Alberto Gonzalez Resigns
"Alberto Gonzales is the first Attorney General who thought the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth were three different things. The President should nominate a new Attorney General whose loyalty to the Constitution is greater than his loyalty to the Republican Party." -- Rahm Emanuel
Alberto Gonzalez Resigns Read More »
Blakey Likes to Point a Moral at Times
Blakey likes to point a moral at times and that evening in the hotel -- our last in Santa Fe -- she outdoes herself. As I maunder on about the day, my mother and the odd vagaries of taste, she delivers an irresistible challenge: name ten female artists of the 20th century who are better than O’Keeffe and I will clean up all the dog and cat poo in the backyard for ever. I start off confidently enough: Agnes M. (natch), Popova, Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse, umm . . . Living artists aren’t permitted, or photographers, so, gosh, Louise Bourgeois and Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott and Kiki Smith and Cecily Brown and Marlene Dumas and Ida Applebroog and scores of others get knocked out at a stroke. (Nicole Eisenman – please know I worship you!) Marie Laurencin seems far too feeble to mention; so too, I’m afraid, does Vanessa Bell. Gwen John? Not exactly a she-titan of the brush. Elaine de Kooning? The canonisation of wives has never seemed to me an effective feminist strategy. Dame Laura Knight? I love her, but does anyone else? Joan Mitchell? Marvellous but . . . uhhh . . . I peter out at Number Seven or Eight in a welter of anguish and indecision. If only Kandinsky or Andy Warhol had been a woman.
-- Terry Castle, "Travels with My Mom," London Review of Books 29, 16 (August 16, 2007).
Blakey Likes to Point a Moral at Times Read More »
Food for Travel
When planning long travels far from shops, there is a selection of basic foods which can be taken along, all long-keeping and light in weight. They should be packed individually in brown paper bags, not in plastic, and then finally in a waterproof rucksack.
All of the flaked cereals, oats, barley, corn, etc.; toasted wheat flour (ready to eat, merely to be mixed with milk or water; grated raw carrot, sterilized by roasting, and packed into jars; dried fruits, especially raisins, dates, apricots, and prunes; (also the dried dom fruits, from the dom tree or Christ-thorn, a small berry-fruit which is almost always on the dom trees, and which keep indefinitely after easy drying. It is carried by the Bedouins on their travels, and was used as a travel food by Christ. A shrub-tree, it is abundant in Galilee.); shelled nuts and pine kernels; sunflower kernels; black olives (dried); a jar of honey; wholewheat biscuits, or sundried or fire-rusked slices of wholewheat bread; dried powdered spices as flavor and tonic for use with the cereals, etc., such as marjoram, thyme, sage, rosemary; raw groundnuts (peanuts) and also raw peanuts ground into flour; carob pods; and of the dairy products, dried milk -- dried milk in cones (sold in Arab shops for travelers) keeps indefinitely, and when crushed into water makes a good milk mixture for eating with the flaked or powdered cereals; also hard cheese and Balearic type cheese . . . salt and cayenne pepper and the common peppers.
--Juliette de Bairacli Levy, Traveler's Joy: A Personal Guide to the Wonders and Pleasures of Gypsy and Nomad Living (New Canaan, CT: Keats Publishing, Inc., 1979), 158-59.