Tales of the Nursery

It is an irrefutable law of nature that all three of one's children will wait until their father is out of town on a two week business trip to collectively fall ill. However, Nature does occasionally have a sense of humor.

I was getting ready to bathe one of the twins, we'll call him Pirate, when the phone rang today. The adorable little angel recently bipedal, destruction machine escaped and re-appeared a minute or two later (don't ask) with his sister's gossamer angel wings on his back. There was Pirate, with his tousled brown hair, mischievious grin, flashing eyes, fat little bare-naked baby arms and thighs...waddling around with a pair of wings on his back. Quite the woodland sprite from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' he looked very Puck-ish indeed.

Later in the morning, Pirate was napping (they seem to be switching off lately) and I was sitting down, holding the somewhat sleeping, thus angelic, other twin. We'll call him Blondie. He was pressed against me, with his feverish baby warmth, the gentle rise and fall of his chest with every breath, his moist cheek and the tendrils of corn silk baby hair against my skin. The babysitter was playing the Fiona Apple song "Fast As You Can."

I may be soft in your palm but I'll soon grow
Hungry for a fight , and I will not let you win

My pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will
Disprove your faith in man
So if you catch me trying to find my way into your
Heart from under your skin
-Fast as you can, baby scratch me out, free yourself
Fast as you can

Strange lullaby for a baby boy. He did not seem to notice or mind.

Then I read to my four-year old daughter. She's a true devotee of the "Get them while they're young" marketing empire aka Disney. If you had a girl, it might be hard to escape the impact of the Disney Princess franchise. I have to say the messaging has its uses, especially in the deportment department "Would a princess pick her nose in the middle of the family portrait for her cousin's baptism?" Although, if you want the really useful parental propaganda, the unadulterated German folk tales are your best bet there..."Know what happens to little boys and girls who nag? They get taken into the forest by their parents and abandoned."

Back to the princesses, my daughter has a book devoted to the folklore purchasing opportunities associated with each member of the Royal Harem: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle (Beauty from 'Beauty and the Beast'), Ariel (the Little Mermaid) and Jasmine (Aladdin's girlfriend). I'm sure Tina Fey would commend their efforts in the diversity department. They've branched out, they really have. They added a few more brunettes, then there's Ariel, the feisty red-head, and Jasmine, the Arabian princess. That's not what was bothering me, it was the sugar-coated, cutesy, cloying nature of the princesses and the stories. Something was missing.

Then it came to me. Where was the realism, where were the Princesses of Monaco? I bet that would make for some entertaining bedtime reading. "Now boys and girls, here we come to the part where Princess Stephanie interviews the royal bodyguards...," fast forward a few years down the road "And then Princess Stephanie had a couple of different children with different princes. Well, actually they weren't really princes and she didn't marry them. You see, you don't actually have to get married to have children. And you don't have to get married if you just want to play with boys. But then, Princess Stephanie got tired of those men and decided she wanted a married man. Only he wasn't married to her. He was married to another woman. She decided she wanted him anyway. She ran off and lived with him at his circus. She took her children with her and they learned to be circus performers. Doesn't that sound like fun boys and girls?"

Merde in France

I discovered this link courtesy of my uncle--"Live from the Belly of the Beast, Les Entrailles de la Bete," an American blogger with the perspective of "more than 20 years behind enemy lines."

...A very impressive mastery of the French vernacular. I wonder if he picked it up doing a DEA with people from Normale Superieure? I definitely missed out on my education. For instance who know the correct translation of bureaucrappers was "les bureaucrottes" or, that to the French, Dubya is "Doubelyou."

With posts such as

The French read 1.7 books a year (including rugbymen calendars) Les franchouilles lisent 1,7 livres par an (calendriers de rugbymen y compris)

What the French are reading. The following excerpts are from Y.B.'s novel 'Allah Superstar' which was on the French best seller list after its publication in August of this year.

'I wouldn't say that 9-11 was a good thing, no. First off it was badly filmed and on top of that we'll probably learn that the Jews did it ...'

'... we should understand the young Muslims that express themselves by doing rodeos with stolen airplanes, even if they should avoid parking them in the building itself, that's true, but at the same time it's not easy to park a Boeing in Manhattan in September.'

It's no wonder that he so's popular over there. Half the fun is reading comments like this one from Laurent, from Navire.

'Sa mauvaise foi est si enorme et systematique, son talent a manier la vulgarite et l'insulte orduriere est si manifeste, qu'il en devient au second degre une lecture tout a fait rejouissante.'

'His lack of sincerety is so enormous and systematic, his talent for vulgarity and slander so great, that if not taken at face value he provides a truly pleasurable read.'

I love this guy. A valuable addition to my daily reading repertory.

Through a Glass Darkly

A Southern Gothic Tribute to Angela Carter

Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house under the eyes of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each of whom, through her projects a baleful posthumous exhistence; she counts out the Tarot cards, carelessly construing a constellation of possibilities as if the random fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into the country of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden.
The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter

The house did have ten or eleven foot ceilings, but could not have been called dark. It was an American house. Naturally it was built of yellow brick. I was nine the year we moved in with my maternal grandparents. Of the two of them, only grandfather was half-American. His father's people were from Atlanta. His father went off to Paris on some sort of European tour, from which he brought back a French bride on the eve of the First World War. Although surprised by the hasty marriage to a foreigner, his Irish-American parents aparently were consoled by the dual attributes of her being Catholic and not-English. I knew her well, as she lived into her mid-nineties and spent the last part of her life in the garage apartment behind their house. She told of no sooner arriving in Atlanta than being taken under the wing of her new kinfolk by marriage, some Aunt who immediately insisted that she go to a tea dance at the Driving Club. There, this Miss Pittypatt-type Aunt paraded her around as "My niece, the Countess." All this was quite embarassing to my great-grandmother. In France, women do not inherit titles, the question of why there are today titles at all, being yet another issue. Had she kept her maiden name it would have died with her, as it were she was quite happy to be called by her husband's name. In the grander scheme of things, the Catholic and non-English bond did not make the marriage make, or rather did not make up for the fact that great-grandfather was an alcoholic and gambler and prone to abandoning his young wife and son to go off on periodic benders. She never spoke ill of him, nor did she did she ever ask for money. One day she simply left the Georgian Terrace hotel where they lived, and returned to France to raise her son in her mother's apartment in Paris.

Great Grandmother saw her brother and cousins go off to fight the First World War with great pomp and circumstance. How they must have looked, the regiments marching out from Paris, beautiful young boys clothed in the ideology of the previous century. They marched right from La Belle Epoque to the War to End All Wars, from the Nineteenth century to the warm embrace the Twentieth century reserved for their generation in the trenches of France. Was great-uncle really in the cavalry back when it was horses and not the air cav that my uncle, my mother's brother, must have known in the Vietnam war? The first world war showcased the advent of military aeroplanes. Supposedly great-uncle's regiment charged off to meet those aeroplanes on horseback, swords in the air. How Don Quixote-esque. The family had a weakness for lost causes.

She saw her son march off to the Second World War. He needn't have done it. His mother's step-father, probably the only real father figure in his life, was Swiss and the head of the Paris office of a respected bank. They could have gone to Switzerland to cool their heels. He could've traded on the American citizenship of his biological father, gone to the States and avoided that war for a few years, but he didn't. Fatalists are they. His military experience was, as can be expected, not of long duration and he spent the majority of the war in a German prisoner of war camp. He eventually bought his freedom with some gold pieces his mother sent him in a jar of honey, how that got past the prison guards I have no idea. He made his way back through Germany, working odd jobs as a house painter until he made it to France and to his fiancee's property in the unoccupied zone. He was a delightful grandfather and, with a child's disingenuousness, I always loved for him to show me his German prisoner of war identity papers, which seemed very exotic.

He met grandmother before the war. She was Colombian, her family originally from Santa Fe de Bogota. Her father worked for the English company, Pearson, in Paris. He was quite a bit older than his wife. When he died, grandmother's mother was a relatively young widow with three small children. I never heard it said that grandmother was any beauty (I only knew her when she was old). She was rude as hell, would say the most outrageous things--so outrageous that she could only have gotten away with them had she some charm and wit, which they say she had. She must have had some desirable qualities for she counted among her suitors a future prime minister of France and she was engaged to a prince from a prominent French family. A prince, how ridiculously fairy-tailish that seems. The normal thing would have been for that engagement to have been motivated by social ambition, but it wasn't, at least not in the conventional sense. It was a competitive "fuck you" gesture, a response to the earlier marriage of her younger sister, the blonde beauty of the family. Well prince though he might have been, she decided that he didn't really meet her needs for a prince charming and showing up her younger sister really wasn't high enough payment for life with him. She broke off the engagement. As consolation she immersed herself in "good works," which is how she met great grandmother, the mother of her future husband. Great grandmother worked in the Red Cross, a job that proved very convenient for getting false papers to people during the German Occupation. Of course, La Resistance occupies its own role in French mythology, but in her case, I think the participation was actual. At any rate, she got a Legion d'Honneur medal for it.

After the war, they immigrated to Atlanta and bought the house where they raised six children, born in the course of five years (Catholicism and the twinning gene). They spoke English with very strong accents, his French, and hers more Spanish. Sharing a common sort of fatherless upbringing in Paris, they nevertheless represented two very different cultures and personalities. I think marriage provided them a respectable context with which to have arguments and argue they did, loudly, passionately and quite raucously. I can't remember so much of what she said, but he used to freely speculate that her people, who considered themselves una buena familia de Santa Fe de Bogota were about three generations removed from the banana tree. I think they loved each other very much.

Great grandmother moved into the garage house some time in the sixties and we lived with them for one year in nineteen eighty. What a marvelous house it was for a child to cavort in. The furniture all came from other centuries, classical lines of Louis XVI, curvy Louis XV and heavy dark baroque-looking Colombian stuff. There were gilded saints in the nooks and crannies and silver reliquaries, but they weren't morbid at all. Hadn't my irreverent mother and her siblings used to put ketchup on the saints' wounds and chicken bones in the reliquaries to shock visiting guests and relatives? They grew into wild children, coming of age in Atlanta in the sixties, of course some of them were still wild in the eighties too. In the eighties, when I was a child, I would run into adults who wistfully remembered parties at my grandparents' house in the sixties. They were European and had permissive attitudes about alcohol. Supposedly they started out rather strict and with the best of intentions, but by the time the fourth and fifth child entered adolescence, I think they just gave up.

Back to the house, any money either grandparent had through their families had long since disappeared through the excess and improvidenceof earlier generations. What last bit they had was spent on raising their own children. Long before the advent of their grandchildren, the house had settled into a genteel decay. There were silk brocade curtains, but they were beginning to be sun-bleached and a little frayed at the edges, there were worn patches in the carpet, vestigial servants bells when the servants were long since gone. This decay was somewhat precipitated by the extended occupation of a snarling dynasty of dachsunds--the house animus, there were generally about three of them at any one time. They mostly had German names like Fritzie and Ludwig. These very spoiled creatures patrolled around snarling and barking and generally relieving themselves on what nice patches there were left on the brocade curtains and oriental carpets. Oh, but it could still an enchanting place for children, we drank wine in our water at Sunday lunch and while we were told that children were to be seen and not heard, we were generally indulged--at any rate, the real lesson among so many boisterous French-Colombian-Irish American aunts and uncles was that you had better be really loud or say something clever and preferably insolent if you wanted to get anybody's attention in the first place. We all danced the can can to "tra-la-la-boom-di-ay" on New Year's Eve.

There was a Red Room, with the furniture and walls all done up in toile de Jouy and a real honest-to-goodness spinning wheel upstairs. The toys that had belonged to my mother and her siblings and grandfather were not particularly numerous, but far better than what passes for childrens' toys today--Madame Alexander dolls, a disturbing little monkey that clapped a pair of cymbals, clever little ivory dominoes in inlay casing from a store called the Blue Dwarf in Paris, grandfather's brightly painted lead soldiers. I always coveted those and wanted to have battles with them; my oldest male cousin got them and didn't let me play with them much. I must admit, though, in every other respect he was an exemplary older cousin--would always play hide and seek with the younger children and taught me to play Poker. While most children cheat at cards for their own benefit, he had the perversity to cheat to let me win the first time--a gallantry I appreciated not at all. I had been particularly obnoxious bragging
about my royal straight flush. With what shame I realized how ridiculous I had made myself, that he let me win. He laughed and I burned with the outrage of the most hardened criminal upon finding herself the victim of some petty chicanery. It was not an affront to property or to honesty; far worse, it was an affront to dignity.

There were French children's books from my grandfather's childhood. They were morality tales, though not morality in any Anglo Saxon sense of teaching children the value of "goodness." Goodness no, these were French children's books from some decades back. They preached the virtues, or more effectively, and much more fascinating, the horrible and creative punishments that awaited children who did not learn to conform to social expectations. One title, Les Gourmandises de Charlotte, the (Culinary) Excesses of Charlotte, told the story of a little girl who refused to eat anything but sweets. She shrinks and shrinks to a very small size and is kidnapped by a rat who forces her to be his servant and cook for him in his rat hole. She realizes the error of her ways, but overcompensates. She then becomes a very greedy little girl, turning very fat and obese. Finally, she learns moderation and to eat a normal diet, at which point she and her parents once again form a loving family unit.

Then there were the clothes that, surprisingly enough, I was allowed to play dress up with. The dresses belonged to some great-great grandmother. They came from dressmakers in Paris and another life--low cut ball gowns in ashes of rose silk broadcloth or gold damask, a royal blue velvet afternoon "for visiting and tea, Madame" jacket with lots of beading, accompanied by a royal blue taffeta skirt. My ancestor must have been very small-waisted and worn a corset to fit into those because they were even tight on a child's figure. I wasn't permitted to put on the good jewelry, there wasn't much of that left. After all, my grandmother did not marry the Prince, but I was allowed to look at a few good pieces and received a sort of early Colette education there--"Now dear, remember the good sapphires are dark in hue." I grew up not to care much for jewelry, doesn't reflect my lifestyle or practical nature. However, only now does the significance of that exquisitely useless bit of courtesan's knowledge strike
me...how to apply it? "Don't expect much from a man who offers you a pale sapphire. He's cheap and will short-change you?" Needless to say, gentlemen bearing sapphires never materialized, nor did I expect them to.

Ironically there was one instance, involving the world to which my husband belongs, a modern, scientific world, when this sort of background served me well. I accompanied him to a graduate conference at the University of Lund, in Sweden, where he was presenting some work on X-ray lasers. We were given a tour of their facilities. I was quite bored with x-ray lasers in general, but there was one point that piqued my curiosity about the thing-a-majiggys: they apparently use gems in them. Ah ha, something I could relate to. I asked a question about the color and hue of the gem in question, can't remember if it was a sapphire or ruby. Quite accidentally, it turned out to be a relevant question. We were, after all, talking about focusing rays of light and the hue of gems was significant there. People were impressed and I had the good sense to say nothing further. Grandmother would have been proud.

Dear me, I seem to have rambled along the passages of memory, puttering around the nooks and crannies of that house. I never got to the portraits. That was the subject on which I was meaning to write in the first place: the portraits of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, the French Revolution and how she came to drink the goblet of blood.

To be continued.

Just Breathe

There was a time in my life, when it seemed that there was time. How it seemed to exist, lots of lovely hours, lying there for the taking. In retrospect, those hours take on a voluptuous quality, a box of rich chocolates, to be unwrapped and selfishly savored one by one. Of course, it's so easy to romanticize that now, the irony being that at the time, I neither appreciated such leisure, nor did I put it to any particularly productive use. If it were a box of chocolates, I must have squandered those hours worrying about getting fat or indigestion. Looking back, I spent a lot of time worrying about things that now seem to have little significance and less importance. Of course, that's a perspective I could only have a few years down the road.

I find it surprisingly difficult to write about my children. On the one hand, there's the concern for their own privacy and then there's the fact that the parent-child relationship is one of those cultural themes so prone to mystification that it's usually best treated in fiction.

What do I remember from the first year of my twins' life? I mostly remember trying to survive the physical and emotional exhaustion that seemed to reach a level of perma-fatigue. It's amazing how quickly you forget (my daughter was three and a half when the twins were born) the way young babies can cry incessantly, even when you've done everything in your power to soothe them. Sometimes the only way to keep from going crazy was to draw a warm bath, get inside, keep the water running and hold my head under water for periodic intervals. You learn to appreciate simple things like the miraculous quality of silence, that moment when they eventually tire themselves out and fall asleep. There's no logic, no solution to that kind of crying.

The sort of education I received was worse than useless in this respect. I had been taught that the most respect-worthy thing a woman could do was to have a great career. There was not much said about raising children. That, by default, was most likely something any poor idiot could achieve. Or worse yet, there was that most pernicious myth foisted on women of my generation--Superwoman, the have it all girl. Ah what new and exciting possibilities for guilt she brings up. At least the women of earlier generations could blame society for limiting their options. With Superwoman, there's nobody to blame but yourself, if you're a working mother and you feel like you're doing a less than stellar job in both categories. Damn you Cokie Roberts, for the speech you gave when I graduated from Wellesely, all about your memories of your mother, the overachiever--the Congresswoman with a baby in one arm, drafting some important piece of legislation, dictating the menu for a fancy dinner party and redecorating the Georgetown mansion all at once. No, Cokie Roberts, you did not help.

Sometimes I did not need to block out the noise; I had the energy to navigate those difficult moments with my children. I discovered quite by accident that my baby boys liked to dance. They were small enough that I could hold one in the baby sling and the other in my arms--you'll try a lot of things to soothe fussy babies and occasionally you find one thing that works, which doesn't mean that it works for all children and not all the time for your children, but sometimes it clicks. Maybe the rhythm calmed them, maybe the twirling just made them dizzy. With abandon, we danced to Kate Bush's "Eat the Music."

Like a pomegranate
Insides out

All is revealed
Not only women bleed

Take the stone out
Of the mango
You put it your mouth
And pull a plum out

...Split 'em open
With devotion

You put your hands in
And rip their hearts out...

The song brings to mind King Lear and his "Pelican children." Do they cannibalize us or do we cannibalize them? Raising children is messy, carnal, both unnatural and natural. It is the gallows humor of having a sick child the day after Thanksgiving when there's one doctor on call and half the parent-child population of the city shows up, the fact that this is almost certainly where the older child picked up the flu she came down with three days later. It is the moment when you have one twin bleeding like a stuck pig from the toe and the other twin is knocking down a tower of CDs and your first thought is to take care of the bleeding child, not so much because he seems to be in pain or bothered by the blood (he isn't) but because you don't want to clean bloodstains from the wool carpet and you know you can always pick up the CDs later. It is those undignified conversations you can't believe you have with the older child. "No, you may not have another pack of shark bites. Well maybe you can have another pack of shark bites, but we have to do all the errands at KMart without you once asking for something. Got it?...No, it's not about what you want. It's about what you need. You asked for exactly four things at KMart. One, two, three, four, that's right...Ok, you can have shark bites when we get home, if you'll just be quiet in the car."

It's the time that creeps up on you, a peace that has to be found in between the bleeding toe, the crashing CDs, the bleating and the shark bites, that moment when you all lie on the floor exhausted but somehow happy...and you forget about getting things done and just breathe.

Bab-el Redux

In the process of nursing my wounded pride after previously mentioned encounter with the Teutonic Carpool Enforcer and feeling churlish, I looked up one of my favorite quotes attributed in various versions to a polyglot Carlos, that is Carlos V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500-1558). It wouldn't make it into any United Nations Day pageant, but Carlos V can get away with it because he is, well, dead and he did belong in some part to all the cultures enumerated.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Being a non-Italian-speaking woman, Carlos V wouldn't have been too successful communicating with me. However, with the ability to speak French and Spanish, I might possess the ability to communicate with men and God, but not, alas, with horses.

Apparently, even the most ignoble motives can come to some ironic fruition because in the process of looking up my Carlos V quote, I found these choice words.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. X

I'd have to agree with him on that one, although it does bring up the problematic nature of the Internet. There is no time, no place and I have absolutely no idea who my readers, if any, are. There's a French expression that translates to "Well known in one's own household--at meal times," but even my mother doesn't read me (she checked out the blog once, but got bored). So I don't so much as have that information to go on. At any rate, I hold my family entirely responsible for the fact that I write the way I do, having grown up in households and among people who existed in a sort of nowhere time and nowhere place somewhere between France, Colombia, and the American South, the eighteenth, nineteenth and earlier decades of the twentieth century, for whom the present reality was a relative distraction, a minor ripple, in the more powerful tides of their dreamy self-preoccupation and tendencies to float off on entirely satisfying and tangential currents...Lastly, if I do, in fact, have readers and, among them, word and language lovers, I offer them this and this link. I especially enjoyed the Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain citations from the first link.

Ride of the Valkyries

My daughter goes to a school that is quite successful when it comes to putting on United Nations day pageants emphasizing solidarity and diversity: "We are all one, we are all different, different is good." It even seems to do a good job at providing the children with an education, as far as I can tell--we are, after all, talking about a four year old. However, its one major failing and my own personal calvary is the car pool line. The first thing I have noticed about car pool, and perhaps this is not unique to my daughter's school, is that it makes practically no difference whether you arrive when school gets out or if you arrive fifteen minutes later. To get a good place, you have to get there at least fifteen minutes early and then it still seems to take forever.

To be fair they have a logistical challenge, given that the upper and lower school share the same car pool lane. On the one hand, you have a bunch of lollygagging adolescents who aren't exactly in a hurry to take a nose-dive down their coolness rating by hopping into the minivan or SUV with Mom. On the other, you have the lower school children who all have numbers and who are more or less efficiently shepherded into their parents' cars by attending teachers. As far as I could observe and this had been corroborated by another mother, cutting in line by lower school parents was permissible. Maybe I missed an important school communique on the matter; it's entirely possible.

Nevertheless, I was absolutely unprepared to be startled out of my radio-listening carpool stupor by the wrath of Brunhild, the German hausfrau Valkyrie this afternoon. She flew out of her car, shook her fist and shouted at me "You haff cut in line. This is not good. You haff cut in line. Now they will not have your child's number. You are slowing down the process."

It was the un-Americaness of her reaction that took me off guard. I have had plenty of people cut in line or do those sort of little annoying things to me, but I think the typical American way of dealing with it is to just steam about it internally and maybe one day get an ulcer or something. Of course, some Americans eventually do blow a gasket when it comes to driving etiquette issues and then they pop off the offending individual with a gun. But that's an extreme. Regardless of what they do about it, for an American, that sort of offense is almost always personal and has little to do with society at large. We care about when people are f*cking with Number One, not so much when they are f*cking with "the process." And back to Number One, how did it make me feel? Well, confused actually. I hadn't meant to be rude. I simply didn't know she was a lower school parent and that apparently, even if she hadn't been, that cutting in line was not allowed in the afternoon. And then I felt extremely sheepish to have somebody so blatantly point out that I was in the wrong. In fact I was starting to strongly identify with those lollygagging adolescents on the curb. I felt fifteen again, hearing some voice of authority query "Do you know what you did?" which is exactly the sort of unfair question that puts you off guard, when you are fifteen and may be f*cking up on a fairly regular basis. You aren't exactly sure "what you did" refers to and you sure as heck don't want to admit to the stuff they haven't gotten around to finding out.

My first reaction was to be rather defensive and snappish with her. Maybe I had been been in the wrong, but there was no need for her get so worked up about it. Get a life, lady. But I had to be fair, seeing the situation from her perspective I would have been irritated too. Of course, if I was going to have a confrontation I might not have made the assumption that the other person knew the rules that they were breaking or, even if I did, I might have tried to shame them into good behavior with a line like "Excuse me, you may not have realized, but you just cut in line..." or maybe that's just wimpy. I decided that I was going to try and disarm the Valkyrie. How long would she be able to sustain her anger against an unsatisfying target? I simply admitted "I'm sorry. I didn't realize that what I did was against the rules. In fact I'm not sure I understand the rules here. Thank you for pointing it out. I won't do it again." This seemed to work because she huffed and puffed a little, then threw her hands in the air and got back into the car.

Of course she was right. They had been able to read her carpool number so her child was quickly brought to her; whereas they completely overlooked me for a while. As she pulled away long before before I did, she couldn't resist one last parting shot "You see. They could not read your child's number." Poetic justice had been served. The rogue element slowing down the process had been brought back into the fold. She who had broken the rules had received her just due.

Bab-el

The nice thing about the occasional interactive nature of blogging is its tempering influence on egos. In that vein, I received the following communication from Carlos Villela, as a comment in Cameron's blog. "To Nathalie: will I ever read something you write, be it a comment or blog entry, without a single word in French mixed in, kinda like thrown in there just to piss off some of those who don't understand it? It seems like you're just trying to sound smarter/cultured, and, sincerely, it's not working."

Note to self: Carlos Villela is not impressed by me. And who is Carlos Villela?
Note to Carlos, if he does in fact read my blog: I hate to break it to you, but you're not the first. In my life so far, I have failed to impress many people. However, most of them don't write me petulant little notes about it. That was kind of special.

Some boys don't like being tied up in words by bluestocking girls. Some boys slip easily out of those words and use them to tie you up. And bluestocking might not be the kind of word the former would use anyway, which is a shame because they might enjoy it.

Mathematics might be sort of universal, but spoken languages most certainly are not. To study literature and writing is to be confronted with the knowledge that communication is an ultimately doomed enterprise. At the base level of linguistics, the signified (the idea which we are trying to express) never equals the signifier (the word or words with which we choose to express this idea). I was confronted with this issue at the hairdresser's today. The hairdresser was explaining to his assistant the intricate color combinations needed to blend a special shade of red for another client. She and the assistant were looking through magazine pictures and the hairdresser was enumerating--"a little light here, a little neutral base here, a little blue here..." At the same time, he appeared to be a little hard on his assistant. I asked him what seemed to be the problem, to which he explained "Oh no, he's been doing this for three years. He knows how to blend color. The only problem is I don't know if he sees her shade of red." And that is the root of the problem, isn't it? "Seeing red" is not as simple as one would think. There are infinite combinations that yield different tones and shades that fall under the category "red." Are you ever going to see "her shade of red"? And even if she knew what it was, would she be able to explain it to you?

The Biblical story of "The Tower of Babel" tells of a time when the whole earth was of one language, and one speech.

The people decided "...let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth...

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Ba-bel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis, Ch. 11, King James Bible)

Apparently "The Tower of Babel" is one of those things like the story of Noah and the flood: a myth that seems to recur in many unrelated cultures. The Hebrew name corresponds to "the gate to God," but the myth itself is a little ironic since, in Genesis, the tower did not receive its name until after the languages had been scrambled. United, they were finding their way "up to God," a curious anthropomorphism that eventually disappeared from the theology. When their speech was scrambled and they couldn't understand each other, the gate to God was closed. Who says the authors of the Bible didn't have a sense of humour? (these insights provided courtesy of Joe Ottinger)

To include bits of other languages in writing is about the failure of communication and a desire to piece together ideas, which cannot be expressed within the constraints of a single language or culture. And even within one language, there is the possibility of a degenerative/inventive quality that takes place at an individual or family level. A friend of mine told me how her family had a tendency to make up words, to the point that even today she says she is shy about using certain colorful words for fear of discovering that they're not really in the dictionary. In her case, her moment of mortification came during a Scrabble game with some aquaintances. I had a similar experience, but for a different reason. My story involved the fact that since I enjoy reading I occasionally start to assimilate words that I have never heard pronounced. If those words come from a language you don't speak, your odds of mis-pronouncing them are even higher. In my case, I can't remember the exact context, but it involved more learned people than myself and the intent to be witty and impress and some interjection of a reference to the muse Terpsichore. Only I pronounced it "Terp si-core." There was silence and then one of the gentlemen said "I think you mean "Terpsichore," prounounced "Terp-sickory" (as in rhymes with chicory). I turned very white and was subsequently silent.

In his introduction to the The Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson describes sound as too volatile and subtle for restraints. He equates "enchaining syllables" to "lashing the wind."

...no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life can be spent on syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express must often speak of what he does notunderstand...

Love, Actually

No, not the holiday movie starring Hugh Grant, which looks to be one of those feel-good pictures serving up stereotypes of upper-class English sensibility for consumption in the American market (maybe British people actually watch that stuff too, I wouldn't know). My husband couldn't be dragged to such a picture. However, being American to the core, I have a weakness for entertainment, even unencumbered by standards of good taste or authenticity. Naturally, I'll be going to see it with my girlfriends.

This had to do with one of the more unusual assignments of my writing career. My four-year old daughter had drawn a picture that she wished to offer as a birthday card, to one of the boys at her school. The picture appeared to be a flower with a sort of detached heart-shaped petal. However, I've learned not go there when it comes to interpreting childrens' art. One's protestations of "What a lovely goldfish bowl" are likely to be silenced by "Actually, it's Jupiter." At any rate, these are the words she dictated to me

Dear Justin "His Surname"
Happy Birthday to you.
Love,
"Her Name" Fleury
The Artist

The first thing that intrigued me was the naming issue: the fact that this wasn't just any Justin, it was Justin with a certain surname. Presumably, names go through waves of popularity and you want to make sure you are addressing the right Justin. Then there was her name. She has a Spanish name, but not a very common one. If you lived in Spain or South America it might have been the sort of name your grandmother or great aunt had. It's not as though she needed to worry about confusion, living in the US with a retro Spanish first name and French last name. But that's not the way a four year old would think. I think it must have had to do with establishing her unique identity, as given to her by others (her name), and as defined by herself (the Artist).

I had absentmindedly signed the "love" in the closing. Big mistake. When I read it back to her, she pitched a fit. "No you can't use that word. That wasn't the word I wanted." So I crayoned over it and wrote "from" in front. Well, children can be pretty perverse because then she decided "love" was what she did want to say, but this was beginning to look messy on the card. Adults like to think of childhood as a simpler time, but apparently semantics are very important to four year olds.

The first time I heard my daughter talking about this boy was in the context of "Justin is chasing the girls. Justin shouldn't be chasing the girls. Justin is now five, shouldn't he know better than to be chasing girls?" I explained that it takes boys a little longer to mature, which she accepted rather matter of factly. But the fact was that this Justin fellow had figured out how to get himself noticed. He had made it into the pantheon of boys that interest my daughter, featuring her "best boy," her "backup boy," "the boy from her new school", "the boy from Sunday School"...and "his brother!" Yes, my daughter has reconciled herself to religion now that she is picking up boys in Sunday School--how my husband smirked at that one.

It would also appear that life is, at the same time, simpler and more complicated at four. Or, maybe it's just more literal. Recently, my daughter told the babysitter "I've just been falling in love so much these days." The sitter, a little amazed, asked "Well, how have you been doing that?" to which, my daugther replied "Well, you know, first you fall...and then--you're in love." The sitter observed "Well, you must have a lot of bruises, then?" to which my daughter replied very matter-of-factly "Surprisingly, no."

Name Your Poison

Tea and colonialism do have a colorful history, but who would think that there could be anything controversial about tea drinking habits these days. Apparently there is.

You see, Earl Grey was a bigot. At least this was the argument put forth in my college dorm committee for ceremoniously removing that beverage choice from our cafeteria. In the early nineties, the popular libation to target for boycot by those with liberal leanings was Coca-Cola, due to their investments in South Africa. But Earl Grey? Frankly, given the fact that he was an eighteenth century British aristocrat, what would have been more surprising would have been the off-chance that he wasn't a bigot. From my brief Google search, he apparently was a poltical reformer, but that's not the point.

The point is that, at the end of the day, sometimes it's just bergamot-flavored tea.

I have to give certain people credit for sexing up the debate on open source because orgies and acid kool-aid sound far more intriguing.
Hmm, if you went as far as the electric kool-aid acid test, you'd even get a Tom Wolfe-y sort of flair.

Ironically, propaganda hack that I am, I personally can't seem to conjure up much enthusiasm for the topic. The debate generally falls into two categories. The first is overgeneralizing open source, which is generally recognized to be software released under an open source license. The problem there is that there are far too many permutations involving licenses, software to which the model is applied, associated business model and people involved in the various projects to say much of interest here. The second pitfall is the beauty pageant approach, which amounts to a listing of "people and projects I generally fancy" or, conversely, "people and projects that I feel deserve to rot." The latter offers some insight into the "I" in question and can be helpful depending on how one values the author's judgment, but it still fails to abstract out the issue of open source.

There are some arguments against Open Source that one sees time and again.

Not all talented engineers work in open source.
Well, there's no sport in arguing that one. True, especially considering the majority of open source projects don't pay and most of us have the burden of earning a living.

This second point is really a sub-point of the first. Loud mouthed, egotistical people are more likely to be idiots. There a lots of loud-mouthed, egotistical people in open source, therefore it must be populated by idiots.

Well I've got to hand it to the critics there--they've got a rich target. The truth is that the open source community does a great job of portraying itself as a bunch of whiny, immature kids and adults, consumed by their own self-importance. The only thing that would appear to exceed their own estimation of their self-worth and disdain for the outside community, would be the disdain the various members of the open source community express for each other. However, regardless of what the statistics say, and despite the fact that it might be a desirable thing, I have a hard time believing that the absence of natural modesty is the unique province of the untalented. I, myself, consider modesty an admirable virtue. Like so many in whom virtue is largely lacking, I absolutely do recognize and appreciate it in others. I love the virtuous. They are delightful people. They never trumpet their own horn, nor are they judgemental. Their very existence is an inspiration. Just being around them makes me want to go out and be a better person. It's a pity there aren't more of them.

There is no barrier to entry for open source: any hack can give it a shot.

Yes, that's pretty self-evident. But how many of the projects do you really need to succeed? The market eventually determines success. The project either gains market share or it doesn't. I am no expert in all the open source projects but I have a hard time believing that the project could be successful and be awful at the same time. And what if the code did suck? Did you pay any money for it? The worst you could claim is that you wasted your time. That's not going to get you too much sympathy. I'm sure more people waste time on IRC chats, forums and reading and writing blogs than they do fiddling around with Open Source. What really intrigues me is when people make comparisons between the source code in an open source project and a proprietary project--like JBoss and BEA. The only people who can make that claim are the developers who write the code for our proprietary competitors, and they're hardly going to be any less biased than we are.

People (especially the better developers) go to Open Source to learn. If you're using open source, you're a guinea pig for developers who are learning to get it right.

Geez, that wouldn't be something proprietary software companies do to their customers, would it? At any rate, in our field there weren't any veteran J2EE app server container designers when JBoss started out. Everybody was learning at the same time.

Anybody can commit code to an open source project. That is scary.

It is absolutely scary. I wouldn't trust an open source project that didn't tightly control its commits.

The pressures under which corporate developers work (read: if it don't work, your company and, eventually you, don't get paid) make them more likely to write quality software.

I agree there, unless the open source project has a tightly integrated, for-profit business model that pays the developers (not just third party investors) and effectively puts the same pressure on them that proprietary software developers experience.

Corporations are natural meritocracies. Thus, wanting to experience the rewards of their merit, the best developers tend to work for for-profit, proprietary software companies.

Well, I have to thank my critic friends for that one because it's every bit as laughable as me entering JBoss in some sort of Open Source "Miss Congeniality" contest. Yes, some corporations are meritocracies, but if there were so many of them I wonder why the movie Office Space was so popular?

Open Source borrows and builds on a lot of stuff. You don't know where it came from.

Well, isn't that the nature of modern software development, to build on the work of others? It's called not re-inventing the wheel. JBoss stands behind its software. Like HP for Linux, we will be offering an indemnification clause as part of our paying production support contracts.

Since most of us stand on the shoulders of giants and creatively appropriate and build on pre-existing traditions, what differentiates the successful from the clueless is what they appropriate--you want to make sure and take the sterling silver and the crown jewels, not the plate junk and the imitation paste baubles.

This final point brings me to my conclusion. The outside critics of open source falsely see it as being more exotic than it really is. Open Source did not appear out of thin air. Where do you think we got our good inspirations and bad habits from in the first place? In the business of profitable romance, the only differentiator is how high the stakes are that you play for and the sophistication with which you play. We're almost honest in our petty venality compared to the corporate masters of the game. One executive talks about "open source software crap." Well, I guess it's because we couldn't get away with selling certified, bona fide virtue or six figure proprietary software crap now, could we? And let's talk about the services business. We're just streetwalkers. It's the analysts who really inspire me. It's not even as honest as pay me and I'll say nice things about you; don't pay me and I'll trash you. Unless you're Sun or IBM, dealing with them is to realize what a provincial peasant might feel like when he visits the most expensive brothels in the capital. All that hard-earned money? Well, that just buys you a peck on the cheek and a squeal of self-righteous indignation about compromising certain ideals. You want love, wanna be "enterprise-ready," well sugar pie honey bunch that costs mucho money. Then you get dissed just the same; thrown out the door with insults from those "ladies". Wanna be my sugar daddy, get your sorry ass out of here and come back when you got lotsa cold hard cash to put on the table...There's a reason they call it the oldest profession.

The Opt-Out Revolution

This article from the New York Times, from which I excerpt the passage below, recently came to my attention.

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of
neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See
all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over
toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes
and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the
50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive
and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.

The article seems to ask two questions. First, why would educated women with promising careers leave the job force (actually the article is really talking about the corporate fast track)? Are they doing so to have children? Or, are they just using children as an excuse? Second, have these women somehow let down the cause of feminism?

The issues broached far exceed the scope of that one article. An interesting counterpoint might have been provided by examining the lives of women who persevered on in exactly the same careers these women left. What sacrifices did those women make, did they also have ambivalent feelings? Such an investigation might have pointed out what many of us instinctively know: raising children isn't exactly compatible with a sixty-plus-hour, scramble-to-the-top corporate workweek. If you wanted to have some presence in your children's lives and not outsource them to a nanny, are you realistically going to make partner in a top law firm? Equity partner? If you're a producer at a top network and escape each round of firing with your job intact, how secure's that job going to look after a few months off and a request for reduced travel and work hours?

The first inkling you get that it might be convenient to have a wife is in reading the different approaches to childbirth in women and men's blogs. The men tend to write the following sort of excerpt: "The young prince/princess and inheritor was born on such and such day," obligatory photo of the little cherub in a moment of angelic repose...and now back to grid computing or torts or whatever it is they blog about. The woman, however, never quite gets back to grid computing or torts or whatever it is she blogs about. Her accomplishments seem to take a landslide down Mazlow's hierarchy of needs and center on things like getting a shower before 4pm or tidying up the breakfast dishes or getting out of the house with the children. Men seem to be impressed by the event of childbirth, the pain and endurance; whereas, women soon learn that the real endurance event is the next eighteen years of their life, or maybe more, if you have a Latin sensibility. My husband tells me of a comic by the well-known Spanish cartoonist, Forges, with a man and woman lying in bed. The woman turns to the man and says "The child is crying. Why don't you go see about him." The man replies "El nino tiene quarenta anos" (the "child" is forty years old). To which the woman responds "Y tu no tienes corazon" (And you have no heart).

It's a wonder anybody who takes an active role in raising children or keeping up a house can put two thoughts together before the child gets sick, or the woman who looks after them is calling you because the evil spirit that inhabits the kitchen plumbing has finally had enough of the lint from the 1970s washing machine and backs up and floods every water-related kitchen appliance in the deluge from hell, or your child comes home with a note that she has been given a charity lunch because you forgot to turn in the form for that quarter's meal plan.

Issues of raising children aside, are women the only ones who might feel the corporate world is a little overrated? Or does the minority discussed in this article, upper middle class women with husbands who can and will support them, simply enjoy a lifestyle that many men secretly envy and would choose if dropping out of the corporate rat race were considered as socially acceptable for men as it is for women, and if they had the financial wherewithal and wives/partners who would support them? "Oh no dear, you don't need to go to work today...why don't you just go to the gym for a little, work on that tummy, relax in the sauna after your work out, meet your friends for coffee at Starbucks, play some video games, smoke a doobie, read something mentally enriching or maybe just rent some porn..." I guess you could even get used to the keeping up your personal appearance is part of your job thing--regular workouts, salon visits, manicures, pedicures, taking care of your skin, shopping. Oh wait, that's only the upper part of middle class. Is the middle class lot then suburban, minivan-driving, coupon-clipping hell? Or are we just talking caricatures and there are plenty of us who prefer to reduce our standard of living rather than do work we don't enjoy or allow work to take over the major part of our lives.

I remember my last year of college when I was going through the whole recruiting thing basically because I had no idea what to do with myself and I asked a good friend what her ambitions were. She replied, "Oh no, none of that's for me, I think I shall be content to continue my creative writing and subsist on academic grants." While the ghost of Cotton Mather might have been rattling around in some vestigial Protestant part of my psyche whispering vague sermons of how the wrath of God might smite those unencumbered by financial ambitions, I was secretly smitten with admiration at such audacity.

In English, for instance, the word retirement sounds extremely negative. Like something that no longer serves a useful function and has been "retired." In Spanish, in contrast, the word is "jubilado" or the overjoyed. I know of no English equivalents for the French "flaner," which always conjures up Baudelairian images for me--not just to stroll, but to amble along, with no purpose, no destination, lost in daydreams and the pleasurable passtime of detached observation. Of course, it helps if you have intriguing things to look at it. When I lived in the older part of Paris known as the Marais, I had a particular fascination with the blue glass bottles in an antique apothecary shop. What wondrous lotions, unguents, perfumes might they hold? Each bottle seemed to contain some sort of mysterious possibility, lost secrets from another time, all the more intriguing because unknowable. And the rhythm of the walk is punctuated by the sights and geography and other people you pass on a city street. From there it is easy to fall in love with rhythm and meter, to revisit imagery through the tumbling syllables in lines of verse.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those were pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding Dong
Hark now I hear them -- Ding dong bell.
(Shakespeare, The Tempest)

So when I see that "sea change" is one of those expressions that has gone and gotten popular for writing about technology, I immediately am skeptical. So, that old rotten idea will now undergo a "sea change" into a promising, high-potential, with-it kind of concept. And it's all good alchemy, but somehow it won't communicate my idea of "something rich and strange." Dammit where's the poetry? Where are the pearls, the bells, the sea nymphs?

There I've gone and done it...started one place, gotten to another, come to no real conclusion in between. And I had things to say about Bertrand Russell and Dr. Johnson, Virginia Woolf and feminism. More on them later. I have kids. And a job.

Fiona Apple is

f*cking annoying.

I wouldn't be this disappointed if I hadn't been hoping she'd be so cool. I had recently been thinking about what cultural and literary references I would pick as reflecting a strong female voice. Wanting to branch out beyond my own eclectic taste and random acquaintances in this domain, I asked the college girl who helps me out with my twins on the weekends who she really thought men should listen to if they wanted to get a clue. She said "Fiona Apple, definitely Fiona Apple."

On a Saturday morning not so long ago, yours truly is hanging out with the babysitter, while the children nap, singing along to Lady Marmalade, "go sister, soul sister, let it flow sister" as we suds off the outgrown car seats and baby stroller with bleach water and some mysterious solution I picked up at the hardware store that promises to remove every stain known to man from every surface known to man, based on a complicated system of ratios to the other two liquids. Now, only other parents can appreciate the value of a responsible babysitter. All the teenagers you would entrust your children to these days have really busy lives with athletics and extra-curriculars or their parents must give them more generous allowances, compared to the days I remember putting in hard work for $2 an hour, would do the dishes, and the $50 or so you could save up meant the difference between Guess jeans and whatever your mother might pick up at Sears. So I do feel lucky to have sitters that are hard-working, actually like my children and are personable to boot.

So my children's sitter tells me her story of the weekend. She was browsing through the poster section of the University of Georgia campus when whom should she see a poster of, but her first boyfriend. Apparently they met when she lived in New York and was going to the Lycee Francais. He went to the nearby Italian high school. He and his friends had a band and he asked her to sing with them, but she was too shy. Her family moved to Georgia and she lost touch with him until recently she realizes that he's the drummer with the Strokes (who frankly I had never heard of, but then I'm not a reference because I don't follow contemporary music that closely). Any way, I thought to myself, that is a good Almost Famous story because your ex-boyfriend could move on to Drew Barrymore and if you had joined his band you could be "On the cover of Rolling Stone." And I'm ten years older and the might-have-beens in my life don't even remotely come close to anything famous...which brings me back to Fiona Apple.

I decided to check out her two CDs. I have to say her voice was actually a nice surprise. It was stronger than I expected. Given the fact that she looks a little waifish, I was expecting less. In her lyrics as well, she could be said to represent a strong female voice. After all, some girls do go looking for wolves on the way to their grandmothers' houses...and are usually disappointed not to find them, because bad boys tend to run the hell away from girls like that. Alas, the criminal, damned and insane generally avoid those who are more demented than they are. So, ok, she's the bad girl "who's been careless with a delicate man"..."because she can" but now she regrets this, because he was "all I ever knew of love." Well, it was time for some revenge for all those "I done a good woman wrong" songs written by self-indulgent teenage boys and men.

I liked the image of the incomplete seduction in "The First Taste," and she has some nice rhymes, in the "The Child is Gone," for example

Cuz I suddenly feel like a different person
From the roots of my sould came a different coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone

Still, something was really bothering me about her music. "The child is gone?" I wouldn't bet on it, not with cliches such as "armour falling down" and "he finds a home in me" or the fact that in two albums, her songs all sound rather similar. That was it, it was the lack of thematic range that disturbed me. With one exception, all Fiona's songs are about angst. And that is where I smell a rat. Eminem? You're white trash, your mother's a crackhead, your girlfriend's a known slut and you live in a trailer? Yeah, I'll give you angst. But, seriously, how much angst can some pretty blond girl who grew up on the Upper West Side and had her first multi-platinum album release at eighteen really have experienced? Sure, the rich and beautiful have their problems too, but she doesn't sing about drug addiction, depression or psychotic families, the usual suspects there. She sings about unhappy love, the failure of communication and the fact that no man will understand what she's truly thinking. Well that might feel really compelling to Fiona, but I'm snoozing at this point. I'd give her two or three songs on those themes, but close to twenty? Oh, and this is too rich for words, I looked up the dedications on the back of her CD cover and lo and behold, there's "The Man--Andy, my Andy--thank you for you." What a poseur! What nerve, she's actually in some sort of seemingly good relationship. I bet she made all that tormented love sh*t up.

Granted, compared to a contemporary like Paris Hilton, Fiona's got some depth, but you still gotta wonder what happens to these kids who are so sophisticated, blase, world-weary and seen-it-all at eighteen. What will they have to say when they're in their thirties?

Writing and Seduction

Is writing about seduction? I think good writing almost certainly is. While the word seduce is most frequently attributed a sexual connotation in English, there are two other definitions: 1) to lead astray, as from the right action 2) to win over, attract, allure. The word is derived from the Latin "seducere," to lead apart, from "se," away, and "ducere," to lead (Collins English Dictionary, 1979).

The first seduction and, many would argue, one of the most compelling seduction references in Western literary tradition is none other than the Serpent's Tempatation of Eve in Chapter 3 of Genesis.

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked: and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (King James Bible).

Michel Gresset examines the role of christian theology in founding a "psychologie du regard" (the French word "regard" as both a verb meaning "to look" and a noun meaning "glance" or "gaze" is problematic to translate into English as it tends to be more comprehensive than any English equivalent I can think of) in his book Faulkner ou la Fascination. According to Gresset, if the Fall has for theological cause temptation, it derives its phenomenological cause from the act of looking. "Before the fall, Adam is innocent; Eve is naked but she doesn't know it. Paradise is beautiful, but it isn't seductive." Before man gained the faculty of sight, there is only the world as God created it, and no staging is possible beyond that which God wishes to see. The demon uses the eye of the serpent as an instrument of seduction, of leading away, because he knows that nudity signifies nothing if it is not looked upon. The serpent diverts Eve's gaze, turns it upon the apple, and awakens in her a desire for the forbidden fruit. The eye is the organ of substitution, not of satisfaction. When Eve eats of the fruit and shares it with Adam, the arc of desire is completed as they move from gaze to consommation, in the shared act of transgression (Gresset, Faulkner ou la Fascination, 1982).

Milton's serpent is one of my favorite literary seducers. He comes to Eve in a dream and calls into question the beauty of a Creation that none can "see." He awakens in the woman the desire to truly see the world around her, "to have her eyes opened," by first leading her to believe that she, herself, is seen and desired.

Thy face, and morn returned; for I this night
(Such night till this I never passed) have dreamed,
If dreamed, not, as I oft am wont, of thee,
Works of day past, or morrow's next design,
But of offence and trouble, which my mind
Knew never till this irksome night: Methought,
Close at mine ear one called me forth to walk

With gentle voice; I thought it thine: It said,
'Why sleepest thou, Eve? now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns
Full-orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; Heaven wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, Nature's desire?

In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.'
(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

But I have let myself become distracted, seduced perhaps by phenomenology and poetry and my readers are possibly practical people, with little time for either, so back to the point. If we take Genesis as literary reference, the first seduction had to do with with man wanting to comprehend his place in Divine creation and wanting to rival the Creator; it had to do with "opening of eyes" and knowledge that would allow one to "be as gods." One might suppose that Paradise was rather chaste (if we ignore what the beasts might have been doing) because the serpent's seduction and the Fall preceed the passage "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain..." which denotes, not the creation of the world, but the creation of the human race and the beginning of history.

When we write, we create worlds or amplify and share worlds created by others. If we exclude the moral or value judgment implicit in a supposed separation from Good and a venturing towards Evil, seduction is simply a leading apart, a diversion from ordinary perceptions. It is an attempt to make others "see" what we see: places, states of mind, ideas, connections between things they might otherwise have ignored. Effective writing communicates and transmits the pleasure of images and sounds, hints at knowledge, leads us, makes us want to think or to see things in a different way.

School Daze/Interview Story

Kindness From Strangers

Thank you, Chiara. I like her best when she communicates her enthusiasm for the things about which she is passionate, when she tells stories, shares her quirky sense of humor or shows the courage to talk about non-mainstream subjects. I like to see debates on ideas. I can appreciate criticism of people's words and actions; I don't like to see personal attacks.

I can understand Chiara's feelings about the French educational system. Like so many would-be utopias, it often fails. Is it an attempt to correct the flaws of some other system, to replace a hereditary aristocracy with a technocracy selected through a brutally competitive and often mean vetting process, whose selection criteria changes over time? I don't know. As an
American, I escaped being categorized by a system to which I didn't belong.

On the other hand, in the US, I wouldn't have been able to get a Masters degree for $600 a year and I wouldn't have gotten to spend hours in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I did get to know some of the Normale graudates (not the professors who are more distant than their American counterparts), but the other grad students and the participants in the conferences. They were wacky in their own sort of passionate way. They challenged me and I couldn't help but respect the fact that here were people who'd never spent any prolonged time in an English-speaking country, who were interested in my culture, and who could write impressive papers on Faulkner in flawless English.

School Daze/An Interview Story

The teachers who most inspired me were those who were passionate about what they taught, who encouraged and who taught by example. "No, you ignorant little snot, U2's 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is not an appropriate choice for an essay; try John Donne" never inspired me to read John Donne. It would be years after that before I'd pick up John Donne, which was a shame because I like John Donne.

Apparently, some engineering schools have some non-sciences requirements similar to the ones that sent innumerate people like me to classes informally referred to as "physics for poets" to graduate from a liberal arts college. My husband told me about one such class "X,Y" by Elisabeth Badinter, which probably attracted the minority of students seriously interested in gender issues and, let's face it, the larger contingent of mostly male engineering students looking for a nice vacation from "calcul variationnel" and a chance to fantasize about Mme. Badinter (as she might have looked over 10 years ago). Well, whatever the motives may be, we can always learn something.

I haven't read her book , but as explained to me, it had to do with the cultural definition of masculinity" Examining the changing role models for masculine identity--from cowboy in the 1950s to Terminator in the 1990s, from flesh-and-blood man to machine." Apparently, masculinity might be something that had to be proven. I had never really thought two seconds about common expressions like "Be a man" or "Boys don't cry" since they didn't strictly involve me. On the other hand, apparently, femininity might be a given. As a girl, I had occasionally been told "Be a lady." However, this had to do with conforming to certain social niceties--like don't rip a whole in that nice lace dress we've starched up for you to wear to your uncle's wedding because you're playing tag with your sibling and cousins. No one ever tells you "Be a woman". Melanie from Gone With Wind might have been a lady, but Scarlet most definitely was a woman.

Might it be a vacation to be a woman? Can you get away with more things as a woman? What might it be like to be a smart woman, as I saw in one comment on this blog. I can't answer the question of what it might be like to be a woman, smart or otherwise. I only know what it might be like to be myself.

I was once asked that question, not the woman part, but the smart part, in a job interview my last year of college. This came from the gentleman, who was then head of Citibank's Global Derivatives. He said "So tell me Miss Mason, are you smart?" He said this in an accent reminiscent of Mr. Kobayashi in film, The Usual Suspects.

Why a person, whose unique experience with derivatives involved one semester of college calculus and not the financial instrument, would be at this interview takes some explaining. It had something to do with not knowing what I wanted to do, the rather limited recruiting offerings at my college, usually involving insurance company training programs, investment banking and management consulting, and some vague feeling that I should justify the cost of my education and find gainful employment (a subsequent brief experience there would send me rushing back into the warm embrace of academia). If I hadn't f**ked up the first part of the process--missing the on-campus interview because I didn't pay attention to the rescheduling, I would not have pursued this job any further. However, there's some perverse instinct in situations where I've failed something or not made the cut, where I find surprising motivation to prove that I was, in fact, worthy.

How to overcome such an unpromising start? Did Mr. R give me an hour of his time because I was a woman? Unlikely. No, he gave me an hour of us time because I told a lie. Did I lie about my background? That could have been easily verified. No, I lied about my desire for the job, in a masterpiece of falsehood, dripping with cliches. I was a bit ashamed, but I was also unemployed. Surprisingly (or not), it worked. His office never called me back, but I was going to be in New York anyway for another company's interview, once again involving no direction on my part, beyond the fact that the campus recruiting meeting offered some more tasty looking hors d'oeuvres than the usual fare at our cafeteria. So, I informed Mr. R's secretary that I would be in the city at such and such date and looked forward to talking to him. A day later she called me back with a scheduled time.

Now, there's a world of difference between being a writer and being an actor. If there's one thing I am not, it is an actor. Once I was in that office with Mr. R, I felt very small and out of place. His question took me aback. Yes, I was smart about certain things, usually involving arcane bits of knowledge in which few people are interested and for which fewer are willing to pay. Then, there are plenty of things about which I am not smart. I knew enough to know that when you don't know the answer, always ask a question. "Well, Mr. R, how do you define smart?" I got some more information there, "Street smart. Tell me a story that proves you're street smart" he said. Even then, I knew that most interviewing isn't about truth. It's about giving them the answer they want to hear. With the perspective of time and experience, the answer there would have been to assume the Cowboy persona: "Damn straight, I am. It's not about the money. I absolutely live to kick *ss in the financial markets," and then I should have added some hastily improvised story, borrowed from a newspaper article no doubt, about how I might have almost been mugged in the South Bronx, but got the best of my would-be muggers and we all wound up drinking a toast at the local saloon. It only occurred to me, a good ten years later, that a dapper Indian gentleman working in the financial markets might not be any better off on the streets of the South Bronx than I would have been.

At the time, however, I was absolutely at a loss for words and no good street smart stories, real or imaginary, were coming to mind. Since the silence would have been even more awkward, I talked about the one thing I did know something about. My undergraduate thesis (now mouldering in some forgotten corner of my college library) had to do with issues regarding personality and artistic theory. One piece of writing that had always interested me was Samuel Johnson's treatment of "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination" in a chapter of Rasselas. For Johnson, imagination springs from discontent with the world as it is and he equates the predominance of imagination over reason with insanity. He believed that most of us spend our time reminiscing about the past or daydreaming about the future, so that the present is almost always lost. He envisioned both a positive imagination, which robs people of the ability to enjoy a reality that can never correspond to the magnificence of their daydreams and a negative imagination (as demonstrated by fear), which destroys the peace of the present by causing individuals to focus on "evils recollected" and "evils anticipated." (Disclaimer: these brief notes hardly do justice to Johnson or Rasselas, if you are interested in this topic and the remedies he proposes, by all means read him ).

Well, talking about imagination and its relation to time and the inability to live in the present is one thing guaranteed not to get you a job in global derivatives. At this point I had blown it and I knew it. Since my future employment was no longer at stake, I relaxed and decided to make the most of this hour Mr. R and I had to spend together. What might it be like to be a Head of Global Derivatives? Well Mr. R told me his story and it was interesting. I asked him what was the one thing he would do differently if he had more time in his life. He told me that that would be to study philosophy. We left on good terms and never saw each other again.

Cherchez la femme...

***Warning*** You did not come here through javablogs. You will find no insights about java, or about technology at all for that matter. I am not an open source diva. The views I advocate are purely my own and those of the shop around the corner that I work for. I'm not a diva at all. I can't sing. I have occasionally been called a brat. You will not find truth or beauty here. If you are still reading at this point, you can only blame your idle curiosity, and we all know where that leads...

Some one actually accused me of writing this blog to promote my husband. I assure you (as will she) that I'm not that clever. Veramente Chiara, si non e vero, e ben trovato.

On m'accuse?...I wonder if the Valerie Plame thing is a reference to me. Of course you can never be sure, it would be a little self-absorbed to think so (people always make that mistake when JBoss people communicate--take things personally that have nothing to do with them), although I do have twins. Well that Valerie Plame reference actually seems rather nice. I guess 31 is a bit long in the tooth to play the chick from Alias. Of course, if I was going to do a jibe at me, I would have come up with some far more disturbing mothers of twins like her or her. And then, if I were married to a French ambassador, he might have had to have attended this school. I'm an American, so I just thought I married a boy from a polytechnic.

I also thought my better half was out running terrorist training camps, but it would appear that we've joined the Establishment. And then, it would appear that afer a raucous night in the dissolute life of a mostly single mother involving being woken up at multiple hours by barking dog and twin A and then twin B (being such clever, cutting edge technology people, we produced a high availability, failover configuration) until about 5:30 at which point the four year old crawls into bed and then the night is over...in my spare time I may have contributed to a war. In this sorry situation, do I have any advice to offer?

Yes I do. In the spirit of Chicago, to all you men out there, if you see domesticity on the horizon, run from it..."Stay away from dogs and children and girls who play for keeps."

JBoss PR, redux

Joe Ottinger writes that a more fitting end to my last piece might feature the Jeff Beck quote: "You'll get yo ass bit."

Since I'm not very musically sophisticated, Joe provides the following background information. "He recently put out an album (called "Jeff!") that has a cover that looks like this: a stick, with a single string (of twine!), and the "body" of the "guitar" has a note, and I'm paraphrasing: "This gitar belong to a hilbily named jeff an if you fine it you better give it back or u will get yo ass bit."

I most definitely will have to familiarize myself with the Jeff Beck oeuvre. However, Joe, I think you're missing the point. Are you confusing style with intent? If you want masochism for the masses, go read Hani. What part of our business model don't you understand? We're not about giving it away now. "Customers pay."

...and I'm not sure that kind of service is in our published pricing scheme, but if it was, it would be very expensive...people always seem to be confusing Professional Open Source with the human fulfillment business. That must be why they're so disappointed when they get to know us.

JBoss Group, could we be any worse at PR?

The answer is a resounding no, absolutely not. We work hard to be this bad. Most people don't understand what a full time job that is. It's a competitive landscape out there. You've got terrorism, crooked politicians, corporate greed, genocide, environmental pillage...it was a close contest, but apparently we did make it into the Pantheon of all Evil, along with George W. Bush and Microsoft. Take that, all you luke-warm, half-hearted weenies out there. You'll have to go to therapy now, because the rest of you are just "Not quite evil enough." Our only regret is that we are only infamous in the J2EE geek ghetto. We'll be talking to our new friends Dubya and Bill Gates about that.

Take insulting people, for example. Why is that hard work? I'll tell you why. It takes a politician's sensibility to remember all those names and situations. People want to feel special, singled out. You can tell them right away, that dazed and confused look on their face, the story they've rehearsed to themselves several times over, the fact that they're still pinching themselves to make sure it really happened. They just can't wait to spit it out. "So and so [member of or affiliated with JBoss Group] was rude to me."

I want to help them, I really do. I hate to be insensitive here, but how can I say it. We're rude to a lot of people, preferably those that could be useful in promoting our product or services. I have a hard time keeping track of what we do. It really pains me to watch people be disabused of their illusions, see them realize that there is no memory of the name, time, context or what was said. It ultimately dawns on them; there wasn't anything special or unique about their outrage, about what took place. Worse yet, there wasn't anything Personal...we just talk a lot of trash.

This is even more perverse, but you can get a reputation. People read about us and they're expecting to be insulted, they're just waiting for it to happen. It's the P.T. Barnum phenomenon. They want to pay their dollar and confirm the full horror of everything they've read. And then if we don't insult them, they can get extremely offended...like they weren't even worth telling off or something. You just can't win in this business.

How do you spin such unpromising material? Well, even we can't be all things to all people. Any vice taken to its logical extreme, excludes others, which leaves us with "JBoss Group: Obnoxious, but not ass-kissers."

Disclaimer: We have a real PR agency, Schwartz Communications. They are a pleasure to work with and very professional. They are often shocked by a lot of what we do. Anything good you read about us is due to them.

Note: To all would-be bilers. You're going to have to work harder to impress me. I'm a Southern girl, born and bred in the briar patch, a mother of twins, in which domestic bliss, I've seen horrors from which the intrepid would shrink and been biled on more times than you can count. Some of you will be bemoaning the good ole days of Sys-con spam, when you find yourselves on our annual JBoss Group Holiday card distribution, featuring a group glamour shot of all our ugly faces, and updates on our children.

JBoss, In the Porn Business?

Once upon a time on an online forum, there was an interchange between an open source developer and a "user" of the product on which he worked, the distinction between user and customer being of some importance in this interchange. When the free help the user wanted was not forthcoming, he proceeded to insult the developer and the product. At this point the developer insulted him back using some choice, off-color words. The episode is certainly in bad taste. However, more interesting than the incident itself is the fascination it seems to hold for those not directly involved.

Are we in the porn business? One would wonder, judging by the number of times that particular incident gets referenced in JBoss threads in public forums and by the fact that even some of the more jaded members of the Java blogging community seem to get hot and bothered about it.

You see, your normal problem in the open source business is not people thinking you're degenerate; it's that people think you're stupid. These would be Sherlock Holmes love to point out the fact that "Ah hah they're not really in this just for peace and love, they have the audacity to want to make a profit"--as if this was some great secret and not something amply referenced in our website and official communication. Then there are the people who equate Open Source with open business. These are the people who write asking for free unlimited licenses to our training material or tell us "You give your software away, where's my free service?"

Nonetheless, if you were in the porn business, against whom would you measure your success? Well, since gonzo "Girls Gone Wild" soft-core porn mogul Joe Francis has been in the news lately, why not compare his business model to that of gonzo JBoss Group Open Source entrepreneur, Marc Fleury.

Business Premise
Joe F: Open Blouses, business based on getting all-American girls to take their shirts off.
Marc F: Open Source, business based on getting top-tier developers to open source their code.

Profit Margins
Joe F: $1000 a day for camera crew, pays girls up to $100; most are apparently just happy to get a free t-shirt. Tapes retail for around $20.
Marc F: Service industry profit margins that subsidize a free product.

Net Worth
Joe F: Upwards of $100 million.
Marc F: Nowhere near $100 million.

Possible pick up lines
Joe F: Want to see my Gulfstream jet?
Marc F: Want to talk about AOP?

Hangs out with
Joe F: rappers, Ashton Kutcher, Tara Reid.
Marc F: wife, children and other developers.

In terms of revenue and lifestyle, professional open source clearly has quite a ways to go before catching up with the adult entertainment industry.

So what does telling someone who insults you to get lost, in no uncertain terms, really signify in a world where, as Bob Dylan says, "You gotta serve somebody"? Maybe it does have something to do with power and self-determination, setting your own rules and boundaries, deciding whom you'll work with and what you'll do. And when you do it, maybe it's about making sure you get paid.

The gentleman to whom the post was originally addressed, in a context that is almost always removed from the reference by subsequent posters, did not take this interchange literally or particularly seriously. Marc and Ben from JBoss met him a year ago. He works for Nielsen Media Research. We are grateful to him for his role in successfully introducing JBoss to Nielsen, who are now happy users of JBoss and customers of JBoss Group.

As for those people to whom this post was not addressed, who are yet fixated on it...they have received their free service. Oh virtue, how dull, perhaps unremarked? would you be were there no somber foil to set off your bright sheen. In a world of crass vulgarity, how much nobler it would be to luxuriate in the onanistic concupiscent bliss of moral superiority.

Hometown

How easily are we marked by the visual and cultural landscapes of the places where we come of age. Growing up, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Atlanta. Yet in every place I lived afterward I found myself longing for the rolling hills and tall hardwood trees of the Piedmont Plateau.

I've heard it said that Atlanta's a fast buck town. You can come from nowhere and be somebody in Atlanta in no time. Maybe that's true. There's no historic district the way there is in more genteel Southern cities like Savannah and Charleston. The developers own the city and they're too busy blasting away the past to make way for progress. It's a city in love with its own mythologies--the Phoenix that rose from the ashes after Sherman's army burned it down, the "City too busy to hate," "the New South" (forward-looking, progress-oriented as opposed to the old "backward" South).

Atlanta is only the latest incarnation in the city's nomenclature. Bordering no major waterway, the city is a pure phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century. Originally called Terminus, it was the end of the line for the railroads. For a while, it was called Marthasville after one of the governors daughters, before the city fathers decided that it had too much of a provincial ring. It's uncertain whether Atlanta is a derivation of Atalanta or a reference to the city of Atlantis. There are two axes to the city's identity. The one driving forward with irrepressible energy, the rough and ready railroad town morphed into a modern transportation hub, the indomitable spirit to rebuild itself from the ashes and bend nature to its will, sprawling outward with no natural boundaries to constrain. The other, more Southern, languorous, the part that knows what it's like to be occupied and is committed to the principle of noble failure because to have succeeded would have somehow meant compromising one's ideals, the part that looks inward and back in time to a mythological past that has to constantly re-invented to serve the needs of the present.

So, what monuments might exist in such a place as Atlanta? It is always a challenge to find some spot tourist-worthy to take out-of-town guests when they come to visit the city, which is how I one day found myself at the CocaCola museum, a most interesting tour of modern American iconography.

The visitation experience is somewhat like an interactive science museum. Lights are dimmed and there is a progression through the Coke memorabilia section. This wistfully recreates '30s and '40s soda fountains and country store Coke signs, with the unforgettable illustrated period-look in the ads, smiling, plump-faced Norman Rockwell-type American girls and boys. It harks back to a time when life was simpler and better, and to values and a way of life worth fighting for. Ten years later, in one of my favorites scenes in the cold war satire, Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Bat Guano refuses to shoot the CocaCola machine to liberate some change, even though nuclear war is at stake. The message: Commerce is sacred.

We then journey from the past into the stylized Future with robotic soda fountains dispensing improbably colored, exotic Coke-family libations from around the world, with neon laser lights and proto-techno whooshing sounds. Commerce is not only good, it is Global, messaging is picked up in the film section

Back then, Roberto Goizueta was still alive and the CEO of the CocaCola company, the scion of a Cuban sugar planting family who went on to head the world's largest sugar-water distributor. In the film short, he looked to be in his early sixties, tall, sleek and cosmopolitan in a dark suit. He spoke in a sophisticated sort of accent common to rich people from foreign parts educated in top American universities--the high priest who was going to initiate you into the mysteries of the Global Brand.

Cut to panoramic views of smiling natives from around the world happily sipping CocaCola: camel herders against the backdrop of the Egyptian Pyramids, Nepali children in the mountains, Africans, Asians, perhaps even some French staged against the Eiffel Tower. These scenes are set to the nostalgic, old-timey Coke jingles I remembered from my childhood: "I'd like to buy the world a coke," "Have a coke and a smile," "Things go better with Coke," "Coke is it," "The Real thing."

I immediately felt better. Want to feel connected? Need a socially acceptable upper? Looking for something genuine or do you just want to be happy? My answers were all there. I wasn't from some two-bit railroad town; I stood at the grand cathedral of commerce, a member of the global family of consumerism, worshipping the transubstantiation of sugar water.

I think I stopped at the gift shop on my way out the door.

On the Pull of Solar Orbit

Will Sun finally make an honest app server out of JBoss? Why does the community care?

Bona fide, certified, sanctified, washed in the blood of the lamb...whew-ee, our heads are so big already, I'm not sure we could handle that kind of validation. But seriously, how did we go from "We do not know that app server, JBoss," to possible epithalamion? We may get to join the family. And what a warm cozy group that promises to be. They could even use the tag line from the Sopranos, "J2EE, family redefined."

Well, families stick together and that's apparently what's needed in this situation. That's right. Better toe the line, children, or Bill Gates will murder us all while we sleep. The restless eye in Redmond wants fresh conquests. How convenient it is to have our common enemy to trot out, in the interests of policing the heterodoxies within.

Like the traditional institution of marriage, this certification seems to hinge more on the exchange of money than technical virtue. And what is this money needed for? Marketing, that's right. Java needs to be marketed. Individuals praising their own product: bad, duplicitous, hubris. Vast anonymous corps of corporate marketing: truthful, good. Can I have fries with that? Will we see it on the Super Bowl? Cause we all know the real reason y'all went into Java programming. That's right, because Christina Aguilera thinks it's cool.

So, in return for paying out some lucre, we get to bear the official name. And what power naming conveys. When you think that by the simple act of re-naming things (as opposed to re-engineering, which sounds like a lot of hard work) you give them a new lease on life. Renounce Satan and all his works, be christened into the Java family and all the sins of your past life will be washed away.

But we've had so much fun being bad. Can our relationship survive communal sanction and legitimacy? Where will all the love and passion go?