Yet another reason to love Joan Acocella is her review in this week's New Yorker savaging a psychobiography of Primo Levi:

As for his life, the position [author Carole Angier] takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She's O.K. We're O.K. Why wasn't he O.K.? Why did he have to work all the time? Why didn't he take more vacations? And how about getting laid once in a while? She records that as a teen-ager he mooned over various girls, but whenever he got near one he blushed and fell silent. "What was this?" Angier asks. "Can anyone ever say?" I can say. Has Angier never heard of geeks? They are born every day, and they grow up to do much of the world's intellectual and artistic work. One wonders, at times, why Angier chose Levi as a subject—she seems to find him so peculiar. And does she imagine that if he had been more "normal"—less reserved, less scrupulous—he would have written those books she so admires?

Also on the subject of the New Yorker, some of its writers are keeping separate archives of their work online, including Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Specter, Peter Maass, and Rebecca Mead (eternally to be known in these parts as Rebecca "You've Got Blog" Mead). Away from The New Yorker, Cathy Young has an archive of her newspaper columns, encased in a peculiar site that brings the neologism "self-stalker" unbidden to mind. I wish she'd leave the punditry aside and again write something as personal as Growing Up In Moscow.
. . . posted by Diana 6/20/2002 09:13:54 AM

Thursday, June 13, 2002

New faces #2: The other one (not to be confused with the other other one, or with me) visits the morgue. Yeah, start reading with that one. Despite the date, I think it was only just posted.
. . . posted by Diana 6/13/2002 10:13:19 AM

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

New faces #1: In addition to the links at left, there's about another 50 journals and logs that I follow but haven't linked to yet. One of them is mechaieh, who posted a most excellent (and concise) progression about writing and responsibility here, here, here, and here. Today she writes about dance class, eerily similar to my own experience last night in my first-ever jazz dance class (my words): If I hadn't just spent nine months learning to stand on one leg in ballet class, I would be unable to do any of this, and isn't it interesting watching new dance teachers react to my inability to tell left from right - an inability that you'd think would have some positive side effects in letting me accurately compute postpositions and read Hebrew, but I can't do those things either.

And don't forget to follow her link to French Street Calligraphy (top page here).
. . . posted by Diana 6/12/2002 05:15:57 AM

Monday, June 10, 2002

Continuing with the other-directed prompts:

For girls, at least, adolescence is a time when people let you know about all the new problems with your body, in case you might have missed them, while not necessarily licensing you to use the full range of available solutions to these problems. Eventually you license yourself to use them, and discover that in fact they are lousy solutions and why on earth haven't engineers come up with better ones? It's just astonishing to me that we can take pictures of Mars while still having developed nothing better than today's razors, tampons, birth control, and foundation garments. Priorities, people!

In the foreign students group, we used to have a Spanish girl who talked endlessly about leg and body waxing, which she did herself at home and had down to a fine art. She talked about it particularly in sauna and at barbecues afterwards, and while there was an element of come-on to the latter ("boys, my legs are so smooth...") and possibly also an element of trichotillimania, there was also a sincere wish to advertise an engineering solution that she felt should be more widely known. After nearly cutting my Achilles tendon for the 5,000th time, I decided to try her method. I got some wax and puzzled through the directions in Finnish and Swedish. One should remove the lid from the plastic container and immerse it in a pan of boiling water until the contents melted, taking care not to get any water into the container. Then one should take the wax into the bathroom and apply it to the legs with a wooden spatula (included), after which the muslin strips should be laid over it.

There was just one hole in the instructions: They did not tell you how long the strips should be left on in order to give the wax a chance to cool and stick before it was peeled off, taking the hair with it. My Spanish neighbor was not available for consultation because she'd already gone back to Spain. I decided 45 minutes should be good and settled down with a book. Of course I fell asleep and woke up the next morning with my legs still wrapped in bandages like a war victim, and the sheets slightly sticky from the wax around the edges.

Because the product was called "wax," I thought it would need to cool to room temperature (in place) to achieve stickiness, like candle wax. In fact, depilation wax is mostly sugar, and is therefore sticky at all temperatures and stickier when warm. You can rip each strip off immediately, and use it again on the next bit. Being an overeducated literalist, I had to go to the Web to figure this out, when I could have just read the ingredients or observed how the stuff acted. Benjamin Whorf would have loved me (see also here for the exact example I had in mind - search for his name). And don't get me started on my history with ski wax.
. . . posted by Diana 6/10/2002 06:04:16 AM

Friday, June 07, 2002

Google has put the entire alt.society.generation-x archives online. The level of discourse there was the highest I have ever seen or probably ever will see on the Internet - the most politically aware, the most intricately cross referenced, the funniest. It is unfortunate that there's no way to go back to the beginning and read forward, since I'm referring of course to the early years before the bullies and spammers took over. But if you were there back in the day, you'll know which threads and writers to look for. My history of newsgroup addiction from 1985 to the present should really be filed under bad habits.

Also, I believe comments should be working now, thanks to YACCS and to Prol for noting that they were taking new users again. This means you can, for instance, try to guess who said what in the entry for two days ago. Among other parlor games.
. . . posted by Diana 6/7/2002 02:14:36 AM

Thursday, June 06, 2002

Francis blogged Swedish Flag Day, which is also the 750th anniversary of Stockholm this year. I wonder why it is that anniversaries pile up like that? My data is full of town anniversaries, some from before the Revolutionary War, that happen to fall on July 4.
. . . posted by Diana 6/6/2002 06:09:32 AM

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

One of the forums had a longstanding thread, "Describe Yourself in Quotes," which I never contributed to because I thought it ought to consist of things said by actual people about the forum members, rather than (as it did) high school yearbook lyrics plucked out of Bartlett's. In the spirit of today's journal prompt by two popular journalers, here are five things people have said about me, or to me about me - neither the highest praise nor the most damaging criticism, but in-between descriptions that might have the ring of truth:

"Nobody really knew her. She just kind of scurried around a lot."

"You are, like, the most intense person in this whole school. You always have this look on your face like, I have something very important to say, and I'm going to say it, RIGHT NOW."

"K---- told me you were a good teacher, but not very social."

"There are a lot of pretentious people at this conference, but I don't think you're one of them."

"Diana is super mysterious and has a left brain-right brain toggle which I envy."

I might add that at the moment I'm not being a very good teacher; I owe half a dozen students comments on their proseminar papers and that's what I'm going to go back to doing, RIGHT NOW.
. . . posted by Diana 6/5/2002 06:40:37 AM

Monday, June 03, 2002

Today's Ilta-Sanomat headline: "Henna-Riikka fought for her life in the bear's claws: 'It kept coming back.'" Apparently this girl was out walking her dog along a highway somewhere in the Karelia and looked back to see she was pursued by a bear. Eventually "I was lying on my back kicking the bear in the stomach and every time I got a good hit it would pull a bit further away, but it kept coming back." The dog ran away. We never got those kinds of stories in the Boston Herald.

Also, remember when I complained that all the Survivor shows were set in the tropics and none on glaciers? There's one in Finland now - in the temperate season, but it's a start. They have a genuine shaman dressed up in moose horns and furs at their bonfire.
. . . posted by Diana 6/3/2002 04:08:36 AM

January 2002, February 2002, March 2002
October 2001, November 2001, December 2001
July 2001, August 2001, September 2001
April 2001, May 2001, June 2001
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
October 2000, November 2000, December 2000
July 2000, August 2000, September 2000
May 2000, June 2000