Mmmhmm.

{via.}

Nigella's Library

When I grow up, I want to be Nigella.  Say no to Kindles! No to Nooks!

The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

I had this poem memorized in college.  I read it for the first time in a course called 'Campus Ecology' and taped it into all of my notebooks and journals.  The course was taught by a one of my favorite professors who let us read David Orr and Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard and just truckloads of Mary Oliver. 

We held class on the green lawn outside Holland Hall-- our limestone castle of a history department-- and we wrote letters to our congressmen about sustainability, green fuels, and wind turbines.  Oliver's The Summer Day became our anthem.  As Joan Didion once so gracious offered-- Was anyone ever so young?

I still think about the poem sometimes, usually in July when the heat seems never-ending and I start dreaming of wool skirts and black tights.  Summer isn't my favorite season.

Rereading it again this year, I can't help but grimace at not only Oliver's overwrought romanticism but also at the girl who once worshiped it.  And yet as Didion also once said (Didion again, I know...) “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

So true, Joanie.  So true.


The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

On Nora Ephron

An ex-boyfriend of mine used to tease me for being 'of the Nora Ephron school of thought'.  Well, tease isn't the right word.  He would shame me for it.  It bothered me to no end (well, an incredibly finite end, actually) not only because I knew he meant it as a dig, but also because I realized that he didn't understand me--- or women like me--- at all.  He thought that by enjoying films like When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail, (not to mention books like Heartburn and Wallflower at the Orgy) it meant I was lacking a certain edge.  He meant that I was unintelligent and flighty.  Ditzy.  Girly.  Plonk.  I remember my friend Annie jumping to my defense, sighting several other writers I favored, artists whom I understood, but I never had the words ready to defend Ephron's wit and intellect.  I regret that.  Ephron was a woman writer who spoke to women, and it's offensive to categorize such a thing as trite.  Nora would have hated him.

We, the women of the Nora Ephron School of Thought, are a certain breed.  We are girls who read The Bell Jar and only saw beauty.  The ones who liked getting frightened by Joan Didion.  We happily wept to Joni Mitchell's River and danced to Patti Smith's Gloria.  We weren't scared and we aren't stupid.  We liked party dresses and pumpkins and clanging kitchens and cappuccinos but it didn't make us dumb.  We were the optimists.

I started giving walking tours of Ephron's You've Got Mail the summer I moved here to anyone who would attend.  At that time, the summer of 2007, it meant mostly friends who were visiting me from the Midwest, but also to new coworkers, to my roommate, and often to myself.  My tour (as directed by the YGM DVD's special features) began at the Cheese and Antique's shop on 69th and Columbus (although no longer in business, it served as the original storefront for The Shop Around the Corner), up to Fox Books (a discount clothing store, I believe), to Gray's Papaya, and Cafe Lalo, and Verdi Square.  I made my way up to H&H Bagels, Zabars, and the 79th Street Boat Basin (Hello, New Jersey!) and finally the 91st Street Garden.  It's a lovely little walking tour for visitors actually, but it started because I didn't know my way around any neighborhoods other than Ephron's Upper West Side.  I was incredibly happy in those days wandering around the city alone, imagining the future I might live on those streets.

I heard of Ephron's death tonight through twitter while at a party at MoMA that I attended with my friend Tanna.  Our hearts sank and our heads began to spin, trying to figure out how on earth she could have died.  She was on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell me just last week.  I listened to the podcast version on my lunch hour while eating a sandwich on the benches outside the Gourmet Garage on Mercer and Broome.   I listened to her play Not My Job, and talk about missing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.  I reminded myself, once again, to read I Feel Bad About My Neck, even though I've been afraid of it up to this point.  I didn't realize that she was sick.

To quote Zadie Smith when Katherine Hepburn died (another story for another time, lordy),  "When people truly feel for a popular artist - when they follow in their thousands behind Dickens' coffin or Valentino's - it is only the dues returned for pleasure given, and it never feels like enough." I would be hard pushed to think of another artist whose death has caused me this much pause.  I guess I felt she was of my time. Someone I might run into someday at Fairway or in line for a movie.  It gave me comfort to think of her still living here, in this New York, not one from another era.  This week will be packed with tributes and outpourings and mourning for the loss of "the last of her kind."  Ephron would be the first to laugh at such grandiose understandings, and it will take us a while to contemplate what exactly is lost.  For me... for me it feels like I've lost a bit of my beginning.

The Riviera Maya

Let's go back.

Le Vent

Wowza--this video of two Staatsballett Berlin ballet dancers shot at 1000 frames per second, to Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place. Gorg.

{via Cup of Jo}

March in Cobble Hill

Brooklyn seemed to have burst into bloom overnight! Congress and Bergen were both lined in pink and white blooms this morning. It's hard to beat springtime in New York.