then.