MY BLOG HAS MOVED/IT IS UP: www.victorianchick.com (Preview of Upcoming Reviews: Reagan, Ann Seymour Memoir, Balzac , George Sand, Thomas Hill

 My saintly boyfriend has spent the better part of last night and some of this morning setting up the Wordpress Blog.

It really is vastly superior to blogger which is less complex and user-friendly but nowhere near as powerful or flexible. (Haha... I am starting to sound sort of computer literate, am I not, or at least less retarded.)

I have to go mail some things and talk to Saab re the fucked up registration but wanted to let everyone know that I would not be posting any more on The Random Review though we will leave it up. I didn't think I would change the name until I found the storefront, boarded up , in NYC: Victorian Chick.

Bob Fois in NYC said this ought to be the name for the blog and others agreed that The Random Review was not good, not reflective of my personality or the content of the blog.

There are categories: film, TV, music, theater, travel, schools (St. Augustine, Westlake School for Girls, Yale, UCSB), family, and of course lingerie..... (I won't post all the FB lingerie on to the blog, however, unless I have something substantive to say on the topic. I hardly ever buy lingerie: I just drool over pictures and I STILL have not bought the birthday baby blue silk vintage nightgown I found a few months ago... I have to find it on links and that is highly tedious...

I will be transferring about 150 essays from the FB Notes.. He will teach me tonight.

Forthcoming reviews: Ann Seymour's I've Always Loved You, James Strock's book on Reagan, Thomas Hill's Autonomy and Self-Respect, George Sand's Indiana, and Balzac's Seraphita and Louis Lambert. I hope to be a good girl and have those out in the next 6 to 8 weeks...

I look forward to meeting you all on Victorian Chick!

XOXOXO

Too Excited to Think of Logistical Shit I Planned for Today: Luigi Dance Schedule for July Workshop Arrived!

I have to go to mail box, post office, rather, and deal with DMV and a few niggling but tiny bills... But who can think of such things when the Luigi schedule for July arrives. It is not that much and I can handle it but Mom encourages my dancing and I know she'll help.

Here it is!!

Monday-Friday:   Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Break (30 min), Intermediate/Advanced  Class: 2-3:30, Repertory: 2:30-3:30

Monday: Technique 7-8:30, Thursday: Style Class, 7-8:30.

Optional for 13 bucks more: Technique Class 7-8:30, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Saturday: Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Workshop Presentation: 12:30-1. Intermediate/Advanced: 1-2:30.

OH MY GOD. This is how I spent my summers from 8th to 11th grade. Of course I was taking buses and hitching rides before I was 16, though when I got sexually assualted at 15, by an asshole in a cream beat-up Chevy, which violated my rule of only hitch-hiking with women in BMW, Mercedes, or the equivalent, I stopped hitching for 9 months till I got my license on the morning of my 16th birthday, and drove the new Toyota Tercel coupe Grandma had bought me the month before, to Hama's 6PM class in Venice. His Jazz 2 which was very advanced.

I have to start going to the Studio City studio and will pull up the schedule. I have to start with some Jazz 1 and beginning classes as I can do a pathetic single pirouette and there is no way in hell I can do a respectable double.

Happy dance commencing presently!!!!!

(P.S: PSA for friends with girls. You have to drive them or give them cab money to their various activities. I took a ride on Sunset and Amalfi, close to Riviera Country Club where no house is under 5 million now. Reagan's ranch was up Capri all the way by Casale road, a few houses down from Abbie Schiller, a girl in carpool, whose dad Bob wrote I Love Lucy... Tommy Chong and Shelby , his lovely wife, live up there too and Shelby was in my dance class and gave me rides at times home to the Palisades.

So just hitching in areas with multi-million dollar houses is no guarantee of personal safety. I was late and there was just no time to take three buses. So I took a ride with this guy with a mustache--maybe this is where my hatred of mustaches originated--and within 45 seconds his penis was out doing peculiar things I did not understand. He pulled me toward him, tried to get me to touch it, and I started to scream in horror. The he sped up the piece of shit Chevy he was driving, chipped paint and big dents--and I screamed more. He pulled me over to him--no bucket seats in this old sedan in 1987--and I unleashed a torrent of words (I know that's a shocker): "If you don't let me out of this car right now I"m going to jump (no power locks), and then I'll get run over and I'll be killed and you will have it on your conscience that you killed a woman. Are you prepared to deal with that consequence??" He slowed down to about 3 or 4 mph , and I rolled out of the car with my dance bag. And then I limped back up to my parents house up the hill by the state part.

They were at the boat as usual. I lived alone at the house in the Palisades, while they were at the boat in the Marina from about 14 or 14.5 yrs old. And I never told them as I knew they would be very angry with me. I was pretty shaken up and just took a bath and went to sleep , obviously not making it to dance and I think my girlfriend Karin came over to spend the night, but perhaps I canceled our date.

I didn't really have a choice. My parents were at the boat. Public transportation sucks in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades to this day. Once you get to Santa Monica , it's fine, as the Big Blue Bus is frequent and runs along many main streets. I was okay but honestly, I think my aversion to the male organ which lasted well into my thirties, though of course intercourse did not bother me, originated in this unpleasant episode.

So really, if you have kids, part of the deal is either driving them to all the shit they have to do--dance, piano, band, tennis, debate, extracurriculars...--or paying someone to do so for you, even if that means just putting them in a cab. Especially if you have girls, it's very important to make sure they have safe and reliable transportation. If I had not taken a ride with this man, and kept to my rule of affluent women in luxury cars , it would have been fine. But a young girl should NEVER EVER take a ride with a man, whether he's in a Porsche or an old beat up Chevy sedan.)

Where I Got the Literature/Philosophy Bug: My Father's Story as a UCLA English Major in his 70s

Dad came into his computer room today, where I have been most of the last two days, apart from the hours spent in bed, near tears, with hydrocolator on abdomen and legs, cursing the day I was born with a uterus. He said he wanted to talk to me and gave me a few documents:  a play he wrote about Christianity in Beowulf, an analysis of the distinction between tragedy and pathos, and an attack on C.S. Lewis's reading of Chaucer's Troilus (with a particular emphasis on Criseyde's character).

He said he would like for me to read them and give him my opinion. This deeply touched me. My mother was an English major at UCLA, but she is not overly intellectual, not in an academic sense. She worked her way through UCLA as her father was out of the picture and poor, and her mother was not very healthy and certainly not able to help financially. So Mom worked a lot. She's brilliant, truly genius IQ, so she did well, but she was not a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, which she surely would have been if she didn't need to pay for school and also support herself the minute she moved into a studio to go to UCLA.

My father was also an English major  but he never finished college. Indeed, he did not even finish half of college at UCLA. The war began and he left UCLA after his third semester, in December of 1942. My father always says my mother is the smarter of the two of them, but that he has more discipline and a more orderly mind. I would agree with this. My father thinks in outline form. He does not ask questions; he cross-examines. And he doesn't write letters; he writes memos. This greatly amuses everyone in my life. Whether he is happy or not, he will write a memo and put it in the mail (he does not use email) and there is always a header with to, from, subject, cc...

Growing up, he was enormously proud not only of my academic achievement, but my true intellectual passion, my articulate understanding of texts and my exuberance in relating this understanding. But my father fears chaos and ambiguity, far more then than now but still has an intense need for order and control, and there were times when I did not wish to communicate with him about my intellectual life because I felt that if I could not explain a messy concept, especially by the end of high school but absolutely by the beginning of college, he was frightened and even threatened. I also felt this overwhelming burden, which I have learned since then is not at all unusual among overachieving children (well, underachieving as an adult but unquestionably an overachiever in school), to "bring their parents along."

I remember the week after graduation, I went to say goodbye to Dick Brodhead, who had taken an interest in me after my long Emily Dicksinon and Stanley Cavell paper, writing my Mellon Fellowship recommendation. He was Dean of Yale, and had been at Yale all his life from undergrad to grad to faculty. He is now President of Duke, which is somemwhat bizarre. He would make a mistake his first year or two and say Bulldog when he meant Blue Devil! He told me he remembered the day when he realized he has "surpassed [his] parents [intellectually]." For him it happened, I think, soon after college. For me , it happened much earlier, because my father had not really gone to college, and studied Plato on his own during flight training for the Air Corps. He had read The Republic at UCLA, been moved by the idea of universal forms of understanding, and been thrilled to find a fresh, clean copy at the Washington State, which he writes about in glowing terms in his memoir about WWII. But I will never forget sitting with Dick Brodhead in his beautiful office in SSS, talking about family and parents (both vexed issues for me in those years and for many years thereafter).

I had an emotional episode at the end of the first term in college, fall of 1990, which my mother called a "stress reaction." It was a bit more than that , but that too is a story for another day.  I was the only kid in Berkeley (my residential college) to receive four As, no minuses. The episode was at the end of the term, when I came home for Christmas, eager to chill out after having written over 14 papers (when I was not even in DS, Directed Studies, which required a paper every Friday about classics), which I meticulously revised until I was satisfied. My family was sailing to Mexico for the usual Christmas trip on which I never went after 9th grade, I think. They didn't go every year after the started in 8th grade I think, but they went a number of times, and that was just not my idea of much-needed "time off" from school, even in high school, where I worked every bit as hard as a kid at Andover or Choate.  I ended up not returning to Yale, and took three semesters off for analysis as well as AIDS volunteer work, Meals on Wheels, and Wellness Center (the Santa Monica cancer center founded by Dr. Harold Benjamin, upon which Victory Partners in thirtysomething had  been modeled).

After that, my father and I never really discussed my coursework in college. Then we were estranged in graduate school, when he retired from law, and eventually after 51 years of service, resigned from the CA Bar. I remember that philosophy, The Character of Philosophical Thought, taught by my college idol , Carol Rovane, gave me the most intense pain that first term. I contemplated dropping it and just taking an easy course, because for me history and political science were a breeze, with no emotional side-effects, but I hung in there. He thought I should drop it and said that philosophy would produce internal conflict in me.

He was right, but I adored it. I also had difficulty with Spenser's Faerie Queene, in my view the most difficult poem or text in the English language before modernism, which I have studied almost not at all. Perhaps Ulysses is this hard, but I never took English 129, Yale's legendary course in the English department on the epic. I took 125, Major British Poets. For the English major you only had to take one, though many people took both. 129 begins with the Iliad and ends, after two semesters, with Ulysses. Spenser's poem about Red Crosse Knight and Una is written in Spenserian stanzas, and this is a wonderful , difficult aspect of the poem. But it's not even easy to make out the plot, and in college my mind was frenetic and often chaotic, far more so than it is now, or than it was in graduate school and I struggled mightily with this text. But I was not alone. There is a joke at Yale among English majors, that one begins to have a nervous breakdown the second week of October, when one finishes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and begins Spenser's FQ.

I hung on and went on to get an A in Rovane's class (I was in the writing intensive section and had a wonderful TA named Carol Freedman, who funnily enough, got her Ph.D. the year I graduated, which I knew because at Yale when you get your doctorate, they publish the title of the dissertation in the graduation pamphlet with everyone's name, how cool is that!)

My sister told me that it pained my father to be shut out from my intellectual life because of his three children, I was the intellectual one, though my brother went to UCLA and studied political science and economics and likes Shakespeare better than I do. But I was the one who had gone to private school from K to 12, while they had gone to public school. And I was the little scholar in the family from a pretty young age.

The difficulty with connecting with Dad about literature or philosophy is that he was afraid of ambiguity and demanded, as I experienced it, to have all concepts reduced to his intellectual system, which was impossible for me, and also, quite frankly, repugnant. So we didn't really talk about my papers. The other part, of course, was that Dad didn't really go to college, just three semesters at UCLA. And then the GI Bill paid for USC Law, and he went to work.

My sister has also told me that it deeply pained my father to be out of contact with me during his UCLA years. She said that the desire to talk to his estranged daughter about literature he could not even discuss with my mother was absolutely overwhelming. He earned an honorary B.A. and even got a diploma from the English department, which hangs over the fireplace in his living room. My father taped every single lecture and now has 16 binders, three-ring binders, with typed up transcripts from ALL lectures! It is a remarkable thing and he will certainly give them to me one day. He became friends with his professor, often taking them on the boat for what we used to call "sewer cruises," little powers around the Marina or perhaps, out of the breakwater for half an hour or so.

So it moved me, this morning, when he asked me to look over his documents. I read Beowulf in high school for AP British literature which I took as a junior because I had skipped ahead in English. I have not read it since, and I am so sad I lost a coffee table book given to me by this short , very sexy and handsome Jewish Yale School of Drama student , with a father who was VP at Paine Webber. I met him at an A and A party (Yale Art and Architecture school) and we dated for a couple months in the spring term of 1993.  He later wrote for Single Guy, the Jonathan Silverman sitcom and he was a talented writer who probably made money in TV after SG as well. He bought me a Yale Press book of Beowulf, and that's the last time I have thought about this great Anglo-Saxon text.

I told him I remembered so little of Beowulf, and that of all of Chaucer (which is also quite fuzzy, with the exception of Wife of Bath tales (both the tale and the Prologue, and House of Fame, an early autobiographical poem about which I wrote an award-winning paper), the Troilus was the work I knew least. It was the last poem we read for the Robert Watson seminar which he held in his apartment on the top floor of Ezra Stiles College, and I didn't even read the Middle English. I just skimmed the modern translation and there was no final exam in the course. This is shameful but I will admit it: no one does all the reading for every seminar at Yale. I was in psychoanalysis for the better part of Yale and I will admit, that even for me, with what is acknowledged to be a formidable mind housed in a disciplined body, it was impossible to do all the reading, primary and secondary. (When I took six courses at UCLA in my senior year of high school, I did pretty much do all the reading. I am not sure how it is now. But back then, Yale was just a lot more work.)

He said it did not matter and I just thought it was so touching than he wanted me, his "kitty cat," to read his work. It is , with the exception of the play about Beowulf and Christianity all in outline form. One of the essays is twenty or thirty pages and it is all an extended outline with many footnotes. This is how my father thinks and he will be the first to acknowlege, I believe, it has to do with a profound need for order and control in all areas of life, a need which clearly originated with his mother who embodied chaos. He used to call her "the chaos that was Bebe." (This is the grandma, Jewish, who cut me out of the will, but that is a story for another day. The short version is that my half-brother and half-sister cut me back in, something I learned only last year. I call my sister my sister but she is not a full sister; we have the same father and (vastly) different mothers.)

I only skimmed a bit of it as he wanted to xerox it all for me. And then he found his essay on Wycherley's The Country Wife  about which my father feels no more positively than The King's Speech or Julia and Julie (the first of these holds the title for the world's "longest, dullest fucking movie"). He wrote a scathing piece about this and it so impressed his professor , that he was asked to lunch to discuss it. Professsor Batten, I think is his name, said that Wycherley, along with Congreve, represents the very best of English dramatic comedy (I don't know if he was speaking of the whole tradition, or simply the post-Shakespearean comedies). Dad said, "Shaw represents the best of English comedy." And Batten, Dad has told me more than once, replied, "There never would have been a Shaw without Wycherley." I must say, I'll take Restoration comedy--Sheridan, Congreve, Wycherley--over Shakespeare's comedies anyday (or even Beggar's Opera, which I taught for my beloved  professor at UCSB, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and remember not at all).

My mother, quite honestly, hardly remembers all she studied in English at UCLA. My mother wanted to be an actress and only went to law school as a backup because she wasn't getting any parts. Her plan had been to enter entertaiment law and then work her way into the business that way. I don't know how many people think of doing this, much less how often this plan works, but of course, law turned out to be her calling and she never looked back. So my intellectual temperament and aspirations absolutely derive from my father, not my mother. And I am so blessed to be able to share this with him now, late in his life.

Herb Morris, UCLA School of Law, Department Philosophy, Trained Analyst: Going with Mom Friday!

This man is amazing! Just wanted to give him a plug, because he has written so much on so many different things. He is a renowned philosopher of law, who has contributed both to our understanding of moral and legal philosophy. He is emeritus both in philosophy and law at UCLA.

He is also a psychoanalyst. My God, when did this man start to work? Or perhaps he's like my brilliant friend in NYC, real life and FB both, who went to college at 14 and powered through grad programs before a political career (not elected) and business success

The philosophical work focuses on "questions of moral emotions, responsibility, punishment," and his paper "Persons and Punishment" was a game-changer in writing about that topic.

His books include two literary works: The Masked Citadel: The Significance of the Title of Stendhal's 'La Chartreuse de Parme' (1968) and Artists in Evil: An Essay on Evil and Redemption in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (2009). Other books include: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (1976), Guilt and Shame (1971) and finally, the seminal Freedom and Responsibility: Readings in Philosophy and Law  (1961).

Mom knew him when she taught at her alma mater, UCLA Law, for one year between two government jobs. I loved it because it was the only time I saw Mom before 7 PM on weekdays and we went to get ice cream around 4 PM quite a lot. I loved that year and then she went "back to work," from my perspective, in 1981.

Professor Morris received his B.A. from UCLA,  LL.B. from Yale Law and a doctorate from Oxford. I am unclear how he can be an analyst without Ph.D in psychology, which is now sufficient as long as you go through the rigors of the analytical institutes. For a long time, only M.D.s could be psychoanalysts. Big fussing as Dad would say between two major analytic institutes in LA over this, and indeed I think an old analyst whose wife was Ph.D, told me that one group within the main analytic institute in LA broke off and formed their own so that Ph.D.s could be let in. You don't need to understand everything about the human body to be a good shrink or analyst, totally absurd. And honestly, straight shinks learn almost nothing significant in med school. If they learn anything, it's in residency. And analysis is not just about meds, obviously, it's the last bastion of elite talk therapy, though of couse , you can find a smart and articulate MFCC or Ph.D. out there , if you try  hard enough.

I cannot wait to hear Herb Morris, not sure if he and Mom were in school together. He's older , more like Dad's age but looks fabulous. If he published that big book in 1961, he has to be at least 8 or 9 yrs older than Mom, assuming he published it at 30. Mom was born in 1940 and would have been just 21 at time of publishing.

From "Writing" to "Content": Reflections on LAT Editorial "All Work, No Pay" re Payment of Huffington Post Writers

As I wrote on Jeff's FB page, the LA Times may be regarded as a leftist rag with great derision by the right, but compared to the SB News Press, it represents the very best in journalism. The News Press makes the New Haven Register or Connecticut Post look like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, depending upon one's political persuasion and thus journalistic preferences.

Today's Op-Ed is by Michael Walker, a talented author who wrote "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood." (I loved that movie , by the way, with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale, about a music industry mother of a doctor son, engaged to a beautiful but solitary scientist, slowly seduced by the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. There is an amazing scene where the son walks in on his mother and her boyfriend, as well as fiancee or girlfriend, not having a threesome exactly, but certainly having an interesting time....)

The dispute at the center of the article is between the Huffington Post, which does not pay its writers, and the slighted scribes, who feel exploited, and are very cranky at the moment. Arianna Huffington sold the paper to AOL for 315 million in February, so she isn't exactly hurting for cash. Last week, according to the LAT, the Newspaper Guild urged its 26,000 members to boycott, the equivalent of a "virtual picket line" until some sort of compensation is determined.

Huffington, a tough broad I am sure, though I do not know anyone who knows her, has taken her cue from a tough broad about whom I know a little bit, Mitzie Shore, the owner of the legendary Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, which gave many luminaries in comedy their start (Leno, Letterman, Murphy, Crystal...) Shore did not pay her comedians because she regarded the Comedy Store as a "workshop" which also launched careers, careers that would prove to be lucrative. Like Shore, Huffington argues that she gives writers tremendous visibility and that this will lead to high-paying gigs. This may or may not be true, and I know a writer for the Huffington Post , Thomas Lipscomb, who wrote a piece in support of humanitarian aid to Libya. I have not spoken with him about this but will write him a private message this evening as he always has illuminating perspectives on a wide range of topics, whether I agree or more frequently, disagree.

The comedians, some of whom subsisted on "pilfered Saltines," while Shore reportedly pulled down some 20 grand a week, organized a strike and they prevailed. Huffington's position is if these writers want to strike, it's fine, because she'll just find new writers. In this era of blogging, FB, Twitter, she may very well be right.

What simultaneously interests and disturbs me is Walker's provocative penultimate paragraph: "The no-pay policy espoused by the Huffington Post is also the Web's fundamental underlying business philosophy--what the stand-up comedy business might have become had Letterman, Leno and the rest not thrown down the gauntlet. The reality is that the complicity of writers and entire publications in serving up endless freebies to the metaphorical Comedy Stores of the Web has gone a long way toward transmuting 'writing,' for which professionals have long received pay, into 'content,' which consumers expect to be free" (emphasis mine).

The comedians apparently never intended to work indefinitely for free, but having set that precedent , they gave Mitzie Shore (Paulie's mother), the opportunity to exploit them. 

What I find most offensive about the idea underlying Walker's claim about writing and content is that true writing--whether in journalism or not--is desperately undervalued in our increasingly illiterate and sound byte-addicted culture with ADD. Now, "straight news," as opposed to editorials, is supposed to be , as Dragnet said, "Just the facts, Ma'am." I am not a journalist and a true journalist would quarrel with this simplistic and patronizing characterization of his work, which he may or may not claim, is an art form. I do believe that the writing of some great columnists--the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world (or Charles Krauthammer or the comparable left-wing journalistic deity)--rises to art. At least, there is art to the writing, whether or not that writing itself should be considered an aesthetic object.

But certainly, the kind of tacky , neon-laden website that bombards a reader with facts , without any essential organization or finesse, is not the same as an orderly, integrated account of a given issue. I also find it upsetting that writers are always the low men on the totem pole, even (or especially) in Hollywood. SAG , I think, has more power and visibility than the WGA, and as I wrote on FB this week, besides the obvious fact that there can be no TV or film without the writers (there is never a shortage of actors, at least in LA and NYC), many a mediocre actor has been saved by a great writer.

And this may be a bit of a stretch--but it's my blog , so I can say anything I want--I think the failure to distinguish between content and style/form is a serious intellectual problem in our culture, particularly our literary culture. I was trained at Yale, as a critic, though I spent more years at UCSB, so I am of course on one end of the spectrum in my literary-critical leanings. I take exception to the rejection of the high/low culture distinction. Sue Grafton may be entertaining (I think other detective writers are better), but she is not Milton! While the levelling of the distinction between a philosophical and a literary text, as advocated or better, described, by deconstruction does not essentially bother me, the denial of a distinction between a poem and a newspaper article does. And I am not here even concerned with distinctions between fact or fiction, or with the complex notion of truth in life vs truth in art (versimilitude). I am merely talking about form and style.

Part of why I hated UCSB so much was the intense cultural studies focus of that department. As I wrote in my inaugural post from NYC, I don't want to focus on race, class, gender, sexuality, history, or politics in the study of literature . Of course Wordsworth talks about the French Revolution in The Prelude (Book 3 of the 1850 Prelude), but when Alan Liu (former chair of my ex-department of whom I was not a fan on any level, and he didn't think too much of me either but it did not matter as I took no courses with him), writes about the Imagination apostrophe (or the Crossing of the Alps, I don't have it here and it's been awhile) in terms of Napoleon, I get cranky.

If I wanted to study history or politics, I would do so. I like both, though I prefer history to political science. I chose to study English because I believe in the category of the literary; I believe that the analysis and understanding of literary langauge--whether in fiction , prose, or poetry--has value. I am a rhetorical critic or a proponent of rhetorical poetics (and I think deconstruction has much to teach us, though I think also that literature is essentially ethical, at least at its best, and that interpretation must move beyond the aporia, beyond indeterminate meaning or endless play of signifiers). That is, I think form is crucial and that poems and novels have rhetorical and narrative structures which demand our attention.

In short, literary texts are not simply about the what; they are about the how. And when we, as a culture, devalue writing and accept "content" as an acceptable substitute, we at once witness and preside over the demise of literacy and critical thinking.  I am not pinning this heavy load on little Ms. Huffington. I am merely saying that apart from the issue of economic justice here, there is an in some ways even more insidious subtext: writing does not matter. And that does matter.

List of LPs Got From Evil Landlord... Remarkable Classical Music!!

This is an incomplete list, FB friends and blog followers. I have another 50 or so in apartment I could not bring down at that late hour...

 BACH

1. Two Suites For Cello. No.2 in D Minor/No. 6 in D Major, Antonio Janigro, cello.
2. Coffee Cantata, No. 211, Peasant Cantata No. 212. Chorus and Chamber Orchestra of Radio Berlin under Helmut Koch. Karrmerchar Saarlouis, Orchestra of the Sarre under the direction of Karl Ristenpart.
3. Two Concertos for Harpsichord and Orchestra, Antonio Ballista and Ferdinando Tagliavini.
4. Four Concertos for Harpsichords and Orchestra: Concerto in C Minor, Concerto in D Minor, COncerto in C Major and Concerto in a Minor.
5. J.S. Bach: Cantata No. 140, Cantata No. 32.

CHOPIN 

1. No. 2 in B Flat Minor, Op. 35 (with the Funeral March), No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58, Abbey Simon, piano.
2. Collection: The Ballades, The Scherzos, The Sonatas, Artur Rubinstein.

MOZART

1. Symphony No. 35 in D Major ("Haffner"), K.385, Symphony No. 38 in D Major ("Prague"), K. 504. Gunter Ward , Conductor.
2.  Piano Concerto No. 24, C Minor, K.491, Piano Concerto No.27, B Flat Major, K.595. Paul Badura-Skoda, Piano, Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
3. Concerto No. 20 for Piano and Orchestra in D Minor, K.466, Concerto No.23 In A Major for Piano and Orchestra, K.488. Piano, Monique De La Bruchollerie.
4. Six Preludes and Fugues for String Trio, K.404a.
5. Concerto No.25 in C, K.503. Edwin Fischer, Piano. (Also with Bach: Concerto for Three Pianos.)
6. Sinfonia Concertante: Violin Concerto No. 2, Rondo in C, Henryk Szeryng, BRuno Giuranna.
7. Oboe Concerto, K.314, Symphony No.34, K.388. Colin Davis, Leon Goosesens.
8. Quartet in A Major, K.464, Quartet in C Major, K.465 ("Dissonant"). Late Quartets.
10. Piano Concerto No.19, F Major, K.459, Piano Concerto No.20, D Minor, K.466. Clara Haskil, Piano, Winterthur Symphony Orchestra.

Me: "I am going to get an oil change in morning." J: "You are a woman of intentions." A Dialogue about my Impractical Nature

I haven't written a blog posting since got back to Southern California because I have had a mysterious stomach ailment for which I will go to Med Center this morning. I have insurance but no doctor because I don't get sick , at least nothing more intricate than a cold or sinus infection. But the lines can be annoying and I will get there at 7:30AM before the 8AM opening. Just enough time to write about the solid hour of nonstop laughter last night in bed after a lovely appetizer at new restaurant, Cadiz, owned by J's friend Ray (State Street).

We just had appetizers. I had a wonderful, finely chopped Dungeness crab salad with fascinating ingredients, none of which I remember, as my stomach was not good. He has grilled baby octopus over some darkly-colored beans. Light and good. The appetizers are a real bargain for food of this sophistication and quality--9 to 12--though portions not huge and they forgot to bring us bread.  There were over ten, including a gnocci with ricotta and a tiny steak thing of some kind. It's a gorgeous space, and I do not know if there is a website up and running yet, or not.

I wanted to go to bed even earlier than usual. I am the only unemployed/underemployed person in America who voluntarily arises at 6:30, earlier when I have just returned from NYC and am on EST time. This last trip--11 days--was the longest I have spent in the East since I came back to CA in the summer of 1996, and it took a full seven days to adjust. Of course , it takes me only 2 days at most to adjust when I go the other way, which should tell you something about my preferences and proclivities.

He goes to sleep very late and usually tucks me in after whatever... But I wanted to snuggle under the giant down comforter with the flannel sheets as I am still in pain from the muscle pull in NYC, compounded by the pain of this mysterious abdominal situation--and I told him I would get oil changed tomorrow. I am bad , as I will soon explain, at just about everything practical. If I think mail is going to bring me bad news, I just don't open it (J said, "Yeah, that's good, because usually if it's bad news or a bill, the situation improves when you ignore it...."). But I am good about oil because I adore  my used Saab 9/3, 2.0T, a 2007 bought in late February, 2010 with only 26K miles.

Oh! I also must get car wash as I will be schepping Dad and  he is getting annoyed at the half a suitcase of clothing on the back seat. This is actually good, because Educated Car Wash has the cheapest gas in SB when you get full-service (interior/exterior) wash and that new car smell is always good so I don't have to spray Kardashian to cover the smell. I also must get some cough syrup as Dad becomes unpleasant when I cough , launching into lectures about smoking, lung cancer, self-destructive conduct (he hates this in anyone and everyone and feels everyone should be in analysis at least once to root out such evils), and finally, the money I will cost him , or my mother, if he is dead, when I must go to the hospital for lung cancer.

The announcement of this intention to do something practical of course gave rise to an extended discussion of the matters to which I have not attended now, almost since we began to date in early August: license plate, broken apartment heater, driver's licence (actually, lost it in November), and a few others I will remember after the doctor I am quite sure.

My mother, truth be told, is getting very annoyed about the license. But until last night, J didn't know I had a letter from the DMV, quite thick, about a month ago which I stuck in carry-on to NYC , but did not open. I said, "Maybe it's bad news." He said what I reported above and asked me about  my registration. I said, "Well, Dad paid all that when we got the car." "Yeah, sweetie, you have to pay your registration every year." I said, "Yes, I realize that of course, but the DMV stuff never goes to me, it goes straight to him, and last year there was some mix-up where he paid twice and I got a check back from them sent to him, so I just transferred the duplicate check to him."

So then he was devilish, I daresay evil, and told me that the DMV letter probably says that you must respond in 5 days or the fee goes up tenfold. I am gullible and he ought not to tease me in this manner. He said ,no, probably not tenfold, but it might have gone up. See, even when something is not expensive, there is something so laborious about mailing a bill. This is why I pay my only credit card--almost no debt, about 350 bucks--online, now that I have figured it out. I forgot to pay it in NYC. The 20th just came and went which is highly annoying but not the end of the world. But for some reason, I find the act of going to a post office to be extremely challenging, arduous even.

This is truly pathetic as my father of course has stamps and I can use his when I go to LA, as I will be doing later on today. I lost my wallet at the gas station around Thanksgiving, but nothing was stolen or charged and I canceled it immediately. I have not even attempted to replace it, as I have no incentive. The passport I got in August for the Dominican Republic works on planes and I never get pulled over for moving violations. I have never had a speeding ticket, red light or stop sign violation in my life. Of course now that it is one year and one month since I got the beautiful Saab (parchment with parchment interior, a limited edition color which is sort of a champagne), and it still says "Graham Chevrolet," I might get stopped by a cop who wants to know why I have no plates. But now that I have no license, which seems to have slipped my mother's mind (but which she knew last week because CVS would not sell me Delsym cough syrup without a license), she is adamant that I not drive without "two licenses."

This led, of course, to the heater issue. I have not had a heater in apartment in two years. Now, the reason for this is mostly that I hate my landlord, to whom I refer on FB simply as asshole. Sometimes he does something so egregious, his status bumps up to the long, ten-letter C word. (He evicted my neighbor Kimberly for having a guy over two nights in one month --non-consecutive--and he harassed her and finally she gave her notice.) I used to in the bad days of depression, though moving to this beautiful apartment in August, 2006, saved my life, have truly unfunny  nightmares about this vicious, controlling, horrible excuse for a human being. Now we have made peace, I bullshit with him and kiss his ass and all goes fairly smoothly. But I am not a neat person--Dad says "total fucking slob"--and the truth is somewhere in between but I  try earnestly to be a good girl at J's house because he is Jewish and so neat. (A new Jewish FB friend in Great Neck has explained to me that it now counts if one parent is Jewish, and it need not be the mother. So I guess I am "truly" Jewish, but I am only half, and clearly I inherited the shiksa slob gene, not the anal, clean for three hours a day for recreation, Jewish gene.) But for a long time, I didn't have the maid in,  and if there is even a speck of dust , he goes apeshit, talks to me like I am in kindergarten (surely this is because my dad pays the rent directly to him and he thinks this is license to treat me like a child), and orders me to have a maid in.

Now, the only basis upon which a landlord in CA can complain about the state of an apartment, is if the mess represents a fire hazard. My apartment was not out of an episode of Hoarders. But I do have a fairly relaxed conception of hanging up clothes when I am finished (my mother, a Shiksa, also has a sort of relaxed understanding, but she has help on a daily basis of course).

So I finally got the maid in and told him that 18 months before, the gas company had told me that this wall unit dating back to LBJ probably, was "a goner." However, in CA (the People's Republic of CA), there seems to be a new regulation which requires a note of some sort confirming the death of one's heater. So I called the gas company--it took about 3 months--and booked an appointment for a Friday at 1:30, about six weeks ago. At the time, J was moving the last of his things from the Goleta house to the Eucalyptus Hill condo (border of SB and Montecito), and I would help him every night after dinner. Well, that night, a Thursday, I left my car key on his old kitchen counter and he could not run me back to get it before the early afternoon appointment.

Well, I suppose this all seemed to me like a sign that I should not have a heater and I have made no attempts to contact the gas company again. The maid has been in twice in the last six months, before the December NYC trip and before the March one and it looks just fine in there. (Here's a tip: it's much easier to keep an apartment clean when you don't live there.... I have slept three nights in 2.5 months in my own apartment. I am either at J's, my parents' in LA, or H's in NYC.)

What's funniest, I remarked, is that these tasks have totally fallen off my list. I still did forget to send the late check for 40 to the gyn in Goleta , not because I don't have it, I just hate mailing things. And I paid them the co-pay but didn't realize the tests were going to be covered by insurance only in part. I so hope they haven't sent this bad behavior of mine along to people who get very vexed about such matters even when it's over 14 dollars...

I must go to the doctor but will finish the other part of the conversation afterward. It involves the way I managed to break his very expensive stereo--rigged so that a 12-yr-old babysitter or a person with no English--could turn on the CD player. I didn't think that you had to use a remote to turn on a CD player--I've never owned such a thing--so I sort of played around with the receiver and server and ended up, unbeknownst to me, pushing "tape monitor 2." He asked me, "How did it occur to you, when you wanted to play a CD, to push "tape monitor 2.'" Well, he sort of knew the answer. I just sort of figured, well, this isn't turning on, or at least, there is no sound coming out, and if I just keep  pressing buttons, something is bound to happen. He told me his 7-yr-old son would never, ever have done such a thing, and that he intuitively knows that you don't just start to poke expensive electronic equipment.

The best part of that story, I suppose, is that when he returned home from moving more stuff, and I told him nothing was working, including the sound for the DVD for Sports Night, he was not pleased and insisted that he figure out what I had broken on his beloved stereo. He was, to be honest, a bit more than not pleased with me , which is extremely rare. But he's anal about his stuff, like most men, just like my father, but not even in a league with Dad. Dad is in a league of his own in all matters, including control and the state of his material possessions (which includes his cherry torte from Gelson's, and in the old days, his mangoes, plums, peaches etc..)

I gently asked, "But  honey, do you want to listen to a CD tonight? I mean can't you just come to bed and fix it in the morning." That was a big no, and he said that he could never fall asleep as the only fucking thing he would think about is why his stereo worked jsut fine before he left for Goleta and didn't work upon his return. He informed me that one does not go to sleep with thousands of dollars of stereo equipment not working. I recounted the story to Dad and he said, "J is absolutely right! You just understand nothing and I don't know how he puts up with you!"

He kissed me goodnight and said that I was a "beautiful , strange creature" and that he did not wish to change anything about me (well he wants me to quit smoking, but he knows it's not happening till 40, or so--I've added an "or so").

Dad Insisted I Tell this Story in the Interests of Full Disclosure of My Dingbat Ways: Missed Plane to London 1984

The summer after sixth grade I went out of the country for my first time. That was before the Mexico trips on the boat and my best friend, Shana Goldberg (daughter of Gary, Family Ties and Spin City) invited me to London for the filming of Family Ties in London. Gary and Diana paid for the whole thing, and would not let parents help, though perhaps parents gave them ticket money.

So Mom and Dad took me to airport to meet Shana and her nanny Betsy, a lovely Iowa girl out of college a few years. We had fun with Betsy and would shop at the Gap for lumberjack tops when that was a big thing, 1984.

They kissed me goodbye and we boarded, Shana, Betsy and I.  There was a mechanical problem which required de-boarding and a considerable delay. So we got off the plane and went to go eat. Now , this is the part that is a bit fuzzy.   The plane was huge, obviously, a nonstop to London as I remember, not a one-stop to NYC first.

Somehow the three of us did not get back in time and we called Gary and Diana, already in London, with, I believe their baby girl who was born when we were in 5th grade. Yes, that's right, because I remember Diana reproduced the nursery when they moved from that lovely two-story house on Anita in Brentwood, between Sunset and San Vicente, when they moved to the "big house," i.e. the house near OJ Simpson, up Oakmont past Rockingham. (I read in the LA Times, it sold last year for 16 million, holy shit). The Anita house was gorgeous, big yard and black bottom pool with royal blue tiles and a little guest house/office which Diana made her office.

She went back to school and got a Ph.D. from UCLA in communications (Sarah Palin's major at Idaho), mass communications was her specialty and to tell the truth, I am not often charitable about that major but don't know a whole lot about it. Diana wrote and studied in that back house and honestly, I think that my fantasy of being a literary critic /English professor started in about  4th grade when I thought, "Gee this seems like a very cool life, to be married to a TV sitcom legend with a heart of gold, a love of pro football/betting--he donated all winnings to liberal causes--and a beachhouse on Broad Beach, the Trancas part of Malibu, and then to write/study all day long..." Of course, I was 11 , so please cut me some slack. English and communications professors/doctorates don't live in houses in Brentwood on Anita south of Sunset/north of San Vicente, but at 11 you only have a certain breadth of understanding of real estate and money.

Gary and Diana were totally cool and I was very relieved. It was, of course, not my fault , or Shana's. We were 12. It was Betsy's responsibility to get us back on the plane at the designated time. I do seem to remember , later, that the airlines said that the repair had gone smoothly and finished ahead of schedule, but Dad said yesterday, "297 people got back on board and you three didn't?"

So driving back to the Oakmont house, we stopped for dinner and I called parents (also at dinner) to tell them we missed the flight. Dad was not angry or upset, just incredulous that he saw me board the plane (no security of course, you could go to the gate back then), and I had somehow managed to miss a flight which I had been ON, sitting in my little seat.

I guess the moral of the story is this: you are who you are. And if you are prone to accidents and fuck-ups, as Dad calls them (he loves to dissect the "anatomy of a fuckup" re plans which are complex, multiple stops, different drivers) at 12 or so, you will probably end up being the center of disaster later in life. I myself firmly believe that I have aliens in life. This is what my ex-boyfriend, 17 yrs older and highly organized, said of my propensity to lose things like keys, chargers, earrings, tops, bottoms, shoes, socks... But the aliens cut both ways; that is, sometimes aliens do michievous and naughty things like dismantle a pair of sunglasses sitting on the front seat of a locked car with the windows closed. Other times, they are benevolent and remove two small hair dye stains the size of 1 carat diamond studs from a used , 60 dollar Armani dress from Discovery Shop, a second-hand boutique all of whose proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. Mom buys 2/3 of her clothes there, used, and often shoes second-hand as well.

Last Night in NYC: Residential History of My Adult Life, Early Grad School Years, Inspired by Friend's Niece's Phone Call

I forgot that you have to sign in to write a blog post! I'm back upstairs--not in the lower apartment tonight--and my friend's niece was nodding off to sleep, 11:35, when her Iphone went off and now we are 20 feet from one another, she in the bed I adore and me on the chair in the living room. It is interesting. I am not sure why, but some people are just easier to live with than others. In December, my friend had to stay in his apartment with me, rather than the lower place and I never had that feeling of constraint and disturbance.

Of course, no two girls share an apartment of this size after college. And I can share space with someone quite easily if s/he does not speak on the phone, but perhaps because I pulled a muscle a week ago which is worse at the moment than all week, and because I'm coughing like someone about to die, it's quite irritating and I very much hope she is not on the phone too much longer. Of course, it is not so bad that I wish to go down four flights for a bedtime smoke. I was about to take a long, hot shower and I will in a moment... (She's a very sweet girl and apparently leaving in a few days: I am very grateful that my friend allowed me to come while she is still in this place... I know this is temporary and that he wants to have it available for friends of his...)

It's just the oddest sensation. I have with J, and the person before him, listened to phone conversations, though not in a 550 sq foot apartment.  I live with J when I am in SB, which probably averages out--not counting trips back East--to five nights a week. I have spent exactly two nights in my own apartment in  two months and one over at a friend's after the Oscars. I have always lived alone, since I started college , at any rate. (Of course I lived with my parents, but it was not full-time, as they lived on their large ketch--54 feet--from Friday night to Sunday night from 9th grade to 12th grade, so I had the house to myself on weekends.)

I honestly cannot remember ever having female roommates. I did the first term freshman year, but the emotional drama of that semester (sans men, it is quite possible to have drama in life simply with family and school, no men involved!) makes it a bit difficult to remember. I had a single for two semesters after my time off for analysis and AIDS volunteer work in 1991, and then in 1993, I got a studio, quite large, in the Taft. I lived there from 1993 to 1996, 10-O, with a large kitchen, living room, normal bathroom, and no bedroom, before moving into the bane of my existence, that horrifying Lebanon shithole dump , a large one-bedroom on Hope Ave on a fucking truck route up to Foothill Ave (which the guy who gave me the place while he went off to work on second Ph.D in Oxford neglected to mention). I lived there for a decade, during unquestionably the most brutal and despair-filled years of my life, and while there were many reasons I did not finish the dissertation, that apartment was responsible for at least 25% of them.

Of course, nothing prevented me from moving. But at the time I was estranged from my parents, had no home in LA, and really nowhere I could escape from SB which I regarded as very close to hell. And I was afraid to move to a nicer place, whether at the same price or slightly higher one, which would have been fine, because I feared I would feel "homeless" in unfamiliar surroundings. This ended up being a central issue in the dissertation because Kant, in the Third Critique, talks some about beauty in relation to a sense of being at home in the world, at least according to Richard Eldridge, full professor at Swarthmore and former chair of philosophy, whose work influenced me very deeply. He was on my Orals Committee and they hooked up a phone in the conference room so he could be on speaker phone during the exam (the Ph.D. qualifying exam, or rather, its passage makes you "advance to candidacy," thus becoming ABD--all but dissertation--a limbo in which many people dwell till the day they die. I am a doctoral candidate or ABD.) .

I have gotten used to typing while listening to summer talk about Hamptons time share, and in fact, this is sort of interesting, thinking about how different this girl's life is from mine at the same year. She is precisely at the midpoint of her third decade in life (twenty-five), and works full-time. At her age, I was beginning my M.A., because I took a year off after college, and graduated at 23 not 22 because I took 18 months off during college. She is talking about many trips, out to CA where her father lives, then New Orleans over Memorial Day, which she wants to do instead of a prior commitment on which she hopes "to bail."

At 25, life was not so terrible. I was in my first year in SB and not yet estranged from parents and LA, and exiled to the hell as I called it, of SB on that miserable , busy, ugly street in the area known as Upper State. There are three banks on the corner of Hope Avenue--Wells Fargo, Montecito Bank and Trust, and B of A--and it's close to the big Vons mall which at the time had nothing cool to eat , really, just depressing.  But I was on fellowship that year, which means they give you money for nothing, and you just take courses and write seminar papers. I had a yoga studio and a bad gym and it wasn't so terrible. But this girl has been transferred from San Franciso area to Manhattan; she is very fashionable with coats, boots, shoes, Tom Ford perfume and Bobbi Brown makeup. She is living a life wholly removed from the one I lived, even at the best moments of graduate school.

Of course, the money she makes is for work I would find at once repellent and impossible: sales. I do not have anything like a salesman's temperament, and even if I did, I would rather live in a shithole in SB, probably, than do work in business, in NYC, though she has a really fun and happy social life.  She seems to like her job. And she doesn't seem to work over 40 hours a week. Still, I would hate to hate my job for 40 hours a week. It's not so much that she has more money than I did at the same age. It's more that she lives in NYC and I was in Southern California in a school I hated, an apartment I hated, and a town I hated, with almost no friends, and no prospects for dating. It is very easy to be alone , in the sense of single, in NYC. And if I had had the outgoing, ebullient air then which I have now, if I had been in anything like a decent urban center, I would have made lots of friends and probably met lots of guys. Even if I had been the picture of bliss and mental stability in those days, I was destined to shrivel up and die in SB, and quite honestly, I didn't have a choice. I didn't get into Yale, Harvard or Berkeley. Chicago gave me no money. And oddly, I did not apply to Stanford or University of Washington, which is in Seattle, a great but very rainy city. (No one in English at Yale undergrad gets into grad, something like two students in ten years.)

Moving on , the summer of 1997 was the summer I moved out of my parents' house in a dramatic manner, taking all my stuff and declaring that I would not be returning. (That was a lovely day by the way, Dad furious and Mom sobbing, but as I will write another day, it was the right decision and I felt a sense of exhilaration though I would pay for the brief bump in my emotional quality of life that summer for years and years.)  I moved into a beautiful guesthouse on 25th and Carlyle, about, in a very expensive part of SM and paid nothing. It was the home of an elementary school friend, Jewish, whose father was at one point my brother's shrink and whose mother was ABD in Renaissance (English) at UCLA. We went to elementary school together and he went to Columbia and then came to UCSB to study with the legendary religious studies professor at UCSB, Walter Capps, the late husband of our very liberal and fabulous Congresswoman, Lois Capps. She took over the seat when Walter died, and the two met at Yale Divinity School, before she went on to become a teacher, mother, and nurse. 

This was also the summer I lived all day at Yogaworks on Montana, a great studio where many famous people go to study with high- profile teachers (Rod Stryker, Meg Ryan's longtime teacher to name one). It was the summer that both Princess Di and Mother Teresa died. I didn't have a TV but the mother of my childhood friend let me watch in the main house and things were, all things considered, not so bad. I watched about three hours a day of NYPD Blue reruns on Fox. I was in Brentwood/Santa Monica, by some miracle, and not in the wasteland--my other word, when sick of hell , for Santa Barbara which felt to me oxygen-deprived.

This may sound odd , since people, multimillionaires dream of moving to SB. But let's face it: people don't dream of a shithole one-bedroom on a truck route in Hope Avenue, with walls of windows in the living room and bedroom facing West, which make the apartment about 90 degrees for four months, with no air conditioning, and no circulation. Sure, it's better than living in the middle of nowhere in a hot, humid, landlocked and unenlightened town. I realize that of course.  But for an LA girl, who lived in New Haven, spent time in NYC, that apartment was the wasteland. And I remember tears rolling down my cheeks around Malibu Canyon or Agoura, when the land by the freeway changes and you know you are no longer in LA, not even in the San Fernando Valley.

Of course oxygen is an element on the periodic table; it does not have emotional dimension. But it truly seemed to me as though the air got sadder, thinner, more suffocating with each mile I traversed from the Valley to SB, heading toward the halfway point, the Camarillo grade. That was the moment, in each drive up, I felt as if I had died emotionally. An hour later, or perhaps forty-five minutes, I would arrive back at my apartment with the yellow door and 132 on the front, with tear-stained cheeks, thinking to myself on Sunday night, "Fuck. I'm back. God I hate my life."

This may be one of a countless reasons why Rescue Me, and more broadly, the comedy of Denis Leary , touches me so. I love that scene in Season 2, Episode 9, when Tommy begins to take the anti-depressants he steals from Janet, after Lou tells him that there are no pills for every conceivable ailment. Tommy is incredulous and Lou tells him, "I'll bet she's on one of those, 'I hate my husband, I hate my life, my vagina hurts, please take it all away pills.'" "They got those?" "Sure, two a day and you might even bang [your husband's] lyin', cheatin', deceivin' little brains out--no offense, Tom."

On this theme, I also loved No Cure for Cancer, from about 1995 or 1996 on, when life was still reasonably tolerable. 1995 was wondrous: graduation, summer home doing yoga all the time, return to New Haven in the fall for my year of graduate applications and stress-free living. 1996, leaving Yale--which this hedge fund guy last night at Fishtail said "had to have felt like a step down" (quite true but you sound like a snob admitting it), and starting the M.A. was not great but not cause for jumping off a building either. Leary, during his rant about rehab and annoyance with "whining maggots," takes aim at those who say they abuse substances because they're "just not happy" and their lives did not turn out the way they thought they would. Leary: "Hey! Join the fucking club. I thought I was going to be starting center fielder for the Boston Red Sox. Life sucks, get a fucking helmet."

I think part of me knew, from the minute I arrived in this place that made me ill, literally ill, in my gut when I moved in the first weekend in September, that things were not going to end well for me with this academic career thing. I remember seeing Fly Away Home with a very sweet older boyfriend, probably 42 or 43 when I was only 24, a stock person living in Malibu, the Sunday before I finally drove up to sleep in the apartment the first time. I cried in his arms in the parking lot of the Mann 8 and said I wanted to sleep at his house and he said that he thought if I didn't go up then, it would be even harder the next morning. He was no doubt right. In 2000, when things shifted and in 2001 when I became a Ph.D. candidate I had hope for a brief period. Then 9/11 happened, and life began to spiral downward, which is obviously why I related to Rescue Me on this visceral level.       

The girl has long since gotten off the phone, and I think it's more the tone of her voice than the content of her speech which provoked this intense desire for her call to end. ("I really cannot think at the moment about anything but the persistence of this voice which I wish were persisting considerably less," I had written before I launched into the residential history of my life which focused my attention.) But it is amazing to think of her life, as a young professional woman with a college degree from a state school (not like University of X...but X State), who is making more money than I ever will, in sales, and planning time-shares in the Hamptons, trips to visit her father and stepmother--to whom she refers as her "parents"--and Memorial Day trips to New Orleans, when I was just beginning my spiral into a crippling depression which would end in the death of all my hopes and dreams from high school on: an academic career at a prestigious university.

Of course, my mother was 26-yr-old first-year lawyer when she married my father, fifteen years her senior, inheriting two children, 5 and 12, in the deal. When you set these three lives next to each other--one by one--there is no question who has the best deal here. This privileged, popular, social girl has by far the best life. But if I had to choose between being married to my father and inheriting two children, on the one hand, and living on the verge of a decade of depression in SB , single and with no responsibilities, I would absolutely choose my path, not that of my mother. I adore my father. I would under no circumstances want to be married to him, especially not in those years, where he was by his own admission, Denis Leary's favorite word, a word about which he wrote a megahit song.

Well, I did not plan to write such substantive note. I was going to take a shower and put on my Obagi anti-aging cleanser about which I have waxed poetic on FB, followed by the lightweight Murad I like very much, both Christmas presents from my sister, a stylist, who can buy this all at Cosmoprof, which requires a current cosmetology license.

And I was going to talk about my Fishtail lunch--I took pictures but of course they're on my phone and the FB friend who was supposed to help, never called me back--and the normalcy of living in NY for 10 days and feeling truly at home. God/the universe does have a sense of humor because the minute I thought I would write about that normalcy and peace, this girl takes a phone call which sends me up the wall! I am thrilled to meet one of my favorite FB friends tomorrow after the psychic and also breakfast with Sharon, a friend I met in NYC not on FB, at Mon Petit Cafe. The post-psychic friend (no Dionne Warwick images intended) will drive me to JFK, for which I am deeply grateful.

P.S. Halfway through the conversation about vacation spots, there was brief talk about apartments. It seems she has found a tolerable roommate and place into which she will soon move. Rents in Midtown are obscene. An average, not nice, big studio or small to medium one-bedroom here is  3500 and a very nice one-bedroom, with or without elevator and doorman, can be 4000. She also gasped at hearing about the end of a two-year marriage, prompting her suggestion that perhaps it is better not to be married. This reminded me of a comment of a FB friend of mine, which he heard from his mother or grandmother: "It is better to be single than to wish that you were." That , in turn, reminded me of a hilarious comment on the wall of a friend of Gregg's , in Southern California, obscenely wealthy and Republican (not obscenely Republican, just Republican, but really pretty far right I think), by a mother who adores her children but still says: "Kids make you old and tired and poor!" I confess this has always seemed intuitive to me, from a very young age!
Of course, Dad wholly approved this sentiment when I told him a few days ago. And ertainly, if I were not around, he would have a significantly greater estate after 39 years. Denis Leary did a hilarious thing about the tab that kids rack up by 18 yrs old in Lock and Load, very funny, though the figure seems inflated even for a kid who attended private school K to 12 and then Emerson College, but perhaps it's about right.)

So that's the last blog from NYC until June or July, where there is a two-week intensive jazz workshop at Luigi, where Francis will be one of the teachers. NYC sucks in the summer with the heat and humidity. But I am quite sure this apartment has a/c, as the unit below does, and it would be worth studying at the original Luigi studio. I know Mom would be thrilled as she thinks it is good for me to dance and sad that , another knock on SB, sorry, there is no decent jazz in all of SB County. There is hip hop: this is not jazz, it is hip hop. (We have ballet and yoga and some tap, even, but no jazz that doesn't look like a bad rock video with slithering, bumping, grinding, glistening bodies.) I would love to visit my friend on the Cape, which is beautiful of course, and where I have not ever been, just Martha's Vineyard the week after college graduation. I did not understood why stars like Carly Simon and John Belushi loved the Vineyard so much after my first day there. By the end of the second, I was hooked and it was a great sadness to leave that quaint little island, with the magical scrub oak, the long and relatively barren beaches of the nature preserve I stayed, and the charming boutiques and cafes. Even the dilapidated little gym in Vineyard Haven had a shabby, patrician appeal.

Worlds Apart and a World Among: Italian Catholics and Second Generation Jews (Yale Paper, 95)

     One need only glance at the titles and chapter headings of Deborah Moore's At Home in America and Robert Orsi's The Madonna of 115th Street to recognize the vastly different ways in which immigrant Jews and Catholics conceived of themselves in relation to the unfamiliar and often hostile surroundings of New York City in the 20th century. Jews not only managed to participate in the "outside world," but to maintain and even reinforce their religious and ethnic distinctiveness through such "associationism" (240). The outward focus of Jews, evident in the headings "Jewish geography," "From Chevra to Center," "A Collective Enterprise," and "The Rise of the Jewish Democrat" clearly opposes the "intense inward preoccupation" of Catholic consciousness, which revolves around the domus, the focus of Orsi's study (113).

     Not surprisingly, the distinction between the centrifugal and centripetal impulses of the two groups manifests itself in both religious practice and in the broader understanding of what religion means to individuals and the community at large. The fact that Orsi focuses his entire study of Italian-American Catholics on the devotion to a single saint (and status), indicates the particularlity and specificity of the Catholic consciousness, in contrast to the generality and expansiveness of the Jewish one. This contrast reproduces itself in the methodologies of the historians and also in the aesthetics of the two books.

     Orsi's and Moore's studies are effective because their approaches are determined by the nature of their subjects,  not the other way around. Put simply, for Italian Catholics, religion is domus, whereas for New York Jews, religion is neighborhood and community ("potential moral community" 149). Given this fundamental difference, Orsi's "local" approach and Moore's "global" one, seems at once logical and necessary. Historians may supplement "hard" research with interviews, but for Orsi, these represent the core of his investigation. Typically, religious historians examine church documents, theological treatises, and Biblical exegesis or commentary, sources which reveal little (directly) about the individual or cultural experience of religion.

     Orsi studies relgion in terms of ritual and ethical belief. These, he argues, are "what matters," not to thechurch hierarchy but to the "people themselves" (xvi). It is telling that the one chapter with a broad theme--immigration--is titled "Toward an Inner History of Immigration." Also revealing, in terms of what matters to Orsi, is that the chapter is by far the shortest in the book.) Moore uses more traditional sources, quoting not just rabbis, but the leading figures in the "myriad" economic, social, educational, political, and charitable organizations in which Jews took part. Like Orsi, her concern is with the people themselves, as her almost ethnographic study--"Jewish Geography"--attests. But for those she studies institutions matter almost as much.

     Both historians, then, display concerns with the psychological and experiential dimensions of religion, a similarity not immediately apparent for the reasons just discussed, but resulting less from substantial theoretical disagreement, than from real differences in their subjects. Neither Orsi nor Moore really theorizes about why Catholics and Jews experienced immigration the way they did, or about which inherent features of each group caused it to adjust to life in America as it did. Each historian provides plausible explanations for what did in fact occur, but neither one goes the further step to explain why each groups basic mode of acculturation was logical or necessary, or why, if the clocks were somehow turned back, the group's immigrant experience would follow the same course. The absence of this type of analysis may be explained by a simple fact: these texts are not works of comparative religion.

     But in reading the two studies, it is clear (and evident in Moore's title), that Jews were simply more comfortable conducting their lives in a manner consistent with their values and traditions than were Italian Catholics in the same period. The reason for this may seem so obvious that  Moore neglects to mention it: Jews were what might be called "professional" immigrants. From the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.  to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Jews lived in the Diaspora, a condition which resulted in a fusion of ethnic and religious identity. While German and Spanish (Sephardic) Jews certainly differ, their status as Jews binds them together in a unique way. Wandering and exile--and their emotional concomitant of fear--are integral, constitutive elements of Jewish psychology.

      Unlike Jews, Italian Catholics were "virgin" immigrants, for whom minority status was arguable more traumatic than for , say, Catholics from predominantly Protestant nations such as Germany or England. The basic distinction then, between first-time immigrants and pepertual immigrants, provides a fram through which the already noted Catholic inwardness and Jewish outwardness may be understood. While fear was part of the Jewish world-view (or New York world-view), Vivian Gornic explains, "We of the second generation were frightened of America also--but we hungered for it more than we feared it" (86). Certainly, American was more hospitable than many other places Jews had lived, where they had nevertheless learned to create self-sufficient communities. One can hardly imagine one of the Italian Catholics of the same generation calling America "hospitable." For them, fear, suspicion, and hostility toward Americans and American values were predominant, at once necessitating and justifying the authoritative claims of the domus. According to Orsi,  "Immigrants [who] wanted to criticize their children's new ideas about themselves and the ways they wanted to organize their lives, accused them of being American" (78).

     It is hard to convey, with a few quotations ,the pervasive disparagement of anything which differered from those ideas or activities sanctioned by the domus. That which did not receive such endorsement was not only bad; it simply did not exist. That a person would want to marry a non-Italian meant thta he or she had failed to learn the values of the domus, or simply values, since the domus represented the only legitimate source of truth and goodness. Such a person, Orsi explains, "would hardly be a person" (80). The "offspring" of the "blood violator" would be "animals" (82), or what was equally repulsive, "Turks" (86). Those outside the domus, or at least Orsi's book (in some ways a simulation of the domus), cannot grasp the devastating power of the latter designation.  This power dervies from the domus's insistence upon defining not just "values," but "meanings of words" (85), and thus, reality itself.

     Within the epistemology of the domus, a Turk was "the opposite of a Christian" (86). One could nto be a Christian without adhering to the rules of the domus; one could not be good person, or a person at all, without being a Christian. The circularity and enclosure of this system is astonishing; it's "voracity," Orsi implies, relates to its epistemological as well as its moral authority. Thus, the domus did not simply shape values. It determined them. When Orsi makes statements like "there were no individuals in Italian Harlem, only people who were part of a domus" (80), he means this quite literally. Only through the reptition of this idea, by him and those he interviews, can one fully grasp the domus's radical suppression of the individual. One man, after speaking with Orsi two full days, said that he wanted to make sure that the historian understood (as if he could possibly have missed this point) that "the biggest emphasis was on the family" (77).

     In this context, both the hostility toward institutions and the devotion to the Madonna make perfect sense. The domus, based on fear and cotnrol, could not tolerate the recognition of any alternative or competing sources of power. The division Orsi points out in the introduction between "religion" and "church" emerges from the fear of that which would challenge or or threaten the domus. The Madonna represented a desperately needed salve for the wounds inflicted on individuals by the domus whose very existence, ironically, was a response to the traumas of immigration, a means of proection against "external powers" (xx). But, as is often the case, the cure was at least as bad as the disease, producing a rage within Italian Catholics so intense , that it could only be "turned inward" (106). It was far too "threatening" to direct such emotions toward the domus, which however problematic, was perceived as the last and only defense against the outsdie world, a perception which reinforced the dependence upon the very system perpetuating the original trauma.

     In addition to offering a general source of healing for immigrants, the Madonna also assuaged their feelings of alienation. The church of 115th Street was viewed "as the end of the long journey of immigration, a source of peace, protection and pardon" (164-5). Embedded in the festa ritutal were themes of wandering and arrival, as immigrants traveled through the neighborhoods of New York to "the Madonna's throne" ( 165). In addition, through prayer to the Madonna, women , especially, overcame the pain of distance from sons, brothers, and husbands. One women tells Orsi, "Many time in this long period of four years I was without word from my son.. But for all this I never succumbed but always had recourse to prayer" 167).

     Paryer not only provided a means through which individual needs could be fulfilled, but through which individuals couldregains at least some of the personal authority and autonomy which the domus systematically denied. One's relationships to the Madonna was, again for women in particular, the only one which did not depend upon the surrender and suppresion of self. Thus, while individuals might not be able to control the essential aspects of their outer lives, the Madonna empowered them to influence their inner livs, allowing them to create within themselves personal sanctuaries.

     As much as any other religious or ethnic groups, Jews understood the need to create an internal refuge in the face of external chaos. To retain their identities in the absence of a homeland, Jews became adept at devleoping cohesive communities in regions with pre-existing political and cultural institutions. Their survival depended upon their ability to co-exist with otherness. History taught Jews that real security rests not on domination and conformity but on acceptance and diversity. Moore presents a vivid picture of what she calls the "democratic pluralism" of New York Jews: "What enabled Zionists to debate Socialists, Anarchists to attach Orthodox, Americanizers to compete with Survivalists, Bundists to oppose Universalists, and Yiddishists to struggle with Hebraists as their common situation as immigrants in New York City" (7).
This toleration of multiplicity can be traced back in part ot the tradition of rabbinic commentary, which differs in form and attitude from Christian Biblical exegesis. Rabbinic Judaism was by no means democratic, but it left more room for debate between opposing viewpoints than did the Catholic hierarchy. Texts such as The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan sought to preserve the current generation's link to the tradition, while at the same time fashioning a unique , current identity.

     The influence of commentary on the organization of second-generation life parallels that of the domus on the organization of Italian-American immigrant life. This is the type of inherent trait which neither Moore nor Orsi attempts seriously to link to the acculturation patterns of his or her group. Still , Moore offers a number ofu seful images which capture the ways in which second-generation Jews participated in, and remained separate from, New York as a whole. The first of these relates to the residential pattern of "concentrated dispersion" which "combined residential segregation with mobility." She adds: "Residence in a Jewish neighborhood and associational ties with other Jews brought one into the orbit of the community into a 'world of Jewish unconsiousness'... secure by strands at once both conscious and unconscious, built up through secondary and primary associations" (16).  The notion of strands which create a strong net or web of support itself builds up from one chapter to the next.

     Moreover, the idea implicity in the words "orbit" and "unconscious" of an overarching or underlying conceptual bond between Jews, suggests the multiple levels on which Jewish identity existed. In general, living in America led to the creation of "institutional bulwarks of middle-class ethnicity, but no longer an ethnicity based on town of origin" (129). Here Moore is describing the synagogue, but her comment applies to most of the institutions she surveys. Religious observance was but one element of being a good Jew: community action and involvement were others. Thus, "While religious organizations emerged as key agencies encouraging Jewish ethnicity , secular alternatives existed" (14, emphasis mine). The interaction between Jews and the neighborhood school exemplifies Jews' commitment to broader social and political concerns. But the school, like the synagogue, failed to create an "institutional community broader than the neighborhood" (147). Moore concludes that "any effort to build a city-wide community would have to rest on a nonsectarian foundation." In the final part of the book, she explores broad-based philanthropic , educational, and political ventures undertaken by second and third generation Jews.

     By the time one reaches the final chapters, whose heading "At Home in America" Moore selects as the title of the book, it is clear that Jews, both collectively and individually, defined themselves in a variety of contexts. Flatbush Jews, for instance, did not all feel and act one way, while the Grand Concourse Jews felt another. Even within neighborhoods , there existed great multiplicity, satisfying the "age-old Jewish need .. to escape from the consciousness (if not the fact) of being a minority in exile" (60). Many Jews, in fact, did not belong to synagogues, yet this did not diminish their significance for all Jews.

     The synagogue , Moore argues, "served as the Jewish home which Jews conveniently could take for granted and ignore" (123, emphasis mine). This, as I have tried to show, reveals a strategy of identity formation more complex, from a developmental and psychological standpoint, than the strategy of Italian Catholics, who for many reasons, seemed to fear that loosening the strictures of the doums wou.ld lead to annihilation. In contrast, leaders of the synagogue centers, which promoted the "preservation and transmission of Jewish religious and cultural traditions" were confident of their "American identity and psychosocial health" (134).

     As many psychologists would agree, maturity involves the capacity of individuals to know themselves in relation to others, but not exclusively so. The tendency of Orsi's Catholics to think in binary, absolute categories contrasts with the tendency of Moore's Jews to think in more fluid and varied terms. To make such a claim is not to indict Italian-Catholics , but merely to recognize that , as a group, their model of identity formation (the domus) reflexts a more acute level of fear, and that this may related to their status as first-time immigrants.

Prefatory Essay to Yale Paper on Italian Catholics/NY Jews: Berkeley, Taft Apartment, Relative Difficulties of Majors, Master Stout and Sarah Palin's Education

I found a paper for a American religious history course in a side compartment in my suitcase and decided to put it on my blog, but in the course of introducting it, I of course, produced a stand alone essay on Yale, the relative difficulty of different majors in the humanities, on and off campus living, Master Harry Stout, a historian of religion, and finally, Sarah Palin's college career. I will post the essay now--"Worlds Apart and a World Among: Italian Catholics and Second-Generation Jews"--which I will type by hand as I have of course no scanner here, or at home, for that matter.

When I found the paper, I thought it would be of interest to my many religious FB friends, mostly Catholic but some Jewish. The paper was for a lecture on American religious history, with Jon Butler a good from of my master, Harry Stout of Berkeley college, whom I saw at the restaurant in the Taft in December of 2009.

He was unchanged and apparently, so was I, and as I sat drinking a glass of wine, he caught my eye, and said, "Maria!" My real name is Maria Victoria Ordin but I never identified with Maria, and I had been tortured with the songs from Westside Story and The Sound of Music, so when I moved to Santa Barbara in 1996, I changed it to Victoria, paid 188 dollars to change it legally, but never posted the requisite newspaper ads, so my driver's licence and passport still say the full name. It was odd that I even responded to my first name, because after nearly 15 years I identify with it not at all.

Master Stout as probably 70 , full head of blonde not gray hair, almost no wrinkles, and the same weight, with a very attractive brunette in her mid-40s and when I told this to sweet Annette, the wonderful Jamaican dining hall manager whom I saw the next day, she said in her accent, "Oooh.. Masta Stout, he like deh ladies!" He apparently got divorced after his kids grew up and dated a few younger women. But he was no Mark Sloan. She just thought it was funny that he had  had a couple younger, attractive women in his life after his long and faithful marriage which by all accounts was very happy, unlike the train wreck of a marriage between Dean Larry Winnie (modern French historian) and his bigshot wife Lee Wandel, historian of religion, whose specialty was the Reformation. Dean Winnie was a small, thin, kind man and quite honestly, everyone thought she was a ballbuster of the highest order.

At Yale, each residential college has both a Master and  Dean, who live in the college , in a very nice multi-story residence in one of the entryways. Being Master and Dean is a prestigious thing, which doesn't pay more, but offers significant course relief to do research, as well as a fabulous home. But it's a lot of work also and you have to be a real people person to do a good job. Masters don't do as much as Deans, who really are responsible for your academic life, excuses , extensions, scheduling etc..

Master Stout was a jovial man and apparently quite a legend in Jonathan Edwards studies, though he was the Master of Berkeley, not Jonathan Edwards (JE). Once he came up to my studio in the Taft apartments, the old Taft Hotel on the corner of Chapel and College, across the street from one border of Yale College (Old Campus, where freshmen live--I refuse to capitulate to political correctness and call them "frosh" or "freshpersons," and yes, people actually use that abomination of a word, as in Freshperson Conference--the orientation for incoming first years). My good friend in CT, a mother and wife, posted a piece about college not being the best years of one's life, today, with so much addiction, eating disorders and depression. I can say, based on my own experience (and need) for intensive psychoanalysis during college, and all my bulimic friends (I'd say one in three to one in four girls were puking when I lived on campus), that college in the 90s was a very intense, rewarding but difficult time for me, and many others. It was nothing like the horrors of graduate school and I regard Yale as a glorious time , for which I often long, unable to get past the desire to do it over in my present  happy state, but it was not easy.

Partly because I took off the second semester of freshman year, and did not return for 18 months ( a story for another day...) I didn't have a lot of friends in BK, and my single there was cute but very small. This is why, in the year of 1992-93, I lived with Dad's friend in the giant duplex on 88th between 2nd and 3rd, about three weekends a month. As Dad said when he saw my 4th floor Berkeley single, "The infantrymen barracks in WWII were bigger than this! We're paying 30K for this??!!" (Actually Grandma paid for the first half, which I never knew and which shocked me since my parents were obviously capable of doing so, no longer in government by the time I was in college.) So after one full year (sort of sophomore/junior combined, as I graduated in six, not eight, semesters), I moved to the Taft, where a graphic design grad student friend lived.

I met her in a small linguistics class for a man who had gotten his Ph.D. at the insanely young age of 23 and was, quite frankly, half senile. I am crushed I cannot find the paper, over 20 pages, I wrote on the differences between written and spoken language. (It is fascinating, truly, that without taking one theory course, I would gravitate toward one of the central themes of deconstruction: speech/writing.) At the time, really since freshman year (also on the fourth floor , though Old Campus and Vanderbilt in particular had monster stairs, so it felt like the sixth floor), I was in chronic pain, from years of dancing, emotional conflict, a fourth floor room, and daily workouts of at least 75 minutes, not counting the 30 of yoga and steam/sauna. Part of the draw of living off-campus (obviously a kitchen held no charm for me!) was having a bathtub. Arlyn allowed me in the spring of 1993 to go to her apartment and take baths and after a few baths , I was determined to move off-campus in  the fall of 1993.

When I went to my reunion in 2010--one of the best weeks of my life--the class of '95 stayed in Davenport, a college with far larger rooms than any in BK. Of course, if you have roommates, you have a common room as well as bedrooms. But even the singles in DC are much bigger and nicer than the singles in BK. I know if I had been in DC rather than BK I would have stayed on campus and quite honestly, had a lot more fun and social interaction. I don't know, however, if I would have graduated with Phi Beta Kappa, as I would have been up talking late in the night over pizza and wine (well, I would have bought my wine, and let friends drink their beer, something I have never enjoyed), rather than revising papers in a meticulous-bordering-on-compulsive manner.

But also, I liked the friends of my friends in other colleges--Ezra Stiles in particular--better than people in BK, and transferring colleges, which is allowed, is a strange and rare occurrence. Still, I had dear girlfriends and some male friends and I was not at all unhappy. I also had a 300 dollar a month phone bill or so, sometimes 200 when moved off campus, talking to my best friend at the time in LA, as well as my mother. It's hard to believe there was no email, and of course, no Facebook in those days. (I got email my first year of grad school, in September of 1996, through UCSB and then in 1998 I got AOL, which I still use, along with lots of porn people and spammers, apparently, because my first emails to new people so often go to junk or spam folders!)

So, while the residential college system--which really  is not anything like the house system at Harvard--can be wonderful, producing the intimacy of a very small liberal arts college within the experience of a decent-sized private college--4.5K to 5K undergraduates--it was not that way for me.

So, Master Stout wanted to see what the Taft was like. I cannot recall if he was like Dick Brodhead, Dean of Yale and now President of Duke, who had come to Yale at 18 and left at 60 or so, and was a true product of Yale, or if he simply came after his Ph.D. But he had never seen the Taft--the nicest building off-campus other than some newer buildings further away, but in less safe areas--and I invited him for tea and scones one afternoon. In the old days, long before coeducation, the Taft was where Yale men imported girls from Wellesley and Smith to sleep with. The saying was, "Smith to wed, Wellesley to bed," as the perception (I have no idea if it is true), was that Smith girls were very serious and intellectual, wherease Wellesley girls were social butterflies with more relaxed morals. (Hillary Clinton of course went to Wellesley and made it into Time Magazine with her commencement speech--I will not here launch into a eulogy of Hillary's virtues, but I think she's a dedicated, disciplined, brilliant woman who has cared about women's and children's issues her entire life.)

He came up in the nice elevator, not the freight one I used as it was closer to the back entrance of the building and my gym, Downtown Health and Raquet, and sat on the Pier One chair I still have but never use because it is very uncomfortable and we ate scones and tea and talked about the courses I was taking that semester: Victorian Poetry and Bible as Literature, both taught by Leslie Brisman, a tall version of Woody Allen. That was one hell of a dose of Brisman, who is very quiet but demanding and probing into one's psychic life if he discerns that this life has any significant tension or energy or power. He knew I had been in analysis and later tried to dissuade me--and everyone else--from graduate school in English. Brisman encourages every top student to go to law or med school. (There were no really dumb kids , well, a few quite mediocre students we'd wonder how and why were there, but only the top 15% or so of the class thinks about graduate school. It is quite possible to be a great, talented lawyer without having any significantly original or scholarly ideas about law. This is not true of professors of humanities subjects.)

Brisman's view--and it is not wrong--is that law school in particular , for a highly intelligent and verbal person, is just a lot easier and shorter than a Ph.D. in the humanities, and that at least in those days, it was a guarantee of financial stability and perhaps, wealth. "Why torture yourself?" he asked me one day, when I was agonizing over a paper, talking about how intensely emotional was the act of writing critical papers, however rewarding.

As anyone who knows me through FB knows, I lost my college laptop in 2006, and then found two floppy disks with about 35% of my work on it. But the papers of 1993-94, with the six 10 page papers from Brisman's two courses, are sadly not on them.

This is all by way of preface to the paper I will now type , but put in the next post, about the differences between Italian Catholic immigrants and second-generation Jews, based on two books, whose titles I forget, but whose authors are Deborah Moore and Robert Orsi.  In 2009, my first time in New  Haven in nine yers, when Master Stout saw me at the bar, the first thing he said after the usual pleasantries (which in this case were true, he looked young and great and I didn't look that much different from the last time he saw me at graduation) was his recollection of a phone call Jon Butler, a fellow historian of religion and longtime friend, placed to him about this paper. Butler was enormously impressed and my TA gave me an A+. It doesn't seem all that wonderful to me, but this supports what I have been writing on the page of James Strock, one of my favorite people on FB. He is a Harvard lawyer (not practicing) who did his undergrad at Harvard as well. He has worked for Bush junior as well as Pete Wilson in CA, who destroyed Mom's longtime boss and friend, John Van de Kamp, in the CA gubernatorial election and was a Republican that Democrats could tolerate. James thinks very highly of Mom and it has been really fun to get to know him. He is also a leadership consultant, Reagan Republican, and author of books on leadership, Reagan, and Teddy Rooosevelt.

He posted something about Ivy League employees and hard work. Only three percent of employers considered Ivy graduates were considered better, more productive workers. I have been making the same point both on Gregg Hilton's page (where you get a lot of bashing of Ivy people and intellectuals, consistent with the kind of anti-intellectual Sarah Palin embodies and champions in my view) and James's page: in colleges of a certain caliber (good public schools as well as Ivies), the ranking or prestige of the college matters less than the major one selects.

This A+ proves, or at least goes some way toward proving, my theory. It was written very quickly, not like an English or philosophy paper. I wrote it in a day or two, after having read the two books earlier in the semester. One reason Yale is harder than Harvard (by many accounts, not just mine), and indeed a lot of other Ivies, is that you have to take 9 courses a year, which means, if you are measuring by units, you have 16 units one term and 20 the next.

My senior year, I had my Paul Fry Wordsworth senior seminar (honestly I could do only about 60% of the voluminous primary and secondary reading), Jon Butler American religious history, John Rogers (love , love, love him) Milton lecture, Laura King and Katherine Gill Renaissance Studies course (history, literature, some philosophy), and Steven Meyer (20th-century Experimental writing: Gertrude Stein (yuck) and Laura Riding (fascinating).

That is a shitload of reading and writing. I took the interdisciplinary course--absolutely phenomenal reading list, including Binding Passions, a cultural studies work by a SCSU professor I still remember--Guido Ruggiero, George Eliot's Romola (my first Eliot novel, oddly enough), St Teresa of Avila's autobiography, and so much  more--credit/D/Fail so if I got a B, it wouldn't fuck up my GPA. (And I never got a B in college, just As and A-s, but got a C- (!!) in the biology of AIDS which I am convinced was a clerical error I was just too lazy to fix, because the previous year, I got an A- or B+ in the very similar gut (guts are science courses for humanities majors--stars for gazers, rocks for jocks and so on) at UCLA summer school: --biology of Cancer.

AIDS and cancer are not that different on a biological/physiological level, or at least, there are some fundamental similarities. There's some deal with the DNA, RNA, retrovirus, transcription blah blah blah... And to get a C-, I would have had to get a 55 or 60 on the final. You know when you've tanked on an exam and that was not at all my perception when I walked out of the Yale Law auditorium, where this old queen taught the course, at least 65, probably 70, and cantankerous as hell. (He had, apparently, lost many friends to AIDS, but was not at all impressed when I told him I had been Emotional Support Volunteer at LA Shanti. I had very little contact with this professor of a large lecture/gut, and don't even remember his name, but I do remember the dorky red-haired male TA being a total dick!)

So due to my C- in AIDS biology, quite ironic as I did AIDS work for 16 months the year before, I graduated magna cum laude, not summa. This is not a big deal in the scheme of things of course, but it did annoy me when watching Gilmore Girls and Rory was summa and I was magna! The most annoying thing is that after being burned with that grade, I took three other courses Credit/D/Fail (you used to just have Pass/Fail, but people would  pass with a D and the administration felt this was unseemly). And the truth is, it's hard to study for a C--you end up doing most of the work and getting a B or higher). I think you can take four courses Cr/D/Fail, and I took three after my stupid choice with AIDS course,  and got A-s on all of them.

Thus, the final term of senior year, Butler's history of religion class was the easy , no-stress course. I didn't have to outline the reading and the major textbook--Gaustad's pretty famous book whose title I don't remember--was just a breeze, not intellectually demanding at all, though quite fascinating. We did read William James , Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as a wonderful book on spiritualism (Radical Spirits, I think by a woman whose first name was Ann), and about six or seven other books. The paper on Catholics and Jews was the final paper, and it really does prove, that while history at Yale especially is a legendary major, it just is not that hard. You write less than half the papers of English and philosophy majors and the papers you write don't produce emotional pain, angst, conflict, tension, bad dreams etc.. My new FB friend, a B.A. in English from Berkeley or UCLA, I forget, said that she didn't want to end up with her head in an oven , like Sylvia Plath, and that both writing poetry , and studying 20th-century poetry, was likely to result in such an ignominious and tragic end. I would not go that far, but there is no question: history majors, political science majors have to work far less hard at Yale and UCLA and UCSB for the same grades, and tend to be happy-go-lucky folks. English and philosophy majors obsess about life and work.

You learn a lot and of course you can deliberate and agonize over seminar papers, but the run of the mill lecture course in history and political science is truly half, at most, of the work of a run of the mill lecture in philosophy and English, which is why, when I get off on a Palin rant, as I am wont to do, I am quick to point out the following:  I don't give a shit if she didn't go to an Ivy. It would have been nice if she could have gone to a great public school in the Pacific Northwest, like the University of Washington or University of Oregon (I don't know how University of Alaska is, I'm assuming there is one), rather than bouncing around the community college system. But some community colleges are top notch--Santa Barbara City College, for instance, has top of the line faculty--and you can study difficult subjects at a high level, including biochemistry and physics.

But she didn't major in any significant discipline with a political valence: political science, international relations, US history, world history, regional studies (Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Africa), economics, or even business. She was a communications/journalism major. As she would say, WTF? It's fine to double major in a real, substantive major and then study a secondary, more methodological subject such journalism--though it doesn't exactly seem to have turned her into stellar wordsmith! But how can you hope to lead the United States of America when you don't grasp world history, politics, and culture, and/or economics and domestic policy/history? (It's also provincial-bordering-on-xenophobic to presume to be president when you haven't traveled abroad till your early- to mid-forties.) Even my most Catholic, Tea Party female friend from Hillsdale in Michigan , who regards her conservative principles as "spot on," concedes she "lacks intellectual gravitas" and that the GOP can do "so much better."

I will now post the essay which gave rise to this rambling reflection on Yale, Master Stout, the relative difficulty of different majors, and finally Sarah Palin. Now that I have enunciated my position on someone I dislike very intensely, I can forget about her forever in a public forum, at least! (I have said this, though, many times: I admire her hair more than I can say. When I turn 50, if Dysport no longer does the trick, I'm going for the full-on Sarah Palin do, complete with the bangs, which at 39, I don't need as I have no wrinkles on forehead thanks to twice a year Dysport (newer, better, cheaper version of Botox which does not immobilize the forehead).