L.A.

It's cold, and the traffic has disappeared since the last time I was here. Instead: empty shopping malls, empty parking lots, and the feel of a recession. Actually, everything looks like a scene from Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. I'd quote from it, but it's back in my apartment in Brooklyn. Suffice to say: mismatched houses, imported exotic plants and construction materials, the occasional turret, and a plethora of pets and track pants. (Those last may not have been in the book.) Oh, my home is magical.

Mating

I am only 100 pages into this immense novel by Norman Rush.  It is his Important Book.  I read another of his books - Mortals - a few years ago, and it was extraordinary but also such a feverish, intense experience that I guess I had a hangover that kept me from reading this book until now.  I'm grateful, because this is one of those fortuitous moments when they right book happens to your life at just the right time.  Not that I am considering a move to Botswana, or a return to fieldwork, or keeping a chronicle of my love affair with a utopian guru, but I have some free time right now and what I really need is a brilliant & confident female narrator.  Which we get here.  I don't think she's actually been named yet, but she's witty and depressed, an excellent observer of the weird social rituals of white expatriates in Botswana.  For a while she dates an ANC revolutionary.  This is how she describes him:

He was myopic and wore glasses, which like his weight had an effect on me.  I have a certain inordinate feeling toward revolutionaries who wear glasses, because there is the sense of how easily they could be unhorsed in the slightest physical confrontation with the enemy just by someone flicking their glasses to the ground and stepping on them.  So you assume such people have unusual amounts of courage.

Please read this book.

Mugsefjun (a.k.a. my preferred buff)

I wish, however, that this was Buff.

A band called Mugsefjun playing a birthday party in a backyard in Reyjavik:

More on Buff

I present to you: Buff. It feels like I'm coming home after five years on the hunt.

buff

I grabbed this poster from the wall next to the bathroom in a Reykjavik cafe. I brought it back, and hug myself when I look at it. Sarah, you might have been pouring coffee from a French press at the time.

Apparently Buff is an Icelandic candy. That aside, I suspect it is a band but haven't been able to confirm.

bookshelf

do you guys know about this bookshelf blog?

what a forlorn, stunning young thing

I hope we the people never get rid of coke machines.

waterfalls

So I was prepared to be impressed by Olafur Eliasson's waterfalls, but they were actually pretty disappointing. Partly, it was that the vantage points didn't actually give you very good vantage (the best option was probably to get on the boat that literally went past them). But it was also because the bridges were still more impressive than the waterfalls beneath them (a definitive win for steel over water) and because the waterfalls would have to be three times as big and tall and wide to make people FEEL them. And that would've killed even more riverside plant life.

ask a librarian

Sarah, how bad is it for books to stack them horizontally like this? I've been doing it off and on for a few years now, and I'm always fearful that one day I'll take an O'Neill play out and its pages will be completely and utterly stuck together.

wreath

I made this wreath from extra paper, magazines, and images from some art book catalogues.  There is also a picture of Henry James.  I may add a ribbon.

snow

Cinderella

I don't know if I ever mentioned that I write book reviews.  

Also, last night I went to Compline, which was relaxing, and today as I walked about I saw tons of people I like on their way to one place or another, and everyone was happy.  It was the stereotypical college town experience that I never seem to have.

And the weather is amazing, and I keep seeing hawks.

So things are pretty good here.  

winter

It's cold here - the kind of cold that sticks to you, that makes inhaling difficult, that freezes your eyelashes together - and so I woke up this morning glad that I finally invested in a 600-fill down jacket. It's a black, three-quarter length coat, the kind that keeps your warm from your head to your knees - imagine wearing a sleeping bag, and being grateful for the insulation. This type of outerwear is expensive, and cost more than I've ever spent on one item of clothing -perhaps more than I've ever spent on one item of anything, save for a computer. I justified the purchase because a) I live in Canada and b) if I didn't get it this winter I would just need to get it next winter, so I might as well get it now and get more seasons out of it.

In any case, I was wearing it this morning and my mum saw me in it and made the following comment:

"The government should buy everyone one of those coats."

I smiled a little bit as I thought of the entire Canadian public wearing poofy, matching coats for five months. My mum's right, of course - I get so many government cheques each year that I know they could have purchased me this coat and still sent me a certain amount of tax-rebate and living allowance money. I'm pretty certain, too, that if the Canadian government put in an order for 30 million North Face winter coats, they could get wholesale pricing. We'd all be happy, warm, little citizens who might be more apt to vote and not end up with the disaster we have right now in parliament.

And so I conclude: government-issued outerwear would be good for democracy (or if nothing else, some sort of national cohesion, which we're in need of right now).

pre-subway

similarly, i find myself in something of a forlorn december daze. have put my feet into black heels today for the first time in awhile, and hope both that i don't trip on the subway and that wearing them will do something for my general outlook.

exhaustion.

exhausted. everyone at my office has the flu. i am going to bed, with books in hands.

poor pig:

That picture below is amazing.  I wish I spent more time in mountains and with dogs.  Also, I thought I would share this photo.  My family doesn't do turkey on Thanksgiving.  This year Dad really wanted a pork roast so that's what we did.  

saturday not-iditarod

There were six of us and four dogs, but two people and one dog took a different route so we split about 30 minutes into the run. We didn't end up finding the lake we were looking for, but someone asked for photos, so here's one: me, Duke, and Maya, searching for a lake.

recipe

ok, this is pretty straightforward BUT, like all of my recipes, there is a secret ingredient.

small tomatoes (cherry or grape - something with flavor)

garlic; ca. 8 cloves 

scallions/shallots/red onions

rosemary (preferably not the spiky kind but the softer kind so it won't get stuck in your teeth)

arugula

cranberries! about 1/2 a cup (this is the secret ingredient)

linguine

feta

1. slice garlic and put in pan with lots of olive oil and rosemary.  leave this in the oven (340 or thereabouts) for about 30 minutes (maybe put a few halved tomatoes in, too, just to make the pan juicier)

2. cut tomatoes in half or quarters

3. chop your onions/shallots/scallions

4. add toms, onion, & cranberries to the pan.  You may need to add some more olive oil.  add a little salt.  Leave in the oven for another 30 minutes or until done (it's done when the garlic is soft).

5. make the linguine, strain, etc.

6. dump everything from the pan onto the pasta, also add the arugula and mix everything around until the arugula wilts down.

7. put pasta on plates and crumble some feta on top

the cranberries make the sauce taste like sun-dried tomatoes, which I don't normally like. Anyway, there are lots of rich flavors and it's really easy to make.

               yum: 

when in rochester...

stand on a porch, in a circle, and blow cigarette smoke towards the street. look across the way and see a parking lot, in an odd shape -- like a serpent curled into a box. flanking it on the left is a church with a tall spire. on the right is an intersection that in the few hours i've stared at it has mostly been empty. a girl who is standing next to me in the circle remarks that she'd like to take a picture of it sometime, and i don't see why she wants to. the cigs run dry quickly, and someone pulls out a key, and we all troop inside.

Wednesday Night Not-Iditarod

eleven people, four dogs, three vehicles to get us out of the city, and one 10km out-and-back that turned into a 16km out-and-back which was manageable because we haven't had fresh snow in a while so the trail was fairly clear but the ground frozen rock solid - my ankles took a number of good twists. the sky was clear, which made it cold, but the stars that much more plentiful. beer and chips when i got home. and so to bed...

bookbindings!

My favorite website.

pyx

Limoges pyx.

from.

A name for a pet...?

Did you know that a pyx is 1) a small round metal receptacle used to carry the Eucharist to the sick and 2) a box used in a mint for deposit of sample coins reserved for testing weight and fineness?

sometimes I wish I had a pet

so I could name it Woody Guthrie.

Basque Dragon

Word:

Enarch, used by David Brooks in his column last Friday: graduate of l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), breeding ground for the top dogs of French government. That's enarch, not eunuch.

Today’s layers:

1. Black t-shirt with little pocket, striped thrift sweater, olive green hooded jacket
2. Greek yogurt, blackberry jam, honey

is pleurisy syd barrett, beatrice potter, or amy winehouse?

elements:

Neasa + Jane + Sarah = stories?

how does one domesticate dragons, anyway?

also, 

what is Calgary?

and who is journalism?

and why is pleurisy?