the signs are prodigious

Today is Miss Jamie's birthday, so let's all say together, Happy Birthday Jamie! Ahem.

Now that we've finished with that, I must apologize for being so long absent from this URL for so long. I shall simply skip the excuses and distract you with these lovely images of autumn here in Bronxville:


I think this little guy liked the sound of my camera shutter...I was lucky enough to get a nice half-hour break in the rain to obtain these! This week is probably to be the doomed last of these colours, but it is a very lively one at Sarah Lawrence--this weekend is Halloween, which may be the best loved and most fervently celebrated of all holidays here, as well as Fall Formal and parents' weekend (we all know that they assign this weekend as family weekend on purpose, in some vain attempt to cut down on partying). I will be enjoying myself on Halloween with my housemates here, but this Friday, I have more important plans than a school dance: the Mister and I have tickets to see the wonderful Cloud Cult live in Brooklyn. Their September album, Light Chasers, is one of my favourites of the year, and presented me with a much-needed burst of autumn optimism earlier in the semester.

I won't go too far into what about this album was so important for me, but I think it has to do with the end of a long spiritual search for the songwriter and the literal birth of new chance for he and his wife. His and the band's story can be found at length on Wikipedia, and it's compelling enough to warrant a read even if you aren't a fan. Something tells me that Light Chasers will be the last Cloud Cult album, maybe for a while, maybe forever, but I think it's a fitting end to a story that is both heartbreaking and deeply triumphant. I am looking forward to a good, hard, empathetic cry at this concert.

In other news, I have been holing myself up here, gearing up for the second half of this semester. I'm two-thirds of the way through Spenser's The Faerie Queene for conference work in Bill Shullenberger's class, and studying Symbolism at length for (get this) an eight-page paper written entirely in French! I must admit that this is a wholly masochistic mission on my part, and one that continually challenges me when I receive potions of it returned to me positively splattered in red pen. But I'm learning... slowly but surely.

I have also been cooking. Intensely. So much cooking. Some of my sweetheart's and my most successful experiments have been: sweet-potato-and-edamame pancakes with baked apples; acorn squash stuffed with grains, hazelnuts, and figs; eggplant, chard, tomato and rice casserole; butternut squash with butter and sugar (for desert!); leeks vinaigrette, which has quickly turned into "any steamed vegetable vinaigrette"; Perfect Miso Soup; and lots of homemade bread. Unfortunately, and this may be very cruel on my part, I haven't any recipes. The two of us have decided it's useless to write down recipes that we come up with--we never end up following them, and we often like to make things just once. But rest assure that they were all delicious, even if completely unreproducible.

I will be home for Thanksgiving weekend, which (hopefully) means that I will make something somewhat like these for my family and maybe have recipes! FOr now, though, I am off to read more George Herbert and teach my housemate Gabe to make bread... Pictures later, and certainly after this weekend!

A Post-Holiday Bagel

I apologize for my absence from the blogosphere this holiday season, but I admit that being home keeps me busier than I'd bargained for. Last night, I returned from Quincy via the Sacramento airport to give M. Benjamin his big send-off to Manhattan. Today he begins his move into his room on Lexington Avenue, in a building managed by SVA, where he will be living for the rest of the semester. Oh, how immensely excited I am to be living a mere half-hour away from him! After living--at the shortest distance--four hours apart for nearly two years, it is a welcome relief to know that we can just eat dinner together. Not to mention that I am thrilled for him to begin his études at art school. He's been waiting for this for a long time, and it's been such a wonderful journey to attend with him.

Christmas here in the central valley fluctuated nearly daily between sleepy and hectic--a quiet Christmas day, followed by a successfully high-energy Yule party (an annual tradition amongst my friends here in California, with potluck-style baked goods, much dancing to pop music we would otherwise not be caught dead listening to, and a bonfire in the backyard), and then a trip north for a happy little dinner-and-wine walkabout in Meadow Valley to ring in the new year.

Today, with my Peach busily unpacking his bags on the other coast, I shall begin the task of making mittens for him and myself out of a giant thrifted men's sweater which shall look eons better as mittens than as a sweater. It's a great modified-stripes pattern in light grey, cerulean blue, mossy green, plum, and dark brownish-orange. Perhaps my first tutorial if they come out alright?

Also, I am reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, a favourite of Jamie's after she read it for a Lit class this semester. We've assessed that Dorian Gray : Jamie as Lolita : me (can't believe I just pulled that middle-school analogy format out of my head). These are two of our favourite books, respectively with characters we feel ultimately drawn to despite their obvious, unforgivable character flaws. I recommend them both if you want some intense poetic tragedy. Not to mention the clothing descriptions in both will simply knock your socks off. Lolita may be the source of my passions for petticoats, hair ribbons, and red lipstick (not to mention saddle oxfords...).

Well, much to do today, but many wishes to all for a fond recovery from the holidays. :) Pictures of Christmas goodies later on if the light gets better later on today, perhaps.

L'Automne Vive!

Today was the most beautiful autumn day that I have just about ever seen. It was brilliantly sunny and clear, around 65-70 degrees all day--just perfect for a light cardigan--and the colours were all freshened and brightened up from yesterday's rains. I enjoyed some lounging about on the North Lawn, reading The Poetics of Natural History, and feasting on a sack lunch of first-crop California almonds (thank you, Grandpapa and Grandmama!), figs, radishes, clementines, ginger-lemon cookies, and a petite peanut-butter-and-strawberry-peach-jam sandwich. I sipped oolong from the TeaHaus (don't you just love it when you can pay for something entirely in coins? It makes me feel one part starving artist and one part Regency maiden...) and reclined at a pic-nic table to enjoy my reading. I've finished the first essay, on father-and-son naturalist duo John and William Bartram, who lived in the Eastern US during the later half of the eighteenth century. I daresay this book is a fantastic read, and turning out to be a perfect source for my Photography conference paper on scientific illustration and photography.

Anyhow, I must say I indulged myself once again with the foliage through my lens, so here are a few more photographs--





Here's the leftover compost of my lunch:

Overall, a lovely afternoon.

Jamie and I went to see Bright Star at the Bronxville Clearview Cinemas last night. It was an indulgently beautiful film, one which entranced me from the opening close-up of a needle and thread weaving carefully in and out of a sheet of fabric. Bring hankies, ladies (and gentlemen). It's lovely, but tragic...

2009 Saw Mill River Parkway BIOBLITZ

On this past Saturday, I journeyed with several other resident "nature nerds" here at college to the campus of Pace University, in Pleasantville, New York, just outside of Sleepy Hollow (I know, right?!) for an interesting nation-wide event known as the BioBlitz. Held locally at the Saw Mill River Parkway, it was a two-day event in which many local scientists, naturalists, and ambitious students arranged in teams sought to identify and report as many species as possible within the area. They focused mainly on animals, plants and fungi, and I volunteered for the tedious, but rewardingly fascinating job of data entry; I took the lists from the various teams and entered the lists of species, locations, and scientific names into a computer database. It was long, but after much counting, categorizing, and re-assigning, we came up with a conservative estimate of at least 636 species in that little area! Go Hudson River Valley! It was wonderful to be on the job of data entry, if only to be able to familiarize myself with the still-unfamiliar wildlife in this beautiful area.

Perhaps out of this recent interest pique, I've begun reading a collection of essays called The Poetics of Natural History, a birthday gift from the best friend, which is blowing my mind with its beauty and thoughtfulness. Thanks, my dearest and loveliest lady friend, wherever and whenever you may be reading this!

'Pataphysics and Georges Méliès

I've finished reading an incredible children's book called The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick which, strangely enough, has ended up a few connecting ends in my studies of late.

The book (link to the book's website: http://www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/index.htm. Be sure to check out all of the neat links to all sorts of cool, weird stuff, like automatons and optical illusions) was an invented story about the intertwining lives of fictional Hugo Cabret, horologist, and real-life filmmaker, Georges Méliès. I looked up the films he's done (embedded below) and found out that he's considered 'pataphysical in his techniques and philosophy. 'Pataphysics, in turn, is a pseudoscience developed in the turn of the century by writer and philosopher Alfred Jarry (of Ubu Roi fame) which, consequentially, Michael Benjamin happens to be reading about right now and has only recently come into my realm of knowledge and definitions. Strange, very strange, indeed.

Anyhow, here are some Georges Méliès films. Unfortunately, the first one is in French, but I think it is also rather self-explanatory. A group of scientists take the first trip to the moon. Méliès was an innovator in the field of special effects--you can see why!

Mon Français Est Déjà Rouillé.

I have returned from Quincy having finished two very lovely books: The Bell Jar, written by the infamous Sylvia Plath, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is a by Jonathon Safran Foer. Both of the novels were beautiful and sad (my favourite sort of book since my literary taste was informed by Walk Two Moons) and it was nice to revisit an old favourite like Plath's work. Both recommended, to be sure.

I've tried to practice my French today (much to my mother's dismay, as she cannot understand a word I'm saying) but I'm afraid that I've already lost much of my vocabulary and several verb tenses. Perhaps I should subscribe to a French blog to keep up...

Amina and I have begun our running! We are two days in, and very thankful we've not run into anyone we know along our jogging path. Tomorrow, I'll take pictures of the two of us in our ridiculous athletic ensembles--we're only a few pockets away from wearing fanny packs.