Zucchini Cake (just another day in Russia)

After visiting a monastery yesterday, we went to a friend's house for lunch. This is Baba Zeena's backyard. It is FULL of gorgeous flowers and probably the best produce in the world.

3-year-old, not at all overwhelmed

Cauliflower

Sunflowers, compost bin, rusty barrel

Cabbage patch with melons hanging in the background

Zucchini the size of the Russian spouse's forearm

 

What does one do with such bounty? Baba Zeena fries the zucchini in lots of butter and oil, and it's delicious. I decided to shred the zucchini and bake it into a cake. I ran into some obstacles: among other things, I had to convert the gas oven settings to find approximately 350 degrees farenheit, and I could only find one measuring implement in my MIL's apartment: a 500 ml cup. The cinnamon smells different here, and the baking vanilla is in powder form.

The oven: note the Turkish coffee pot

It turns out that "3" is about 325 and "4" is about 350

But I was determined to surprise my MIL who was very skeptical about the American custom of baking with zucchini. I used Smitten Kitten's recipe for zucchini bread.

random image of child with bucket of purple gooseberries

Fortunately MIL remembered where she had stashed the cake tin she apparently never uses and dug it out for me. Here are some of the ingredients, including eggs fresh from the village, the powdered vanilla, and the weird cinnamon.

Even if one had not been baking under the influence of wine, the cake batter might have seemed too green, yes?

The cake baked a little longer than I expected (unfamiliar oven, unfamiliar ingredients), but it came out of the spring form pan perfectly. The crust (now on the bottom) is lovely and crusty, and the cake inside is moist enough. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with my attempts to bake here.

TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Breakfast: zucchini cake with plum

What I'm reading in Russia

I started with Darkness at Noon, published in 1941, set in the 1930s during Stalin's purges. It's beautifully written and thought provoking. Because of my lack of knowledge about Russian history, it was difficult initially to orient myself to the plot-tangle. Rubashov is an old Bolshevik, one of the original revolutionaries and a hero of the civil war. Now in his 50s, he's been imprisoned for colluding against No. 1 (Stalin). The novel structure is organized around three "hearings" during which Rubashov is slowly manipulated (maybe?) into agreeing to confess in a public trial to plotting an attempt on No. 1's life. During each section (Hearing 1, Hearing 2), Rubashov philosophizes and reminisces, and it's during the reminiscences that the reader learns how deeply committed Rubashov was to the international communist party, and the emergence of his misgivings about the work he does for the Stalinist party. One cannot feel deep connection to this hero/anti-hero, and it's difficult to sustain sympathy for Rubashov as an individual; however, it's easy to learn sympathy for the culture that produced him and the ideology that entrapped him.

I started reading this on my Kindle, after seeing my 15 year old friend Sasha reading it on her tablet. She's a huge Tolstoy fan, and I figured, if she can do it, I can too! Plus we're going to St. Petersburg together next week, and I thought it would be fun to read it along with her while seeing some of the sights Tolstoy includes in the story.

Teaching the God of Small Things

character map

While snapping this picture on her gifted-and-talented phone, my student accidentally cut off Margaret Kochamma (and dead Joe) on the far left side of this whiteboard picture, and I wonder if that signifies something about the students' current inability to process post-colonial conditions of shattered intimacies, but here you have it: the character map we developed after reading the first three chapters of the novel for today's class. In my South Asian Literature course I allotted only four class sessions in which to discuss this fractured, poetic 320-page postcolonial novel. Today, in a brief lecture I provided what I thought might be necessary background information about the colonization of places along the Malabar coast, the state of Kerala and its Communism, land reforms, Syrian Christianity, the caste system (although they've already studied Cracking India and Untouchable, so they're pretty well-up on that), in addition to biographical information about Arundhati Roy. I am probably the last person to find out that the novel is loosely based on Roy's life, and that of her mother Mary Roy.

We began to have a rich discussion of the significance of the History House and the allusions to Heart of Darkness in chapter 2--one student pointed out that the 7-year-old perspective dominating the narration conflates Chacko's philosophizing about History as a big ghosty house they inhabit with an actual house that holds a haunting history of its own--the British guy that went mad, like Kurtz. Students appeared surprised when I explained that Kari Saipu, or the "Black Sahib," seems to have had pedophilic tendencies, and that this has implications for how postcolonial Indian history is imagined in this book (Kari Saipu makes me think, in fact, very much of early scenes of Hari Kunzru's Impressionist as well as what happens to Estha later, and then of the Kite Runner which we'll be watching rather than reading. Why all the pedophilia, Edward Said?). I suppose I'll keep blogging about this, since it's one place to keep my thoughts linear in a case where the novel is anything but.

Bolly Log

I've been watching Bollywood movies on Netflix for the past couple of weeks. I cannot get through a single movie in a night, but that's neither here nor there. I've got a lot to catch up on; it's been a while. Here's what I logged this winter break (and still counting):

• Chennai Express: 2013 with Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone (both from Om Shanti Om which I loved). Very silly. Stereotypes of South Indians abound. Also a long and bloody fight scene.

• Dostana: 2008  Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham pretend to be gay to rent an apartment. Lots of John Abraham's awesome physique. Bad music. I was going to be offended about the gay stereotypes but the KISS and then the ambiguous ending made up for that.

• I, Me, aur Main: Briefly, I got on a John Abraham kick. Wouldn't you?

• Dil To Pagal Hai: 1997 with Shah Rukh Khan in his bad hair days. I think I should probably have seen this sooner. I already knew all the songs (which I love--old school playback singers). But Netflix had this on a timer, and the timer went off before I could finish the story!
• Lakshya: Totally my favorite film so far, a war drama based on the 1999 Kargil conflict (when Pakistan-backed armed forces infringed on the Line of Control in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu-Kashmir). Why did I love this? Soldier Hrithik Roshan of the two thumbs can dance and he shows it off in Main Aisa Kyon Huun. Also features Amitabh Bachchan and Om Puri in Experienced Soldier roles.
• Bunty aur Babli: Rani Mukerji and the Bachchans. I love the Bachchans. A few things I appreciate about this movie: the subversively DIY Hindu-ish wedding ceremony with innovative vows and explicit references to consummation. Rani's and Abhishek's constant costume changes. Amitabh in a Guy Noir role. The (to me, at least) amusing fantasy that a woman can give birth to a newborn the size of a healthy 3-month old in ten minutes, flee the police mob, and jump on a train. This review finds it an adorable Bonnie-and-Clyde send-up featuring "girl power" messages. Well, kind of.

On Breaking Down Gender Stereotypes

Once again, I will not be supporting the GoldieBlox company, in spite of its stated goal to "break down gender stereotypes." In what one online friend referred to as a "jerkmove," GoldieBlox is threatening to sue the Beastie Boys to preempt a copyright infringement case over the use of the rap group's "Girls" song in a commercial. The Beastie Boys have published an open letter in the NYT.

I am so annoyed by this pseudo-feminist company that I can't even repost the original GoldieBlox commercial, even though it offers what I find to be a clever parody of the Beastie Boys song because I think the toy is a stupid gimmick. It features a conventionally pretty, able-bodied girl with long blonde hair. Sometimes she has an African American sidekick who is also as pretty as a Barbie. The toy does nothing to "break down gender stereotypes" other than give these characters pastel colored tools.

Just a quick little OMG

I did my first tweet ever for #AcWriMo.

My kid is breaking the first of her 2-year molars (bottom left, and she's 2 1/2). We were thinking she was just "being TWO" but no, she's just "being TWO in pain." There is a difference. I have to believe that.

Working on Marie Corelli always makes me happy. Because you're reading along and then you come to something like this:

... never in all the passing pageant and phantasmagoria of history did a greater generation of civilised hypocrites cumber the face of the globe than cumber it to-day,—never was the earth so oppressed with the weight of polite lying,—never were there such crowds of civil masqueraders, cultured tricksters, and social humbugs, who, though admirable as tricksters and humbugs, are wholly contemptible as men and women. Truth is at a discount,—and if one should utter it, the reproachful faces of one's so-called “friends” show how shocked they are at meeting with anything honest. We are drifting our days away in a condition of false luxury,—of over-ripe civilisation,—which has bred in us that apathetic inertia which is always a premonitory symptom of fatal disease.  (Modern Marriage Market)

I think she just nailed what folks now refer to as "first world problems." More wine please now.

Teaching Barthes, Foucault, and Gubar this week in my Lit Theory class.
Full of misery about 2/3 of my Composition class.
Waiting for good news from two major submissions last summer. Was supposed to hear "in October." And now it's November 2. Does anyone else watch the calendar like I do, in regards to these sorts of things?? Yes. They do.

Is it possible that there is too much Halloween candy in the house?
And there's this:

Good Morning Goon

This morning, I'm in the kitchen putting lunches together for me and the kid, and I hear her yell from her crib, "MAMA! I WANT A BOOK!" Of all the books on the floor of her room, this is the one she wanted:

I love this kid. 28 months old, and already a dedicated reader with a taste for parody.

Baking Bread is as Hard as I Thought It Would Be

In a charmingly clear essay called "The Intentional Fallacy," which I am preparing to teach to my Literary Theory class this week, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote,

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. ... Poetry is a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery.

I read this, and then I went to a bread-baking class, and the combination of Wimsatt & Beardsley and yeast was this poem. I have not written a poem in a long while, and I've never made bread from scratch.

How does one judge a loaf of bread?

Not as early as monks, but not as late as students
A morning more humid indoors than out
Seven or eight maybe, imperfections
In a church kitchen.
Unseen hands had heated the milk
Counted the yeast
Distributed spoons.
A wheelchair, a walker, one eye blind and one wandering,
All of us kneading for the sake of our souls
Unequal to our uneven ovens
With no leader, weak lighting, glass loaf pans, cold tea
A rising, then, a falling:
Mine, puckered, but still nourishing.
What is the standard by which we disown or accept the self?

From LJ Notices to Correspondents, December 2, 1854

Q. R. H.—Courtship is an indispensable preliminary to marriage. Sebastopol has to be taken by a regular siege. It is the same with that citadel—a woman’s heart. You must approach it in due form, and fire the big guns of big promises.

Here, the London Journal editor responds to a correspondent's query presumably about whether a period of courtship is necessary, with a timely reference to the Siege of Sebastopol that was, well, ongoing (September 1854 - September 1855), because the Russians did not wish to give up the Crimea. To translate: the peaceful-looking Victorian lady, pictured there in Charles Green's 1878 watercolor (titled appropriately "Courtship"), represents the Imperial Russian Army under attack by enormous British cannons, like this one:

by William Simpson

Sounds very romantic.

It's Not Just Me

One of my colleagues recently referred to me, to my face, as "baby crazy." Hunh. I did not realize I was so transparent. But you see, I am merely channeling a cultural preoccupation, one that rivals "belly melt."

Summer Break Update 2

Illustrated London News at Alderman Library

In June, I attended a class at the Rare Book School at UVa. We (8 students and 1 professor) spent the week reading about and discussing the theory and practice of bibliographic description, textual criticism, and scholarly editing. We also practiced collation (side-by-side page/image comparison) using the Lindstrand Comparator, the Hinman collator, and electronic options like Juxta. The week was not so much a carefree gallimaufry summer camp as a diversely focused conference *on the purest crack* -- with obligatory attendance, no late entrances to sessions, healthy food at breakfast and breaks, and "electives" that included a talk on rare text preservation, a screening of a documentary about paper, a printing press demonstration, lunch-break visits to Special Collections, weeping in the Alderman Library stacks (OK, I'm probably the only RBS student who took that elective), and lots of used book store shopping.

I am eager to put this new, hard-won knowledge to work, both in the classroom (Literary Theory and Criticism this fall) and in my research (planning for a scholarly edition is under way).

Other fun events in June? I was invited to give a lecture for the local chapter of the Victorian Society for America. I presented a PowerPoint about Victorian matrimonial advertising, because the subject is fun, accessible, and makes people reconsider what they imagine was/is "conventional" in match-making and courtship then/now. A reporter and photographer from the Virginian Pilot were present, and the story was printed in last Sunday's paper.

Sewing projects:

Found some English home-dec fabric scraps at an old upholstery shop

There were enough scraps to make the doll a dress, too

Not a fantastic picture, but there you have it: we all match

The Summer Reading-for-Pleasure Project continues to be a challenge. I finished Maisie Dobbs in record time, really loving the development of the lady detective character and the suggestive inter-war English cultural history lessons. I picked up--and put down--and repicked--and reput (and so on) The Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao. I just cannot get into this story, although many of my most respected reader-friends recommend it. I was counseled to drop it for this summer, since it's defeating the purpose of the Project. I have also been trying to finish The Marriage Plot. I never got through Middlesex and I found The Virgin Suicides alienating in a too-frothy (do I mean precious?) way. I'm not sure Eugenides does it for me, but the premise here is too good to pass over. Mostly, though, it seems like a rip-off of Franny and Zooey. What am I ripping through because it's so over-the-top awesome? Marie Corelli's 1887 novel Thelma. It merits a post of its own.

Television: OMG this season of Master Chef features mean girls, pretty girls, vegetarian girls, and hipster girls. SO GOOD. At home, we are practicing our pasta-from-scratch, our eggs benedict, our cheesecake, and our sentimental background narratives about why we would make TV-candy competitors for when we go out for the show.

I also started watching Alias. It's Buffy without the camp; Lost without the brain-teasers. I object to the frequency of torture scenes, especially to the constant representation of Sydney-Bristow torture. But otherwise, the show is awesome through Season 3 (I just started Season 4: jury is out), and it motivates me to exercise my pout.

Banjo: I can now strum the alphabet song, and my daughter doesn't run away screaming in terror anymore. I feel pretty smug about this. This week I'm supposed to practice some basic frailing and learn "Good Night Ladies."

Summer "Break" Update 1

Book review? drafted (and then I found out it's not due until end of June, so I'm a month ahead--victory!--but anyway, it's a double header of this and this)

Beehives? we moved the bees from their mailing packages into their gorgeous new waterfront apiaries this week

Bad television show? watched (Hemlock Grove S1)

Banjo? not much--the C chord is hard to get right and my kid screams when she sees me bring out "jo jo"

Sewing? so far, just this dress (Simplicity 5695)

Next up:
1. Felt food is my newest DIY toy project idea... who knew there was this out there?
2. Matching outfits for me, the kid, her dolly
3. Book proposal and prep for RBS course in June
4. Finish reading The Beetle and move on to a real "for fun" book, as opposed to reading something fun that I also plan to teach in the fall
5. Sign up for banjo lessons

Thoughts on Two

This kid eats frozen peas stuck in fresh raspberries. She pretends to apply make-up to her face with a tampon. She gives me "pedicures" while I get ready for work in the morning. Today her new words were "dirt" and "hummus" and she correctly identified the number 8 after pushing that button a gazillion times on my cell phone. She is two.

In this picture, she is sitting on my lap and eating a birthday cupcake at school, surrounded by her beloved friends and teachers (and papa is in the background). She makes life worth living.

Before she was born, I was afraid she wouldn't be. And after she was born, I was afraid I would fail to get my dream job and I'd have to explain to her later why I gave up trying. Neither of these fears came true, and most of my biggest hopes have. I am so blessed to have the constant challenge and opportunity to balance my life with this brave/cautious, grinning/screeching, easily frustrated/simply pleased, mischievous/curious, strong/fragile, hilarious/heart-breaking kid and my life as an English professor teaching college kids who roughly fit the same description.

Breast-pumping at Conferences, and the Renewed Curiosity of the Boob

Miriam Posner has published a valuable, informative article about how to accommodate a breast-pumping mom at an academic conference on her blog.

HEAR HEAR!

At a conference in Houston, someone (someone really smart, with a PhD and lots of books and articles) suggested that I should use a public bathroom to pump during a large group dinner at a fancy restaurant. I was desperate, so I checked out the bathroom: the only outlet was near the sink, far away from any locking stalls. To relieve myself of engorgement--or just to stay consistent so I could keep producing milk on my daughter's meal schedule--I'd have had to get half-naked (I supposed I might have fashioned a drape out of my suit jacket) and stand before a wall of mirrors with vacuum cones stuck to my boobs, the loud WHIRRRR of the machine defeating even vague aspirations to inconspicuousness. I ended up taking that meal to-go.

At MLA in Seattle, a well-meaning volunteer sent me on a wild goose chase looking for *the mom room* deep in uninhabited portions of the Convention Center. Eventually, I was so frustrated that I finally locked myself into one of the presentation rooms, hoping I'd not meet someone famous, or anyone on any of my interview committees, on the way out, 20 minutes later. I also pumped my way through some over-scheduled campus interviews. (You just try to explain to the interviewers why you need 20 minutes to yourself between that meeting with the dean and the luncheon with the students--without revealing you have a hungry 8 month old two states away waiting for your happymeals.) And I was the one begging the airplane attendants for new ice to put in my travel cooler that was full of the saved milk I was dragging home for the kid. That stuff is liquid gold! Pumping-and-dumping can make a hormonal, sleep-deprived new mom on a job interview dissolve into a puddle of tears on the inadequate floor space of an airplane bathroom.

I nodded my head the entire time I read Posner's article, but there are a few things she was simply not petty enough to mention: 1. how fast you leak when you can't pump in time--milk blossoms ruining your nice conference outfit and causing untold embarrassment (and 1a. the discomfort of those maxi-pads for breasts); 2. how hard it can be to find ways to save the milk you've pumped--ice, coolers, decent sized fridge/freezer units in a hotel; and 3. how darn heavy the pump equipment and cooler (full of ice and bags of milk) can get over the course of a day (and 3a. that awkward moment when someone asks you what is in the huge blue plastic case you're carrying around with your laptop, or jokes about what the cooler might contain, you know, to get you through the long day of panels.)
I paid some good money (about $30 or $40/month) to rent a hospital-grade breast pump for some of these conferences, and that thing was a brick. It's like carrying a precious brick--one that will cost you about $450 to replace--in your suitcase through airport security, lounges, bathrooms, lines, planes, taxis, hotels, and so on. You already never stop thinking about your boobs and when they're going to betray you, and now you've also got a gold-producing brick (with various tubes and funnels) to babysit.

Funny thing: my kid weaned herself as soon as she learned how to walk (away from me), and she has not considered my chest since that time, eight or so months ago. Until last week, when she learned the word "boobs" and now she's constantly checking to see if mine are still around. At my house, we are hoping that this renewed interest in Mama's chest does not transfer itself to daycare.

Stung

Can you see the queen in this picture? Just take a moment to look for her. She's gorgeously golden, largely beautiful, and hard at work laying eggs.

This afternoon I spent a couple hours at the apiary on campus. I wore a smock with a hat-and-veil for protection, and I congratulated myself on not getting stung. Then on the drive home (not from my school, but from Mat's daycare!), a stray bee who apparently decided to hitch a ride with me/us discovered she did NOT want to be stuck in my hair anymore and stung the back of my neck.

I was thrilled! The sting was not any worse than a tattoo. I saw my first queen bee in action and learned a little something about beekeeping, a long-time fascination. I cupped a drowsy drone in my palm, ignored the agitated worker bees buzzing around my ears, and assisted in the splitting of a hive. A few years ago, I saw this film, Queen of the Sun, at the Seattle International Film Festival with a best friend. I already knew about Colony Collapse Disorder when I saw the film, but the documentary clarifies the potential for devastation, confirmed by this recent NY Times article. Do you love vegetables? Do you love almonds? Do you eat plant-based foods ever? This PSA is for you! Our crops are in danger. Crop monoculture is an enormous problem. I don't think backyard-schoolyard-churchyard apiaries are going to solve this dilemma, but they surely are a start.

I also taught Mona Caird's 1888 essay "Marriage" for the first time today, and it went very well. Oh, fin-de-siècle marriage debates. Sigh. All in all, today was a very good day-after-birthday. (And yesterday, the actual birthday, was less great, because I discovered a student had turned in this lousy paper as his own work. Somehow plagiarism is even worse when it's about one of one's most beloved novels.)

Reading and the Potential for Combustion

How fun it would be to participate in an online Wilkie Collins reading group.

Except that I'm in the middle of King Solomon's Mines, Jane Eyre, and Wives and Daughters just now, and a student just enthusiastically loaned me A Great and Terrible Beauty (which I shall squirrel away for Spring Break, when I shall deserve it most).

This term I am teaching three literature courses: ENG 250: Heroes and Monsters in Victorian Fiction (focusing on textual analysis); ENG 289: Approaches to Literary Study (the gateway to the English major course); and ENG 302: Marriage/Divorce in Victorian Literature. Such disparate topics yield interesting textual coincidences. For instance, in the first two weeks of the semester, I read Beowulf--and then The Tempest--along with Dracula and Wuthering Heights. This provoked comparisons of Grendel and Heathcliff, Grendel and Caliban, Dracula and Heathcliff, and so on. The coincidences make my head explode, and then my brains leak all over my classrooms. Today I found myself saying to my ENG 289 class, "Jane got calibanned by Aunt Reed."

Illustration by Walter Crane, c. 1893

Loyal Huggies Fan Reconsiders

I was at the gym today when this commercial caught my eye. Luvs has a whole series of these amusingly true "first kid/second kid" TV ads. Jezebel liked it last summer. AdWeek approved. Of course a whole lot of other viewers and critics were offended. We're pretty committed to Huggies Lil Movers here, but I am awfully tempted to show Luvs some love, now that I've finally caught up with the ad that made a big splash last summer. (What else did I miss last summer when I was moving across the country? The Magic Mike phenomenon. Well, I finally caught up with that last weekend, too. How I value my new colleagues.)

Incidentally, the best advice I heard as a new mom was to "raise your second child first." We're working on that. I never wasted money on a hooter-hider or bothered to drape, except in the presence of my grandfather or my Russian FIL. Breastfeeding in public should not be taboo.

I wish I knew how to hyperlink this image!

Movie Tripping

I used to get a lot of joy out of reviewing movies here on this blog.
Now I just get joy out of going to them.
Over my very long holiday break, which I supposed I would spend writing an article, I traveled much, I was very sick, along with the rest of my entire family (biological and chosen), and I used that as my excuse to go see four movies currently playing in movie theaters. This is noteworthy because I have not seen a movie in a movie theater since my child was born. Last Oscars-season sucked for me. I am the sort of person who will go see any movie playing especially if someone else is paying for it. "Romantic" relationships have been sustained for me by spending long times at the movies. Yes, the syntax in that last sentence was creative, and only I know what I meant; my point is, da films are crucial.

Movies I clocked over the break:
The Hobbit
Les Miserables
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook

Quick & totally unnecessary reviews:
Hobbit: seen with BFF 1, enjoyed, stunned that it ended mid-story. If I remember correctly, Tolkein's Hobbit was a relatively short book. I read it in Jr. High School and hated it. Must re-read. Very glad to be teaching Beowulf this term, because thanks to this movie, my students may have greater appreciation for the Anglo-Saxon epic which features many of the same elements: gold-hoarding dragon, women-excluding community of back-slapping/mead-drinking warriors.

Les Mis: seen with BFF 2, lurved, other than Russell-who-can't-Crow and high-warbler Seyfried. My love of productions of this story goes back to the Pantages Theater circa 1989. I have the entire Original London Cast Recording memorized. I have multiple worn-out garments featuring young Cosette's face. I wish I had more critique of this movie version... but that's lurve for you.

Lincoln: I am historically idiotic, but didn't Lincoln outlive two of his sons? I kept measuring this movie against Seth Grahame-Smith's inspired book Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The movie kind of fell short.

Silver Linings Playbook: unconventional love story that ends conventionally. Sometimes (but not with regard to X-Men) I wish I was Jennifer Lawrence.

Please Don't Buy My Daughter This Toy

Every day one or more of my friends re-posts the link to this GoldieBlox video on Facebook. My friends tend to be highly intelligent and typically very highly educated folks, which is why this affinity for girly blocks with ribbons puzzles me. This toy really bugs me.

GoldieBlox appears to be a fancy building toy with polka-dot pink ribbons and small *clothed* animal figures atop yellow pylons. More about the pylons later. Apart from the girly colors (pastels: pink and purple, yellow and blue) and girly trappings (ribbons, tiny cute animals), what makes this girl-friendly? It comes with a book, because, as the designer informs us, girls like to read! Unsurprisingly, the heroine of the book is a slender white girl with long blonde hair. Little girls are supposed to read the book(s) to learn how to play with the toy. That would seem to delimit what the kids can actually do or "build" with the toy, wouldn't it? Building toys are about stimulating the imagination: "hey kid! I challenge you to make something you haven't even dreamt up yet!" I honestly think the designer had more fun creating the prototype than any child will have playing with the toy. And that leads me to the pylons.

Photo credit: Susan Burdick Photography

They were originally spools of thread. Look at this prototype! Doesn't it look like it was super-fun to put together? The designer got to make something out of wood, paper, markers, and other mundane  things found in most homes. I used to do stuff like this when I was little--make shit out of the shit that was just lying around. I made dolls out of rocks, and houses for them out of macaroni boxes. (Because even as a child I was interested in domesticity.) I'm pretty sure Mathilde will end up making stuff like that, too. When she's not inventing potions with the chemistry sets her father will inevitably give her.

I just don't believe that girls need special building toys any more than Ellen thinks women need special pens. If the point is to get little girls interested in the STEM fields, then give them regular building toys, more often, and play with them together. Girls of my generation were frequently told that we weren't good at math because we were girls. We need to change the messages that little girls hear (at school, at home, in the media), not change the toys.

One of my biggest beefs with this toy--and with the inane video being used to spread the good news about it--is that this commendable motive to introduce girls to engineering is obliterated by the stunningly pretty femme designer's heart-felt "more than just a princess" slogan. This clever marketing ploy is precisely why all my educated feministy friends are buying the message (if not the product). People, listen up: even though the toy's designer claims it's an anti-princess project (not her exact words, OK), it's still a very gendered gender-specific building toy. Pink! Ribbons! Pretty blonde girl heroine! Tiny animals wearing tiny clothes! I will buy Mathilde REGULAR Legos, blocks, Lincoln Logs, and K'Nex instead. My girl can read the awesome books she already has, and use her *imagination* to build things with non-gender-specific toys. She may choose to build dollhouses, or treat the smallest Lincoln Logs as babies. But she doesn't need a special girl-only product to do this. (And she is, by the way, up to a 4-block tower these days!)

Hurricane Sandy Apple Pie

Here on the east coast we've been bracing for Hurricane Sandy. I think we've got all the necessary supplies for bad weather: bottled water, cans of tuna, rolls of duct tape, flashlights and extra batteries, candles and matches, extra Cheerios, red wine, and, of course, homemade apple pie.

For the past month I've been imagining a blog post entitled "Suck it, CSA!" more often after I've been unusually successful at cooking and eating everything in the weekly CSA box. It's been a lot of collard greens, kale, green beans, butter beans, cabbage (geez, it's been a lot of cabbage), asian pears, and apples. Every week there are different apples in that box. They are generally very tasty--even the Red Delicious, a variety I'd never buy in the store because they are pretty fecking boring, as apples go. As I am the only raw apple eater in the house, the apples have piled up.

 So last night I put on my brave pants and made a pie. I used this recipe for both the pate brisee and filling.

I should admit that I have not made a pie crust from scratch in many MANY years. While I am not a bad baker, pie crusts were never my thing. Back in Seattle, I had three good friends who took care of all my homemade pie crust needs. Now that they're 3,500 miles away, I have to do it myself. Sniff. 

It was labor intensive. It was time consuming. It was fecking worth it. Oh FLAKEY flakeness. Oh complex, inviting, warm filling. Oh $7.89-a-carton Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream on top.

Hurricane Tableau: Irony wine, apple pie, and pistols, just in case

Here, by the way, is my child in her cabbage leaf hat, which she thinks is hilarious. How I wish that kid would eat some of the things I cook from my weekly CSA, instead of just wearing it all.