Feb 5, 2010
Feb 4, 2010
Verses
excerpt from Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That (1929)—
Bavarian food had a richness and spiciness that we always missed on our return to England. We loved the rye bread, the dark pine honey, the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice and the help of snow stored during the winter in an ice-house, my grandfather's venison, the honey cakes, the pastries, and particularly the sauces rich with different kinds of mushrooms. Also the pretzels, the carrots cooked in sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blueberries. In the orchard, close to the house, we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were also rows of black-currant and gooseberry bushes in the garden. The estate, despite the recency of my grandfather's tenure, his liberalism, and his experiments in modern agricultural methods, remained feudalistic. The poor, sweaty, savage-looking farm servants, who talked a dialect we could not understand, frightened us. They ranked lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians, settled about half a mile from the house, whom my grandfather had imported as cheap labour for his brick factory—we associated them in our minds with 'the gipsies of the wood' of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day and made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards—when milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burned, and we complained—'Those poor Italians in your grandfather's brick yard used to burn their polenta on purpose, sometimes, just for a change of flavour.'
Installation for Thursday
Frederic Edwin Church's The Heart of the Andes (1859) exhibited at the "Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the Sanitary Commission," New York, April, 1864.
Feb 3, 2010
news
From NYRblog---
Conspicuously absent from the debate, in France and in Britain, is any consideration of the Islamic veil’s historic dimensions. It seems clear from earliest sources that the first Muslim women went about unveiled; and some of Muhammad’s female followers fought courageously alongside his men. The custom of veiling appears to have developed later as a reaction to the institution of slavery. As the Islamic state expanded, a growing flood of slaves were captured as booty, and sold in the slave markets. Many of these were young women who were incorporated into Muslim households as concubines. Slave women were required to expose the head, arms, legs, and upper parts of the chest, and to enhance their value slave merchants ensured that they were well versed in singing, dancing, music and poetry—necessary skills for the arts of seduction and love.
In the face of this challenge the supposedly respectable women retreated into the sanctity of the home. By the twelfth century Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (1149-1209), one of the most renowned and influential of Quranic commentators was arguing that “a free woman’s entire body is a shameful nakedness in itself” and must be fully covered. Razi’s reasoning was commercial: Quranic writings on modesty did not apply to slaves because they were items of property whose purchase or sale required “an investigative and careful inspection.”
The long-term social consequences are hardly surprising, given that in parts of the Muslim world slavery was only formally abolished in the middle of the last century. Veiling and sexual apartheid, though not universal, became the hallmark of urban Muslim societies from Indonesia to Morocco. With colonial administrators regarding female seclusion as barriers to the “civilizing mission” of empire, wearing the veil inevitably became a form of resistance to foreign conquest. In the West, its symbolic charge is far from being depleted. It may justly be regarded as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, but like punk and other urban styles, it can also mean a deliberate rejection of the current cultural norms imposed on women of every age, shape, appearance and size.
Feb 2, 2010
Feb 1, 2010
Observe the first day of spring with Brigid of the Gael whose special province is
babies; blacksmiths; boatmen; cattle; chicken farmers; children whose parents are not married; children whose mothers are mistreated by the children's fathers; dairymaids; dairy workers; fugitives; infants; Ireland; Leinster, mariners; midwives; milk maids; nuns; poets; poor; poultry farmers; poultry raisers; printing presses; sailors; scholars; travellers; watermen
but who as "fiery arrow" guides everyone into the new and the renewed. Special love to our children, watermen, dairies, poets, readers and scholars, and travelers. As Lady Gregory transcribed:
Now as to Brigit she was born at sunrise on the first day of the spring, of a bondwoman of Connacht. And it was angels that baptized her and that gave her the name of Brigit, that is a Fiery Arrow. She grew up to be a serving girl the same as her mother. And all the food she used was the milk of a white red-eared cow that was set apart for her by a druid. And everything she put her hand to used to increase, and it was she wove the first piece of cloth in Ireland, and she put the white threads in the loom that have a power of healing in them to this day. She bettered the sheep and she satisfied the birds and she fed the poor.
Here's a blog. The title involves a misuse of the word hipster (though maybe not?...the meaning's surely expanded, maybe a hipster is...fuck it), but otherwise, it's pretty quick and delectable. Can you stand these houses?!
You don't have to say you're sorry.
We love Rex Ryan and his storied 7,000 calories a day; and why does anybody have to apologize for acting up at a mixed martial arts event in Florida?
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