Just Put 'Em On The Train

I read this story about Cleveland not getting chosen for the 2008 Republican convention and felt squirmy and embarrassed in the same way that I feel whenever I see a particularly poignant defacement of a subway-wall advertisement for Ugly Betty:

The GOP requires 20,000 rooms and the Cleveland team had put together a plan that included using hotels, inns, lodges and resorts in Akron, Ashtabula and Sandusky, an average of 45 miles away.

[Ohio GOP Chairman Bob] Bennett intends to find out what, if anything, didn't work in Cleveland's pitch and fix it.

Ummm, I think I know...

Indeed

I just finished reading Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey by Alison Wearing. After spending several months traveling around Iran cloaked in the compulsory chador, Wearing ends up at the house of a Canadian embassy worker, whose teenage kids are watching MTV. Here's her impression:

Stick figures prancing around in their underwear humping the air....it's not just the clothes or the lack of clothes or the grinding or the gyrating or the pouffed-out hair or the ass out as far as it can go or anything. It's the look on their faces. I had forgotten how women look when they spend their lives trying to be sexy. I had forgotten how lonely it looks. How painful it is to watch.

The Vessel

I liked this quote from Philip Pullman:

A novel for me is an attempt to build a kind of hermetic vessel that can contain this essence you've been dreaming about, this feeling that you don't want to evaporate. You keep it enclosed and you don't tell anyone about it until you build a vessel that can contain it and keep it at its maximum intensity and purity — that's the novel.

Read the rest here.

I Am..Still...EMPEROR!

We'll see if The Power of the Dark Crystal can hold a candle to the Gelfling-based fan fiction I wrote in second grade. Yeah, I don't think so either.

Montana Musings

So I'm starting to think I should rename this blog Really Bad Nostalgia Trip.

Today it started with an Oregon chai. It's been lovely chilly and rainy here in the mornings which is inexplicably the best time for both getting up early and sleeping late. Today I succumbed to the latter, failing to eat breakfast before I left home. I'm not much of a Starbucks person, but today stopping in for a hot, milky beverage seemed the right thing to do.

I was instantly transported to the fall of 2000, when I was living in Missoula, Montana, and working at a very successful, locally-owned natural foods store, the quality and integrity of which I haven't yet found an equal to. Although I didn't much like working at the store - I didn't really fit in with my hipster coworkers, and I was understandably struggling to adjust to a drastically different environment - the vaguely bubblegummy flavor of my Oregon chai stirred up a few pleasant, semi-forgotten memories.

Once at my desk I began working on a project about the Plateau Indians - familiar names like Salish-Kootenai, Ravalli, the Clark Fork River started coming up, and I was lost in remembering.

Huckleberries. Salmon. Cardamon ice cream cones at the Big Dipper, which was auspiciously placed at the halfway mark of my walk from work to home. Being able to walk to the farmers market on Saturday mornings or better yet, Wednesday evenings, when you could enjoy your huckleberry pastry and espresso in the gathering dark. Except being on the edge of Mountain Time, it often didn't get dark until 10 pm in the summer.

Driving up Highway 93 ("Pray for me, I drive Highway 93") toward Flathead Lake, a road which has morphed into a semi-mythical landscape in my dreams. (I learned to drive, at a rather late age, in Montana. )

Going to Lolo Hot Springs, lying in the warm water and smelling the cold, pine-redolent air. Driving back in the rain and seeing rainbow after rainbow after rainbow arcing over the mountains.

There was one fall day, too, that involved standing in line forever to get a s'more. I don't know where this was. And then later in the day...a haunted house (no, a haunted forest) up in the hills that was only accessible via this creepily decked out old school bus that now makes me think of Fairbanks 142 but then just seemed kitschy and nostalgic and good Halloween fun.

More Autumn Musings

Yesterday was spent at the farmers market in the rain and wind and cold, my favorite time to go. They're starting to sell end-of-harvest bags of lumpy, ugly tomatoes and things for cheap. After a late-afternoon nap I spent this evening making a big batch of tomato sauce to freeze - the tomatoes were giant, deep red, salty sweet, and so luscious it took over three hours to cook them down properly. Inspired, I made a list of other things to buy and make and freeze. Bags of blueberries. Heirloom lima beans for roasting and throwing in soups. Homemade cabbage pierogi. And I ate for dinner exactly what you should be entitled to eat for dinner as an adult: caramelized peach and raspberry tart with vanilla ice cream, made almost exclusively from local ingredients.

I'm starting to have more moments where I can't remember what I'm supposed to be anxious, nervous, or nettled about. The disappointment of having missed out on the local, cage free chickens was drowned out by the experience of eating fresh apple-cider donuts in the chilly, grey air, the relief of finding a used book at the Strand that I'd been planning on buying new somewhere else. The irritation at getting off at the wrong subway stop while loaded down with groceries was supplanted by the memorable Indian meal I wrote about in the comments here. And by reading Henry James late at night, by lamplight, while the wind howled outside.

Autumnal Musings

One of the best things about going to the Farmers Market every week is that right now, right as we speak, I'm witnessing that glorious shift between summer and fall that's heralded by the arrival of sweet, local Concord grapes. If there's ever any doubt that summer's about to end, even when the night turn cool so abruptly it's like God's opened the refrigerator door looking for a midnight snack, the arrival of those frosty purple grapes makes it real. Yes, they say. It's time.

I'm not being terribly original when I divulge that I love Autumn. I mean, who doesn't? I love taking my cardigan sweaters and jeans out of the closet. I love single-apple cider laced with a smoky, peat-redolent Scottish whisky. On a cold night. Listening to the last of the crickets, the day Jim Blum gets it in his head to play only songs about autumn.

And then there's the eating. Though not a squash person, I do love a white ceramic souffle dish filled with creamy red and yellow potatoes, local onions and sweet corn, sage, tarragon, and a rich orange cheddar. And a light breakfast of cheddar and walnuts and apples. And coming in out of the cold rain to a grilled cheese sandwich on whole-grain bread I've made myself and a bowl of Tomato Bacon cream soup. (That I've made with the last of the summer tomatoes - the ugly ones that the farmers are practically paying you to take away). And a bowl of thick Turkish red lentil soup in the evening, the kind that never fails to give you a second wind, no matter how soul-sucking your day was. And opening the first porter you've had since spring - what's this? Was humankind meant to drink something this strong?

Oh, yes.

Brilliant

Just as I didn't realize I'd been picturing Snape as Alan Rickman until I actually saw it, I haven't realized until now that I'd been picturing Mrs. Coulter as Nicole Kidman.