Hermenautic Circle blog

The aim in this essay is not to raise mass consciousness about gum pollution. Over the past year, I’ve been something of a gumshoe, investigating and documenting patterns of gum goop, and talking to perpetrators and victims alike. Now I’m ready to share my findings.

It's actually wonderful to be back in NYC. The crowds, the excitement, the fashion. Walking everywhere. Picking up ingredients for dinner on the walk home from work. Wearing high heels and a good outfit to work. It's the little things, no?

We arrived home late Sunday evening and I went right to work, doing a freelance full-time writing gig for the next two weeks. I'm writing beauty copy for a fancy face cream and fragrance descriptions and online copy for a perfumery. I'm sad not to have time to go to the farmer's market, but I'm happy to have income.

Tonight Steve and I, both exhausted from work, threw together a quick meal--pan-fried pork tenderloin, which was frozen in a maple/mustard marinade, corn, stripped from the cob and sautéed in butter with salt and fresh pepper, and steamed broccoli with soy sauce. Simple food but the kind I love on a weeknight. I'm such a fan of the protein and two sides.

The wine, a french white crisp with a nice finish and lots of minerality, tasted so good when I sipped as I cooked, winding down from the day.

At dinner we raised a toast to my dear little Sebastien, who just started preschool. Steve and I dropped him off yesterday morning without a fuss and he's so proud of himself to be there. He is no longer my wee baby. Sigh.

Cheers!

A fun meander, if your child is excited about the alphabet:

Prepare a clipboard with the ABCs in large, clear type; give your kid a pen or pencil, and set out for a stroll, someplace where signs are abundant. Encourage your child to cross out any letter she sees.

My kids loved going out with the clipboards -- I think it felt very important and official. They enthusiastically roamed Dekalb Avenue, the main drag of my Brooklyn neighborhood, planting themselves down on the sidewalk each time they encountered an interesting sign. The neighborhood shopkeepers were charmed, and the kids made an especially strong impression at the local pizzeria ("Z!").

Desmond was very thorough and precise in his search for letters; Nini was more freeform, eventually just crossing out letters because she liked the feeling of scribbling with her red pencil.

I suppose you could do this as a car activity, but I found the pokiness to be sweet, an almost meditative way to experience our neighborhood. The walk held their interest for far longer than I would have imagined, and ever since, they've been noticing the signage of the city in a new way.

To what extent does design criticism inspire a reaction; to whom is criticism addressed and what happens as a result of it being read? This article discusses the way in which an excerpt from a review of a 1955 Buick unexpectedly inspired a painting by one of the world's best-known Pop artists, Richard Hamilton.

I've always wanted a rubber stamp that said "REQUEST DENIED", although I don't know if I'd ever be able to bring myself to use it. (That said, I once had made, and gave to someone as a gift, a rubber stamp that was a full eleven inches wide and four inches tall, which said PISS OFF! in all caps. That was fun to pick up at the office-supply store.)

But if I did have a "REQUEST DENIED" stamp, I'd use it for this semi-serious request that was written about here, at the Volokh Conspiracy:

Instead of creating a new word to represent someone who is receiving guidance under a mentor as a 'mentee', couldn't someone (not certain of who is responsible for adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries) simply add an additional definition to the word protege to allow for further meaning?

Okay. Let's unpack this a bit:

• There is no one person who is responsible for "adding/changing definitions to the official dictionaries" -- at least, not for English, as English has no "official dictionaries." Perhaps you're thinking of French?


• Dictionaries (as is, thankfully, pointed out in the original post) don't add new definitions "to allow for further meaning". "Further meanings: allowed" is the DEFAULT SETTING. You want to use protege to mean mentee? Go ahead, knock yourself out -- just be prepared to be misunderstood.
  
  (Me, I occasionally use henimus to mean "(not a) genius", based on a MISUNDERSTANDING of this episode ["Girlfriend 2000"] from the old Chris Elliott show "Get a Life", which I think four people watched ... although the toxic-waste-doping spelling bee episode, "Chris's Brain", with its prize of a jewel-encrusted dictionary, is a Dictionary Evangelist favorite. But I don't expect to be understood when I use henimus, because it's about as obscure as you can get.)


• If you don't like mentee, there's no reason you have to use it: say "the person I mentor," or some other work-around. Just because a word exists doesn't imply that its use is obligatory.

Also worth rebutting (which Volokh does quite well, but I'll throw in a couple pennies as well): the idea that if the word mentee exists, that this implies the existence of the verb to ment. I don't know where this notion came from, but English morphology is a bit more fluid than this. You can certainly go from mentor to mentee without having to postulate some missing-link verb *ment. Although, frankly, I'm considering using ment now (strictly jocularly, and on my own recognizance) just to piss those anti-mentee people off.

To sum up: yes, mentee is a slightly awkward word. Give it time to grow up a bit, or use a work-around of some sort ... although if you decide to repurpose another word, be prepared for some "what?" reactions. But, please, don't waste your time or anyone else's trying to get a dictionary to record a change that hasn't yet happened in the language. We have enough to do keeping up with the changes that have!

Thanks to Kat for the link!

HALLELUWAH TWO: A FESTIVAL OF ENTHUSED ARTS
Presented by Blackbird, Yeti & PSU’s Popular Music Board
Three days at Holocene, Portland, OR: Aug. 31-Sep. 2 (1001 SE Morrison, Portland OR 97214)

The music-film-arts event that ‘Portland Mercury’ called “the greatest festival of all time” --without a hint of hyperbole, of course-- returns to Portland, OR next weekend.

This year we’ve got a slew of Portland’s finest musicians paired with such internationally renowned musicians as Califone, Climax Golden Twins, the Blow, They Shoot Horses Don't They? and Can vocalist Damo Suzuki (which is sweet since he inadvertently named the festival some 35 or so years ago). (Very) loosely put, Friday is the more dance-oriented night, while Saturday is more folk and rock-based, and Sunday’s performers lean more towards improvisational freak-outs and drones. We didn’t want to divvy it up by genre too much, so there are plenty examples to the contrary.

There’s a rad literary program put together this time by Yeti magazine, and brilliant films shown each night from Seattle’s DIY ethnography crew Sublime Frequencies. We’ve enlisted artist/ Albina Press curator Gretchen Vaudt and photographer Norm Sajovie to mount a full installation of new work solely for the festival.

{ Friday 8.31.07 }
* The Blow, Panther, They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Beauty, White Rainbow, Alexis Gideon, Valet, Metal, The Joggers & Modernstate. Hosted by DJ Spencer Doran, DJ BJ & DJ Hanukkah Miracle.
* Sublime Frequencies presents: ‘Niger: Magic and Ecstasy in the Sahel,’ a film by Hisham Mayet. 70 minutes: A celebration of life in the Sahel region of Africa, this film showcases many of Niger's venerable music styles: Tuareg electric guitar trance rock, Bori cult dance ceremonies, Fulani folk, and roadhouse gospel rave-ups.
* Doors at 6PM; film starts 6:30 PM promptly.

{ Saturday 9.1.07 }
* Califone, Dark Meat, Bowerbirds, Plants, Eternal Tapestry, Builders & Butchers, Whip, Strangers Die Everyday & a special appearance by Rob Walmart (performing from inside a van outside the venue). Hosted by DJ Yeti.
* Sublime Frequencies Presents: ‘Palace of the Winds,’ a film by Hisham Mayet (filmmaker in attendance!) 45 minutes: An entrancing look at the culture and music of the Saharawis from the Western Sahara and Mauritania. Journey from the northern fringes of the Western Sahara to the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott.
* Action-packed and NOT-BORING literary event curated by YETI magazine with Jana Martin (author of ‘Russian Lover,’ a Yeti publication), Curtis Knapp, Tom Blood, Vanessa Veselka & Mike McGonigal.
* Doors at 4PM; literary program starts 4:30 PM promptly (even if it’s nice outside).

{ Sunday 9.2.07 }
* Damo Suzuki (performing with the Portland All-Stars: Honey Adams, Yellow Swans, Adam Forkner, Emil amos & Dan Wilson), Tara Jane O’Neil, Ilyas Ahmed, Master Musicians of Bukkake, Evolutionary Jass Band, Climax Golden Twins, Cexfucx, the Sea Donkeys & Katharina Tunicata. Hosted by DJ Old Fronteir.
* Sublime Frequencies Presents: ‘My Friend Rain,’ a film by Robert Millis (filmmaker in attendance!) 45 minutes: A collage of musical segments, tropical backdrops, and mysterious celebratory events captured live and in the moment by Robert Millis and Alan Bishop on location in Thailand, Burma, Indonesia and Laos.
* Doors at 6PM; film starts 6:30 PM promptly.

Portland State University students get discounted admission. Three-day passes are available for $30.00 via Brown Paper Tickets here.

The Folding Paper Box Association of America would influence more than just packaging regulations: a half century before the Poynter Institute would claim authorship for its revolutionary Eye-Trac research, the FPBAA was already tracking viewers' visual responses to packaging...

I was going to wait until I spruced things up a bit before opening this blog for business, but that was before my friend Bruce sent me an article announcing that neuroscientists in the U.K. have completed a study showing "scientifically that there are gender-based colour preferences." Researchers showed men and women 1,000 pairs of colored rectangles on a computer screen and asked them to choose the ones they liked best. And whaddya know? It turns out that boys like blue and girls like pink—or at least "gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum" (huh? doesn’t that mean it's still blue?) because it reminds them of "riper fruit and healthier faces," presumably reflecting a biologically determined interest in cooking and caretaking.

There's no mention of whether the researchers took into consideration the fact that blue and pink weren't originally "gendered" colors. Prior to the mid-19th century, babies usually wore white. Then a trendsetter in France got the bright idea to identify girls with pink and boys with blue. In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868), artistic Amy March puts blue and pink ribbons on her sister's newborn twin boy and girl "French fashion, so you can always tell" them apart.

But these arbitrary color assignments didn't stick. In the U.S., blue and pink were appropriate for baby boys or girls well into the 20th century. When Nancy Pembroke, College Maid (1930) and her friends decide to impress the upperclasswomen of Eastport College by dressing up as babies (a ploy that works, by the way), Nan says, "I thought we'd make up the blue stuff for you, Janie, as one-piece dress, using your night-gown for a pattern; and I'll be a boy in pink rompers." Meanwhile, some authorities counseled adult women against wearing "too young" baby blue. "Many women go through life clinging to the mistaken notion that 'blue is my color' simply because they were dressed in pale blue from babyhood up," wrote the author of Color and Line in Dress (1934). In 1948, a fad was born when college girls started wearing pink Brooks Brothers' dress shirts—for men.

So what happened? Mamie Eisenhower, for one thing. When she wore a pink silk ball gown spangled with 2,000 pink rhinestones to hubby Dwight's inaugural ball in 1953, the press went wild. Karal Ann Marling reports that by 1955, "First Lady Pink" (also known as "Mamie Pink") was "a bona fide color" for a raft of clothing and consumer products.

Mamie helped feminize the color, but pink still hadn't attained its girls-only status. In the late 1950s, men could select from a range of pink or pink-and-black shoes, socks, and dinner jackets, among other items of clothing. Elvis represented its flashy rock 'n' roll roots, but by the time pink men's clothing appeared in the staid Montgomery Ward catalog, it was safe for suburban dads, too.

Certainly, many of us who grew up in the mid-20th century saw reproductions of Thomas Lawrence's Pinkie and Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy hanging in our homes and those of our friends. Perhaps familiarity with these paintings helped to subliminally reinforce the equations of blue=boy and pink=girl in our young minds.

In any event, by the time the baby boom was in full force, color coding babies in pink or blue was becoming an established habit and modern "fact."

The tyranny of pink has only grown in the past couple of decades. The girls' aisles at big box toy stores are screaming repositories of all things pink. Of course, Mattel's famous fashion doll has her own proprietary shade of "Barbie pink." Barbara Ehrenreich has eloquently written about the "cult of pink kitsch" surrounding corporate breast cancer awareness campaigns.

Up until now, I haven't minded the color pink—I even own one of those "breast cancer awareness" stand mixers (it was gift and I love it). But I know plenty of women who were told to act like little ladies (i.e., sit down and shut up) as they were forced into pretty pink dresses—and they hate the color with a passion. Given the new report that pink is my biological birthright, I'm considering joining their ranks.

After ten months in Africa, I recently visited the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to see Design for the Other 90%. Here, I thought, was an exhibition I could enthusiastically embrace. Unfortunately...

Cooking for my children gives me more pleasure than is probably healthy. Like most things about parenthood, it's ultimately more about me than them, but still, I feel a deep satisfaction when I get them to eat something warm and full of veggies and I’m not afraid to admit I sometimes feel a bit smug about this. But then I feel them pizza three nights in a row and I’m humble again.

Over the four years since I’ve had children, I have developed some rather good recipes that appeal to little ones—plain, but flavorful, small bite-size pieces, and a large amount of veggies snuck into the mix. Oh, and ideally the recipe should be fast--nothing like starving children to give you a migraine or sending you hitting the booze harder than normal. This soup actually uses boxed chicken stock, but if I have time, I usually make my own from left over roast chicken bones and old veggies and then freeze it for soups whenever I need it. (See, I *am* a little smug). I also added an optional half-cup of leftover pasta, which I always seem to have in the back of the fridge, in this recipe, but you don't need it.

Ingredients
2 boxes organic chicken stock (Imagine brand is decent)
I large organic skinless, boneless chicken breast
5 carrots, chopped into small rounds
3 celery stocks, chopped into small pieces
1/2 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, peeled but left whole
1 large handful of parsley, tied with kitchen string
1 cup of any or any combo of the following frozen peas, fresh or frozen corn, fresh or frozen broccoli chopped into bite-size pieces, zucchini chopped finely, or any other veggies you have on-hand that your kids might like.
1/2 cup of leftover plain pasta, any shape, already cooked (optional)
Salt and pepper
Time: 30 minutes, from start to finish

In a large saucepan, add chicken stock, chicken breast (no need to chopped in yet), carrots, celery, onion, garlic and parsley. Bring to a boil and simmer until chicken is fully poached, about 20 minutes.

Remove chicken breast with a slotted spoon and place on a cutting board. Remove parsley and discard. Chop chicken into very small pieces and return to pot with vegetables and pasta, if using. Simmer everything until veggies are cooked through. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serves 4-6 kids. Especially good served with grilled cheese sandwiches.

I just can't get enough...

Dinner Party # 12
Smoked beef and pork Ribs
Purple and white cabbage coleslaw with apples and jalapenos
French-style potato salad with parsley and chives
Cherry tomato salad with parsley, salt and olive oil


I take full responsibility. I was fixated on finding an old door which I could turn into a table so we could eat outdoors. I’ve never understood why my in-laws, who have a large yard with an incredible view of the Columbia River and Mount Hood, have no real lawn furniture or outdoor tables. Where are the big lounge chair and the side table for holding magazines and cocktails? Where’s the picnic table and benches with the umbrella?

Apparently, in my search for a table-like substance, I had turned off the power source in the garage that was igniting the hot plate that was heating the wood chips that produce the smoke that would cook our pork and beef ribs. As I was nursing a beer and entertaining Sydney and Sebastien by letting them play naked with the water hose, Steve woke up from his nap and noticed there was no smoke coming from the smoker. Chaos ensued. Plans to pick up steak were made. The oven was heated.



The secret to understanding my husband is to know that once a problem enters his little WASP brain, he must, no matter how little or inconsequential or big and seemingly impossible, solve it. He paced around the burned-out lawn. The boys and I watched on as he moaned and groaned and went in the house and came out of the house. Finally he had the idea to test the electricity—and sure enough it was discovered there was nothing wrong with the smoker per se, but rather that I had shut off the power source. The switch was turned on, the power sparked up and the smoking continued. The delicious odor of the smoker filled the air—it smelled like one of those WPA lodges built in the depression, with four or five giant fireplaces going at the same time.

Meanwhile I searched for a table. We found something suitable that my father-in-law uses for a desk and set the table outside. We started smoking the ribs around noon, after they had sat in a dry rub of brown sugar, onion powder, garlic powder and chili powder over night. With power outages et al, they were ready to slice around 6:30.



Our guests were a couple we met at the hippy church where Steve’s dad is a pastor. Paolo is from Lucca, a tiny hill town in Tuscany. He met Jennifer, his wife, when she was teaching English in his village and, after six years in Italy and having two children Allesandro (1) and Jean Lucca (3), they decided to move out West to help Jennifer’s sister run a restaurant in Bingen called Solstice. We’ve met them two or three times and I just knew they’d be people I’d want to sit around the table with, so one day we stopped by their house and left an invite to come to our smoke out.

We greeted Paolo and Jennifer on the lawn with Prosecco, which I feel is the best thing to drink with Bar-B-Que. We set up the four boys with various cars and trucks and things that go while Steve and I made final dinner arrangements, slicing the ribs and putting everything on the table. Dinner was served!

Easy. There are some evenings that just flow. Jennifer and Paolo were gracious guests and they both ate heartily, which I especially appreciate in women. Paolo told us about his first marriage and child, about growing up in Italy. Jennifer and I analyzed cultural differences between Italians and Americans, particularly around domesticity. We compared notes on our lack of childproofing and willingness to drink wine while breastfeeding.



More wine and the conversation turned to writing. Like many mothers I know, Jennifer yearns for time to write, time for herself to be creative. She asked me how I do it. Unfortunately, I don’t have answers. I find it uncomfortable to be a writer and currently have no idea what I am doing. Steve is calling it my mid-life crisis. I’m just not sure how to handle the whole career thing, but mostly I am letting go of the whole fantasy of becoming a famous writer, where your career is handed to you on a silver…you know how the cliché goes.

Until I figure out the whole writing thing though, I’ll just keep cooking and having people over and talking and trying, in these extremely trying times, to be as decently human as I can be.



As the Northwest sky turned very black and I actually noticed stars, Paolo began singing Italian songs to the children. The boys each found a parent’s lap to sit on and the evening unfolded. I led everyone in “If I had a Hammer” and “I Had a Rooster.” The ended on a sweet note.

I was up until 4:30 this morning, buzzed out of my mind on Northwest coffee. The drive-thru latte shacks are dangerous to my sanity. Thankfully I had a good summer read—Marion Keye’s Is There Anybody Out There? to keep me company all night long.  I had checked it out from the local library and not just condemned myself to reading Ernest Hemmingway’s Complete Collection of Short Stories, which of course is incredible, but not exactly the kind of thing you want keeping you company while your mind is racing and you’re contemplating your career and questioning your goals and considering whether or not motherhood is perhaps reward enough and then you're thinking about whether or not you should spend the money to get a massage to undo the damage of a short bed with a-hundred year old mattress.  Hemmingway is definitely not the person to turn to at these sort of moments

Exhausted as I am today, I feel like it was such a treat to indulge like that—staying up all night to think about life, worry and read, cry a little, and dive into the drama of my own self indulgence. The consequences are small out here on the Gorge. We had no where to be the next day. Steve got the boys up and dressed, Christie, our babysitter we found at Steve’s Dad’s hippie church, came at 7:30 to mind the boys while I slept in and Steve went to our local café to get his writing done. At 10am, I drove the 3 blocks to Grounds, for the free wifi and more strong coffee (it’s a hopeless addiction). And in a not-so-strange coincidence—White Salmon where we stay out here is a small town and both the gay-loving/peace-making Christian church and the deer antler, 80’s rock playing, concrete-floored, local-wine/strong coffee café are within walking distance of our home-base––Christie, the babysitter works at the same café, so when she has to go to work, she drops our two boys off with us and starts her shift, and Steve and I, ostensibly end our writing days.

Food Update

I have invited the Italians, who moved here from Luca, one of those incredible hill towns in Tuscany, whom we met at the leftie church, along with their children Jean Luca (3) and Alessandro(1.5) to sample the American delicacy of smoked meat. Last summer, Steve and I made our own flower-pot smoker and besides a pork shoulder made just for the immediate family, we have not shown the Columbia River Gorge what we are really about.  As you can see from the images below, it’s a pretty simple contraption, our flower smoker is. Just a hot plate, a large flower pot and bottom, a meat thermometer and some wood chips.

This is the whole contraption...



Here's what it looks like when open. The grill is where you place the meat, underneath are the wood chips, and the hot plate slowly heats the chips so they smoke the meat.

On a beastly hot late summer day, there's nothing better for kids than ice and snow.

We've had a whole Arctic in August theme going the last two days, full of great frosty activities that appeal to the little artist, scientist, and construction engineer in every preschooler. Some advance prep was required, but nothing too time-consuming.

The sensory joys of these activities are their own reward. I've been feeling fairly homeschooly lately, so I prefaced some of these activities with a little lesson about the North Pole: where it is, why it's called a "pole," what conditions there are like, what animals live there. I'm sure there are good books out there that cover this material, but I just sat with my kids by my side and used Google Image Search to find some relevant photographs: a spinning globe, some icy Arctic landscapes, and sundry Arctic creatures.

My children suggested that if we were going to the North Pole, we needed to take the Polar Express, so before we even made it to the back yard, we got to assemble a long train with kitchen chairs and undergo an exciting and perilous journey.

First on our agenda was ice painting, an ideal hot-weather preschool pursuit. Freeze slightly watered-down tempera paints in an ice cube tray, balancing craft sticks in each space to serve as handles once frozen. (Don't worry, the handles don't need to stick straight up.) Give your kids some big sheets of paper to paint on, and turn them loose. The paints spread quite nicely once the melting really begins.

As another ice experiment, I froze diecast cars and plastic bugs inside big blocks of ice. (I used empty milk cartons: fill with about an inch of water, freeze, add toy plus more water, freeze, and repeat.) To get the toys back out, you can just let the summer sun do the work, or better yet, help your kids experiment with different ways of melting the ice. Mine especially enjoyed playing with warm water, a garden hose, and a big shaker of salt, and were excited about the different effects each method had on the ice block.

Later, once the children's hands were dry, I dumped five pounds of white flour into a big bin and let them play snow mountain with it, using little loaders and dump trucks to move the snow about. They clearly loved the soft, cool feeling of the flour and had a grand, messy time. A garden hose took care of the considerable spillage.

By the time all these activities were over, we had talked about everything from geography to chemistry to color theory. And we topped it all off, of course, with an icy treat: homemade juice popsicles.

Even the smallest child can make something of great beauty with this collage technique.

Cut a picture frame out of cardboard, sizing it so your child can comfortably carry it.

Turn it plain side down, and measure out enough clear contact paper to stick all around the frame. (Some people call it shelf paper instead -- you can find it in the housewares section of a big store.)

Peel off the backing, stick down the contact paper, turn it over, and voila! You have a sticky canvas for your child to decorate.

You could use this technique for any sort of collage, of course -- it needn't have a nature theme. But I love the experience of accompanying my kids as their take their little picture frames along on meadow walks or strolls the the woods. I find it helps them slow down and really look at the natural world around them.