Hermenautic Circle blog

Van (approx. 4" across)

His name was Paul and I met him at band camp. Well, choir camp. He may have been disturbed, but I always had a thing for the hard to get guys. We finally spoke on the last day of camp and decided to exchange addresses. Yes. Actual, physical, addresses.

We wrote letters for weeks before he asked me to be his girlfriend. I was thirteen and thrilled, he was 16 and tormented. But I didn't care. It was so romantic. I even kept all of his letters.

Finally my parents agreed to drive me out to see him. FINALLY And we went to the natural history museum. My ridiculous attempt at a cover for what I was sure was coming. And so, under cover of the planetarium, he kissed me.

I felt right and wrong at the same time. I had never been kissed, much less french kissed before. This, of course, was shortly followed by a clumsy attempt to feel me up that left me feeling dirty for hours...

In the end, it wasn't meant to be. The kiss was over and the magic was gone. I never saw him again.

Waupaca, Wis. (AP) — A man who was upset with his wife for not buying beer took vengeance by shooting one of the family’s two pet goats, prosecutors say.

Peter W. Mischler, 48, was charged this week in Circuit Court with mistreatment of animals, possession of a firearm while intoxicated and disorderly conduct with a dangerous weapon.

The complaint said Mischler came home Saturday from hunting and became angry with his 22-year-old daughter for letting the goats out and making a mess. While she was talking on the phone to her mother, authorities said, he told her to tell his wife to bring home some beer, but his wife refused.

He then threatened to shoot the goats, according to the complaint.

After his wife arrived home, she and the daughter heard four gunshots and went outside and found one of the two goats with its entrails hanging out, authorities said. They said that goat had to be killed later by a sheriff’s deputy.

Mischler posted a $1,000 cash bond set by Circuit Judge Raymond Huber and was released.

A hearing was scheduled for Dec. 4.

jay: part of me hopes that really bad things happen to this guy right now, but the rest of me thinks that his life is already an incredibly slow painful grind into some form of hell anyway, and i wouldn’t want anything to hasten his descent.

R. Walker posted a photo:

GAUHATI, India (AP) — In a Nov. 13 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paris Hilton was praised by conservationists for highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, said she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India.

jay: i’m with you, paris. the man helps you when you help yourself. take that, drunken elephants.

Locavore.

Oxford announced its Word of the Year today, plus the list of runners-up (which included, in alphabetical order: aging in place, bacn, cloudware, colony collapse disorder, cougar, MRAP vehicle, mumblecore, social graph, tase (or taze), previvor, and upcycling).

It's always fun to be involved in picking the word of the year, although after two years of researching, arguing, persuading, and negotiating (not to mention the concentrated application of some world-class Google-fu) to promote my candidates for Oxford's WOTY (2005: podcast, 2006: carbon neutral), it was a relief to let Ben Zimmer take over the heavy lifting ... and it means I can do a little second-guessing and show you some of the words on my list that didn't make it to the short list. Call them the runners-up to the runners-up, a sort of semi-honorable mention.

There weren't many, but the ones too good to let get away include:

brick: to cause an electronic device to become permanently nonfunctional (this word got a lot of play when people's cracked iPhones were bricked by the firmware update)

hypermiler: someone who uses various driving strategies to maximize fuel efficiency

griefer: someone who deliberately promotes discord, especially in online environments

jatropha: a plant whose nuts can be used to produce biodiesel


unconference: a conference where the agenda or schedule is set by the attendees

There you have it ... if you're hungry for more Word-of-the-Year (or as we call it, WOTY) action, there's always the American Dialect WOTY vote in early January. (This year it's in Chicago!)

Sam Jordison has written up his long interview with me about The Red Men. It lives here http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/off-piste-reading-an-interview-with-matthew-de-abaitua/ See what you think. Let ...

A Few First Kisses



A courtyard kid's game of catch and kiss,
and I slowed down.
Caught by my neighbor,
we entered my stairwell
and pressed our mouths,
as if they were elbows or knees.
Afterwards, the other children laughed:
never intending
consummation of the competition.

Us kids crowd round the twirling bottle,
yet too young for postures.
Parents upstairs, little we cared,
and atop the tables were brown bowls
filled with brittle pretzels.
She was the first whirl: comical girl from Japan.
All sweat and odd knots,
our tongues felt foreign between each other's teeth.
We held hands for the evening,
despite our newborn itch.

She lay in my lap
as I sat on the curb.
The block was lined with kegs, grills,
young boys and girls,
we were all drunk on stale beer.
I sunk my neck to reach her.
Our inverted mouths met.
My heart and belly held warm wax
as our lips flickered like amber flame
about a twisted wick.
Once done she thanked me for her first
and I learned thirst.
One day we'd kiss in a torrent,
and like a Pavlov dog
I no longer mind the rain.

She spoke of Plato and Socrates
as she sipped her vodka & lime.
I offered to walk her home
but instead she led me to a bench
where the woods commence
of northern New York.
Her face was fixed with the perfect kissable mouth.

We woke in bed beside one another,
beneath the heated sheets of an august morning.
She slept and I pressed against her.
She woke with reciprocity.
We knew it was wrong
and it ended in departure.

Another returned.
We kissed knelt before my wooden porch door.
Neither of us knew what it entailed,
and perhaps never will.

I read her Joyce from my pillow
in the pre-dawn black of my bedroom,
all at her request.
Alongside my recital,
she found my kisses to be O so dirty.

At the tail-end of the party,
last one of the year,
we met and danced
and met once more.
She had a caramel complexion
and loved that I could keep tempo
between her rotund hips.
The last thing we exchanged was numbers,
and I never called her.

Lips, lips, and tender tongues.
Kiss & tell, everyone.

My friend Mimi Pond recently had one of her cartoons appear in animated form on Slate TV. I've been a huge fan of her work for many years and it was such a treat to see it animated. Plus, anybody who's been in a bad relationship (I guess that's probably all of us at one time or another) should be able to relate.

Boom Box (clear ripple)






TV (clear ripple with blue screen)



Log (frosty clear, green leaf)





Log (root beer and amber, green leaf)

This was a commission for a displaced London guy. (Approx. 17" X 9")

To make ends meet, I moonlight as a beauty writer for a British perfumery. While in the office one day for a meeting, one of the art directors noticed a copy of Rachael Ray’s Everyday in my bag.
"What!" She cried. "Whose magazine is that?!?!" with a look of horror on her face.

Now, granted, this young woman is thirty, single and more prone to standing at a bar downing shots than over a hot stove. Still, I had a moment of hesitation and embarrassment. Because I live in Manhattan I delude myself that I am somehow immune to the truth of my life: I rarely leave my apartment save to pick up the kids from preschool in the East Village, grocery shop or go to Pilates. This hot young thing led me to once again face reality: I am not the hipster I was ten years ago.

Clearly, Sydney, age four, Sebastien, who is two and a half, and I are the only ones of our social set who admittedly love the queen of cute, Rachael Ray. But I must stand by my woman––I love her recipes—they are fast, flavorful and healthy. When you cook seven nights a week and eat lunch and breakfast at home almost everyday, you need ideas to get you by. Compared to the almost pornographic Giada and the somewhat dunderheaded Emeril and the rotund Mario, Ray is a calm, solid force. Yes, I know she has dumb sayings (EVOO anyone?), but I can forgive her these. Alton Brown is equally quirky—and also helpful—but no one goes on and on about how annoying he is. Plus it is the ONLY show my kids will watch with me and her recipes always delight everyone in the family. The funny thing is, I cook her dishes for my refined food-and-travel-world friends (the very ones who look at me with sympathy when I mention I love her: “the poor girl has gone not only domestic but dumb as well”) and they LOVE the meals I make.

The other thing is, as a graduate of the prestigious Food Studies program at NYU, I should know better. Our graduate program used cultural studies texts like Consuming Geographies by Bell and Valentine and French theorist Jean Baudrillard, not to mention Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser. Even in the food and pop culture class, Ray was never discussed. She was indeed almost unmentionable.

Paradoxically, it is because I studied food from a sociological, historical and cultural perspective, enough to make me a certified foodie, that I can embrace the appeal of Ray, who manages to marry the joys of the culinary without the pretentiousness of high-end of food culture. Ultimately, what you discover when you look at the worlds around refined food, is that what you eat tells stories about who you are. In New York, where, how and what we eat helps defines our status. People mention restaurant openings and reservation lists like some might mention a Hermes bag.

How does a recipe from Thomas Keller define a person differently than one from Ray? The Keller recipe takes two days, expensive ingredients and may or may not have been properly tested. Not so Ray’s recipe. She thinks about real working women’s lives and how to make them easier so that they can enjoy food.

But maybe the truth is: I just like her, in all her silliness and what-not, the woman hits something in me that feels wholesome and bright and good. Now this might make me dumb, delusional, and square, but at least I am well-fed.

Slate defends Ray.

I wasn't so much sweet sixteen and never been kissed as self-doubting sixteen and never fathoming a boy actually noticing me and wanting to kiss me. I spent most of my teens in fantasy, watching Molly Ringwald movies and imaging I too could be swept up by the cool guy and never have to worry about feeling ostracized again.

At high school in Toronto, I played in the concert band. Part of the program was to exchange bands with an American high school. The night the band from Evanston, Illinois arrived we all waited in the school gym to greet them, and that's when I saw Him. He was the most beautiful boy I'd ever seen. And he was popular; he was enveloped by friends laughing and joking; he didn't seem to notice he was in a foreign country surrounded by strangers. I thought I saw him look at me, but I knew I was mistaken.

They began calling out names. At "Mark Holland" he stood up. Instantly I thought of my options. Naomi Holland or Naomi Major-Holland. I thought he smiled at me, but I knew I was mistaken.

I wasn't mistaken. He did look at me. He did smile at me. And then during the four days of the exchange he talked to me. And then on the last night of the exchange he kissed me. We were at a party "slow dancing." Which in teenage terms means wrapping your arms around your partner and turning in a circle at a glacial pace. The kiss was perfect, even better than Molly Ringwald being kissed by Michael Schoeffling at the end of Sixteen Candles. It wasn't just that he wanted to kiss me, it's that he kissed me in front of EVERYONE! Everyone could see that I was worth kissing.

It turns out Mark Holland had a girlfriend back in Evanston. By which I wasn't just crushed, I was doomed: I spent years attracted to unattainable men who lived in far away places (but that's another story). Regardless of all that, when asked about my first kiss, I always smile, sigh wistfully and say "Mark Holland, from Evanston, Illinois."

While I woke up this morning slightly bleary, our Halloween party was, on the whole a a ruckus success. There was chaos, and more chaos, intense feasting on candy, pink champagne, a pint-size dance party to New Order's Blue Monday and trick or treating through the bacchanalian halls of our 30-story building. And most of the party had cleared out by 7:30, leaving us to catch up with our good friends who stayed on for another glass of red wine and a bath for the wee ones. I even cleaned the oven before I went to bed.

There were no goodie bags, no chicken fingers and no organized activities. I figure there is so much about our kid's lives that are kid-ized and bastardized to fit a rather narrow--and dare I say commercial--viewpoint that children must always be ENTERTAINED or worse, EDUTAINED. Our parties cater towards parents having a good time, engaged in community, not just standing around awkardly watching our children in some lame activity.

Next time, however, I will make a concession. Being the smug bastard that I am, I'll remind you, dear readers, that my children eat a wide variety of food, mostly because I only make one meal each night for the family, which they can either eat or go hungry. So they eat sushi, noodle soups, kale, pork roast, pad thai, whatever is not spicy or strangely made of potatoes or squash (go figure). But at a party with extreme mayhem, even my kids need easy finger food so they will actually eat something. My brilliant, "let's be healthy!" idea to serve beans and rice and whole wheat tortillas on plates for the kids, wasn't the greatest. The kids did end up crazier than perhaps warranted.