Midnight in the Villa Straight, Part 2

Marie-France Tessier as Scheherazade

In the prelude to A Thousand and One Nights, or the story of the ensuing stories, King Shahriar is the happy ruler of a prosperous land until he learns that his wife has betrayed him. Determined that no woman can be trusted, each day he orders his Grand Vizier to find him a beautiful young woman whom he marries and beheads the following morning. Hardly a family in the city has been spared, until the Vizier's oldest daughter, Scheherazade, asks for her father's permission to be the King's next bride. Scheherazade comes upon the ruse of telling a story her wedding night. By morning she has reached the most exciting part, so that in order to hear the end of the story, the King is forced to postpone her death. That night Scheherazade continues her story and weaves another one right into it. At dawn the King is again left wondering how it will end and is forced to postpone her death once more. This goes on week after week, month after month, year after year, for a thousand and one nights, in which time the King forgets his sorrow and desire for revenge.

Postponing death preoccupies both Marie-France Tessier and Ashpool, founders of Neuromancer's Tessier Ashpool clan and the eponymous multinational, Tessier-Ashpool SA. While both seek immortality, they differ in the paths they choose to achieve this end. Marie-France Tessier believes the future lies in a symbiotic relationship between the family and the two artificial intelligences (AIs) she has commissioned. In return for ceding their conscious decisions to the AIs, "Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity." Ashpool, on the other hand, believes in a vision of immortality through cryogenic freezing: "a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter."

At first glance, it would seem that Ashpool's vision prevails. Unlike Scheherazade, Marie-France does not escape murder. She is dead before the story begins. However, this is a technological ghost story. Making no appearance in the story, Marie-France nevertheless manages to perpetuate her vision and drive the plot through the capacities she has designed into the family AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. "Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside." Neuromancer, on the other hand, is something "like a giant ROM construct for recording personality, only it's full RAM. The constructs think they're there, like it's real, but it just goes on forever." Wintermute can only communicate with humans by taking on the appearance of others; whereas, Neuromancer has his own appearance, that of a thirteen year old boy. The boy/Neuromancer explains that his name is an amalgam of neuro, for nerves, romancer (storyteller), and necromancer, one who calls up the dead.

The central action of Neuromancer revolves around the attempt to break through the Tessier Ashpool ice, a high-security firewall protecting the corporate and family IT infrastructure. Breaking through the Tessier Ashpool ice will mutate the Tessier Ashpool family destiny, to the degree that the family, the company, their orbital colongy Freeside, and the family seat Villa Straylight all represent different facets of the same organic growth. The "dome of Tessier Ashpool ice" that Case sees as he is attempting to crack into their network brings to mind Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dream-vision poem, Kubla Khan, which begins at the point of disintegration. The author writes that the poem came to him in an opium trip dream/reverie. As he sat down to record the images, he was detained, so that when he returned to recording his vision it was as though "the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast." So the poem is all about recreating something that has been lost. Like the Tessier Ashpool vision and its embodiment in the Villa Straylight, Kubla Khan's "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" is the rather tenuous creation of a mad visionary.

...I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware, Beware!
HIs flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

(Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

In Neuromancer, the interrelation of the Tessier Ashpool mind, their physical architecture and their network architecture is manifested in the following passages: Case cracking the AI defenses "The roof of his mouth cleaved painlessly, admitting rootlets that whipped around his tongue, hungry for the taste of blue, to feed the crystal forests of his eyes, forests that pressed against the green dome, pressed and were hindered, and spread, growing down, filling the universe of T-A, down into the waiting, hapless suburbs of the city that was the mind of Tessier-Ashpool S.A."

"In Straylight, the hull's inner surface is overgrown with a desperate proliferation of structures, forms flowing, interlocking, rising toward a solid core of microcircuitry, our clan's corporate heart, a cylinder of silicon wormholed with narrow maintenance tunnels, some no wider than a man's hand...The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull...We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seemless universe of self. (from Lady 3Jane's Essay)."

"Straylight was crazy, was craziness grown in the resin concrete they'd mixed from pulverized lunar stone, grown in welded steel and tons of knickknacks, all the bizarre impedimentia they'd shipped up the well to line their winding nest."

With Neuromancer, Gibson may have invented cyberpunk, but he also borrows, and mixes with the futuristic, many conventions from a genre that is the opposite of futuristic--the Gothic novel, as reflected in the novel's liberal use of archaic references, the importance placed on the setting of the Villa Straylight and the general ambiance of decay, dementia and decadence. '"Gothic' originally referred to the Goths, a Germanic tribe, then came to signify "germanic," then "medieval"....authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages and sliding panels, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurences...The term "Gothic" has also been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events which are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states." (A Glossary of Literary Terms, M.H. Abrams).

The Villa Straylight functions as a sign referring to the Tessier-Ashpool family's rejection of the outside world in their attempt to create a self-contained universe. The villa's winding, burrowing passages are meant to draw the eye inward, so that even the last rays of light become lost in its labyrinthine structure. The Villa Straylight's topography is not unlike Scherazade's narrative in A Thousand and One Nights, with its stories within stories, passages from this world into the magic realm, often by route of seemingly banal objects...lamps that call up the jinn, wooden horses that fly, secret passageways, doors hidden behind tapestries, golden keys that fit into silver locks, magic passwords. Things are not what they seem: an island with palms trees turns out to be the back of a giant whale, subjects fall asleep and dream that they are the caliph and wake to discover that they were the caliph for a day. Boundaries are hard to determine, motifs recur, stories flow into each other. The listener forgets his original destination, seduced into a detour within a detour.

Thresholds or liminal spaces between the "real" world and the alternate world of "cyberspace" recur throughout Neuromancer. One of the reasons that I was interested in reading this book was curiousity regarding the attributes Gibson would have assigned to cyberspace, upon coining the word in 1983. Gibson describes cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination." In A Thousand and One Nights and similar folktales, one enters the "other" world through a magic door, a hidden cave, falling down a well; in Gibson's gloss on this age-old concept, the instrument of passage is the computer console. Another recurring threshold in Neuromancer, which lends an impression of the uncanny, is the division between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The protagonist Case's guide to cyberspace and cracking the Tessier Ashpool ice is Dixe Flatline, so named because he flatlined for several minutes in a past encounter with the Tessier Ashpool Rio AI. Flatline is no longer even alive, he's a ROM construct. Two passages in Neuromancer suggest that Case, from whose perspective the story unfolds, may also be a "flatline." The first such passage is the sequence where he meets Neuromancer, the personality AI, and interacts with the contruct of a Moroccan beach, abandoned bunker and his former lover. Neuromancer says that he "calls up the dead" and that Case is in "the lane that leads to the land of the dead." Case, himself, theorizes that he has flatlined at this point and that his brain is dead. He makes the choice not to permanently reside in Neuromancer's fantasy land. However, the book's ending calls into question Case's grasp on reality when, in a later cruise into cyberspace, alongside the two "tiny, impossible" figures of the boy Neuromancer and Linda, his dead lover, he sees--himself.

Freud defines the uncanny as that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Writing in German, he talks about the relationship between "heimlich," homeley, "heimish," native and the "unheimlich," literally "unhomely," which translates in English to "uncanny." A common convention in literature of the uncanny is that of the unreliable narrator. The reader must be left in doubt as to whether the events described by the narrator are "real" or simply the delirium of the narrator's mind. Another common theme in literature of the uncanny is the theme of the double--"the subject identifies himself with someone else so that he is in doubt as to which self his self is...in other words there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing--the repetition of the same features or character-traits, or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations (Freud, 'The Uncanny')". In A Thousand and One Nights, all women become interchangeable for King Shahriar after his wife's treachery and all women must suffer for her actions. It is only by the circuitous route of Scheherazade's storytelling and the passage of time that he is able to escape this compulsion to generalize the attributes (and associated anger) toward one woman with the class of women as a whole. In Neuromancer, the doubling or multiplication of identity appears in the Tessier Ashpool affinity for cloning. Supposedly, the founders, Marie France Tessier and Ashpool have two children--Jane and Jean (French male name) who have each been cloned ten times, thus 3Jane and 8Jean, the two Tessier Ashpool offspring active during Neuromancer. The Tessier Ashpool family's practice of periodic cryogenic freezing also ties into the death motif, where the frozen sleep represents a temporary death or flatlining of sorts. It also complicates the family members' relationship to each other. Supposedly, 3Jane's father has been frozen and her mother long since murdered at the point she is first unfrozen, so that her sole knowledge of her parents comes from thousands of hours of tapes and diaries stored in the family's software cores.

The Tessier Ashpool alienation from self, family and the larger world leads to their degeneration. This separation is also a doomed quest. The most determined isolationist of the lot, Ashpool, becomes suicidal upon contact with the creeping intrusion of images from the outside. Despite promises to the contrary, Ashpool has felt the cold during his cryogenic freeze--"the cold let the outside world in," filling his head with "dreams that grow like slow ice." Ashpool's name combines two images: charred cinders and the deceptive Coleridgian pool of water whose images shine bright one moment and disintegrate into ripples the next. It is a vision that cannot sustain intrusian by the outside world. His wife's family name, on the other hand, evokes the abstraction into miniature shapes...a shattering that rearranges and builds new forms. The verb "tessellate" means 1. to construct pave or inlay with small tiles 2. to fit together exactly: triangles will tessellate but octagons will not (Collins English Dictionary, 1989). The best way to understand tessellation is to visualize it. Tessellation lends a visual interpretation to Marie France's dream of using technology to replicate an organic hive- or insect-world where individual self-awareness and identity are sublimated and subordinated to membership in a larger group. This sort of philosophy, taken to its logical conclusion, could either be used to justify the worst sort of dehumanizing fascism or promote the idea of a wholesome ecology where individuals operate in harmony among themselves and within the larger environment. A more interesting exposition of this line of thought (applied to literature) can be found in T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." No, it's not the shallow philosophical references that interested me, but rather the novel's imagery describing a narrative process where the storyteller sets in motion events that drive a plot, whose conclusion she cannot foresee--in this case, the union of the forces of action and change with the forces of personality--that interested me. In Marie-France's case, the ice is not harbinger of a murderous cold, but rather a creative architectural vocabulary built upon tessellating stalactite repetitions. If the ice is the defensive wall around the Tessier-Ashpool fortress, the narrative that created that fortress also built the hidden passageway to overthrow it. The architect optimizes the conditions leading to the system's eventual and calculated destruction. And the destruction is not an end, but enables a reconstruction, and so on, like shifting shapes in a kaleidoscope...or the metamorphoses of images in a pool of water...for a thousand and one nights, or forever and a day.

Author's Footnote
"Nihilistic Technofetishists"
As one hindered by a chronic handicap when it comes to linear plot, I never got around to working the reference into the thesis above. I include the expression here because it caught my fancy and because I alluded to it at the end of "Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1."

"Dr. Rambali smiled. 'There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness'...If the technology had been available the Big Scientists would all have sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists (Neuromancer)."

Midnight in the Villa Straylight, Part 1

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea...
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The Villa Straylight," said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, "is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves...(Lady 3Jane's essay, Neuromancer, William Gibson)

With the barrage of here-today, gone-tomorrow sci-fi flicks flashing across the movie previews these days, it's a damn shame that nobody (to my knowledge) is going to bring William Gibson's Neuromancer to the big screen any time soon. Movies like the Fifth Element and the Matrix series appear to have liberally inspired themselves from imagery and themes in Neuromancer, yet neither possesses the intensity and originality, that which is both disturbing and compelling in Gibson's vision. To cinematically portray Desiderata street would betray the truth that it must look different for every viewer; yet the simple fact that Gibson came up with a Desiderata street deserves a director who would make it visually stunning.

With my luck, the movie version of Neuromancer will fail to be a classic in the Blade Runner category . It'll wind up being done by the people who made Starship Troopers and they'll cast Denise Richards as Molly Mirroshades. Meanwhile, the actress who comes closest to my idea of Molly would be Asia Argento. To be fair, Starship Troopers' Barbie and Ken in Outer Space meets hit-you-over-the-head "this is fascism" irony is not my cup of tea. However, it's also rather evident that I don't belong to the movie's target audience, per this entertaining observation from "A Viewer" on Amazon.com.

"Like most boys, I suffered from two terrible drives that overwhelm our much-vaunted aura of rationality. First, I am obsessed with sex appeal. Secondly, I want to kill things. These twin drives -- Eros and Thanatos -- are thoroughly exploited and mocked in Paul Verhoeven's astounding 1997 action epic, Starship Troopers. Based on (and a critique of) the Robert Heinlein "juvenile" title of the Fifties, Troopers works on numerous levels: thrill-ride, eye candy, unsubtle anti-war statement, commentary on fascism, and exemplar of Verhoeven's horrifically callous sense of humour."

I find "A Viewer"'s critique far more compelling than its actual subject, but then I'm the girl who felt the only thing that would have redeemed the orgy scene in Matrix Reloaded would have been a soundtrack featuring the Eurotrash club favorite Rivers of Babylon.

Back to Neuromancer, these notes from a university English department syllabus offer a reasonably fair overview of Neuromancer for the unitiated. I tend to agree with Professor Brian that the most original thing about this book is not so much the plot or the characters, but the storytelling. However, unlike Brian, I am interested in the cliche nature of the plot and characters exactly because they represent an updated version of classic archetypes.

The Cyberspace Cowboy
"Case was twenty four. At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He'd operated on an almost permanent high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix." Footnote on Dixie Flatline, he does for redneck revenants what Bill Clinton did for redneck Rhodes Scholars.

The Expensive Razor Girl
There is actually quite a long lineage of martial women in English literature. Before Eowyn, there was Belphoebe. Of course both of these characters embody the archetype of the virtuous warrior. The femme fatale is something altogether different, yet equally ancient in Western tradition. Camille Paglia describes the femme fatale as part of the weary weight of eroticism, beneath which both ethics and religion founder, she who possesses an amoral affectlessness, a cool unreachability that beckons, fascinates, and destroys (Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae).

Paglia's vision of the femme fatale focuses on the power she projects (to men), attributing her origins to the cthonian murk of Nature. What Paglia does not fully reflect upon (it diverges from her theories) is the possibility that the femme fatale is as much the creation of Society as she is of Nature, and that she pays a very high price for the terrible nature she must acquire in order to survive. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Rappacini's Daughter," Beatrice inhabits a lush garden reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, only she and the plants are poisonous. Beatrice, like Molly has been scientifically experimented on. The technological enhancement that renders these women superior to Nature, also separates them from Nature and other human beings, with whom they will never be able to physically and/or emotionally interact. The femme fatale represents a departure from a norm where, in almost every culture and society, women are expected to be nurturers; cultures and societies where women are far more likely to be victims than predators. Strictly speaking, the femme fatale is a freak. In Molly's case, the eyes, arguably one of the most expressive parts of the body, have been surgically sealed behind her mirror glasses. Her eyes will offer no clues to her emotions or thoughts, they only reflect back the image of the person gazing up her and, figuratively, what the viewer wishes to see in her. Her tear ducts have been re-routed. She doesn't cry; she spits. Molly's eyes are technologically functional and enhanced, however in the process, what was human about the eyes has been mutilated and destroyed. In his Essay on the Uncanny, Freud associates anxiety about the eyes, specifically the fear of going blind with the dread of being castrated--a rather apt metaphor for Molly's emotional state.

Not surprisingly, the person who comes closest to getting an emotional rise out of Molly is the sadist, Peter Riviera. Peter possesses the ability to "dream real," that is graphically project holographic imagery from people's innermost fantasies and anxieties. His cabaret piece, "The Doll," starts with disembodied hands, wrists, legs, torso that merge into an image of Molly. Riviera then weaves himself in the projection, simulating copulation with the Molly image until the clawed hand extracts its nails and rakes him across the back. Gibson mentions the exposure of some bare spine, but leaves the rest to the reader's imagination as the observer, Case, stumbles out the door and vomits, although, to be honest, Case had consumed a lot of alchohol and drugs at that point.

Gibson's description of Riviera's cabaret piece reminds me of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies to the extent that they invite the reader to visualize or, in the case of Kill Bill, graphically choreograph a sadistic and disturbing tableau of violence. Gibson's Molly and Uma Thurman's "the Bride" in Kill Bill are both hired mercenaries employed by men (or ultimately, in Molly's case, an AI). A high tech femme fatale would be nothing without the right look--black gloveleather jeans, light-absorbing matte jacket, shuriken, flechette pistol, cherry red cowboy boots with lacquer heels, burgundy-sheathed razor nails...the nails or metallic claws, that little detail that sets Molly apart and makes her just that much more disturbing than a groupie like Trinity from the Matrix movies or Kill Bill's the Bride. What is disturbing about the Bride is what she doesn't look like: a woman who has been tortured, shot in the head and left for dead, who spends four years comatose, neglected and abused in public charity hospitals--where she apparently had access to plastic surgery techniques worthy of Neuromancer because by all intents and purposes she should look like the Bride of Frankenstein, not Uma Thurman. I prefer Gibson's Molly femme fatale archetype because she's not airbrushed, or to the contrary, she's so airbrushed she gleams, shiny and metallic--not so much human as feline. At the end of the book, Molly slinks out of the narrative field of vision, taking her unknowability with her.

Because if you did drop all that mystification and Molly really talked, what would she say? That, at the end of the day, all that kung-fu and killing people is just a job and a physically demanding one at that. Compared to "jacking" into the Matrix and playing with Chinese viruses and AI ice, running around and doing martial arts in lacquer-heeled cowboy boots? That shit'll seriously fuck with your back.


To be continued, with reflections on nihilistic technofetishists and Marie-France Tessier Ashpool as Scheherazade.

"Mad, bad and dangerous to know"

...Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her diary after meeting George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Now that is what I call marketing.

These words, which apparently applied more to herself than Byron, introduce the idea of a reputation that in other circumstances could not fail to disappoint. The novelist Lady Blessington anticpated her first meeting with Byron with a thrill of dread...and was very much disappointed: "I had expected to find a dignified, cold, reserved and haughty person, but nothing could be more different; were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was flippancy, and a total want of that natural self-possession and dignity which ought to characterize a man of birth and education."

Well, la dee dah. I don't particularly relate to the Byronic hero in nineteenth century literature and philosophy "...a man greater than his emotions, capability and suffering. Only among wild and vast forms of nature--the ocean, the precipices and glaciers of the Alps--can he find a counterpart to his own titanic passions. Driven by a demon within, he is fatal to himself and others; for no one can resist his hypnotic fascination and authority. He has committed a sin that itself expresses his superiority: lesser men could not even conceive a like transgression. Against his own suffering he brings a superhuman pride and fortitude. Indeed, without the horror of his fate there could not be the splendor of self-assertion and self-mastery in which he experiences a strange joy and triumph." [English Romantic Writers, edited by David Perkins, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967] However, I have read Don Juan, whereas I'd be hard-pressed to name anything published by Lady Blessington.

Actually, Camille Paglia's chapter on Byron in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson re-ignited my interest in him. Byron provides ample fodder for her thematic investigations into the polymorphous perversity of Romanticism. More on Camille later, as she deserves a blog entry to herself.

I digress to....Sylvia Plath. I saw the preview for the movie Sylvia once or twice. I assume it came and went in the box office (where, having three children, I don't often go). So I bided my time waiting for it to surface at Blockbuster. And so it did, in the form of one lone copy. It was my turn to pick up the rentals. I made a tactical judgement. My husband's last foray produced not one but two B-minus forgettable flicks, whose failings were myriad enough to earn me the credit I needed to impose dubious and unshared tastes. Mad Max II, the pre-agreed upon movie was not only was not at that Blockbuster, but (according to the sales associate) not even in the system. The moment was mine to seize. I acquired the target and, for good measure, picked up Dirty Dancing, Havana Nights on the way to the checkout.

"Have fun watching Sylvia put her head in the oven" my sister dryly offered, when I shared the viewing plans for the night. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I was hoping for passion and the meeting of great minds. Daniel Craig's "understated" performance meant that I'd probably have to delve into Ted Hughes poetry to see the some sparks. The most exciting it got was watching Gwynneth's Sylvia recite a passage from Chaucer's Wife of Bath to some cows in the Cambridge countryside (I knew there would be a payoff for learning Middle English pronunciation) but, even there, the chosen "woe that is in marriage" passage was foreshadowing the eventual disintegration of the couple's relationship.

To the extent that the movie shows Ted Hughes' abandonment of his wife and their two young children for his lover, Assia Wevill, he does come off as quite the archetypal shit. Two generations of feminist critics flaying his hide, with regards to his treatment of his wife and the questionable taste of editing her posthumously published manuscripts, where some of the more sensitive material dealing with their relationship just happened to disappear---is probably no less than he deserved. This book looks like it might provide an intelligent and scholarly account of the relationship between the two poets.

As far as the movie is concerned, though, Hughes is really a secondary figure. In fact, an episode with Sylvia's mother dwells on the issue of whether Plath was not instinctively drawn to the sort of man whom she knew she could not control. The real performance is Gwynneth Paltrow's depiction of a woman falling apart.The pressures mounting on the couple are daunting. Hughes' poetic career takes off, while Plath feels creatively stalled in her writing. When she does publish her first collection of poems, Colossus, it is generally ignored by the critics. We follow Plath, struggling to raise her two young children, through a bleak and dreary winter in Devon and then London, where she wonders if she hasn't "conjured" her husband's lover out of her own anxieties. The obstacles facing Plath in her writing somewhat recall Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, especially Woolf's interest in the logistics of writing and her belief in the necessity of having an independent income and the ability to go off, undisturbed, to "a room of one's own." In that vein, one homey detail I found particularly interesting (and not so surprising) was the fact that Plath did much of her writing late at night while her children slept. It would appear that Plath's marriage to Hughes and her motherhood both cannibalized (to use some Camille Paglia imagery) and creatively inspired her.

Ra Ra Rasputin

It wouldn't be summer on the island without a trifling little scandal to liven up the pages of the local newspapers--something more entertaining than the perennial July news of the heat or the annual arrival of the Spanish royal family, which happens to be disappointingly discreet compared to their Northern brethren. In this case, a Mallorquin government official happened to be on a trade mission to Moscow to promote tourism in the Baleares. A gesture of international goodwill and cultural tourism led him (and probably other more clever goverment representatives) to the doors of the Rasputin club, and the accomodating ladies therein. The affinity of politicians for women of ill repute being rather universal, the distinguishing factor here, without which it might not have become public knowledge, was charging the invoice to a government credit card. Apparently the risk of auditors and journalists discovering the caper represented less of a clear and present danger than using a personal credit card, monitored by his wife.

The true entertainment value of scandal lies in the associated production of metaphors and puns, in this case, Russian doll imagery for the unfolding layers of scandal and the ressemblance between the words "Rasputin," and the Spanish "putin" (diminutive for prostitute) and "puticlub" (sporting club for activities related to the aforementioned).

In the IT world, an alcohol-infused Microsoft caper has introduced me to the video elegy "Bye Bye Mr. CIO Guy" and the terms "rolling sod" and "black blogging," through this link and this link, sent courtesy of an industry journalist.

Picnic in the Countryside

To the Island

We walk along roads fringed by low orange-tinged mortar-less stone walls, away from the sea, towards the sierra, past hunting reserves, past fincas--some manicured with oleander and bouganvillea hedges, some wild terrains where goats pasture, the occasional bell or car rupturing the silence, past groves of olive trees with silvery green leaves, fig trees, past stalks of queen anne's lace and yarrow encrusted with snails. My daughter wants to take home some snails. "Remember the three shrimp you caught with your net in the rocks off the jetty yesterday? We took them home. They jumped out and the ants ate them and you cried." The argument fails to persuade a five year old in a fit of biological acquisitiveness. We settle on dislodging two snails that she places in her pocket. We continue to the stream, to look for the nest with duck eggs. Dragon flies and butterflies hover, and then, out of nowhere, bees. My daughter is stung. The antihistimine syrup I give her is far less poetic and works slower than the country remedy described later that day at the picnic at the finca.

At the Finca

The woman seated next to me at the table tells me the following story: "When my daughter was your daughter's age, she came across a nest of bees and wound up with eight or nine stings. The farm workers told me not to worry. They brought a jar of oil and rubbed it on her arm. Within seconds the pain disappeared."
"There must of been something in the oil, right?"
"Oh yes, there was. The trick was to drop a scorpion in boiling oil. Upon contact with the oil, it releases anti-venom into the oil. Venom, anti-venom, most antidotes are made from the poison, you know. Of course they didn't know why it worked, they just knew that it did."

The hosts and most the guests are Mallorquin. The house is not some retro-modern Iberian country chic fantasy built-to-measure by English, German, occasionally French, proprietors. It is a modest agricultural structure, half of which is a terrace shaded by a vine-laden ceiling trellis. There is an outdoor oven and plywood table covered in paper cloth. The food is divine. The meal starts at two-thirty with a caldo de mariscos, shellfish soup with saffron rice. I clumsily try to pry open the lobster and crab legs, bits of juice flying everywhere, the stinging in my fingers compounded by the irritant in the shells. No one seems to notice. The main course is lechona suckling pig, served with potatoes sauteed in olive oil and garlic, followed by salad, fragrant local melons and then pastries, ensaimadas and fluffy almond medrichos and finally coffee. It takes me the better part of the meal to determine the relationships of kinship and friendship of the twenty or so people gathered at the table. I am seated next to the Patriarch, who looks to be in his late seventies.

"Do you still work?" I ask him.
"Naturally, I'm the only one who works around here. Who do you think subsidizes all this," he points to the dinner table.
The woman on my left turns towards me. "Don't take him seriously. All of the rest of us were here this morning, cleaning up the spider webs and setting the table. At one o'clock, Papi arrived, sat down and opened up his newspaper."

All the food preparation is handled by three older women, one of whom, the excellent cook, is the Patriarch's wife. She and her two companions barely sit down for the greater part of the meal which commences at two thirty and ends at quarter of six. I am surprised to see these three women, two generations older than I, do all the work while the rest of us remain seated.

"Your wife works very hard."
The Patriarch responds. "For that reason, I keep her."
"I got married at fifty. Do you know why? One day, I was sitting at the Brisas bar by the port and the waitresses asked me 'What'll you have, grandfather.' So I got married. Of course, I regret it. Now here am with this old woman. Not that I'm not so young myself. No, I'm old as the hills. How it pains me to sit here with this broken down body." He looks towards the young girls at the teenage end of the table. "I want to be seventeen again."

Some time passes. The Patriarch leans towards my father-in-law indicating the rest of the table. "How it amuses me to listen to the foolishness these people recount. All of them, except me. I am the only normal one here. Foolishness, yes, especially the women. He looks towards me--I have said little due to my rusty Spanish--and generously offers "Don't worry, I'm sure you can't help it."

He continues. "My daughter occasionally calls me the Dictator. All because I asked her to set the table. Can you imagine. I, who've never so much as broken a plate in my life. She's in Barcelona now, working as an architect. She's twenty-six. What I really want is a grandchild. She's had two boyfriends that she bothered to present to us. Supposedly there's another one now. One of those movie actors."

The Patriarch's godson interrupts: "Theater. He's a theater actor." Non-plussed, the Patriarch responds. "Exactly. Un canta-mananas."

Later that evening, I ask my in-laws about the exact nuance of "canta mananas," literally "sings in the morning," promises much, but delivers nothing. The English equivalent of "good for nothing" doesn't seem to quite fit.

"Yes, well "canta mananas" does convey more happiness than "pela gatos," my father-in-law reflects.
"Pela gatos? You mean cat-peeler? How does one peel a cat?"
"Ridiculous, but colorful. That also means one who does nothing, but with a nuance of low social standing."
My mother-in-law adds. Yes, it's not like "Un Viva La Virgen."
"One who shouts 'Long Live the Virgen?'"
"Yes, you know in those religious processions. There are those who carry the cross. And those on the sidelines who shout "Long Live the Virgen." Someone who lives life as a tourist."
My husband remarks. "Supposedly the Eskimos have twenty different words for snow. Well, they've got a lot of snow. You've got to wonder about a language that has so many expressions for doing nothing."

Back to lunch and the Patriarch.
Someone asks him about the extent of his property.
"A couple thousand meters squared. Several years ago a man came and offered me twenty thousand pesetas for this land."
Another person interjects "It's probably worth ten times that today."
The Patriarch reflects: "Perhaps. The point is that at that time I had a police dog on the property. I told the would-be buyer. Yes, well there's only one problem. If I sold you my land, where would I put my dog?"

At quarter of six, the Patriarch graciously rises. "Delighted to meet you my dear, but I must go now. Lovely to have so many people here and all, but it's quite tired me out." He swats away a fly. "Quite exhausting. Yes, it's time to tuck in for a little nap."

A Leafy Bower

The hydrangea outside my kitchen window changes shade imperceptibly each day. The blooms started out whitish with the slightest hint of washed out lilac, and subsequently have gone through the spectrum of blues from light, know there is a name for this shade, but the only reference that comes to mind is the sort of light blue car color favored by Oldsmobile, Lincoln or Caddy driving grannies. The color has now deepened to more of a purplish tone. In my mind's eye, I am constantly re-drawing my garden, if such the rather forlorn and randomly placed shrubs and trees planted by the house's original owners, could be called. I make for myself a leafy bower. I see trellises of jasmine climbing up the stark brick walls of the house, I build multi-tiered Frank Lloyd Wrightian brick planters with cement caps redefining the front yard, holding weeping cherry trees, the children's vegetable garden, my husband's tomatoes, with steps in between and borders like an oriental rug. I should like to have an outer border of crepe myrtle, lots of gardenias, and of course--a fountain. What I do have is one new low wall of planters to enclose the back yard of our corner lot.

The rain has been sparse this spring and I have to water the new plantings fairly frequently. It is the early evening and my daughter wants to help. The shade and partial shade garden form a border under the canopy of two oak trees. I stifle the impatience that wants to get this done in a relatively brief amount of time and take the time to teach her how to water the plants properly, indicating the name of every plant as we go--dogwood, camelia japonica, camelia sassanqua, azalea, lenten rose, fern, pieris, hydrangea, astilbe, columbine. By the end of this episode, the mosquitoes are as sated on our blood as the plants are quenched with water.

I make an association between teaching plant names to my daughter and the Loreena McKennitt song "The Mummers Dance" from "the book of secrets" CD, which I lost over a year ago, before recovering it in exactly the place I remembered it being, a place where I can remember having searched countless times. The song would haunt me several years ago in Northern California, right around the time my daughter was born. It got some radio play and I would catch snatches of it, but it was months before I managed to catch the part where they named the artist and title. My daughter likes learning the names of things the way I do. Physically, the only traits where she resembles me are the fair skin and a certain expression in her eyes, which are brown, and not grey-green. In an abstract way, she reminds me of one of the Infantas from Velasquez's painting "Las Meninas," something about the fair skin, dark eyes, golden hair and the set of her face. The faerie childe tosses her hair, the ropes of natural curls recalling the ribbons and leafy garlands in the song.

When in the springtime of the year, when the trees
Are crowned with leaves. When the ash and oak, and
The birch and yew are dressed in ribbons fair.

When owls call the breathless moon, in the blue

Veil of the night, the shadows of the trees appear
Amidst the lantern light

We've been rambling all the night, and some time of
This day. Now returning back again, we bring a
Garland gay.

Who will go down to the those shady groves and
Summon the shadows there, and tie a ribbon on

Those sheltering arms, in the springtime of the year.

Ah, the evocative power of naming. The CD insert reference to mummers comes from John Frazer's book The Golden Bough, according to which "mumming has its roots in the tree-worshipping of the peoples who inhabited the great forested regions of a Europe now long gone. Mumming usually involves a group of performers dressing up in masks (sometimes of straw) and clothes bedecked with ribbons or rags, and setting out on a procession to neighboring homes singing songs and carrying branches of greenery." I also looked up mummer in the Collins English Dictionary, where it is 1) one of a group of masked performers in folk play or mime 2) a mime artist 2) humorous or derogatory, an actor. Apparently the word derives from the old French momeur, from momer to mime, related to momon mask. I looked up two similar sounding words--mummy, an embalmed or preserved body, deriving from Old French momie, from Medieval Latin mumia from Arabic mumiyah for asphalt, and originally the Persian word mum for wax. In the Collins Dictionary, there were no linguistic origins given for mummy, the English child's word for mother. The potential associations there are boundless and, occasionally, disturbing.

Saturday Night in Sin City

In the era of Nouveau Vegas, this casino has a nineteen fifties seediness to it. Even the chips look cheap, their pastel colors and Monopoly printing mocking the denominations they supposedly represent. It is an hour and a half wait in line to get into the night club. The investor, who presumably knows the cost of everything, handles the negotiation. It occurs to me that there are multiple paths to this destination a) "immediate" reserved for habitues, celebrities, the preternaturally cool or beautiful b) the "short" line for those with the knowledge, confidence and economic wherewithal to master the system and c) the regular line for, well, for people like myself. "Wasn't he offended when you offered him the cash," I ask the investor, once we've been shepherded into the five-mintue line. He responds matter-of-factly "Are you kidding, there's no way you could offend these people. The whole reason they work that job is to get spiff." I stand corrected, I guess the possibility of a Las Vegas bouncer being offended is rather preposterous. "Well," I ask "how did you know how much to pay him? Did you ask?" He answers "There's a difference between handing him a twenty at which point he'd ignore you and handing him a $100, where he'll take care of you. I just handed him $30 per person." Hmmh, there is a short line and it costs $30 per person, I absorb the knowledge that I will never apply. I imagine myself trying the same manoeuvre and, low point of humiliations, being snubbed by a Las Vegas bouncer who takes me for a gauche out-of-towner, either offering too little or too much, and who even if she offered the right amount, couldn't master a petty bribe with panache.

Once inside the club, it is apparent why the normal line has an hour and a half wait. The bodies are packed in every single part of the club, not just the dance floor. A hoochie girl carelessly stabs the back of my foot with her heel. Wincing with pain, I give her a sharp look. She defiantly glares back at me. I'm not going to get an apology out of her and educating her on the polite and civilized course of action, given the circumstances would be an utter waste of time. The music is modern hip hop, the lighting set up evokes a sort of late seventies retro future look, with frames that spin around and every now and then shoot out fire. The voice booms "It's Saturday night in Sin City." Oh really? Presumably people are happily sinning in many other locales, but hey it's all about branding. I look around, taking in the tableau of "sin" that offers itself up at this Las Vegas nightclub. It reminds me of something. I tap one of my companions. "All that's missing, is for the blood to start coming out of the ceiling sprinklers." He gives me an indulgent smile. He either a) hasn't seen "Blade" b) doesn't think I'm funny c) can't hear a word I'm saying against the booming music. I survey the rhythmically throbbing bodies. The hoochie heel mutilator is rather representative of the crowd, whose dress code and appearance leans more to North Jersey than vampire chic. It's Saturday night in Sin City.

Life Lived for the Retelling--Milan Kundera's "La Lenteur"

I first bought Milan Kundera's "La Lenteur" on impulse in a Paris rail station some years ago, and subsequently read it on a trip to Brussels. I looked up the English translation of the book title and was surprised to see it as "Slowness," which is technically correct but sounds wrong in English. In French, "la lenteur" has (at least for me...which is another problem altogether touching on the degenerative nature of language) the connotation of a certain sensuous slow-time. I recently re-read this book on a cross country flight to Las Vegas. The fact that high-speed air travel offered me the rare, distraction-free occasion to mull over the ideas he touches on in that book is not without its irony.

In the book, Kundera sets up a contrast between eighteenth and late twentieth century aesthetics as regards sensory experience, speed, memory and audience. His premise is that speed is the form of ecstasy with which the technology revolution has gifted man. He contrasts a runner who feels entirely present in his body, conscious of his breathing and the sensation of his feet pounding against the pavement, with the sensory experience of a man who delegates the faculty of speed to a machine...(poorly no doubt translated by me) "as such his body is no longer part of the equation, he gives himself over to a speed that is incorporal, immaterial, pure speed, speed for its own sake, ecstasy speed." Kundera feels that there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, and speed and the ability to forget. The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of the memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity with which one can forget. The term "ecstasy speed" to the contrary (he later associates it with some "apparatchik of eroticism"), what Kundera is really celebrating is the lost quality of slowness. He weaves in two parallel stories to contrast the presumed sensibility of the eighteenth and late twentieth century.

The twentieth century story involves a young man who is a hanger on in an intellectual group in Paris that prides themselves on their libertine outlook. They are libertine to the degree that their pleasures are cerebral rather than sensual and to the degree that the conquest of pleasure is not about pleasure itself, but about conquest and victory. Not surprisingly they admire the Marquis de Sade, and a certain Sadeian aesthetic pervades in their intellectual disgust for the outside world and retreat into an artificial world and the economy of human interaction, as demonstrated by the ways in which the members of the group undermine each other. Their privilege is that of a certain degree of intellectual cognizance and their scorn is reserved for individuals who are inept or lack self-awareness. de Sade's work is mainly concerned with the privilege of power and the pure hatred of the strong for the weak (Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman). Although dramatized in pornography, the de Sadeian focus is political satire, with characters who play for life and death stakes. His characters tend to be representations of abstract ideas. Meanwhile, the focus is more individual in Kundera's "La Lenteur" and the victim is personal vanity. Despite the fact that the generalized pettiness and self-preoccupation of the Kundera characters prevents them from being individually sympathetic, the quality of his prose and characterization makes the tragedy of their condition rather poignant.

The members of Kundera's clique have developed a theory of "dancers"--generally media and political figures who uphold certain causes "or rather their vanity upholds those causes" not because they believe or disbelieve in the causes, but because those causes offer them opportunities to take center stage and showcase themselves in photographic media moments--kissing AID's victims on the mouth or swatting flies away from the body of a child during the Somalian famine. Similar in spirit to de Sade's imagined world where one person's pleasure can only come at the expense of another's pain, Kundera's dancers must displace each other to occupy the center stage. Their objective is to transform their lives into works of art, which will move and impress onlookers. That audience takes the form of the mass of anonymous, invisible spectators at the other end of the television screen. In this objective, the Kundera dancers find themselves in a brutal (and hilarious in a bitter-sweet manner, because the stakes are so low) competition with each other.

Central to Kundera's story is the idea of the resonating shell where no action or communication is private and everything is amplified for the viewing pleasure of a broader audience. In the eighteenth century part of Kundera's story, that audience constitutes a limited group of people from the same privileged social class, who also share similarities in their outlook upon life. In this group, everyone knows each other. In the twentieth century part of the novel, the audience is an invisible, mass audience. The privileged audience of the eighteenth century, as embodied in Choderlos de Laclos's "Dangerous Liaisons," is concerned with cleverness and refined sensibilities; Kundera's mass audience of the twentieth century is concerned with tableaux of moral "beauty" and superiority, however the sub-plot and parallel story has similar paramaters to the eighteenth century story because the protagonist is simply vying for the attention of his own intellectual clique.

In both worlds, where the attention of the larger audience is sought, disclosure is the weapon of choice. The central conflict faced by the eighteenth and twentieth century protagonist is whether to communicate a certain experience or keep it for themselves. In both episodes, the case could be made that the protagonist was, to a certain degree, ridiculous. Each story involves a one-time encounter with a mystery woman. The difference is that the eighteenth century protagonist actually engages the woman and enjoys the experience, whereas the twentieth century protagonist disconnects from the entire experience completely because at the very moment it takes place, the sole importance of the encounter lies in its becoming a story to be retold, for the purpose of impressing his friends. The young eighteenth chevalier determines that there is no explanation for what he experienced and that the public perception of his dignity would be ambiguous were it to be disclosed. He decides to keep the narrative to himself. We last see him leaving the chateau of the mystery woman in a long, slow carriage ride back to Paris, where he is engaged in the agreable passtime of sensual recollection. By contrast, the twentieth century protagonist has nothing agreeable to recollect. His self-preoccupation and omnipresent inability to live or remember his experiences outside the context of their perception by a larger audience produces an overwhelming feeling of humiliation. He gets on a motorcycle and speeds back to Paris, trying to forget the actual circumstances of the event as soon as possible.

April Come She Will

April in Atlanta is, perhaps, the most beautiful month. It would take an aesthete of depression or an allergy sufferer (Out out vile dust!) to find it the cruellest month here. Although I did recently attend a funeral featuring the Anglican Liturgy for the Burial of the Dead. As they interred the ashes in the church garden, I had to restrain my young daughter who wanted to catch a caterpillar. Such intrusion of life and the chrysalid reference did cheer me. The azaleas and dogwoods are in bloom, the weather is still temperate, the mosquitoes, fortified since my childhood with the introduction of Daybiters, are not yet out.

I do not get to think about April, T.S. Eliot, or daybiters for long. "Mommy, Mommy come quick. One of the boys is launching himself from the armrest of the chair into the playpen." If I were a good American mother, that is the kind willing to see nascent brilliance in every random action of her progeny, it would occur to me that this might show some future promise of an astronautical career. At the moment, all I can think is that that if he plays his cards right he could be the next Johnny Knoxville . Maybe the Classics got parenting right; all I need now is to find is a sympathetic she-wolf to help me raise those twin boys.

Could I be the only parent demented enough to blast out the Rolling Stones "Mother's Little Helper" to get through the five o'clock witching hour of the children's dinner? Or, "No, we are not listening to Wee Sing Fun and Games "Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar" again; it's time for some Tina Turner, babies. My children are good sports, they really are. My four year old daughter now asks for Tina Turner. I figure if you don't take the pep pills, you're at least entitled to some really loud music to get through the anti-aircraft siren-strength screams, background whines and the twins' food launch missile strikes without going into a catatonic trance. This job doesn't offer combat pay.

Ironically, it's the girl who sends me to the emergency room on an evening when my husband is out of town. She puts a gash in her forehead while jumping on the brick steps on the back terrace. The nice thing about living in a big city is that (barring traffic) you can be at a specialized children's hospital in about twenty minutes. The bad thing about living in a big city is that at the same point in time there will be about twenty other kids ahead of yours in the emergency room of that same hospital. At Children's Healthcare they give you a vibrating thingy to let you know when it's your child's turn to be seen. They have the same thing in trendy no-reservation policy restaurants. Unless your child is having a seizure or a hemophiliac bleeding episode, you can definitely be seated quicker in the trendiest restaurant in town than you'll be seen at Children's Healthcare. Nobody is particularly impressed with the bloody washrag my daughter is holding to her forehead. The friendly college-age girl, probably a junior version of what is now known as a "patient advocate," circulates. Several coloring books and plastic mini-toys later, the question of what she can do to help definitely seems rhetorical since she can't help most of us with what we want, which is to have our child seen by a doctor in less than ninety minutes. It's nine thirty in the evening by the time the doctor takes a look at my daughter. She's doing fine (she'd been fed and bathed before her jumping episode at 6:30 in the evening); however, the fact that I haven't had dinner, the permafatigue and the fact that my husband isn't there is taking its toll on me. I remember the mother of a child in my daughter's ballet class last year proudly telling us how they made the hospital call a plastic surgeon and waited six hours for him to come and sew up her daugher's cut forehead and that it was so worth the effort and the wait because "you know, it's your little girl and you'd hate for her to go through life with some unsightly scar." The doctor is talking about glueing and deflecting my best efforts to protest and make noises to the effect that I have keloid scars, I'm afraid she scars badly too, her cuts don't seem to heal that well. The doctor looks at one of her scars and is not impressed. I'm alone, tired and hungry. It's going to take being a real bitch and waiting several more hours to get a plastic surgeon in, and, frankly, I don't know a thing about facial scarring. I'm caught between two disquieting images--my daughter at fourteen being self-conscious over this scar or the fact that maybe I'm being completely neurotic. After all, when I was a child nobody would have thought twice about having some emergency room hack stitch up their child...that is if they even bothered to go to the hospital at all, as opposed to slapping on a bandaid at home. My daughter gets glued. She does far better than her mother who is nauseous and barely escapes fainting.

What is wrong with American women of my generation that so many of us are so traumatized about whether we are good mothers? We read too many books on parenting and child development. I think we are rather isolated, compared to earlier generations of women who may not have worked, but did enjoy stronger networks of fellow mothers who could share stories and experiences that child-rearing into perspective. Comparatively, women are waiting until later in life to have children. Some may have given up a promising career to stay home with children. Those mothers often seem to have higher expecations than earlier generations, as though the child's achievements must justify the mother's sacrifice.

I do not think I shall have this problem, not being aware that anyone ever awaited a mutual fund shareholder annual report with breathless anticipation, or if they did, the reasons for that had little to do with the writing. As for my current job in charge of PR in a "nepotistic little family"/nobody in their right mind, outside of family, would have joined us when we started out company, opinions are divided. Some say we have the worst PR in the entire Java industry. Conversely, those who somewhat begrudingly see in our efforts a ruthless talent for self-promotion attribute this to no less than a pact with the Devil, so I can't claim much credit there. No, I'm feeling quite at peace with my own temporal nature and existential irrelevance today. In no way qualifying as a Mother Superior...I know exactly how she does it, it's all about lowering your standards and choosing your priorities, darling...I think I shall submit myself for membership in a less exclusive and far more entertaining club.

The Decadent Mothers' Club--For every woman who didn't give up coffee while pregnant, forgot when it was her turn to handle snack week at preschool, talked about setting up a cocktail playdate with the parents of her childrens' friends, who "supports" her child's education by offering the school live auction high-bid on box seats for the Prince Musicology concert at Phillips Arena, who struggles with the thought that she has about ten more years to start acting like a grown-up, and then decides to take Liz Phair's advice, who when asked if her son might not be a bit freaked out by having her as a mother when he's fifteen said "Well I figure that by the time he's fifteen he'll be pretty freaked out, anyway. I'm just helping him put this into a concrete context."

Through a Glass Darkly--Part II

Through a Glass Darkly, Part I

Translation of CORRESPONDENCES, Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Let sometimes emerge confused words;
Man crosses it through forests of symbols
Which watch him with intimate eyes.

Like those deep echoes that meet from afar
In a dark and profound harmony,
As vast as night and clarity,
So perfumes, colours, tones answer each other.

There are perfumes fresh as children's flesh,
Soft as oboes, green as meadows,
And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant,

Possessing the diffusion of infinite things,

Like amber, musk, incense and aromatic resin,
Chanting the ecstasies of spirit and senses.

The Chalice of Blood

Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was a painting by Puvis de Chavannes, a reference in Balzac's Vicar of Tours, a poem by Victor Hugo and a riddle of my childhood.

I first came across her among the paintings in my grandparents' house: an oil depicting a fair girl with long blond hair and blue eyes, her countenance a mixture of fear and resolve. She stands solitary and sacrificial against the backdrop of the guillotine, arm extended to reach for a goblet lifted up by the angry, ruddy figures in the Revolutionary mob.

Years later in Paris, seeking any possible distraction from my thesis research in the Bibliotheque Nationale (National Library), I took the opportunity to look further into her story. What light would dusty historical tomes shed on a family oral tradition where magic realism featured so prominently? The only online narrative I could find of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil's actions during the Revolution, Charlotte Yonge's The Second of September 1792, tells a story similar to the accounts in the Bibliotheque Nationale. The main difference lies in the tone that strives less for historical objectivity than a dramatization of events in the service of a moral lesson. One can just imagine the Ms. Yonge as a maiden aunt with scholarly leanings. In its moral objective and tone, The Second of September recalls the illustrated Lives of the Saints that children were encouraged to read during my brief sojourn in Catholic school. The hope that these stories would inspire us to lead saintly lives did not take into account the perspective of a ten year old girl. In the saintly life, it seemed one had a choice between youth, beauty and an early death in the throes of the most creative forms of torture known to man, or maturity and long life...lived out in a nunnery. Needless to say, neither was appealing.

Charlotte Yonge's account

"About twenty-two ladies were together, and were called to leave the prison, but the two who went first were at once butchered, and the sentry called out to the others, "It is a snare, go back, do not show yourselves." They retreated; but Marie de Sombreuil had made her way to her father, and when he was called down into the court, she came with him. She hung round him, beseeching the murderers to have pity on his grey hairs, and declaring that they must strike him only through her. One of the ruffians, touched by her resolution, called out that they should be allowed to pass if the girl would drink to the health of the nation. The whole court was swimming with blood, and the glass he held out to her was full of something red. Marie would not shudder. She drank, and with the applause of the assassins ringing in her ears, she passed with her father over the threshold of the fatal gates, into such freedom and safety as Paris could then afford. Never again could she see a glass of red wine without a shudder, and it was generally believed that it was actually a glass of blood that she had swallowed, though she always averred that this was an exaggeration, and that it had been only her impression before tasting it that so horrible a draught was offered to her....

M. Cazotte was imprisoned again on the 12th of September, and all his daughter's efforts failed to save him. She was taken from him, and he died on the guillotine, exclaiming, "I die as I have lived, faithful to my God and to my King." And the same winter, M. de Sombreuil was also imprisoned again. When he entered the prison with his daughter, all the inmates rose to do her honour. In the ensuing June, after a mock trial, her father and brother were put to death, and she remained for many years alone with only the memory of her past days."

As a child, I interpreted this story as a moral test. Given the opportunity, would I sacrifice my own life to save another? Looking at the painting of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, I feared that I had been measured and found lacking.

Worse yet, the gesture was useless. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil later lost her father and brother anyway. What did it mean to face death to remain faithful to one's God and one's King? While the gratitude of God is not for this world, it would appear that the gratitude of kings leaves much to be desired. In one of the accounts of Mlle. de Sombreuil's life in the Bibliotheque Nationale, it told of Mademoiselle, now Madame in later years, petitioning the Restoration king for some pension with which to educate and raise her son. While the exact details of her later life and reduced circumstances escape me, the suggestion of a less heroic and penurious middle and old age lend perspective to the second painting of Mlle. de Sombreuil

Who is that old woman?

To my ten year old self, the idea of my own aging seemed distant and unreal, thus I experienced great difficulty in reconciling the earlier and later portraits of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil. While I was not particularly interested in the imagery of self-sacrifice, I did appreciate that certain standards of beauty had been respected in young Mademoiselle's portrait. The same could not have been said of "Mademoiselle" de Sombreuil, the twilight years. The earlier portrait memorializes one moment that came to define her life for others, frozen in time, romanticized, a small paintstroke in the larger tableau of Nineteenth century French literary and artistic fascination with the Revolution and the phase known as La Terreur...a tendency to seek solace for impersonal and senseless acts of violence in individual acts of faith, courage and devotion. The latter portrait presents the older woman, independent of any dramatic context, montage or romanticization...a pinched expression on her face, wrinkles, wart on her chin, dark hair that sits unnaturally on her head (did I read that she lost her hair, was it a wig?). The face in the portrait of young Mademoiselle Sombreuil reflects the instantly recognizable archetype of the girl martyr. In the later portrait, the old woman's facial expression represents no archetype, no solace, no resolution.

From The Vicar of Tours, Honore de Balzac

"In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood only though their souls. Others obey some family pride (which in our days, and to our shame, decreases steadily); these devote themselves to the welfare of a brother, or to orphan nephews; they are mothers while remaining virgins. Such old maids attain to the highest heroism of their sex by consecrating all feminine feelings to the help of sorrow. They idealize womanhood by renouncing the rewards of woman's destiny, accepting its pains. They live surrounded by the splendour of their devotion, and men respectfully bow the head before their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor maid; she was and ever will be a living poem."

Translated stanza from The Death of Mademoiselle de Sombreuil, Victor Hugo

Her life was a pure mystery
Of innoncence and saintly remorse;
This soul that passed along the earth

In between the living and the dead.
Often, alas, the unfortunate one,
As though, from her destiny
Death broke the bond,
Felt with vain terrors
The icy passage in her pale veins

A blood that was not her own!

The Rose

My parents' rose garden was a true labor of love in the American South. The bushes would initially flourish in the early temperate months of spring. However, when the air took on the moist shimmer that gives way to the crashing violence of afternoon thundershowers, which punctuate the heat of summer, the roses began to look a little beleagured. They required constant watering (on the roots only in the early morning), fertilizing and spraying, lest they be consumed by aphids, parch and dry or fall victim to an outbreak of black spot. They had whimsical names: Mr. Lincoln frequented Queen Elizabeth in a court composed of Peace, Double Delight and Voodoo, staid reds and pinks gave way to a veritable Mardi Gras of color--flouncy whites, swirls of hot pink on white, canary yellow blending to deep orange.

As they tried out different varieties, they learned that modern, hybrid tea roses, bred for hardiness and a longer blooming season, display a sort of uniform and regular beauty that, alas, leaves much to be desired in the perfume category. To get a rose that smelled like a rose often meant going back to the older varieties, notably antique tea roses. In researching those varietals, I discovered that "Mademoiselle de Sombreuil," in addition to being a vampire of virtue, was also a rosa rugosa.

From The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter

"When he returned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of Count Nosferatu's rose drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elaticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendor.

The next day, his regiment embarked for France."

Measuring Life With Coffee Spoons

A rainy Saturday, my husband and daughter are out of the country. I have a babysitter for the twins. There is no excuse to put it off any longer. Time for an intimate Saturday preparing the past year's tax returns. Time to re-acquaint myself with depressing amounts of minutiae...medical expenses, charitable deductions, 1099-Divs, 1099-Ints, property tax, mortgage deductions, figuring cost basis on employee stock investment plan stock that was purchased in intervals over a two year period at a previous job... the little cramps start to develop in the muscles of my neck and shoulders. I despise this sort of activity. Not that I am, in general, offended by the idea of paying taxes or that our tax returns require any great amount of sophistication. I resent having to spend a day concentrating on things that should not be important. The sun comes out in the afternoon and I want to see how far the daffodils my daughter and I planted in the fall have come up; I want to watch my boys playing in the yard; I want to read some more of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I do not want to be going through sheafs of financial statements, listing, summing and dividing purchase prices. The reductive nature of these forms repels me. I do not want to be squeezing the past year into blanks, where my identity is my social security number, name, address and birthdate, and my relevance is relegated to financial transactions. There is a morbidity to the detached perspective of this ritual, like falling asleep and dreaming of coming back as the executor of one's own estate. And realizing that nothing itemized on those sheets of paper has much to do with what we care to bequeath.

Going Native--Entrepreneur Notes

Every now and then, a small jolt may bring us to some awareness of an outside perspective on one's own small, limited community or profession. In the tarantella danced by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, one catches glimpses of such a perspective in a term, that if not generalized in that industry, likely conveys some common sentiment therein. The situation involved a VC partner sitting on a board of a company that lost an impressive amount of money in an improbably short period of time. In vain, the other partners tried to get Jones to rein in the situation that had got out of hand and give them an objective account of what was going on. To their surprise, Jones repeated the party line of the company's managers, optimistic that recent unpleasant circumstances were nearly a a temporary glitch along the way to the company's inevitable and imminent prosperity. Jones had "gone native."

Lacking any particular skypish allure--no profits, company operates out of a secretive location in Estonia, the founders (also founders of Kazaa) cannot set foot in the US because they will be served with a subpoena=irresistible attraction, and having once lost our own money in a negative experience we vowed never to repeat, I was sympathetic. I could not imagine nonchalantly losing other people's money. We're in boring old infrastructure software. It may be the end of middleware as we know it, but we feel fine. Then, my bemusement took a reflective, tangential turn. How might one know what circumstances would cause a person to "go native" without spending some more-than-touristy time in the jungle? What skills might one need to survive that jungle? What does building a company without money and patronage have in common with a sojourn in the jungle?

The first negative has some advantages. Comparatively, the "native" has no money or professional standing to lose. This may enable some clarity of vision and foster the ability to take risks. Should the would-be entrepreneur have a strong belief in themselves and strong convictions about what they are doing? It undoubtedly helps. It is no surprise that the classic gentleman, at least in a sort of English, Jane Austen, 18th century perspective, was not expected to be involved in "trade." The business of building a business has the quality of putting one into contact with various people and experiences outside the normal pale. Some prove to be an inspiration, people it is a pleasure to know, experiences one is fortunate to have; some people and experiences leave no lasting impression; and there's the non-negligible portion you learn to survive, recognize and avoid, in a nowhere land aglow with the slow-burning after-haze of paranoia, beyond the timid lying morality of those who would cast stones.

I would not call being an entrepreneur a glamorous career. There are perhaps two types of entrepreneurs--those who love the challenge of and being involved with every aspect of building a company and then, there are those for whom building a company is the only way to do the kind of work they truly enjoy. The latter commit themselves to building the representation of a vision because that's what they have to do. Then, maybe after a while, they get better at that than everything else. Maybe it doesn't exist.

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind...
Shakespeare, The Tempest

And then again, maybe it's like the Cheshire Cat, who disappears and leaves behind his grin.

Profile

Total Geek Moment--Playing Scrabble with a good friend in Middle English. And laughing at off-color words that haven't been off-color in a few centuries.

Education: Wellesley College, BA in English Lit. Mona Lisa Smile it was not; although, I did belong to a "society" while I was there. The Shakespeare Society was not terribly exclusive. If you liked Shakespeare and theater, you had a good chance of being accepted. The fact that women played all the roles was a twist on Elizabethan theater since boys played the women's roles in Shakespeare's time.

Universite de Paris VII, Ecole Charles V--DEA in Etudes Anglophones/Comparative Literature. Loved teaching, but never found a research topic about which I was passionate. The trick is to find a topic about which nobody else has written. Came to the conclusion that there are good reasons nobody has touched some of these topics.

Adolescence--Survived. Empathize with quote by Angela Carter along the lines of "My adolescent rebellion is a period I now remember with intense embarassment, the chief problem being the absence of other people with whom to rebel."

Unusual thing to find sexy--String Theory, probably because I don't understand any of it and can't do the math....but I've got to say, all those colliding branes, open and closed loops, gravitons, super-symmetry, excited-state subatomic particles, parallel universes and thirteen dimensions. What's not to love.

Favorite writers- incomplete and in no particular order--Charles Baudelaire, Blaise Pascal, Honore de Balzac, Marguerite Duras, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Edgar Allen Poe, Michel de Montaigne, Maya Angelou, Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, LeoTolstoy.

Worst employment moment ever: being fired after three months from my first job ever out of college-- marketing assistant at a fund-raising consultancy for 1) improperly duplicating the color-coding scheme on meeting packets 2) forgetting to send an enclosure with a mailing 3) talking while stuffing envelopes.

Not very--Mechanical, could write a treatise on stupid things I've done in cars. Got drivers license at seventeen, only because humiliation of being in a carpool with younger kids became unbearable. Learned to drive stick shift at nineteen. At some moment in the process, my father suggested that maybe drinking a beer might help me relax and do a better job behind the weel.

Sort of known for--Being Communications Director for a company that has many, er PR moments, is known for its modesty, professionalism, and employing some of the bad boys in the J2EE industry, among whom my husband is one of the most outspoken.

Humiliating social moment--Mr. Bogey, my Bull terrier, was totally snubbed at a French dog show where we took him in hopes of establishing his pedigree. Ok we bought him from the gypsies on the Quais de Paris, but he does have all the neurotic bull terrier traits--occasionally chases his tail, loyal but dense, has sensitive skin, and has a shoe fetish (all shoes must be picked up around the house or he drags them off to his lair). Picture of General Patton and his bull terrier, Willie.

Lives in--Atlanta. It took me almost ten years and living in a lot of more cosmopolitan places to decide to return to my hometown. Places I sort of like to go to in Atlanta--Cafe Intermezzo, Jolie Kobe (now Azure) in Sandy Springs for best pastry in the city, Alon's Bakery (Virginia Highland) a good runner up, Doc Chey's Noodle House in Virginia Highlands, Chez Philippe In Peachtree Hills (love the Sunday brunch), hairdresser "Pascal" at Studio Pascal in Buckhead. Technically he's Pascal Bis (the second) because I used to go to another Pacal who moved to Aspen and became a celebrity hairdresser. Have heard the Supper Club and Cafe d'Alsace in Decatur are good, but haven't been there yet. Heck anybody who moved to this town six months ago, probably knows more of the happening places than I do--I've got three kids.

Strange fact--Had pet rats as a child. These were "fancy domestic" rats, not the common wharf varmint variety. My rat was caramel and white and called Turkish Delight; my sister's was black and white and named Daddy Boze. It used to provoke some curiosity among the neighborhood mothers when we would stroll our pet rats in a doll parambulator--but not much, we had the good fortune to grow up in the South where you have to be really eccentric to stand out.

Used to--Run marathons: Boston (twice but not officially since you have to have a competitive time), NYC (my favorite) and Washington DC Marine Corps. Average time--4 1/2 hours, finishing was the main accomplishment. Definitely would recommend the NYC marathon for someone who's never run one before--great way to see the city, especially parts where you might not feel comfortable going under normal circumstances, loved the bridges and the enthusiastic crowds.

"Etat Civil"--Married with three children.

Aging Gracefully with Children

I find it exhausting raising 15 month-old boys when they are rampaging through the house throwing everything out of cabinets and drawers, stealing each other's toys and barking indignantly at each other like seal pups. However, a recent car ride, with a friend, our daughters and her thirteen year old son, made me consider the daunting possibility that a couple of years down the road I would be the parent of adolescents. The scene brought back memories. "Charlie" as we'll call him was upset because his mother wasn't listening to the "cool" radio station. Rather than sit back in his seat and deal with it, he kept lurching forward and trying to switch the channel, which only made my friend more insistent. Finally, the Four Seasons December '63 (Oh what a night) came on and we couldn't resist and started singing along "Oh, what a night, late December back in '63, what a very special time for me, as I remember what a night!"

There's something so ridiculous about adolescence, teenagers and how seriously they take themselves, as highlighted by that cheesy song. Maybe it was being around a thirteen year old and not feeling so far removed from that stage ourselves (granted I was born in '72 and my friend is a little older), but it seemed very hilarious and she and I decided to be equally immature and continue singing out loud.
"Mom stop singing now, you've got a terrible voice."
"You don't like it, well now you're going to have to listen to the entire song..."
Even I couldn't resist, "Chill out Charlie, you'll be old some day yourself. Oh and what's with calling your mother homey, you know they were saying that back in the eighties when I was your age. Are you so sure you're with it?"

The upside with thirteen year olds is that they move on, so twenty minutes later Charlie was happily showing off some hockey moves at the ice skating rink and acting like a sweet kid again, not yet old enough to be totally embarassed about being seen with his Mom and her "homey."

It did make me think about the parenting thing. I only had a younger sister. I guess my reference on mother of boys would have been a family friend who had five sons. Two of them were my sister's and my ages and we hung out with them a bit in junior high and high school. You couldn't get anything past Mrs. X. I remember one of the boys describing their brothers coming home late one night and sheepishly hugging their mother good night. "Hmmh," she said "It smells like you boys have been drinking beer, smoking pot and then eaten some peanut butter to cover it up."

A Hazy Shade of Winter

Might-have-been's become never-to-be's;
Possibilities unforeseen
Bloom and fade.
The growth of an idea, a question, a phoneme.
Sound waves bounce images black and white,
Growth truncated by blight.
Count to sleep under the surgeon's knife,
Wake up to emptiness.

Lie weak and weary.
Drink soursop tea,
Creole sensibilities,
Radiance, resonance and revenants.
Natal day shared with Poe.

Six paperwhite bulbs,
Winter forcing in Deco glass.
Holly tree outside the window.

Roman shades, color of creme brulee.
Lustre of raw silk,
Baby's sigh and rumble of passing train.
Prismatic water droplets shatter
Mosaic tile of celadon and bleached bone,
Shifting patterns of light.

Headscarves and the French Secular State

Recently Andy and Kame both blogged about this issue, haven't checked Merde in France yet, but I'm sure he has an opinion as well. The topic is hardly recent. I remember in the late eighties, Mitterand's wife was in the news a bit for supporting the rights of Muslim girls to wear headscarves in the French public schools.

The issue of outlawing religious references in children's clothing does seem very exotic to Americans. In Atlanta, some of the public schools (sorry all you English people, but the logical association of the word public is "freely available to the general public"--it doesn't make sense to use that term for exclusive private schools) have gone to mandatory uniforms. This has to do with some studies showing a correlation between mandatory uniforms and children's academic performance. I don't remember reading too much there, but I think the reasoning went that the clothing lent a "professional" association to the idea of school. You remove clothes as a major distraction and way of children establishing their identity and you reinforce some minimum standards. American parents are more concerned about having little Brianna not adopt the baby Britney pre-teen slut look or preventing ittle Johnny from wearing his jeans hip hop style, floating around his knees.

Why do the French care? It's a good question, and one on which I can only give an outsider's perspective. I can only imagine this goes back to France's long history of having Roman Catholicism as the state religion and the corresponding abuses that accompany that level of power and influence, so that following the French Revolution there was a very strong secular backlash. I remember reading that at some time in the post-Revolution period, it was requested that taxpayers list their religious affiliation on their tax returns so that they could be assessed a tax for the upkeep of their religious institution, and that it was the state who paid the salary of the Catholic priest, the Protestant pastor or the rabbi. This is more involvement than I would have imagined a secular state would want to have in religion, albeit the strategy was probably about control. There is a balance. I also remember in the Mitterand years that some of the religious schools in France were receiving state subsidies. They were upset when the government started intervening and telling them what they could teach. Yet, at the same time, they were taking the government money, so it was only a question of time before that sort of conflict arose.

I was surprised to hear my husband say that in France, the state schools are considered to be the best and that it is the private schools, which are often seen as a refuge for people who couldn't hack it in the competitive public school system--or for those whose parents have strong feelings about their children receiving a religious education. I don't think I could say the same for quality of American public schools, or at least the secondary schools in the city or state where I live. On a national level, one also reads that American children tend be among the lowest scoring in standardized tests compared to the rest of the world; certainly the political agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties pay lip service to concerns about the qualilty of public education in this country.

Thus, the general quality of French public schools is, I think, an important issue. While it would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds for children to have access to free, excellent public schooling, that is simply not the case in many places, certainly not in many parts of America. Ideally, free excellent quality public education would be a right, but in the real world it appears to be more of a priviledge. In France, one could argue that the quality of the public school system is very much the result of a centralized social and political agenda enacted by a government strongly entrenched in a secular tradition.

Are children in school to express their individuality? If they are in private school and that's what their parents are specifically paying for, yes. However, I'm not sure this is the case for public school, which we all pay for, but which must strive for standards that are acceptable to the majority. I've only seen his show once or twice but I'm sure some conservative American pundit like Bill O'Reilly would be pretty ambivalent here. If it was about little Maggie being prevented from wearing a discreet (read not the Madonna fashion statement) cross to public school, he and the religious right would be in an uproar. However, I can see him being sympathetic to the issue of uniforms in public schools and the policing of some minimum standards in attire.

Where are the people protesting for the right to religious expression in French public school coming from, specifically as it concerns Muslim headscarves? First, let's factor out those with no religious feelings about the issue at all who are simply protesting for the sake of protesting (ironically, the religious protestors are aligning themselves with a popular, secular French cultural trend there). Second, I cannot exactly know the feelings of the true protestors. Growing up, I never really knew how to interpret the practice of women wearing headscarves or sort of loose coats to go out, in certain Islamic countries. With an American girl's sensibility, it seemed oppressive, but I lacked reference points outside my own culture to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. This confusion would have been heightened by the fact that both countries I chiefly read about, growing up in the US in the eighties, represented politicized Islam--Saudi Arabia and Iran.

It wasn't until I read the Iranian writer and literary critic, Azar Nafisi's book "Reading Lolita in Tehran" that I gained a sense of how a woman who grew up in a secular culture in an Islamic country (pre-Revolutionary Iran) would approach the same theme. Her take is that Islamic women who cover their hair and wearing loose-fitting long clothing do so as a personal expression of religious piety. When Islamic states require that women adopt this style of clothing and remove the element of personal choice in that decision, she feels they render the gesture meaningless. Well that I could understand better, or at least I could sympathize with choices people might make on an individual level. Admittedly, the sort of paternalistic sensibility conveyed by a phrase like "men have the eyes of wolves" doesn't really strike a chord with me or maybe I wouldn't peg the susceptibility to visual stimulation as a uniquely masculine trait and, at any rate, people will always find something to fixate on. After all, hadn't my English Lit friends and I had a good laugh about who was capable of finding the more "racy" parts of Spenser's Fairie Queene and I remember an older Spanish gentleman commenting on some earlier part of the last century, when women did dress more modestly: "ah, the rapture of an ankle!" The issue only becomes problematic when a gesture originally meant to reflect individual modesty or piety becomes viewed as a politicized statement.

If I were to go to Saudi Arabia, I would consider it normal to comply with their laws as regards women's clothing. If I were Saudi, the fact that Saudi Arabia is not exactly a democratic government is another issue, although some evidence suggests that if it were more democratic, the resulting government might be even more fundamentalist. So I'm not sure that would do anything to free up the dress code. At any rate, it's not my government or my culture, and I would be respectful of their laws if I were there. Correspondingly, the French government ban on religious expression in public schools is not a law that I would necessarily have supported were I French. However, I can understand where this law is coming from and that is something I can respect. Like it or not, public education is not about honoring the individual preferences of every single citizen, but about promoting the ideals of the state that supports it. In France, that is about the strong commitment to secularism in public institutions.

Michael Moore and Titles

At the end of my previous Reading Michael Moore post, it occured to me that the subject I was interested in pursuing further was not Michael Moore's work itself, which is thought-provoking and conveys messages that I believe are important, but rather peripheral aspects of his style or simple snapshots of what he covered in Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men

I find the title Stupid White Men as well as chapter titles like "Kill Whitey" completely gratuitous. As a, let's face it, not-so-stupid white man, Moore probably figures he can get away with it, granted they have a provocative ring. Maybe the titles are not meant to be taken literally, but I still find it pandering for attention at the expense of intellectual honesty. As a pale woman, I'm a member of the wrong color category, but the right sex, according to Moore. If he were going to be scientific about his moralizing, he should do so in a case where every category had the same opportunity to take part in the destructive activities he mentions. Are women morally superior or do most of them simply lack the opportunities or the energy to start wars, oppress people and destroy the environment? I once worked with a man who found Barbara Bush's comment that "one in seven Americans is governed by a Bush" (back when George W. was still governor of Texas) highly disturbing. He found it infuriating that everyone naturally assumed she radiated goodness simply because she was an old woman wearing pearls. Virginia Woolf looked at the issue of gender from the reverse perspective, wondering why it was that women hadn't authored more important works of literature in her essay "A Room of One's Own." She attributes this to the fact that women tend to be the ones principally responsible for raising children (not to mention bearing them), coupled with the fact that women were historically denied education, knowledge of the world and access to publication. She feels that a guaranteed private income and a room of one's own are the necessary first conditions for women to write.

Recently, some have speculated that I may have authored this blog. The idea that I have the time for such activity and that they may, by extension, have been conversing with me through this person is highly entertaining--a testament to the fertility of some imaginations and the degree to which certain people do not really know me. While it is true that the shop around the corner I work for has its preoccupations with taking over the world, there's a distinct possibility that the conventional tactics for pursuing that goal are quite time-consuming enough and there's little left over in a day in the life of yours truly to subvert the "authenticity" of blogsphere.

At fourteen months, the twins are now "fully operational" death stars. Their current interest is stress testing the Playstation and GameCube. The GameCube proved a better time investment. Pirate was crouched over the cube swatting at every possible inch of the surface until he came upon the eject button by hazard. "Ah so..." At this point Blondie leans over and observes. It's a little unquieting, like watching the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. If coming home from work to the twins was not exhausting enough, there's the four year old and her playdate who have needs as well, specifically sandwiches. Of course, they don't want the same kind and while I'm attuned to (and don't tolerate much in the way of) my daughter's culinary quirks, I come up short when it comes to the playdate. "There is mayonaise on my cheese sandwich! I don't eat mayonaise." I laboriously scrape off the mayonaise, but it's not good enough. "Fix me a new sandwich." The week-day babysitter wryly observes "You should have just told him it was a new sandwich," but it's too late and she's not helping either so I fix a new mayonaise-free sandwich...only to notice fifteen minutes later that it hasn't been touched. When I ask the child about this, he answers "Oh, I don't like that kind of cheese."