OF A GOLDEN AGE

From Coupling, the British version:

What in the name of God’s ass is the purpose of potpourri? Looks like breakfast, smells like your auntie!

Queer theory groundbreaker and literary theorist Eve Sedgwick has died of breast cancer. On her chosen field:

“It’s about trying to understand different kinds of sexual desire and how the culture defines them,” she told The New York Times in 1998, explaining the function of queer theory. “It’s about how you can’t understand relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship between them.”

Sedgwick was a luminary.

From design mind, a summation of and commentary on a recent address by “information design” expert and industry beacon Malcolm McCullough:

Instead of building roads and bridges to connect the disparately located and reign in suburbia, [we could] attend to massive projects of culture, and physical marketplace, and the stage, and screen, and other activities that bring together a society in physical proximity, rather than relying on the siren songs of technological advance for telecommuting and geographic isolationism.

Our cities are frequently not designed for the amount of traffic generated as is, let alone if we increased the urban population density to a more responsible number for the amount of land our cities take up. Unfortunately, as the post describes, this means our suburbs spread beyond any rational means and push people further and further apart. McCullough is pushing a reversion to urban culture where people intermingle and look at one another.

When people don’t look at one another, relations suffer in unexpected ways. In the BBC’s 2001 miniseries The Human Face, host John Cleese describes how people in cars act badly and fail to relate to other drivers: We can’t look at each other’s faces and see, or hear, the subtle expressions of apology that we use after bumping into each other on the sidewalk.

This post is dedicated to my Fleetwood Mac-loving parents.

From a New York Times Fashion article on Stevie Nicks’ influence:

[Nicks'] reach extends to Hollywood as well. Lindsay Lohan hopes to buy the rights to her life story and to play her on film. Unmoved, Ms. Nicks responded: “Over my dead body. She needs to stop doing drugs and get a grip. Then maybe we’ll talk.”

Awesome.

• Last night I made vegan cupcakes while Andy talked to me about cooking goat. It was a delightful contrast. I have put a cap on goat-cooking-related conversation though, so now he can’t really talk about it again for at least a few weeks.

• Contrary to popular belief, spring is not here. Sunday, it snowed; yesterday, it dropped below 30; today, the wind peeled the surface off of a billboard near my office. However, I spent a while browsing a friend’s immense collection of vegetable seeds and it made me feel good. Eventually things will grow out of the ground again. I swear.

• Seth Godin encourages proactivity this week by some unconventional entrepreneurship, which folds in nicely with Trendwatching’s April bulletin on so-called “sellsumers.” Recently, Godin is doing a fine job of offering multitudes of ideas not only to sometimes make money, but to keep busy and stay mentally buoyant. For instance:

“Most companies would welcome a post-tax-day accountant who offered (on spec) to review bills or expenses in exchange for half the money saved. If they had time, they’d do it themselves, but of course they don’t.”

• Um, did you know that Georgia Tech’s mascot is a great old Ford coupe and its fight song was partly written by avant garde composer Charles Ives? Me either.

• Dustin Rowles’ update on Iron Man 2 at Pajiba includes a hilarious little diatribe at Terrence Howard for turning down his role from the first movie:

You get to be Colonel James fucking Rhodes in not only Iron Man, but in The Avengers and whatever else Marvel spins off. You do that for a few movies, and you are set. For life. That’s like getting a clerkship on the Supreme Court. Sure, the money is lousy and the hours are long, but you can do anything you want afterwards.

• Many prominent law firms have pushed back the start dates of their fresh hires up to a year or more in response to the recession, but some are getting creative by loaning their newbies to legal aid organizations during that time at lower salaries.

• I did a lot of work on my stylesheet this weekend. Click through and look at the site, it’s a lot cleaner and brighter.

My lovely ladyfriend Erica asked if I’d knit her a scarf several months ago, and once I finished it took me a month and a half to bring it to her. I thought, “How sad that now it won’t be scarf weather again.” Then it sleeted and snowed almost all of yesterday.

I can’t help but feel partly responsible. From here on out I’m only knitting bathing suits.

Kelly Slater is the most successful professional surfer in history. He won his first world championship at age 20, in 1992.

In 2006 he told GQ, “I’m just having fun, because I don’t have to win a title to be fulfilled.” He won that year and again in 2008.

Oh, Bukowski. You rip-roaring belligerent drunkard. It’s okay, I love you anyway, and here’s one of my favorite poems. I can never decide whether or not it’s a spin on those terrible Love Is… comics.

(This man is definitely one of my Favorite Things but that post will come sometime in the future.)

a definition

love is a light at
night running through the fog

love is a beercap
stepped on while on the way
to the bathroom

love is the lost key to your door
when you’re drunk

love is what happens
one year in ten

love is a crushed cat

love is the old newsboy on the
corner who has
given it up

love is what you think the other
person has destroyed

love is what vanished with the
age of battleships

love is the phone ringing,
the same voice or another
voice but never the right
voice

love is betrayal
love is the burning of the
homeless in an alley

love is steel
love is the cockroach
love is a mailbox

love is rain upon the roof
of an old hotel
in Los Angeles

love is your father in a coffin
(who hated you)

love is a horse with a broken
leg
trying to stand
while 45,000 people
watch

love is the way we boil
like the lobster

love is everything we said
it wasn’t

love is the flea you can’t
find

and love is a mosquito

love is 50 grenadiers

love is an empty
bedpan

love is a riot in San Quentin
love is a madhouse
love is a donkey standing in a
street of flies

love is an empty barstool

love is a film of the Hindenburg
curling to pieces
a moment that still screams

love is Dostoevsky at the
roulette wheel

love is what crawls along
the ground

love is your woman dancing
pressed against a stranger

love is an old woman
stealing a loaf of
bread

and love is a word used
too much and
much
too soon.

Someone on Pajiba reviewed Jane Eyre in one of the most poorly fleshed out writeups I’ve ever read, of anything.

Money passage:

And this is what I don’t get: if the point of all of the novels written in England in the 1800s is to show that those who are good and wonderful get what they deserve, and those who are assholes get their just desserts, how is it that Jane — by being pious and generous and good — gets stuck with a crippled asshole as her reward? Yeah, she loves him, but I can’t figure out why. He’s much more likable in the movie. In fact, the movie is better than the book. Go watch it instead.

Hahahahaha. Many things about this are amazing. I never realized “all of the novels written in England in the 1800s” had the same goal, nor that Jane and Rochester are such simple archetypes. What an idiot.

Rochester isn’t supposed to be likable, he’s supposed to be tormented and with good reason. In that regard, the movie version described here does not make a lot of sense. It negates the point of the novel if Jane and Rochester have a charming courtship and live happily ever after. They’re the 19th-century version of a broken home!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t even like this book, though it is beautifully written and complex. I can’t relate to Jane nor to the melodramatic 1800s feel of the writing. Yet, as one of my favorite professors said often, you can appreciate something without liking it.

A few weeks ago my friend and former high-shool teacher Kelly wrote an intense, wonderful account of her favorite cookie recipe and its influence on her relationship with her future husband. Here is my favorite part:

Men my age tended to be freshly divorced, pudgy, cap-wearing, and goateed.

Then today my best ladyfriend Emily wrote about a similarly beloved cookie recipe and, since she is a bigtime international politics dork, took it in a make-cookies-not-war direction:

These cookies will win hearts and minds. You could subdue the nastiest of people, prevent unrest, and end wars with these cookies.

Kelly’s cookie of choice is Nigella Lawson’s spin on death by chocolate. Emily’s is a chocolate-coffee variety from Gourmet. Both, apparently, bring people together. The moral is that you should go forth, make cookies, live long, and prosper.