5 posts tagged “vanity”
In less than a week, Team Snarkfox will be in glorious London, England, with all that entails (acute childhood nostalgia, oddly flavored crisps, gawking at things in Liberty, visits to cousins, buckets of tea, the Tate Modern, hemorrhaging money). We haven't been in almost six years, and I can hardly wait. I am filling the time until then with:
- desultory filling-out of forms that must be completed before my job status shifts over to something else, which it will do while we are out of town;
- largely failing to read the things I ought to be reading in preparation for next semester;
- sending occasional work-related emails so that people will be under the mistaken impression that I am getting something done;
- formulating schemes to run away and read novels on the lawn.
I have been feeling somewhat ancient and unaccomplished lately--or rather, naggingly aware of the fact that I should have gotten a good deal more sorted out by now, given the age that I am, and that I'm not going to suddenly get a few years back to get it righter. On the other hand, this state of affairs is hardly a surprising outcome of the habits outlined above, now is it? Also I note that my face appears to have mutated into that of a well-creased yet puffy monkey, which is not heartening. I had hoped to age gracefully, but it seems that unless it turns out that "comic and rubbery" is the height of grace, I am out of luck. Too bad.
But London! London will be extremely heartening, and indeed probably even replete with actual reading of novels on lawns. There are a lot of grassy squares that are eminently suitable for just that very thing. It will be restorative.
Speaking of novels, I keep reading The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West, over and over again. I read lots of books more than once, of course, but this is a different, more total and consuming, kind of rereading. There are a number of books that I read and have read this way, often coming to the end and flipping back to the beginning to start over again without standing up in between. Most of the books that fall into this category I read for the first time quite some time ago. The majority date from childhood, when it seems my whole life was consumed by an unbroken stream of reading, and whenever I happened by some circumstance to be forced to do something other than read, my mind was still awash in whatever books I had been reading just before.
The Fountain Overflows I read for the first time only six months ago and I believe I have read it at least six times since then. I wish I felt I had the skill to explain what makes it so entirely compelling to me.
It was written in 1956 but is set about fifty years earlier. The narrator, Rose Aubrey, is one of four children in a family that appears to be almost entirely unfit for the world in which it lives. Their father is brilliant, handsome, mercurial, a political genius, and constitutionally incapable of passing up an opportunity to lose money in the stock market or to bite a hand that feeds him. Their mother, once an accomplished concert pianist, is thin, anxious, nerve-jangled, shabby. To outsiders she seems hopelessly odd, but in fact she is clever and generous, capable of holding the family together and looking after a number of other characters in distress that cross their path.
Rose, her twin sister Mary, and their brother Richard Quin never doubt that where the Aubreys and the outside world diverge, it is infinitely better to be an Aubrey. The oldest child, Cordelia, is built differently. Their oddness and poverty agonize her. She is pretty; she plays the violin in a way that stupider adults think is impressive, though the musical Aubreys know better and are agonized in their turn:
...we would rather have been musical with Mamma than have red-gold curls and make utter fools of ourselves by playing the violin as Cordelia did. We were sorry for Cordelia, particularly now, when Papa, from whom she derived such interest as she possessed, had gone away for six weeks. But all the same she was an ass to think she could play the violin, it was as if Mary and I thought we had red-gold curls.
This gives you some idea of the quality of the writing. The discrepancies between the judgments of the non-Cordelia Aubreys and the judgments of most of the people they come into contact with (in all of which the book sides definitively with Rose) produce the emotional tensions and central drama of the book, though page to page it is filled with small events. Mainly it brilliantly captures what it is to be a child, (thus) relatively powerless, and possessed of very high standards. I love it.
Oh dear, what a ridiculously long post this turned out to be, and with so little holding it together. On the other hand, writing it cheered me up enormously. Since I'm pretty sure that only about three people are going to read it in any case, so be it. Maybe one of you will even read the book and tell me how much you loved it.
Oh right, I like to use Vox to talk about all my consumerist foolishness! I'd forgotten.
I'm feeling pleased at the moment with a shirt I just bought at Target. I was reading this post for the archives of A History of Architecture, where she pointed to several examples of chic people incorporating clothes from Target into their fashionable wardrobes. (Art History and History of Architecture certainly are at the apogee of academic stylishness, aren't they? Linguistics, I may tell you, certainly is not.) Since we were going to Target anyway to pick up such romantic items as sponges and kitty litter, I thought I would take a look at the clothes while I was there. That post was about a skirt that all these well-dressed types had identified as especially good, which I looked for particularly, but it was long gone, I think.
This shirt that I bought instead is very pleasing, however. It's from the Converse One Star line and doesn't appear to be available online. It has a surprising number of interesting and weird details. At first glance it is an ordinary cotton duck buttoned shirt. But then you see that it has inset panels of ribbed cotton jersey running up each side and down each sleeve. (This, incidentally, makes the fit extra nice.) The sleeves also have a button halfway down the upper arm that you can use, maybe, to pinion your rolled up cuffs into place, though I haven't figured out quite how. The One Star logo appears on a funny little piece of off-white, shinier fabric that's folded around the hem and sewn down so that it looks like a mysterious patch. White grosgrain ribbon runs up the button side edge of the shirt, underneath the buttons. The third button down is sewn on with black thread while the others are sewn on with white thread. There's a strip of ticking ribbon sewn inside the lower edge of the collar, so that it shows as the collar falls back (because you haven't buttoned up all the way to the very top Erkel button). In conclusion, it is packed full of odd little textural touches, and I think it also cost me $16. It is good on top of a black poplin dress with long gray socks and clumpy black shoes, not that you can really tell from this grainy and underlit photo:
I now own three variations of a single dress, made by Velvet (not of velvet; they're actually of lovely, comfortable, fine cotton jersey). This is a bit ridiculous of me, but I am very happy with them. I intend to more or less live in them all summer (except to work, because on me they are a bit too low cut for that). I like to imagine that the differences in color and neckline make their essential sameness a bit less obvious, though I also recognize that this is wishful thinking. But they are so nice-looking and also comfortable, I could not resist. I have a feeling they are also quite popular--probably when I am in New York I will discover that everyone owns one--since they keep selling out immediately at all the little online shops. Here they are, as usual not modeled by me, but just scooped up from various websites:
As usual, I will be spending my birthday away from home this year, as it falls during the aforementioned Krakòw conference. I can hardly wait for my exciting Polish birthday! F. says that she will be sure to fill my bed with sausages.
Last night we indulged in a bit of the classic conversation about what fun it will be when (soon, soon) we are old and gray and don't understand the new technology, and are vulnerable to all the hyperscams. How our children will groan and roll their eyes when we blithely nanojack the CrAzY Ice and our houses catch on fire, our bank accounts go mataglap, and our feet turn into giant tits.
On that topic, email just sent: "Please to enjoy my enormous satchel. It is not infected by virus. Fear not, system is safe from the transmogrifications of feet." But is it really? Only time will tell.
I really dislike what the thumbnail-making process has made of that picture of S. and me over in my sidebar display of recent photos. My chin is menacing me. Make it stop! I am going to have to upload a bunch of pictures of cute little mammals or something to shove it further down the queue, there.
Yesterday there was a guy wandering around on the first floor of our building, which is home to a cafe, asking people for some kind of help getting a prescription he needed after getting a bunch of stitches put in his hand over at the nearby hospital. I think he needed a ride to a pharmacy because he couldn't drive with his hand all fucked up, or something along those lines, though maybe I misunderstood, because then why not call a cab? He was offering to pay ten bucks for your trouble. I told him that I couldn't go anywhere because I was actually at work, and he said, "Please!" in a particularly heartbreaking way. I think it was extra affecting because it seemed so full of genuine frustration. I hope he got that shit worked out.
Meanwhile, the neighbor we lent a bit of money last week under kind of similar circumstances has not paid us back, not, I think, because the whole thing was a scam, but because she is sort of a fuckup, and would rather keep the cash. This is what S. predicted would happen, and lo, so it did.
While I'm on the topic of consumer goods, I would like to report that I seem to have found a product that prevents my hair from being a giant bushy mushroom of dorkitude. This is truly an age of wonders. The product in question is John Masters organic hair pomade (see also here and here). It seems to be made of olive oil, beeswax, mango butter, babussu oil, jojoba oil, wheat germ oil, vitamins A, C, and E, and essential oils of bay laurel, atlas cedar, massoia, and fir balsam -- so, mostly oil, oil, oil, and a side of oil. Yet it imparts only softness and de-puffing factor, nothing sticky or greasy or gross. It seems highly probable that it would be disasterous on hair with less... personality than mine, though.
