Archive for March, 2007|Monthly archive page
BlogLily: Annual Report
Comments(25)
The BlogLily Corporation, a privately held company, is pleased to make this first annual report to its shareholders, the hundred or so people who have left 2,572 comments in the year we have been offering this product (all 192 of them), quite for free, to anybody who wants to read it.
Of the many statistics that measure the health of an enterprise, one of the most difficult to measure and, thus, the most valuable to have on hand, is the Pleasure Experienced Per Unit of Production. (On cheery days, we refer to that as Pep -Up, but that is when we have been drinking too much black tea.) Just how much fun was it to make the product? Did the employees sing while working? Or did they whine to each other and get up a lot to go the restroom, and on the way stop in the kitchen and eat a lot of junk?
We are pleased to announce with some degree of certainty, that Pleasure/Unit of Production was so high that BlogLily barely moved from her computer for an entire year, so enamoured was she of the entire enterprise involved in making this blog. She did not once regret doing it, wish she was doing something else, or complain about it. Others moaned a little about how the quality of the cooking was going downhill because of the blog, but learned to Make Do with burritos and pizza. The pleasure index for this enterprise is far, far higher than it is for most of the things BlogLily does, which means she is having a little crisis about how it could be that she is doing anything else at all besides writing this blog. That is a question she will answer next year.
Another indicator of the health of a blog is the number of comments left on the blog. In the last year, you commented 2,572 times. (Actually BlogLily left a good number of those comments in response to things you said, but we’re not going to go through and count them. That would be boring and the Pleasure Index militates against boring stuff.) A lot of people had a lot of interesting things to say. And there was a more than adequate amount of complimenting, agreement and flattery. For that, I simply say, thank you and bring it on!
The number and success of new product launches also tells us something about how an enterprise is doing. Quite scattered and more than a little enthusiastic, BlogLily has spun bits of herself off into so many places that on some mornings she is uncertain where to find herself. She has written about great, unsung blogs on BestBlog on WordPress, about feminism on What We Said, about her lunchbox obsession on the TiffinTin. She found solace and sustenance in creating a little record of living with cancer here. And, because she loves to talk, she began what she hopes will be a long lived podcasting career here. Oddly enough, just the other day, she decided she’d like to have a home for her notebooks. That can be found here, at NoteLily. In addition to these sites, she is also considering finding a person who’s willing to be her on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so she can get some work done and play with her children. They are not required to wear her wardrobe. If you’d like to volunteer, you can email her at bloglily(at)yahoo(dot)com.
Her archives are bursting with interesting things, like a very full attic, including a description of how to find lost property, and how to improve your life by throwing away your couch. Some are forgettable. Some might be worth reading. But the one thing she does not want you to miss is the important fact that there is FOOD in here. The best way to find it is to search for it. See what happens if you search for any of these: cookies, potatoes, steak, lemons, raspberry jam, jello, brownies. Don’t eat them all together, but there’s something sustaining in there for everybody.
And thank you, all of you, for sustaining me in this last year with your kindness, your wit, your intelligence and your willingness to laugh at my jokes, even when they are not that funny. You are wonderful readers.
xo, BL
“Hardly a Single Life has Passed From Which We Could Not Learn Something”
Comments(9)Thanks to the white rabbit, I’ve begun W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Johnson. This humane, generous bit is from Bate’s introduction:
“Johnson loved biography before every other kind of writing. It gives us, he said, ‘what comes near to us, what we can turn to use.’ He believed that hardly a single life had passed from which we could not learn something, if only it were told with complete honesty. He was thinking how isolated and compartmentalized all of us really are, and how much we all need — all the more as we reach middle age, and increasingly begin to face the fact of our disappearance — to touch hands with others, to learn from each other’s experience and to get whatever encouragement we can.”
This sums up something essential, this phrase of Bate’s: “hardly a single life has passed from which we could not learn something, if only it were told with complete honesty.” I suppose the place this enterprise begins is with our own telling of our lives, and how clearly we are able to describe ourselves to each other.
On Naming (and on Eating Vegetables)
I have been working, a subject so eye-glazingly dull I cannot bear to even discuss it. And so I won’t. Instead, I would like to share with you a piece of family news and a small recipe, one that everyone should have.
I can only begin the family news, though, by reflecting for a second on the names we use when we write about our families. (The names I use, I mean.) Although my sons love the idea of being known all over the world by their real names, I have long had a superstition about using those names, as though to say their first names might somehow be bad for them.
But I have just this moment realized that is silly. They don’t care in the least if I use their names. And they know better than to go to a stranger who happens to know their name. The world, it seems to me, is not so dangerous that writing their actual names on my blog will put them at risk. (Except the risk that they might be deeply embarrassed by me, but that is a risk they will have to learn to Deal With.) In the end, I’m not sure why I ever thought — in that back of the mind, unexamined place all our fears live — there was any danger in using their names.
I’m quite proud of their names, in fact, because I chose them. My husband (he’d prefer to be referred to simply as my wonderful husband whom I was lucky to marry rather than one of the superbly unreliable men I dated throughout my career) and I agreed, before our children were born, that if they were girls I would choose their last name and he would choose their first names. And if they were boys, I would choose their first names and he would choose their last names.
As things turned out, I got to choose six names — a first and a middle for each of our three boys. He, on the other hand, simply had to get the spelling of his last name correct on their birth certificates, a simple enough matter, I’m sure you’ll all agree, compared to naming not just three boys, but two who are twins and, thus, need names that mesh, but do not actually rhyme. (We have moved forward from the time when twins were named things like Colin and Rollin and Jessie and Bessie.)
I named then Charlie, Jack, and William, dear reader. (Charles, John, and William, in fact.) My inspirations were as follows: English kings, American guys, Shakespeare, my father, my brother, my husband’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather, his best friend, and my husband. I went this way because I felt it was important that they have a decent explanation for my decisions. You are named after several really fine men, including the man who wrote As You Like It struck me as preferable to, you are named after an actor who played the unreliable doctor in The Days of Our Lives.
The family news is that Jack, who is a singer, performed this weekend with the San Francisco Symphony. He had a solo — a brief piece in which he had to rise up and sing many very high notes — and he acquitted himself admirably. In fact, today in our local newspaper he is described as “excelling in his small assignment.” He’ll like that phrase because it seems so adult and professional.
This phrase, in addition to being part of my family news, has made me think about the aim of hard work. In the last week of grinding work, I’ve forgotten that in addition to actually just finishing my job I might consider how I could excel at some small part of it. Not the whole, long involved thing, but just a piece of it. As is often the case with the young ‘uns, we learn things from reading their press.
And now for the recipe, a little value-added week beginning thing for you.
Every single person who eats — which would include every one of us — should have a nice recipe for vinaigrette. I know I’ve described this before, but I’m going to do it again. And I’m also going to suggest that you consider making it in this enormous quantity. That’s because if you have lovely vinaigrette on hand, you’re far more likely to eat vegetables. Here it is:
Macerate together these things:
2 shallots diced small
2 cloves garlic — diced small
2 teaspoons coarse salt
2/3 cup vinegar (red wine, champagne, balsamic)
–let sit at least 30 minutes
add 1 cup olive oil
4 Tablespoons dijon — shake and drizzle
I’m going to suggest that you begin the week by (a) excelling in at least one thing you’ve been assigned to do and; (b) drizzling some nice vinaigrette on your favorite steamed vegetable.
And later in the week, after I’ve excelled in at least one small thing, or at least eaten quite a number of green vegetables, I’ll be posting the BlogLily Annual Report . It has actually been an entire year, shockingly enough, of telling you exactly what’s on my mind and it is now time to account for how that’s gone.
Casual Carpool with the White Rabbit
Inquiring minds might be saying around now, how long am I going to have to keep looking at that blog post about jury duty? Sure, it’s important, but litlove has already chewed up most of western literature in the amount of time it took you to talk about a single trip to the museum and the occasional jury duty summons.
It’s true. I’ll just say it now. I have been slacking. That weekend in L.A. and the one before it in Monterey rearranged my usual somewhat diligent DNA into a big ball of relaxation and sloth. It is also spring here in northern California in a major big way.
But that’s over now. I’m past jury duty and on to another institution — this time a local one — an institution that I really love, and learned to love more this morning because it resulted in not one, but FOUR, great book recommendations.
The institution is called Casual Carpool. That’s the name for the line that forms near the Safeway supermarket just down the hill from my house . It began informally when most of you were mere children, as a way for solo drivers to take on two passengers and then zip triumphantly and smugly over the Bay Bridge in the carpool lane, which is reserved for cars with three or more occupants.
Now, it’s become a bona fide force in the transportation scheme around here. There’s a sign in front of the Safeway, and even a few rules about Casual Carpool — mainly, you can’t play really idiosyncratic music and you can’t talk too much to the passengers you pick up. In turn, the passengers are not allowed to tell you which route to take to get onto the bridge on days like today when there was more traffic than I’ve ever, ever seen in my entire life. Ever.
Okay. 8:32 a.m. I pick up rider number one. A truly stunning young woman who, I realize when she says good morning, comes from some relaxed and wonderful country in Africa. She is sweet and does not care in the least what sort of music I play. (I know this because I actually asked her, just so I could hear her accent again.) She sits in the back and for the rest of the trip I’m about to describe simply looked out the window and smiled.
Second passenger is, more or less, the white rabbit. Nervous. Twitchy. Cute. In his forties or early fifties. Nice scholarly glasses. When I asked him if he wanted to put his briefcase in the back seat, because it looked too large for his lap, he snapped, “NO.” Yikes. Is there something illegal in there? How illegal could it be? He’s wearing those professor glasses and he looks so otherworldly. Is he smuggling into the U.S. a copy of Colm Toibin’s latest book, a book that’s only available in the UK?
The next thing that happened occurred because I was flustered, in my defense. But somehow, I took the very, very stupidiest way you can take to get on the bridge. The carpool lane was inaccessible because there was so much regular traffic in the way. As we crawled along, my chagrin grew. We were not zipping by the foolish people who try to get to San Francisco alone in their cars — and zipping, believe me, is the whole reason for taking these strangers into my car. It got so bad that I found myself wishing I’d brought something to offer the white rabbit and the African beauty to make up for my stupidity: coffee, cookies, a nice scone. Alas, I had nothing and I felt it would only increase my discomfort if I apologized more than the seven times I’d already apologized. Silence spread through the car like vegemite. (That is for you Charlotte.)
Suddenly, the white rabbit barked. Actually, dear reader, he laughed. He was enjoying his book. By this time, normally, I’d have dropped him off. But because of the traffic and my chagrin — two things not notable for producing anything pleasurable — I actually discovered some pretty wonderful things, things that I wormed out of him as I tried to distract everyone in the car from the fact that we seemed to be moving backwards rather than forwards.
My method was simple: first, I asked him about his reading preferences. He was clearly an intense reader because he told me that although the book that had made him bark/laugh was not that great, he makes it a habit to finish a book he starts. Novels, he likes novels, but he sometimes has trouble finding something really good to read, having read so many.
Now, I’ll admit that he did not ask me about my reading preferences. It is my experience that true readers are actually somewhat rare and they assume that most people do not read Good Things, so they don’t even get into book conversations. Or maybe he didn’t want to talk to me because he hated the way I had chosen to get across the bay to San Francisco.
Whatever. All I know is that I felt it important to make some statement that would telegraph, I am a Serious Reader, but not a perfect one. That way, we could talk until we got to the city. My method of establishing my cred was a bit crude, but highly effective: I confessed that I too liked to read but was having trouble getting through Ulysses.
This had an immediate impact on the white rabbit. He sat up straighter and became … friendly. Not someone who was mean and barking and short tempered and smuggling something illicit in his briefcase. In short, he was a book lover and so was I. Enough said. Well, actually, more was said. Soon, we were on to the topic of his dissertation (he had been to graduate school in English and left short of his dissertation to become — what else? — a lawyer): Evelyn Waugh. From Evelyn Waugh we ventured over to Siegfried Sassoon’s series of fictional memoirs that White Rabbit said was wonderful. And I believed him because he was On Fire about them.
Paul Fussell, he said. You’ve got to read, Abroad, a wonderful book about travel writing before the war. And then he offered this tidbit: You really should read Ellman’s biography of James Joyce. Better than any concordance for setting the scene with Ulysses. And, by the way, skim and skate over the surface of that book without guilt. You will get wonderful things from Joyce as long as you don’t try to wring every last bit out. Leave a little for the next time you read him.
And then, finally, as he was getting out of the car, he offered me his final suggestion, the way you’d hand someone a bouquet of lovely spring flowers, W. Jackson Bate’s biography of Samuel Jonson. You’ll like it and it will enlarge your reading considerably. And then he was off, dear reader, leaving me scrambling for a pen to get down all those great suggestions.
Turns out I’m done slacking. I went over to Booksprice and Amazon and ordered every single thing he recommended. Next month is my casual carpool reading month.
Sitting up straight now, BL
Sacrifices
Comments(18)This evening I found myself thinking about jury duty, an almost universally reviled reality of American life. Around here, you find out you’ve got jury duty when a colored postcard shows up in your mailbox. It tells you that in two weeks you will be required to take the day off, and show up at your local courthouse where you might be chosen to figure out whether somebody’s committed a truly disturbing crime or — possibly even worse — you find out you’re going to be spending the next six weeks deciding whether Company A did some obscure and financially complex wrong to Company B. Without question, both sides will be represented by lawyers whose hair and skin color are identical and who speak in a monotone worse than that of Mr. Bailey, your high school history teacher. It is not a pleasant duty.
Very few people know that the right to have real people — impartial people — decide whether or not you are guilty of a crime is guaranteed under the United States Constitution. It is also the only mandatory civic duty all Americans are asked to perform, unless you count grilling meat on the 4th of July. Although American juries sometimes do outrageous things (could McDonald’s really be responsible for the injuries people sustain when they spill hot coffee they’ve decided to balance between their legs while driving?), they mostly — in my experience — figure out the true and just result. For some reason, groups of twelve strangers are just really good at knowing what’s right, especially when they’re in a courtroom and instructed carefully to do that by a serious looking woman or man in a black robe. And if they have Gregory Peck on the jury, there’s no looking back.
The people who wrote the constitution knew how smart ordinary people are and also knew that it’s a good idea to put the power to decide guilt and innocence in the hands of the people, rather than judges.
For some, especially those who are self-employed, extended jury service is a huge financial burden. For others, it’s a huge, inconvenient pain in the neck. But it is also part of living in a democracy, which is a privilege for which we are ordinarily asked to make no sacrifices. I don’t think most potential jurors realize, when they resist jury service, that the orange postcard they’re holding in their hand represents the only sacrifice they will ever be asked to make in order to sustain democracy. Most people are unaware that citizenship is more than simply a matter of paying your taxes and obeying the law and are outraged to learn that they might be expected to do more than that. And that is because we don’t live in a culture where sacrifice has anything to do with being an American.
In the end, I think it’s a mistake that we ask so little of ourselves to ensure that our democracy is healthy and functional that something like jury duty could cause so much irritation and outrage. Not asking more from all of us is a mistake that weakens us as a people and weakens the system we benefit from. That’s because people who make sacrifices for a larger goal — whether it’s jury duty or serving in the military — are much more invested in the outcome and in the system than those who don’t. For example, if every one of us had to serve in the military, the conversation leading up to the war in Iraq would have been a lot different than it was. Americans don’t like to be told what to do, that’s for sure. But it’s a shame that in preserving our right to be left alone, we might also have left our system alone and vulnerable to people who really don’t have our interests at heart, like the people in the current administration.
Thinking like this makes me feel like an old coot, truth be told. Still, I do think it’s good sometimes to think about the constitution and democracy, and what our responsibilities are to those institutions. If we all stopped doing that, someday we might wake up and find out they’ve disappeared. So next time you get an orange postcard, do your best to pay attention to it and give it the respect it deserves. It’s your chance to keep the ink on the constitution from fading away.
A Trip to the Museum
It is not, in fact, the case that I do nothing other than gallivant around California behaving like a woman on vacation. In the past week, I’ve worked, walked, cooked, celebrated a birthday, helped someone figure out an experiment to test the crispness of potato chips, and read three chapters of The Penderwicks out loud.
But this weekend, I had the enormous pleasure of being picked up at my house by a friend who was not there to do the carpool. We flew down to Los Angeles with two other friends. The first thing we did after getting off the plane was drive to the Getty Musem.
And there I realized that I have no systematic method for visiting a museum. In my four decades of life, all I’ve learned is that it’s a big mistake to look at pictures or anything on a wall or a pedestal for longer than an hour and a half. I did like our visit — and although it stretched to three hours — it was actually pretty satisfying. It went like this:
11:45 p.m. Arrive at museum. Actually, arrive at museum parking lot. Why are there so many parking lot attendants at the Getty? Three people pointed us in the direction of the underground garage, the entrance to which was directly in front of our car. In fact, unless we suddenly put the car in reverse, there was really no where to go besides the garage.
12:00 p.m. Tram up to museum. The museum is not meant to be seen in the same landscape as motorized vehicles. For this reason, it looks like a bunch of very clean white buildings that were airlifted directly out of the architectural model, given a healthy dose of construction steroids and plunked down on top of a mountain overlooking Los Angeles. Am not sure I like being a stick figure in an chic architectural model. Notice how thin many Angelenos are, and realize I am not, in fact, a stick figure.
12:15 pm. We decide to lunch.
12:45 p.m. Fortified by lunch, a decision is made to visit a special exhibit being held at the museum. It features the work of Gerhardt Richter, a German artist I’ve actually heard of, because I read an article about him in the New York Times magazine five years ago and vaguely recall that maybe some of his paintings are copies of photographs. The twelve canvases he painted in 2005, a series of abstract pieces called “Wald,” are on display. They are pretty clearly not copies of photographs. He has obviously moved on from that period.
Am told by the very informative cards that are affixed to the wall next to the paintings that Richter’s paintings in this series are not abstract forests but evocations of the emotion of the forest. Do not see the difference and feel vaguely suspicious that I’m being had.
Still, decide it’s kind of cool that he gets an entire room in a museum devoted to the stuff he did in 2005, and wonder if he did these at a rate of one a month, or if he did them all at once and took the year off. It would be lovely to be an artist, I decide. In a room adjacent to the Wald display, Richter’s work is paired with that of another artist from Dresden. A German romantic whose name I cannot remember. Lots of landscapes. Solitary figures or trees and/or Christ in landscapes. Really complicated gold frames. Decide I do not like this brooding kind of painting. The only mood I experience is irritation. Perhaps it is because Los Angeles is not a brooding kind of place. For that you need fog, and other kinds of bad weather.
2:00-2:20 Make the mistake of wandering through more romantic paintings — weird sort of representational paintings of abstract things — spring, small children, odd portraits. Decide the Getty does not have a good collection of European art, although I don’t know anything about European art.
2:20 Try to find the photographs of Los Angeles exhibit, thinking this will be a great antidote to bad European art and instead end up in bric-a-brac collection, also known as French Rococo room. Do not like this room. Too many small objects. Seem to be in a bad mood.
2:30 Locate the special exhibit of French illuminated manuscripts. The room’s dark, the manuscripts incredibly bright after so many centuries. Am comforted and centered by words and pages, the impulse to make the written word beautiful. Why should a “Q” not be a work of art? Books are so fragile, yet here they are, something that connects us to the past, a past that’s really unimaginable. What was this world like, of monasteries that were centers of learning, where young men made things like this?
3:00 A short detour to look at weird still lives made out of silver by an 18th century French silver artist. Am taken with a platter that has boar’s heads for its handles. I do so like the French, despite the French rococo room.
3:15 Arrive in the gardens. Wish I’d spent the entire afternoon here. Wonderful, fun metal trellis things shaped like bouquets (except they’re about thirty feet high) on which bougainvilla is growing.
The gardens are young, but you can see what’s going to happen when the bougainvilla matures.
There are also bare plane trees that were obviously chosen because they’re so sculptural. A really weird labyrinth made out of azaleas. There’s no path to walk, just water. Think about the guy who has to put on hip boots, or better yet, get in his little inflated put-put boat, and wade out to the hedges to keep them trim.
The gardens are beautiful. The illuminated manuscripts make you think about what endures and what is timeless and how far away we are from the past, all of which are good things to contemplate on a lovely spring afternoon.
And so to Santa Monica for a pedicure.
This is Not a Starbucks
The Cup o’Mud in Bodega, California is tucked between a surf shop that’s been there since surfing was invented and an antique shop that’s open on Thursdays “if the weather’s nice.” Across the way is a biker bar and the church where Alfred Hitchcock filmed part of The Birds.
The sign above the coffee bar at the Cup O’Mud warns, This is not a Starbucks. Please do not ask for a frappe, crappe, tall, grande, vente. It’s a medium or large. Up in the rafters above this sign are some artistically arranged coffee bean sacks. Smack in the middle of them is a button that says, I could shit a better president.
I can’t think of a better way to put it.
Coffee served by woman with bleached white hair. Multiple piercings. Tattoos. Edge of the continent attitude. Good latte. I had a large.
Daffodils everywhere. Bikers too. Everyone we come across — bikers, surfers, women from L.A. carrying Louis Vuitton bags and driving SUVs — seems to be having a restorative weekend. I certainly did.
A Bus Just Hit the House
Last night, at about 8:40, a bus hit our house. The house slammed forward and then back and stuff downstairs made out of glass rattled around. The only trouble is we’re not on a bus route. We are, however, on the Hayward Fault, which runs directly behind our house and is slated to swallow us all up sometime in the next thirty years. The thing that ran into our house last night was a 4.2 magnitude reminder of that apocalyptic possibility.
The USGS (the United States Geological Survey) calls an earthquake like that a “light” earthquake. I’m glad they don’t do food labelling. If they did, we’d all be obese — these people don’t know what light really means. That bus hitting the house thing was no “light” experience. It was heartpoundingly scary and unsettling. Houses are not supposed to move. And if you look at this link, and scroll down to where yesterday’s 4.2 earthquake is highlighted in red, you’ll see that after it were a bunch of little jolts and sqeaks. Those get called “minor.” Maybe so. But this weekend, while I’m gone with some friends, my husband is putting together a major earthquake kit.
An earthquake kit is enough food, and drink and medicine and money and water and batteries and flashlights and blankets and booze to keep you going for a while — probably a long while, given the government’s predilection for not rescuing Americans who’re victims of natural disasters. Our trouble is that we always end up eating the peanut butter and soup we’ve stashed away in the earthquake kit and we can’t seem to ever find the camping stove to put in there. And when we need extra money or a flashlight — well, there’s always the earthquake kit.
This weekend, that will be fixed. Now we just have to remember to stand under a doorway or duck & cover under the piano next time the bus hits the house. Our impulse to stare at each other with our mouths open will not serve us well when that 4.2 minibus of an earthquake becomes a 7.2 freight train.
Have a safe and fabulous weekend.
To the Person Named “DropDead” Who Sent Me This Nice Email After Their Comment Failed to Appear
Filed under: Comments |
Maybe you should post Notice: you only enable comments that
a.) Agree with whatever you post about?
b.) are flattering to your ego
c.) DON’T contain any new information
d.) would NOT lead to any actual discussion
e.) fawn all over you
Dear DropDead,
Yes, it is entirely true. BlogLily exists within a happy little bubble. I don’t actually want to participate in conversations where no one listens to anyone, where people lecture in capital letters and get other people so riled up or turned off that we never get to hear about the last wonderful thing they ate, or read or heard or did.
Come to think of it, my happy bubble doesn’t have a place for people who tell me to drop dead either. Something about your first comment — the one where you imagined me to be saying something I didn’t say so you could lecture me on something I wasn’t talking about — made me think you were the sort of person whose second response would be a silly email like this. That’s why your comment never appeared. It didn’t sound to me like you were going to show up and talk about your favorite Victorian novel, that’s for sure. And was I really wrong in thinking that you weren’t going to be nice to the good people who come here and talk to each other?
And yes, I do want to be fawned over, flattered and agreed with. That’s why I’m a lawyer. That’s also why I had children. Let the fawning, flattering and sucking up begin!
Thanks for visiting and have a nice day,
Lily