From the monthly archives: December 2009
I was thinking, at first, that 2009 was relatively uneventful; then I thought harder, and knew I was wrong.
There were quite a few firsts this year. I got my first teaching job – and, incidentally, found the first thing I’ve ever loved doing unreservedly and would be happy doing for a very long time.
Tom and I took our first long vacation together off the East Coast, in places neither of us had visited before: a week in the Caribbean (where, for the first time, we snorkeled and kayaked on the ocean), and a week in Santa Fe.
We started our mostly-monthly brunch series and crammed 20+ people into our apartment.
In January, we battled our first bedbug. (I say bedbug, singular, because we never managed to find it or see it, and it was most certainly not an infestation. But it was awful. There may have been two or three, but they tortured us for a month until we beat them with elbow grease, a mattress cover, and Mr. Clean.)
Tom got a Wii for his birthday, and has been enjoying it since. I never once played video games growing up, so I’m learning to like it, but that’s a big first for me.
I also, of course, finished my graduate degree, which I’d been working on since January 2008 – not a dreadfully long time, but long enough that it felt monumental.
I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting, but at the end of the year, I am mostly grateful for what happened, and ready to move into a new year and decade. The noughties were good to me, on the whole, and I’m curious to see what the teens will bring.
This year is full of resolve – resolutions mostly given to me for health or career reasons, and very few I’ve made myself. But I hope mostly to slow down and remember it all more thoroughly.
I woke up to feather-like snow dropping heavily from the sky. Tom’s job is on holiday hiatus, so he doesn’t have a (business rental) car to dig out, and so we can just enjoy this for what it is: beauty.
We were upstate for Christmas, enjoying time with my mother and brother, extended family, and old friends. We celebrated two completed M.A.s (mine and my childhood best friend, Sarah’s) at Brown’s Brewing Company, one of our favorite places – both now and, for me, in college. Some things come full circle.
We amassed quite a collection of new books under the Christmas tree, and Tom gave me a wee camera, which I am very excited about. We love our dSLRs, but it’s hard to haul them around without purpose. This camera is so small that I can drop it in my pocket or bag. Exactly what I wanted.
I cooked Christmas Eve dinner for fifteen or so extended family: baked chicken meatballs, pork shoulder in the crockpot, balsamic braised brussels sprouts, spiced carrots, creamy mushrooms, stuffed onions, and vanilla roasted pears.
And it’s a good thing, because I also went to the doctor, and due to some inexplicably high blood pressure and family medical history, he’s put me on a restrictive diet (no dairy, no gluten, very precise proportions, etc.) for a few months. I spent a lot of time the day after Christmas working out things that I can eat now, in the proportions I can eat them. So, I was grateful to have such tasty food over Christmas.
We came home on Sunday night; made dinner for the Poleys, who are visiting the East Coast from Nebraska for the first time in a long while, on Monday (catfish, sauteed onions and kale, sauteed mushrooms, roasted baby potatoes); and saw Tom’s father on Tuesday. Yesterday we spent mostly working, but the rest of the week promises to be full of delights: movies, games, good company with people we haven’t seen in a while, long conversations over good food, museums, rest.
Well, due to the snow and a few other contributing factors, we did not end up going to Phoenixville yesterday. And, hence, we are in New York today, spending some quiet time at home and at the movies before we plunge into the (good kind of) crazy that is Christmas with my family.
But it’s just as well. After church yesterday, Tom and I walked down through Soho to the wonderful Cafe Gitane, where we feasted on spiced couscous with bits of eggplant, peppers, chicken, and who knows what else, spicy lamb sausage, toast with roasted red peppers, and mulled wine. We came home and spent the evening playing a video game together (fairly rare in this house) and then watching Heartbeat Detector, which was not nearly good as I’d hoped, compounded by the fact that Netflix was streaming it jumpily, and the sound became increasingly disconnected from the visual – not as huge of a deal for a subtitled film, but still annoying. But we ate cheese that we had planned to bring with us to PA and had a lovely time of it.
We are both “off work” for the next two weeks – I’ll be doing some things from outside the office and working on a piece for Paste, and Tom is off, but not getting paid, which makes it a bit less satisfying. We head north on Wednesday and should be back on Monday, mid-day. A much-needed end-of-the-year break.
Tis the season for movies, and so I’ve spent the better part of this week at screenings and at my desk, writing reviews. (One more to go before Christmas.) I’m not allowed to really talk about the movies before their release date, so I won’t say anything now. But it’s a bit wearying. This year’s overall film quality has been pretty poor, so the good movies – or the good-enough movies – are making waves, and while that’s fine, I find myself nostalgic for 2007, when I had to choose between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood for the top of my list.
Tis also . . . the season, and so we’ve been making preparations for Christmas. This was the big Christmas gift-buying week. I wouldn’t say we’re overly extravagant, but we seem to have an awful lot of people to buy presents for this year, and so let’s just say that I’m looking forward to all the Amazon Rewards Points we’ll be getting. (We also left Whole Foods last night after the last round of gift-buying with the clerks asking us how they can become our friends.)
This weekend looks to be harried, but good: Friday night’s screening of A Christmas Tale (one of my favorite movies of 2008), A Streetcar Named Desire starring Cate Blanchett on Saturday afternoon, a trip to Phoenixville and then Swarthmore to visit friends. We’ll come home and have a day here before we head north for Christmas festivities!
It’s strange, lately, to look back over our weekends. They are wonderful times of respite in the midst of very busy weeks – times when we wish we could just turn off our phones and ignore the world to make it complete. Still, I come to Monday and can barely remember what we did.
On Saturday, we both woke up rather early after a poor night’s sleep (for no particular reason). I went for a long walk (the only form of exercise I can get these days that I find enjoyable and that doesn’t destroy my knees, which is essential, given the amount of walking we do in the course of a normal day in the city). I went to the farmer’s market to pick up some sundries – kale, big heads of garlic, berry pies the size of muffins – and then came home to shower. We ate chicken quesadillas and drank Mexican hot chocolate, bought a birthday present for a little boy, then spent the afternoon playing Metroid (him) and reading Portrait of a Lady (me). In the evening, we went to BAM for Mortal Engine (stunning). A good day, and one without any transportation besides our own.
We typically spend Sundays at church, then brunch, then head back home for the rest of the day. This Sunday, we drove through the rain to church, then to Jersey City, where we celebrated the aforementioned little boy’s birthday with a beer tasting (one-year-old children don’t notice so much if it’s really a party for the grown-ups). We stayed for a long while, then drove back to Brooklyn and spent the rest of the evening reading and watching bad movies, as is our wont.
I woke up inexplicably exhausted (I think it’s the short days, with late morning sun, that does it). Knowing it would be a lost day if I didn’t get out right away, I headed into the day for a five-mile walk through the various brownstone neighborhoods. Lately I’ve been trekking out to the Brooklyn Promenade to see the East River and watch Manhattan get ready for its week, then down into one of the shopping districts to look at the people rushing around me, and then walk home admiring the architecture. I don’t get tired of this; it’s so much more interesting to me than simply trees. Here I get the trees, and the historic homes, and glimpses of people’s bookshelves and Christmas trees as I walk by. The history, the humanity: it’s fascinating.
I spent the rest of the day tying up some loose ends and writing a review of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a disturbing film that is nonetheless very good. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It’s a tricky movie to pin down, and so I had to wrangle the review a bit, but it’s also the kind of movie that becomes more interesting as you write about it. I have three more reviews to write this week, and only one of them is not a wrangly sort of review.
But then: Christmas!
One of the things I like most about living in New York is that many people at least pretend to care about what they eat on a daily basis. Brooklyn is locavore central (which may seem ironic if you haven’t been here), but even for those who never cook for themselves, good options are everywhere. All chain restaurants are required by law to put calorie counts next to their food choices (which was a huge shock at first, though I’ve noticed calories going down over the last year – smaller portions?). Every deli seems to have a tossed salad station now, made to order on spinach or mixed greens. Practically every burger joint worth its salt has taken to using grass-fed beef, and proudly proclaims the news on the menu.
But what made me think about this today: I passed one of those little generically Italian pizza joints on University Place, near NYU. They’re ubiquitous and always called “Gino’s” or “Papa Somebody-or-other’s” or “Luigi’s.” Fluorescent lighting, tiny place with room for one line, the sort of place you expect enormous slices of greasy pizza and a can of Pepsi for $1.50.
But outside was a sandwich board proclaiming “We make whole wheat crusts and use organic vegetables!”
Only in New York.
Last night, I went with some friends to The New School for a panel on “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual,” co-hosted by the literary journal n+1 and Eugene Lang College. Panelists included Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, Christine Smallwood, and Caleb Crain (who moderated, mostly).
Of course, off the bat, one sees that there are no presently-evangelical intellectuals on that panel. (They’re all ex-evangelicals, to one degree or another.) As it turned out, this may have been a wise choice. The panelists spoke about their backgrounds and how their evangelical upbringing contributes to their work today as intellectuals, and then took questions from the audience. I suspect that had a known evangelical intellectual been on the panel – a philosopher, a minister, whatever – the Q&A session may have devolved into ad hominem attacks. It stayed mostly respectful, as these are non-evangelicals who nonetheless do not believe that evangelicalism is the worst thing to appear in America.
Gladwell grew up in Canada, son of a Jamaican mother and English father, and in a relatively staid British version of evangelicalism that doesn’t couple a particular politics with the faith, and I suspect this may have something to do with his ultimate conclusion that he’s “truly sad” that he doesn’t share his parents’ faith. He reiterated this point several times, and spoke of attending church in D.C. when he lived there. He remembered a communion service, which he said was one of the most beautiful things he’d experienced, and seems genuinely sad that nothing he will experience outside of that service will affect him in the same way.
Christine Smallwood’s background most closely mirrored my own: an evangelical church in New Jersey that slowly drifted toward contemporary evangelical expressions of faith (especially in worship), with a “WWJD” orientation. She spoke of the emotional focus that her church moved into, of the gradual dumbing-down of what they were taught. Now a Ph.D. candidate in literature and a former associate literary editor at The Nation, she made some interesting points about the “crisis of narrative” that evangelicalism’s overwhelming on conversion creates, and how that may play into the decline of the megachurch. She also said that the Bible taught her a lot about literature: that narrative is the best vehicle for delivering truth, that language is important, how to do what we call “deep reading.”
James Wood grew up Anglican, but his mother was Presbyterian, and it sounds like they were not terribly high church. In this discussion, he’s most notable for having written some scathing critiques of the “new atheists,” while not being a believer himself. (Look up his article “God in the Quad” from the August 31, 2009 issue of the New Yorker – it knocked my socks off when I first read it.)
All three are no longer believers, but their stance toward evangelicalism was fairly charitable, given the circumstances – more charitable in some cases than some of us who remain in the church. I have fairly detailed notes, but I’m mulling them over rather than just writing everything down here.
I think one of the things that struck me most, though, was when Mr. Wood said that he was drawn out of faith partially because he discovered the world of literature, where you could “talk about anything.” In other words, in fiction, you can encompass the totality of fiction. Nothing is off-limits simply because of its content. This rang true for me, in that there seem to be many books that evangelicals aren’t, or weren’t, “supposed” to read. This accounts for my long and detailed knowledge of mediocre Victorian novels and spiritual biographies (which were approved reading material), but my absolute lack of hundreds of other very necessary and empathetic books. (Innocuousness in a moral sense was more important than telling the truth “slant,” as Emily Dickinson said, and my year working at a Christian bookstore proved that this is not just a phenomenon among Christian fiction for young people, where it might perhaps be explainable.)
Nothing was said that particularly surprised me, but it’s refreshing to show up at an event like this and see some kind of strides being taken toward understanding, rather than categorical dismissal. It’s important for evangelical churches to see what kind of fruit their form of Christianity has reaped, both good and bad. I have a lot of hope that evangelicalism – in the true sense – will shed the vestiges of anti-intellectualism (something I’ve run into all my life, though I’ve been privileged to know some well-read, deep-thinking evangelicals) within my lifetime. I hope I can be part of that.
Even if real knowledge of evangelicals (the people who hold the theology, not the politically-powerful demographic) is woefully inadequate in the mainstream, at least they’re trying. As someone who lives somewhere in the middle between these two – evangelical theologically if not demographically, intellectually aspiring if not actually intellectual quite yet – I think I can see a place for me in there somewhere.
This past summer, as I realized that my graduate work was winding down, I came home one day and told Tom I wanted to start a book club.
So in August, we had the first meeting of the Bluestockings. Definition of bluestocking from Wikipedia:
A bluestocking is an educated, intellectual woman. Such women are stereotyped as being frumpy and the reference to blue stockings refers to the time when woolen worsted stockings were informal dress, as compared with formal, fashionable black silk stockings.
The term originated with the Blue Stockings Society – a literary society founded by Elizabeth Montagu in the 1750s. This provoked derogatory usage in the late 18th century, specifically in reference to women — previously the term had referred to learned people of both sexes. Such women have increased in number since, as women now enter higher education in large numbers. For example, in Britain, women are now 55% of new entrants to university and outnumber men at every level up to PhD.
It goes on to talk about the prejudice toward women who dress certain ways, but that’s only vaguely relevant to the group. We are young New York women, and so we are more or less fashionable (maybe less in comparison to some young New York women, but more in comparison to our friends in less hyperfashionable places).
In any case, we are all about reading good books, which at this point has been mostly literary fiction and some nonfiction. What we’ve read so far:
- The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
- Lush Life, Richard Price
- What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami
- The Red Leather Diary, Lily Koppel
- The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
- The Supper of the Lamb, Robert Farrar Capon
- A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
We’re reading Olive Kitteridge for January. We get together with snacks and drinks and talk about the book – and, of course, whatever’s going on in our lives. It’s completely delightful to read good books and talk about them with other people who actually like good books as well. I maintain that someone’s book list is a better indication than even their taste in film or music of “the tribe.” If you and I like the same books, we’re probably kindred spirits.
Many of us Bluestockings are also taking the Fifty Two Fifty Two challenge (read 52 books in 2010). Any books are allowed – YA novels, graphic novels, the world is your oyster, etc. If you want to join us, you can sign up here and occasionally drop in to list off what you’ve read recently. Most of us are also on Goodreads.
Over Thanksgiving, I was trying to remember when a certain holiday event had taken place, so I went to our old blog to look it up.
I poked around the archives a bit and realized something: I was a much funnier writer when I blogged. In fact, I chuckled at some of my own old blog entries. The practice of blogging gave me a reason to remember things that happened during the day, a reason to capture moments.
We ended the blog when 2008 turned into 2009 because it had become a burden, something I felt like I had to do but couldn’t fit into the schedule. But nowadays, my life is quite different, and now that I’ve just about finished my M.A. – hopefully-final-thesis-draft was deposited in the department this week! – I think I’d like to take it back up again, as a way of making a daily or more-daily practice out of writing once again.
So, here I am. I make no promises. But I hope to see you around these parts.
People have been asking, so here it is: my 2010 book list.
Reading
- Works of Love (Kierkegaard's Writings, Volume 16) - Søren Kierkegaard
- Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
- Julian of Norwich: A Contemplative Biography - Amy Frykholm
- Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy - Dave Hickey
