Official Sponsor of Summer ‘08

Almost speaking of Asia and sponsors—this reminds me! OLYMPICS.

Gotta remember to eat and shower in a timely fashion.

Must stop reading only Jezebel. But thankful to Jezebel for linking to this: Jewish Dolls for Jewish Girls

Two nights ago, after reading this, I started melting marshmallows with my butane torch and eating them with pieces of Belgian dark chocolate (from Westside Market, where it was curiously kept next to the cheese).

Satisfying dessert cravings has never been as innovative or pathetic.

We moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio when I was about to enter 2nd grade. I spent that first year at Maple Dale Elementary. The next year, we moved across the street to a different townhouse complex and managed to cross a township line. Same school district, different elementary school. I found myself at Symmes Elementary. Right down the road from the elementary school was the local library. Whenever my parents would pick me up from school (usually from my various short-lived extracurricular stints: Girl Scouts, the basketball team), a stop at the library was inevitable.

The Symmes Library, part of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, was a circular, neo-classical building. It never quite managed to be imposing and mostly looked weirdly out of place amidst the suburban lawns surrounding it. Come to think of it, it was sort of like Butler Library. The same Greek greats inscribed along the exterior. Unlike Butler, however, it was not open 24 hours a day and did not destroy the souls of many.

I still have a map in my mind of the children’s section—the corner in the very back was where I found The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Standing there, at my left was a shelf containing Wren to the Rescue. To the right, all the Zilpha Keatley Snyder I could ever hope to find.

I realize now that my childhood taste in books was largely determined by my predilection for nooks and other comfortable spaces for small people. I must have spent a good six months reading only authors whose last names began with S.

I’m not entirely sure how I branched out to G, but at some point, I must have, because I happened upon Top Secret, a book by John Reynolds Gardiner. Admittedly, it was a little bit below my reading level, but saved by the fact that it was awesome.

And I mean that. How can you go wrong with a book about human photosynthesis? A young boy wants to study it for a science project. His teacher ridicules him and assigns him a new project: lipstick. Thoroughly disgruntled, he decides to pursue photosynthesis anyway. The kid starts turning green and craving sunshine, his parents don’t believe him, the Feds get involved.

It’s everything a kid’s book ought to be: funny, fast-paced, secretly educational.

I wonder, though—why do we feel such a need to hide from children the fact that we’re teaching them something?

My father always complains about what he calls the apologetic way in which science is taught in American public schools. He says it prevents kids from finding joy in science for itself. He thought science fairs were generally silly and found most of our “science projects” useless. Still, he did enjoy taking over those projects whenever I would ask him for a little help. Once, I asked him to help me print out a forest background for a shoe-box diorama about dinosaurs. Soon enough, he was doing all the work. Collecting pine needles and twigs, cutting out the pictures he printed from the internet—I was lucky if I could get my hands on a glue-stick. It did, however, turn out way cooler looking than the one pictured below.

For a long time, I argued with Papa about his opinion of American education. I had to. How else could I justify bothering to do any of the work? As I grew older, I started to see his point. Shoe-box dioramas are great for elementary school kids, but when I reached 8th grade biology and was still making dichotomous keys (of wacky creatures, mind you) or coloring in pictures of mitochondria, I started to wonder why I spent so much of my time in science classes making things look pretty.

High school started the next year. Earth Science with Mr. Vorwald. He really did try to make us find some kind of joy in science (and even wrote a book! a lab manual, really), but the fact that we learned applied sciences before pure sciences once again seemed like a kind of apology. We studied star spectra and learned about the doppler effect at a time when we knew next to nothing about optics. The wave theory of light? Did we talk about that in 7th grade physics—all I could really remember was F = ma.

The New York State Regents curriculum suggested that students had to be convinced that there was some kind of purpose to physics or chemistry before they could start learning it. Of course, most of us didn’t see any purpose in interpreting star spectra anyway. It wouldn’t have anything to do with our lives unless we became astronomers and who did that anymore? Or thought about it at the age of 14?

This brings me to an op-ed by Brian Greene, linked by Lucy Tang, but also mentioned to me by my mother (not my father, you’ll notice). Greene’s point is different from my father’s. He doesn’t accuse American science curricula of being apologetic, but rather, he finds it dated. He argues that it bears no connection to our everyday lives, which are rife with all kinds of technology of which most of us have little understanding.

He also speaks of science as an art, writing that, as with literature or music, “a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.” He’s right, or at least inspirational. He makes me want to embrace science in the way I embrace music or words.

Greene goes on to critique the “firm belief in the vertical nature of science”—the notion that science education must follow a step-wise template. And here’s where I’m not so sure I agree with him. It’s all very well to shoot for the wow-factor of quantum physics or the fact that physicists are currently recreating the conditions of the big bang, but isn’t there a wow-factor to the simplest of science that we constantly fail to convey?

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty amazing that Newton invented calculus (well, mostly) in order to fully understand motion. I think there’s something really wondrous about how Mendeleev predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered—the periodic table itself still kind of floors me. Can the universe really be that beautifully ordered? OK, maybe not.

So my grand proposal for science education? Teach it like history. Teach it when we’re young. Make the great discoveries seem and sound as great as they really were. Don’t undercut the beauty of science by reducing it to looking up “dinosaurs” in Google image search. I can (and do) do that on my own time.

Once we’ve reached middle school and treat everything with disdain, accept that we won’t be impressed by Mendeleev or Newton. But know that any 7th grader can handle a lot more than F = ma. If we’re learning algebra and reading “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (even if it is a terribly edited abridged version), we can take on optics and circuits and magnetism. And don’t try to impress us by lighting a light bulb with a potato—I am never going to light a light bulb with a potato. Impress us by taking apart a socket or a toaster (or an iPod) and showing us how everything works, in everyday life.

Then, just maybe, I won’t ask, “When are we ever going to use this stuff?”

New York in June

new york in june
the kind I never knew
the weighted air
so still out there
I can’t believe it

new york in june
taxi cabs are sighing
with fitful breaths
their tired vents
emit frustration

and the subway cannot bear
the staleness of the air
the night grows heavy
the streetlights, they glisten
and we try hard to sleep
through our

new york in june
this kind we never knew
the starless skies
ablaze with signs
we can’t believe it
we cannot leave it

and the air conditioner’s out
hanging useless from the window
the ceiling fan’s slow
the fridge starts to rumble
and we try hard to sleep
through this

new york in june
the kind you always knew
the heaving crowds
a sea of sound
can you believe it?
why won’t you leave it?

Books I’ve Read Since Spring Semester ‘08 Came to Its Unpropitious Close:

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

• Location: Coach Bus, Spain (Madrid, Toledo, Granada)
• Dates: May 24 - May 28
• Comments: I should have read this when I was about 15, but as it was, I read it now. Summer before my last year of college and I’m more disillusioned with academia than Waugh’s interwar Oxfordians. Sadly, the miniseries is not available on Netflix online, or I would be spending the next week in a Jeremy Irons-induced stupor.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

• Location: Coach Bus + hotel room, Spain + Portugal (Seville, Lisbon)
• Dates: May 29 - 30
• Comments: Even I can’t believe I’d never read this before. Epic. Heart-wrenching. American. Plus, Elia Kazan’s version is available to watch instantly on Netflix. James Dean-induced stupor expected soon.

Chip Kidd, The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters

• Location: Tiny room in Schapiro (Columbia University)
• Dates: June 7
• Comments: Good is Dead. Also, graphic design is cool.

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

• Location: Subway cars, tiny room in Schapiro, etc. (New York City)
• Dates: Presently reading
• Comments: I am never writing a song about love again, unless it involves a boy monster falling in love with Hercules. And, may I also say, adjectives! They’re del.icio.us.

Around 2 pm, I was playing his version of “Pretty Woman” on Across 110th Street, the Saturday soul show. The phone rang. I picked it up, said “Hello, WKCR?” The caller paused and then said, “Hi, this is Al Green. What’s your name?”

He wanted to know what album I was playing. I told him “Your anthology.”

Seriously.

I think I actually told him “I love you.” He said, “You’re playing some good music. Good bye.”

The series is a kind of amalgam of Wind in the Willows and the Knights of the Round Table. Think Watership Down meets Ivanhoe.

Central to the books is Redwall Abbey, essentially a rodent monastery. Here, the noblest of mice would find respite, a haven from the savagery of the world around them. They would read illuminated manuscripts, meditate, and most importantly, eat. Feasts at Redwall were epic. Scones of acorn flour served with sweet meadowcream, rich raspberry tarts, dandelion wine—these mice lived the life.

He sat with Rose between her parents, speechless at the sight of the abundant tables. Flowers trailed everywhere, from the rafters, walls, windows and table edges. Roses, lilies, vines and blossoms festooned the whole place, twining around the urns of strawberry cordial, dandelion and burdock cup, mint and lavender water, chestnut ale, blackcurrant wine and cider. Platters and trays were heaped high with salads, cheeses, breads and pasties whose contents he could only guess at. Babies and little ones seated on their parents’ laps gazed longingly at the array of trifles, flans, puddings, pies and tartlets, each with its honey-covered contents peeking through mounds of cream.

That’s a passage from Martin the Warrior, one of my favorites. Almost painful to read, I know.

I was always particularly enamored of the blackcurrant wine, since blackcurrants, as most of the world knows, are the most delicious berries in existence. Raspberries are a close second. Strawberries are always dependable. But blackcurrants—they’re something else.

Blackcurrants are a species of ribes berry. Most berries are in the family Rosaceae, which as the name suggests, also includes roses. Blackcurrants, along with red currants and gooseberries, used to belong to the Saxifragaceae family (which includes hydrangeas) until the 1980s, when taxonomists decided they deserved their own family, Grossulariaceae.

Anyway, all of that isn’t as important or as interesting as blackcurrants themselves and all their tasty potential. Anyone in England or the vast majority of the European continent and the former British colonies is well aware of just how delicious these berries are. You’ll find blackcurrant jam, candies, and yes, wine. There’s also Ribena, a syrupy, blackcurrant concentrate, which is diluted with water or soda. There are some haters, don’t trust them. Personally, I was always a fan of blackcurrant-flavored Fruitella, a chewable candy similar to Starburst. I still insist that my parents stock up on these in the duty-free when flying back from India.

So why are blackcurrants largely unknown in America? Why are blackcurrant preserves absent from American grocery stores and yet found in the Swedish food market at IKEA? Short-answer: the lumber industry.

A few years into the 20th century, American farmers and foresters found that their white pine trees were suffering from “blister rust”, a kind of parasitic fungus believed to be carried by blackcurrants and gooseberries. In 1911, a meeting of New York State officials and representatives of forestry interests determined that the best solution was to ban blackcurrants. Gooseberries and red currants received a more lenient sentence: they just had to be kept at a good distance from white pines.

Other states followed suit and so it went until March 3rd, 2003. On that historic day, Governor Pataki ushered in a new era of New York State agriculture, or a return to its glorious ribes-rich past. Bill Number S2592 lifted the ban, and five years later, we have this: Currant C, a blackcurrant juice beverage produced just a little ways upstate in Hudson Valley.

With the popularity of hip beverages like Pom and Kombucha, I’m hoping Currant C will soon be widely available, delicious and over-priced. And I’ll be stocking up on blackcurrant jam at the next farmer’s market—or heading to the new IKEA in Brooklyn.

We (my family, all four of us) are making our way through Southern Spain and Portugal via Trafalgar Tours. I’m the youngest one here. Everyone else in our group appears to be retired or Australian, except for a group of American women in their late 20s who work in investment banks based in London.

Right now, my father is asleep, my mother is drinking coffee, and my brother is in the other room, either smoking cigarettes or watching Spanish television. I’m here, eating chocolate-covered peanuts, feeling a little buzzed from the sangria we got at our welcome reception.

This afternoon, we went to El Museo del Prado. I got to see this painting and a really comprehensive Goya exhibition. Art Hum came back to me, vaguely.

This country is not so hospitable to vegetarians. I may have to make some exceptions. And I’m all out of chocolate-covered peanuts.

In Memoriam A.G.