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ernie bufflo and the wizarding world of harry potter

In case you doubt my Harry Potter love, this was my Halloween costume a few years ago.

Did you miss me? The blog has been rather neglected for a while because I went on vacation with my family to Walt Disney World.  While we were there, Jon and I took a day to visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Islands of Adventure, something we’ve looked forward to since the day we heard there would BE a Harry Potter theme park.  I figured y’all might like a review of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

To preface, I should say that I’m something of a Disney World loyalist.  This trip marked my 14th visit to Walt Disney World, and if you figure that each vacation was 5 days in the parks, I have spent 70 days in Walt Disney World.  I know Disney like the back of my hand. Map? I don’t need no stinkin’ map!  I’ve also visited Universal Islands of Adventure once before this trip.  And I have to say: I wish Disney had done the Harry Potter park.

Why? Well, while Universal undoubtedly has bigger, better rollercoasters and thrill rides, and more of them, Disney does better at creating a cohesive world.  From the minute you pay your parking fee and the attendant says “Have a Magical day!” Disney is themeing every tiny detail of your experience.  Everywhere you look is a piece of a greater theme.  And you never see chipping paint or dusty animatronics because Disney has an entire fleet of maintenance people painting and touching up each and every single day.  Contrast that to the sad, faded, chipping paint in the Dr. Seuss portion of Islands of Adventure: there was scum in the water of the fish on the Cat in the Hat ride, which also featured a very dusty cast of robots!  Disney is also exceedingly efficient.  There are people making sure the right number of people get on the correct seats of the rides so the lines move smoothly.  Meanwhile, on the Dragon Challenge ride at TWWOHP, it was a free-for-all of seat choosing, which led to clogged lines and confusion.

Also: at Disney, you can take your bag or stuffed animal or magic wand on every single ride with you.  Even the ones that go upside down like the Rock’n’rollercoaster.  At Universal, before you ride anything, you have to stash your stuff in a nearby locker, which, though they are free, ads a whole new layer of pushing, shoving, and waiting in line to the experience.  In addition, Disney’s FastPass system is more democratic.  At Disney, you simply show up at an attraction, swipe your ticket, and get a FastPass which tells you to return at a certain time to enter a special line that is invariably much shorter than the main line.  At Universal, you just pay twice as much for your ticket and you can stand in the faster lines all the time, all day, unlimited.  I have to say, though, those who go through the Single Rider or FastPass (whatever Universal calls it) lines at TWWOHP are missing out, as some of the best parts of the park are actually along the main line.  Perhaps my biggest tip: stand in the main line for Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, which is the ride inside of Hogwarts, even if it’s an hour long, because otherwise you’ll be missing out on some majorly cool stuff.

Hogwarts was captured perfectly.

This guy looked just like a Weasley, and he was actually British. Instead of sticking him in Three Broomsticks, TWWOHP should have him working in Zonko's, doing magic tricks and actually "being" a Weasley.

Finally, Disney doesn’t call their employees “cast members” for nothing.  Every single person who works there knows he or she is literally playing the role of a citizen of a magical world, and they act the part.  From the deeply creepy folks who are found to work the Haunted Mansion to the 1920s “movie stars” roaming the streets of Hollywood Studios (aka MGM Studios), every single person you encounter is in character.  At TWWOHP, there are a few folks playing actual characters, be they Ollivander, or the conductor of the Hogwarts Express, but I wished the employee had had an answer when I asked him if the Sorting Hat had determined which house colors each TWWOHP employee was wearing, instead of looking at me like he had no idea what “sorting” was.  I also wished there had been some actual witches and wizards roaming around the Three Broomsticks or bumping into us on the streets of Diagon Alley/Hogsmeade.  (On that note: TWWOHP takes things from Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade and smooshes them together into one place they call Hogsmeade, which is not entirely accurate to the books.)

That said: TWWOHP is extremely well done, despite my view that Disney could have done it better.  As we approached the gate of Hogsmeade, Jon and I were jumpy with excitement like two kids on Christmas morning.  And everything just looks right.  I knew it would, I really did.  I mean, they got the movies right, without disappointing the passionate fans of the book series, so they had already proven they could do it.  They did not let us down.

Hogsmeade/Diagon Alley looks like it should and features all the shops you’d expect, including Honeydukes, Zonko’s, Three Broomsticks, The Leaky Cauldron, and Ollivander’s.  There will be a line outside of Ollivander’s.  It’s worth standing in.  What’s it for? It’s to get inside the shop and see a little show where one lucky kid is chosen to have his/her wand selected by Ollivander himself.  Sorry folks, you probably won’t be that lucky kid.  BUT, it’s extremely well done, and the kid who was chosen when we were in the shop was so excited that it was adorable to watch.  Everyone else has to select his or her own wand in a very tiny and crowded store.  Still: I GOT A  WAND! Hermione’s wand, to be exact, because she and I are practically the same person.

Also inside Ollivander’s/The Owl Post, you can purchase postcards and Owl Post stamps, and have them postmarked and “delivered by Owl Post” (which apparently operates in cooperation with the US Postal Service) to your friends, which is pretty fun.

The first attraction when you walk in TWWOHP is the Dragon Challenge.  This ride was actually at Universal before TWWOHP and was called Dueling Dragons, as it’s a two-track coaster which has both tracks running at the same time, so it sometimes looks like you might actually touch the other car on the other track.  They worked it into TWWOHP themeing by making it the Dragon Challenge from the Triwizard Tournament.  Aside from having to stow my stuff in a locker and some confusion that could have been remedied by having employees ask how many were in each party and sorting them into rows, it’s an awesome, intense coaster and a lot of fun.  It does go upside down and through corkscrews. I loved it.

Goblet of Fire

The main attraction, located inside of Hogwarts, is Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey.  It’s part virtual reality, part animatronics simulation, and if you are prone to getting dizzy, take your Dramamine– you’ll need it.  It’s a really well-done ride, and, as I mentioned before, make sure to go through the whole line or you’ll miss out on some real favorites from the world of Hogwarts.  (We first rode the ride by going through as single riders, and later rode together, going through the main line.  We were astonished at all we’d have missed out on if we hadn’t gone through the main line.)

There’s also a sort of kiddie coaster called The Flight of the Hippogriff, and you get to see Hagrid’s House in line for that attraction.

Another major aspect of Hogsmeade is obviously the Butterbeer.  I was worried it would be disgusting, actually buttery or sickeningly sweet in the hot hot heat of Orlando.  It was better than I imagined. It was delicious– I had the frozen version on a cast member’s recommendation.  They have carts selling it in the streets, but you’d be better off to go have lunch at Three Broomsticks and sip your Butterbeer with your meal inside the air conditioning.  Three Broomsticks also had great food, including a Great Feast which feeds 4 for $50 and is a great deal in theme park food, along with other British classics like shepherd’s pie, cornish pasties, and roast chicken served with rosemary roasted potatoes.  They also have actual Hogs Head beer, in case the teeming masses in the park make you yearn for something with more of a kick than a sugar high from a Butterbeer.

Inside the Three Broomsticks

Ultimately, I had an awesome day at TWWOHP. I got to enter a world I know and love through books and films, and it lived up to my high expectations as a fan and a reader.  Still, as a Disney fan, I have even higher expectations of my theme park experience, and I know it could have been better.  Despite that, I know any of my Harry Potter fan friends will absolutely love the park, and I can’t wait for some of them to go so we can geek out about it together.

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scenes from a long weekend

Thursday: A bit of an unfamiliar coolness in the air as we, clad in the nicest clothes we’ve worn in weeks, stroll hand in hand through a trendy neighborhood in the midst of it’s monthly neighborhood street fest.  We pause to listen to a live band soundchecking on a porch, smile at babies in strollers, and laugh at large, fluffy white puppy dogs.  We sit across from each other at a candle-lit table, eating fancy food subsidized with a Groupon, drinking pinot gris, and having the best talk we’ve had in weeks.  We come home, change out of our fancy clothes into our pjs, and sit on the couch, sipping whiskey and continuing our great conversation, until, full on food and booze and life, we fall happily asleep.

Friday: Meet up with an old friend and a new one for a drink and end up on a lovely patio in the cool night air, Christmas lights strung in the trees.  We regale the new friend with old college stories, and I realize that some friendships will always just pick right back up where they left off.  Just a tiny reminder of why I’m glad to be home. The night ends with all of us yelling cuss words and chasing my dog Olive down the street after she escapes past the new friend at the front door. A real bonding experience.

Saturday: Forced to read Lolita for a class, I decide that perhaps the glorious weather and our front porch swing will make the novel less nausea-inducing.  As I read, a gorgeous calico cat comes meow-ing up to me and hops right into my lap.  As I pet her and she purrs and I turn pages in the novel I so desperately wish I could stop reading, we observe the neighbors.  He: bearded and manly attempts to fix the flat tire of the family van. She: stands beside, nervously “helping,” cell phone in hand, seemingly ready to call in a professional.  A small boy brandishing a large stick chases a chicken across two front yards while his tiny sister zooms across the yard, dressed as Batman, cape flying behind her.  Eventually my new kitty friend decides she’d rather go play with Batman and heads across the street, while I take my icky pedophile novel inside.

Sunday: We gather in a backyard with a crowd of all our new favorite people from Eikon Church for a cookout.  Grass fed beef burgers cook alongside vegan black bean patties.  The smoke of some folks’ hand-rolled cigarettes hangs in the air.  Children are everywhere, falling down the stairs, pretending to be the ice cream man, ramping off curbs on tricycles.  We sit in the grass and talk for hours as the night grows cooler and dark.

Monday: We meet up with some Eikon Church friends, our vintage bikes in tow, at the Big Dam Bridge (thank you Little Rock for that lovely name) for the longest bike ride I’ve ever attempted along the River Trail.  We weave from civilization to nature and back again, emerging from thick forests pierced by shafts of golden evening light to see the same beams radiating from the shining gilded top of the state capitol building.  At one point we pause to watch a mother doe and her two fawns tiptoe through the trees.  Later, a cotton-tailed rabbit scampers across our path.  The boys speed away from me, and I pedal on, slow and steady like.  They double back and catch up with me, before zooming off again. I don’t mind. I enjoy the quiet of the trail, so close to the city and yet so remote all at the same time.  I smile at every person I pass.

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master list

Remember when everyone you know was posting on Facebook about how many books they’d read from some BBC list? The gist was that they thought that the BBC had said that the average person had only read 6 out of the 100 books, so if you had read more than 6, you could feel smug and superior– I know I did.  The truth is, that list was really just a list culled from people’s votes for the best-loved novel, not some sort of required reading list.

A newly minted English Lit grad student, I am now in possession of a list of things I have to read and master (in addition to everything I read for my actual coursework) in order to get a Master’s Degree.  Much like my pediatrician hubby taking his boards this October, English Lit students have to take a big exam at the end of their schooling called “Comps.”  Basically, you read and study and obsess over a list of literary works, and then they give you a bunch of ID questions (sample: name the work and author this line comes from: “The world is too much with us, late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”) and you write 3 1.5 hour essays, and then, if you pass, you get a Master’s Degree.  It’s terrifying.

Anyway, I figure a list of works considered necessary for any Master to master is more of a definitive reading list than any ole BBC top 100 popularly-voted list, and thought I’d share my comps list here.  For one, you can check your literacy and see how many you’ve read. For two, you can join me in my shock and awe at the breadth of the list, and possibly even my disappointment that they only managed to come up with ONE twentieth century British woman writer.  For three: Do you happen to own any of these works? Can you help me save some bucks and let me borrow them? Pretty please? I promise not to write in them or abuse them in any way. I just need to read and study them over the next two years or so.  And fourth: I’m going to use this to cross off ones I’ve read, using it as a little checklist as a I go.

So, here you have it, the stuff a bunch of Ph.D’s have decided I must know in order to be a Master of English Lit (some items are not novels but are poems or short stories by the same author):

Medieval:

  1. Beowulf
  2. Wanderer
  3. Battle of Maldon
  4. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: “Account of the Poet Caedmon” and “The Conversion of King Edwin.”
  5. The Dream of the Rood
  6. Lyrics: “Western Wind,” “Summer Is Icumen In,” and “Adam Lay Ybounden”
  7. Ballads: “Edward, Edward,” “Sir Patrick Spens,” “Lord Randall”
  8. Langland Piers Plowman (Passus 18)
  9. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  10. Chaucer: (to be read in Middle English) General Prologue, The Miller’s Prologue and Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Words of the Host to the Physician and Pardoner, Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale (all from The Canterbury Tales); Troilus and Criseyde
  11. Chaucer: Lyrics: “Truth” (“Balade of Bon Conseyl”) and “Complaint to His Purse”
  12. Julian of Norwich: A Book of Showings, from Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 27, 58-61, 86 (Norton Anthology selections)
  13. Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe, from Chapters 1, 2, 11, 18, 28, 52, 76 (Norton Anthology Selections)
  14. The Second Shepherds’ Play
  15. Everyman
  16. Malory: Morte Darthur, Caxton Books XX, XXI

Renaissance and Seventeenth Century

  1. John Skelton: “The Tunning of Elinour Rumming,” “Phillip Sparrow”
  2. Thomas Wyatt: “Whoso list to hunt,” “They flee from me,” “My lute, awake!,” “Mine own John Poins”
  3. Thomas More: Utopia
  4. Sir Philip Sidney: Astrophil and Stella (Sonnets 1, 2, 5, 6, 15, 21, 31, 39, 41, 45, 49, 52, 53, 71, 74, 81)
  5. Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene (“Letter to Raleigh” and Book I), Amoretti (Sonnets 1, 34, 37, 67, 68, 75, 79), Epithalamion
  6. Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus
  7. William Shakespeare: Sonnets 3, 18, 20, 29, 30, 55, 60, 71, 73, 94, 116, 129, 130, 138, 144, 146
  8. William Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, A Midsummernight’s Dream, Henry IV, Twelfth Night, The Tempest
  9. Mary Wroth: Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Sonnets 1, 16, 39, 40, 68, 77, 103)
  10. John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
  11. Ben Johnson: Volpone, “Song: To Celia,” “To the Memory of Shakespeare,” “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” “To Penshurst,” “To Heaven,” “Ode to Cary and Morison”
  12. John Donne: “The Good Morrow,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Indifferent,” “The Canonization,” “The Flea,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “The Ecstasy,” “Elegy 19,” “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward,” Holy Sonnets 5, 7, 10, 14, Meditation 17
  13. Robert Herrick: “Delight in Disorder,” “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” “To the Virgins,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
  14. George Herbert: “Easter Wings,” “Prayer (1),” “Jordan (1),” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” “Love (3)”
  15. Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress,” “The Garden,” Upon Appleton House
  16. Francis Bacon: Essays (“Of Truth,” “Of Great Place,” “Of Superstition,” “Of Studies”)
  17. Sir Thomas Browne: Religio Medici
  18. John Milton: Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Areopagiticia, “Lycidas,” “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso”

Restoration and 18th Century

  1. John Dryden: Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, An Essay of Dramatic Poetry
  2. William Congreve: The Way of the World
  3. Alexander Pope: Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
  4. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: “The Lover: A Ballad”
  5. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” “A Modest Proposal”
  6. John Gay: The Beggar’s Opera
  7. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
  8. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
  9. Thomas Gray: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
  10. William Collins: “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “Ode to Evening”
  11. Oliver Goldsmith: The Deserted Village
  12. Samuel Johnson: Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes, “Pope” and “Milton” from Lives of the Poets
  13. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (Hibbert’s Abridged Edition)
  14. Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
  15. Robert Burns: “Address to the Deil,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “Tam O’Shanter”

19th Century

  1. William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
  2. William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Elegiac Stanzas,” Michael, The Prelude I-II, Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
  3. S. T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, “Kubla Khan,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “Dejection: An Ode”
  4. Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, III-IV, Manfred, Don Juan I-IV
  5. Sir Walter Scott: Waverley
  6. P. B. Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “To a Sky-Lark,” Adonais, “Mont Blanc”
  7. John Keates: Odes: “Nightingale,” “Grecian Urn,” “Melancholy,” Sonnets: “Chapman’s Homer,” “Bright Star,” “When I Have Fears,” The Eve of St. Agnes, “To Autumn”
  8. William Hazlitt: “On Gusto,” “My First Acquaintance with Poets”
  9. Charles Lamb: “Old China,” “Dream Children”
  10. Thomas De Quincey: “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth“
  11. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
  12. Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
  13. Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus
  14. Lord Tennyson: “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Lotos-Eaters,” “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Locksley Hall,” In Memoriam
  15. Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “The Bishop Orders His Tomb,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” “Abt Vogler”
  16. E. B. Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese (21, 22, 32, 43), Aurora Leigh Books 1, 2, 5
  17. John Ruskin: “The Roots of Honor” from Unto This Last, “The Nature of Gothic” from The Stones of Venice
  18. Matthew Arnold: “Memorial Verses,” “The Scholar Gypsy,” “Dover Beach,” “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” “The Study of Poetry”
  19. A.C. Swinburne: “Hymn to Proserpine,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” “The Triumph of Time”
  20. Christina Rossetti: “Goblin Market”
  21. G.M. Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Spring and Fall,” “Carrion Comfort,” “No Worst, There Is None,” “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, Not Day,” “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”
  22. Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  23. Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
  24. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
  25. Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
  26. George Eliot: Middlemarch
  27. Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers
  28. W.M. Thackeray: Vanity Fair
  29. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

20th Century

  1. Thomas Hardy: “Hap,” “The Darkling Thrush,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “Neutral Tones,” “Channel Firing”
  2. W. B. Yeats: “The Stolen Child,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Adam’s Curse,” “September Byzantium,” “Leda and the Swan,” “Among School Children,” “Byzantium,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Long-Legged Fly,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Under Ben Bulben”
  3. Wilfred Owen: “Dulce et DEcorum Est,” “Strange Meeting,” “Disabled”
  4. D.H. Lawrence: “Piano,” “Snake,” “Bavarian Gentians,” “The Ship of Death,” Women in Love
  5. W. H. Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts,” “Lullaby,” “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” “In Praise of Limestone,” “The Shield of Achilles”
  6. Dylan Thomas: “The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower,” “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” “A Refusal to Mourn…,” “Fern Hill”
  7. Philip Larkin: “Church Going,” “High Windows”
  8. Seamus Heaney: “Digging,” “Punishment,” “The Strand at Lough Beg”
  9. G. B. Shaw: Arms and the Man
  10. Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
  11. J.M. Synge: The Playboy of the Western World
  12. James Joyce: “Araby,” “The Dead,” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  13. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
  14. Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
  15. E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
  16. Harold Pinter: The Homecoming
  17. Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
  18. Derek Walcott: “As John to Patmos,” “A Far Cry from Africa,” “Ruins of a Great House,” “North and South”
  19. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
  20. Salman Rushdie: Satanic Verses

American Literature Prior to 1860

  1. American Indian Myths and Tales: Pima story of the creation and flood; Winnebago trickster cycle (Norton Anthology selections)
  2. William Bradford: Of Plymouth Plantation
  3. John Winthrop: “A Model of Christian Charity”
  4. Mary Rowlandson: Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
  5. Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” “On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet”
  6. Edward Taylor: selections from the Preparatory Meditations, including “Prologue,” First Series–22, Second Series–26
  7. Jonathan Edwards: “Personal Narrative,” “A Divine and Supernatural Light,” “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
  8. Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography Books I and II
  9. Phillis Wheatley: “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” “To His Excellency General Washington”
  10. St. Jean de Crevecoeur: “What is an American?”
  11. Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”
  12. James Fenimore Cooper: The Pioneers
  13. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address”
  14. Henry David Thoreau: Walden, “Civil Disobedience”
  15. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “The Minister’s Black Veil”
  16. Edgar Allan Poe: “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “Israfel”
  17. Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
  18. Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Chapters 1, 7, 10, 14, 21, 41
  19. Herman Melville: Moby Dick, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “The House-Top,” “The Maldive Shark,” Billy Budd
  20. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “My Lost Youth,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Fire of Driftwood,” “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport”
  21. Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The Wound Dresser”

American 1860-Present

  1. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  2. Emily Dickinson: poems numbered 67, 125, 130, 214, 258, 280, 303, 328, 341, 435, 448, 449, 465, 632, 657, 712, 754, 986, 1071, 1129, 1732
  3. Henry James: Portrait of a Lady, “Daisy Miller,” “The Beast in the Jungle”
  4. Sarah Orne Jewett: “A White Heron,” “The Foreigner”
  5. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: “A New England Nun,” “The Revolt of Mother”
  6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “The Yellow Walpaper”
  7. Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery, Chapters I, XIV
  8. W. E. B. Dubois: The Souls of Black Folk, Chapters I, III
  9. Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage, “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” “The Bride comes to Yellow Sky”
  10. Kate Chopin: The Awakening
  11. Edith Wharton: The Age of Innocence
  12. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
  13. Willa Cather: “Neighbour Rosicky”
  14. Robert Frost: “After Apple-Picking,” “Home Burial,” “Birches,” “Design,” “Desert Places,” “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
  15. T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
  16. Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro,” “To Whistler, American,” “A Pact,” “Portrait d’une Femme,” “The River-Merchant’s Wife,” Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
  17. William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This is Just to Say,” “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “The Dance,” “Tract,” “The Yachts,” “To Elsie”
  18. Wallace Stevens: “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Snow Man,” “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Of Modern Poetry”
  19. Langston Hughes: “Theme for English B,” “Epilogue (I, too, sing America),” “Harlem”
  20. Hart Crane: The Bridge
  21. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
  22. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
  23. William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, “A Rose for Emily,” “Barn Burning,” “The Old People”
  24. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes were Watching God
  25. Eugene O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night
  26. Eudora Welty: “A Worn Path,” “Petrified Man”
  27. Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire
  28. Flannery O’Connor: “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Good Country People,” “Revelation,” “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” “Parker’s Back”
  29. Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
  30. Robert Lowell: “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket,” “Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead”
  31. Allen Ginsberg: “Howl”
  32. Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
  33. Elizabeth Bishop: “The Fish,” “Questions of Travel,” “The Armadillo,” “In the Waiting Room,” “Crusoe in England”
  34. Richard Wright: Native Son
  35. James Baldwin: “Sonny’s Blues”
  36. Toni Morrison: Beloved
  37. Joyce Carol Oates: “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been”
  38. John Updike: “A & P”
  39. Philip ROth: “The Conversion of the Jews,” “Defender of the Faith”
  40. Sylvia Plath: “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”
  41. N. Scott Momaday: The Way to Rainy Mountain
  42. Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony
  43. Louise Erdich: “Fleur”
  44. Don DeLillo: White Noise

So. There you have it. Over 160 things I have to read and know well in order to get an MA. This is why I have to quit my book club.

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a preacher, a prisoner, and the desires of the heart

Prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen.

After last Saturday’s rally (sidenote: go check out my friend Ryan’s take on the rally and see some video), I’ve spent a lot of time this week reading about the West Memphis 3, particularly Damien Echols’s letters.  Damien compares himself to a monk a few times, and in a way I can totally see it– his letters are full of spiritual wisdom and contemplation, and he spends a lot of time in meditation.  Of course, he’s also completely different than a monk, because they freely choose their seclusion from the world, and Damien has been locked away for 17 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.  Still, his writing is beautiful and I encourage you to check out his letters if you’re interested in the case.

Something that completely struck me by surprise were the positive mentions of Joel Osteen.  I spent a summer working in the Family Christian Bookstore, and during that time, I familiarized myself with the works of Joel Osteen because I wanted to know what I was talking about with customers.  My basic impression was that Osteen is in the vein of the “prosperity gospel,” and the general gist is that God wants to give you “the desires of your heart,” usually interpreted to be material goods and wealth and power.  This theology hinges upon Psalm 37:4, which says “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”

Osteen, in my mind, is in the same camp as Joyce Meyer, who I read quoted in TIME magazine as saying:

“Who would want to get in on something where you’re miserable, poor, broke and ugly and you just have to muddle through until you get to heaven? I believe God wants to give us nice things.”

Really? I seem to recall something about a rich man and a camel, and the eye of a needle…

From the same TIME piece:

[Osteen] and [his wife] Victoria meet with TIME in their pastoral suite, once the Houston Rockets’ locker and shower area but now a zone of overstuffed sofas and imposing oak bookcases. “Does God want us to be rich?” he asks. “When I hear that word rich, I think people say, ‘Well, he’s preaching that everybody’s going to be a millionaire.’ I don’t think that’s it.” Rather, he explains, “I preach that anybody can improve their lives. I think God wants us to be prosperous. I think he wants us to be happy. To me, you need to have money to pay your bills. I think God wants us to send our kids to college. I think he wants us to be a blessing to other people. But I don’t think I’d say God wants us to be rich. It’s all relative, isn’t it?” The room’s warm lamplight reflects softly off his crocodile shoes.

It always seemed to me that folks like Osteen and Meyer get it backwards, saying that what you want, God will give you, if you just have enough faith, no matter what it is that you want.  I fail to see what a call to take up our cross and follow Jesus has to do with being “happy.”  To me, the point of the Psalm is that when you delight yourself in God, you begin to want Godly things as you are transformed into a Godly person, and then God will happily grant your Godly requests.

And yet, here is Damien Echols’s take on Joel Osteen:

I’m a huge fan of a minister named Joel Olsteen. I think he’s a genius–not a genius of the mind, but a genius of the spirit. I listened to a speech he gave about not being critical, about letting God fight your battles instead of striking out at those who try to hurt you. As I listened to it I could feel everything inside me saying he’s right. I’m trying to look at this situation and see it as the Divine sees it instead of the way an angry man sees it. I’m trying really hard to be thankful for what the pain has taught me, instead of being bitter about the pain itself. Sometimes it’s hard, though. Right now I’m working on trust–trust that one day I’ll be thankful even for the vampires in my life. –February 18, 2010

When I got up this morning I wasn’t feeling all that well. It was more emotional than physical, but I felt tired and worn down. Then I turned on the television just in time to catch Joel Osteen’s latest message. I can’t even describe what a huge difference it made in my day. He was talking about what he called the “trial of faith” ~ the time between when you ask for something and when you receive it. It was all about not getting discouraged when it feels like nothing is happening, because the Divine Mind is still at work behind the scenes even if you can’t see it. It felt like he was speaking directly to me, and I was hearing with my heart. I went from a state of feeling beaten down, to a state of joyous excitement. I fully realize that televangelists are a big turn off for many people, but this guy is different. I’m about as far from being a fundamentalist as you can get, yet Osteen has never said anything I’ve been remotely offended by. In fact, I always come away from hearing him with a little more strength than I had before. If you set aside preconceived notions and really listen, you can hear pure magick in his words. Or at least I do. –March 15, 2010

It seems to me that Echols hears Osteen’s message in a completely different way than I read it in his books in the Family Christian Bookstore, and I guess it’s because the desire of his heart is pure, a desire for freedom from the injustice of his imprisonment, rather than the typical American desire for wealth and material things. And you know, I truly believe that God wants to grant Echols the desires of his heart, to give him his freedom.

And I guess this is where I have to admit: my husband was right, and I was wrong.  When we drive past billboards that essentially say “TURN OR BURN!” I tend to go on a rant, wishing those billboards weren’t there, thinking they tend to do more harm than good, and that a relationship with God based on fear of punishment is far less desirable than one based on love and gratitude.  Jon, however, usually tells me that if even one person’s life is changed by that billboard, then it’s worth it.  I guess I have to concede the same point about Osteen.  If, seen through the eyes of someone with a pure, godly desire, his message can be one of hope and freedom to a man like Damien Echols, wrongly in prison, well then, I’m glad he’s out there preaching it.

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do fun stuff

Pacing the Panic Room is one of my favorite places in all of the internets. Ryan Marshall takes amazing photos and makes gorgeous videos set to lovely music tells incredibly honest stories about life with his wife Cole and kids, Tessa and LB. LB has a rare genetic disorder called Smith Magenis Syndrome, and Ryan has rounded up a bunch of awesome artists to help raise awareness about SMS and funds for case studies to help parents and families who are dealing with SMS. These artists have created Do Fun Stuff (Vol. 1) (If you click that you can preview the album and read more about it. I really wanted to put the widget at that link onto my site, but WordPress doesn’t allow iframes, boo hiss), which is a kid’s music CD guaranteed not to suck or make you want to stab your eardrums out with a rusty nail. I don’t have kids, and as such, I’m not forced to listen to crappy kid music on a regular basis. I don’t have to buy kid’s music if I don’t want to. But this album is good stuff, and I don’t hate it. In fact, I like it. A lot. I have a feeling you’ll kinda like it too. So, buy it on iTunes, jam out with your kids or your dogs or your own bad self. Help some kids and their families. Do Fun Stuff.

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voices for justice

All I had was a crappy BlackBerry camera, so you'll have to take my word for it that this is Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp.

Last night I went to some of the best church I’ve ever experienced. Except it was in a Music Hall with 2500 other people and led by a handful of famous people.  I was at a rally/rockshow in support of the West Memphis 3.

The West Memphis 3 are Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelly, and Jason Baldwin, a group of young men arrested and convicted as teenagers for the murder of three children in West Memphis, AR.  Many people, including myself, believe the West Memphis 3 are innocent and wrongly imprisoned.  One of them, Damien Echols, is on death row.  I encourage you to read about their case and decide for yourself. It blows my mind that we can have people on death row on such shaky evidence.  There is no DNA evidence tying any of the Three to the crime scene, although DNA evidence of one of the victims’ stepfather was found at the scene.   Instead, the case relied on what was a most-likely coerced and later recanted confession from one of the Three, Jessie Misskelly, who is mentally handicapped and, though he was a teenager, was questioned without a lawyer or a parent present.  In addition, the way the investigation was handled, the way the story was told to the public and the media, and notes recovered from the jurors all point to the fact that these three men are wrongly imprisoned and have been for 17 years.

In those 17 years, the Three have found support for their cause all over the state and all over the world.  Thanks to a pair of HBO documentaries, they even gained the support of some major celebrities: Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and Johnny Depp.  With Damien Echols’ oral arguments before the State Supreme Court coming up on September 30, their local and celebrity supporters decided it was time to hold a rally to both raise money for the WM3 legal defense fund and to get active in contacting state leaders in support of new trials for the WM3.  That led to last night’s Voices for Justice rally.

Of course a rally featuring Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Natalie Maines, Patti Smith, Ben Harper, Dhanni Harrison, Joseph Arthur, and Bill Carter drew a large crowd– where else are you going to see Eddie Vedder letting Johnny Depp take lead guitar, or both of them playing backup for Patti Smith?  Still, I was really disappointed to see that Bobby Ampezzan’s review in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette focused primarily on suggesting that people packed out Robinson for a rock show, not because they care about a cause.  To that I ask, Bobby, did you SEE how amped people were when Rev. Thompson Murray from Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church gave a stirring min-sermon about the cause of justice as something Jesus would have supported?  The way people cheered during the videos highlighting the miscarriage of justice in this case?  The way people gave money as buckets were passed, offering style, around the music hall to collect money for the WM3 legal defense fund? But what does Bobby know? He describes Natalie Maines as having “a shaved head” (she was sporting a cute, short pixie) and rags on her for “[using] cue cards held aloft in the pit for one of her numbers” despite the fact that she barely talked the entire show because she said she was too emotional about a cause she has long-supported for words.  It really disappointed me to see that write-up, and I felt like it had an agenda to downplay the real experience of the rally.

Like I said before, the entire experience, to me, was most akin to some really good church.  We started with a sermon and a preacher telling the crowd that Jesus is always on the side of justice, quoting Amos 5:24: “But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!”  We had some congregational singing, along with Eddie Vedder as he performed Tom Waits’ “It Rains on Me” and with the entire assembled “band” as they performed “People Have the Power.”  We heard the personal testimony of Eddie Vedder, as he described spending a recent evening around a campfire in his back yard with Fistful of Mercy (Ben Harper, Dhanni Harrison, Joseph Arthur), when they stood in a circle saying a kind of prayer that the WM3 could one day join them there, and realized that the answer to their prayer was to get down to Little Rock for the rally.  Isn’t that how prayer so often works? Instead of using it to magically give us things, God uses it to remind us that we need to take action.  That’s how it usually goes for me.

For me, some of the most powerful moments of the evening were while Natalie Maines was singing.  While she has one of the most powerful voices I’ve ever heard, I think I was most stuck by her fiery spirit.  I like a woman who refuses to be shut up.  She sang a traditional gospel song called “Death’s Got a Warrant,” previously recorded by another favorite of mine, Patty Griffin.  The song was obviously aimed at the true murderers, and said “you can’t hide, God’s got your number and he knows where you live.  Death’s got a warrant for you.”

To me, the best song of the evening was Maines’ performance of Dan Wilson’s (best known as the lead singer of Semisonic) “Free Life.” The song was very stirring, as it seemed to be about Damien Echols reuniting as a free man with his wife Lorri Davis.  Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:

Let’s take a little trip down where we used to go
It’s way beyond the strip, a place they call your soul
We’ll sit down for a while and let the evening roll

Don’t worry about the time; we’ll find a place to stay
The people round here seem familiar in some way
Look kind of like we did before we got so cold

And in the air the questions hang
Will we get to do something?
Who we gonna end up being?
How we gonna end up feeling?
What you gonna spend your free life on? Free life.

It was a good question for all of us. I hope the people in attendance won’t take for granted that we are blessed to have our freedom. I hope that they are moved to support the cause of justice, because when someone can sit on death row for a crime no one can be certain they committed, we are all a little less free.

And you know what? I have enough faith in people, enough faith in what I experienced with 2500 other people last night, to believe that it wasn’t just about Eddie Vedder and Johnny Depp.  It was also about three innocent men in prison.  It was about justice.  And there are many ways to help between now and September 30th.

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the happiest kroger on earth

Full disclosure: I was recently contacted by a PR person from the Kroger company, who had found my blog and wondered if I might like to join some other Little Rock bloggers in a tour of their new Kroger Marketplace store which opens tonight in West Little Rock. Since many of my local bloggy friends were going, I said sure! So, today, I went on a guided tour of the nicest, newest grocery store I’ve ever seen, and I ate free samples of delicious food, and I had a fabulous time.  Honestly, it’s not hard to have a fabulous time when surrounded by ladies who will giggle with you over the pussy willows in the floral department and laugh at your quips about dog popsicles being FOR dogs, not MADE FROM dogs and make jokes about how a bunch of bloggers around a sushi sample tray is a lot like Shark Week.  And I admit, I’m just plain interested in grocery stores, so I thought I’d share what I learned (I was not required to write about this event).

You see, though I’m a super proponent of local, sustainable food (see my “we might starve without a CSA” post for proof, or check out this post for a rundown of my “food rules”), most of my food still comes from my local grocery store.  In Charleston, I was rather spoiled in my last year there, because a brand-spankin’ new Harris Teeter opened up less than a mile from my house and an awesome Earth Fare natural supermarket was located just down a greenway from us.  I could bike to both.  And y’all, the Teet, as I liked to call it, was FAN-CY.  It had the largest produce section I’d ever seen, and, upon first visit, I noticed the fanciest thing of all– like a Methodist, I felt “strangely warmed” in the frozen foods section.  I looked up to see that they were piping in hot air to cut down on the chills when the freezer doors were opened! It’s not very eco-friendly, I’ll admit, but it sure is fancy!  We got most of our produce from our CSA, most of our other groceries from the Teet, and I hit up the Earth Fare once in a while to shop the bulk bins.

No grocery store I’ve visited in Little Rock has come close to being as nice as the Teet. Until today.

Have you ever seen a grocery store produce section with every veggie in a perfect little pile, not disheveled by a hundred shoppers’ grubby little hands?  It’s glorious.  The WLR Kroger Marketplace has the largest produce selection I’ve ever seen, and they said they make an effort to acquire local (within 400 miles) produce as much as possible.  Anything you see labeled local is within 400 miles of the store.  Sure, it’s not hydroponically grown in your neighbor’s back yard, but I will applaud any step in the right direction– when a company like Kroger, the largest grocery store chain in the world, tries to cut down on the amount of petroleum used in the shipping of our food, it makes a difference.

nice selection of organic produce.
perfect piles of produce.

In addition to an awesome produce department, this Kroger had BULK BINS. I could have hugged them.  I’m a big bread baker, and a big baker in general, and having a place to buy organic flour and raw sugar in bulk? Well, it makes my little heart happy.  There was also a large selection of natural/organic products, and even a large selection of gluten-free products.  Right now I have to make separate trips to a Kroger store for my groceries and a Whole Foods for the bulk bins.  After this store opens, I’ll just be hauling my little hiney out to Chenal and hitting up the fancy Kroger Marketplace. (Though my usual grocery store, the Kroger in Hillcrest, will be reopening after renovations this October, and I’ll still shop there for most of my day-to-day food.)

Bulk Bins!

I was also very happy to hear from the guys in charge of the meat and seafood departments.  Kroger apparently is very big on voluntarily labeling country of origin and wild-caught/farmed on its seafood, which is really helpful for me as I try to eat sustainably when I consume seafood (for a consumer’s guide to sustainable seafood, check this site out).  We also learned that Kroger goes above and beyond national standards and employs its own inspectors to make sure its seafood and meat is of the freshest quality.  And when it comes to meat, I was happy to see that they had a number of all natural, hormone/antibiotic/nitrite free, vegetarian-fed, sustainably raised meat to choose from, including pork products.  I have cut down a lot on my meat production in order to afford to eat natural/sustainable/ethical meat when I do consume meat.  Beyond the products that made me happy because they fit into my food values, I have to say that the folks working the meat and seafood area obviously take a lot of pride in what they do and have a passion for their jobs.  That’s fun to see!

The seafood selection, which will be labeled as to country of origin and wild caught vs. farmed, which will make choosing sustainable seafood easier.
So happy to be able to get natural, more ethical meat in a major grocery chain.
Linda from the bakery had a theatrical flair and a love for her job.

Overall, yes, this is a conventional grocery store and it’s still full of rows of foods I wish didn’t exist– heavily processed, full of corn syrup, empty calories in boxes and bags. BUT, this store is also making it easier for people to get fresh, more local produce and fresh, more sustainable meat and seafood, and that’s a step in the right direction that I totally applaud.  The store also has a commitment to helping shoppers create more meals at home by demonstrating cooking techniques, suggesting pairings, giving samples, and having well-trained employees who can answer shoppers’ questions.  All of that on top of bulk bins? Well, my only complaint is that it’s way too far away from my house for me to shop there on a regular basis.  Now to begin the countdown until my neighborhood Kroger reopens!

If you’d like to see more photos from the store, you can check out a slideshow on my Flickr.

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like riding a bike

My snazzy "new" bike.

Last night after dinner, as the sun started to go down, my best friend and I strapped on some helmets and sped off on our trusty cycles.  We zoomed down the streets of our neighborhood, racing the daylight and each other, to the soundtrack of a thousand cicadas buzzing in the trees. We made a lap around the playground, but decided not to stop and play with the other kids, instead zipping off in search of another downhill to give us a dose of speed.  As I flew down the hills, as much wind as the humid Southern summer air can muster in my face, I caught myself smiling wide, tongue half-out like an eight-year-old.  In my mind, I was popping wheelies, if not in reality. We perched at the top of a hill, wondering if the bright light streaking across the darkening sky was an asteroid or an airplane, and we marveled at the giant pink-tinged moon hanging over a shining state capitol building, smiling down on our city with its chubby old man face.  When we pulled up to our driveway, I half expected my mom to tell us to hurry up and get bathed before bedtime– tomorrow’s a school day.

It was a wonderful way to spend an evening.

It was also a wonderful twist to a bad situation.

On Friday night, after an all-ages dance party with friends and their children (complete with glow-sticks), we came home and, as usual, I opened the back door to let the dogs out into our fenced back yard.  Ten minutes later, a neighbor knocked at the door, Bessie collared in one hand, Olive running across the street.  “How the heck did they get out of the fenced yard?” Olive’s a runner, but it’s usually because she’s slipped past us at the front door.  We captured her and went to check out the back yard. The alley gate was open.  Neither one of us had been out the back gate, so we knew someone had been IN.  That’s when we noticed my bike was missing.

Let me tell you, I loved that bike.  It wasn’t fast, and it often wasn’t functional, but I loved it.  It was a petite black Parkwood (I thought the name was special because we used to live on a street named Parkwood) with silver fenders and a silver basket on the front, and we bought it off of Craigslist.  It had a sticker that bragged it was Made in the USA, and it was so heavy it must have been forged out of pure American iron.  It was mine.

I try to have a hands-off attitude toward my stuff.  I want to be the kind of person who would give my bike up to anyone who asked me for it.  And, though I loved it, the loss of the bike didn’t bother me nearly as much as the feeling of violation, that someone had come into my back yard to take my things, and the fear and worry that one of my dogs could have been killed or hurt because the thief left the back gate open.

Because I like to bike to my church, I wanted a replacement bicycle.  I started browsing Craigslist the next morning and found a listing for two matching, vintage French town bicycles, specifically 1974 Motobecane Nobly bicycles.  The seller lived so close to us I could have biked there had I had a bicycle, and Jon and I went to scope them out.  Just to see other options, we went to a bike store and I tested a cute little hybrid that rode like a dream and shifted gears with the click of a button.  Less cute was the $400 price tag, though, so we left without making the purchase and went to see the Craigslist find.  When we saw the vintage French bikes, we knew we had to have them, and $200 later, we were on our way home with our beauties.

I found a .pdf of the 1974 Motobecane catalog online. The bike in the background looks identical to my new bike, except mine has groovy lights on it.
The Craigslist image of our "new" bikes.

And they are beauties.  They’re painted a lovely copper color, and though the chrome was a little rusty, they polished up nice.  They have fenders and racks on the backs, still sport 1974 bicycle license plates from Wichita, Kansas, and my favorite features are the working head and tail lights operated with a friction generator activated as the bikes are pedaled. They’re a sort of bike you don’t see very often in a world that seems divided among road bikes, cruisers, and mountain bikes/mountain bike wannabes– they’re basically city commuter bikes, more upright than the average road bike and outfitted with a cruiser’s fenders and racks, on skinny road bike tires, with apparently unusual 27 inch wheels.

Isn't that headlight the cutest?

These crazy levers are how you shift the gears.
Looks like my plate's expired.
I like that the seat says "sat."
This is the mechanism that powers the lights. As the wheel turns, the little wheel turns and generates the power. So cool! Why don't "real" bikes have these?

Beyond the rust, the tires were dryrotted, the gears weren’t shifting, and the brakes were sketchy.  My best friend/biking buddy/bunkmate Jon happens to be pretty handy with bikes, and by last evening had my bike newly shod in fresh tires and tubes, tuned up to the point that 4/10 gears (activated with levers at the center of the handlebars) are now working, and had the brakes mostly fixed.  His Motobecane is still not up and running (the rear gears seem fully locked up and won’t move a bit when he pedals), but he hopped on his trusty day-to-day bike and joined me for our joyride.  My new bike turned out to be much lighter and faster than my last bike and was a downright thrill to ride in comparison.  Jon said he had trouble keeping up, and in truth, I left him in the dust a few times.  He says he can’t wait to have his speedy new old bike fully operational so he can give me a run for my money.  Maybe his will look as snazzy as this fully restored version.

I may never be Lance Armstrong, as I’m not particularly interested in cycling long distances, but I’m more than excited to have a time machine to transport me back to my childhood for evening jaunts around the neighborhood.  Maybe after that we can catch fireflies in a mason jar.

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kitchen catch-all

My Kitchen Catch-all posts are a roundup of what I cooked, where I ate, what I’m thinking of cooking, and what’s got my brain cooking each week.  Let me know what you think, and tell me what you’ve been cooking lately!

eating in

This isn’t everything I cooked this week, but more of a highlight reel.

  • The best dinner I made all week was this French Tomato and Goat Cheese Tart. (At the time of writing, this link was giving me “database errors” but I swear it’s where I got the recipe.)
  • The same night we ate the tomato tart, I also made us a fancy dessert: Honey Lemon Pots de Creme.  Usually, you see chocolate pots de creme, and though I love them, they’re not very summery.  This recipe makes a VERY lemony, tart, creamy dessert. Jon wasn’t crazy about them, but I was a fan. Be sure to grate the lemon zest very fine or it will make for a strange texture.
  • Berries in Meringue bowls with Orange-Scented Chocolate and Vanilla Cream: Because the pots de creme used a bunch of egg yolks, I had a bunch of whites left over.  I had seen an episode of Jamie Oliver this week where he made a big meringue with pears and chocolate and cream and decided to try something similar.  My vision was to have little bowls made of meringue, filled with summery berries and drizzled with orange-scented chocolate and sweet vanilla cream.  To make the meringue, I whipped my six egg whites until they formed firm peaks, then added about a cup and a half of sugar and a pinch of salt and whipped on high for about 8 minutes.  I formed the meringue into 6 little bowl shapes on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper and baked for about an hour at 300.  I filled each bowl with blackberries, and drizzled them with chocolate (the chocolate was bittersweet chocolate, melted with the zest of 1 orange and thinned out with a little cream) and topped them with a vanilla cream (1.5 cups heavy cream whipped with 1/4 cup powdered sugar and a dash of vanilla). SO YUMMY.

    Ok, so, you can't see the berries, the cream would look better if it had been piped on, and the chocolate wasn't thin enough for pretty drizzling. STILL. This was amazing.

eating out

Much like I did for Charleston restaurants, I plan to make a running list of places I’ve tried in Little Rock.

  • Wednesday night I joined some girlfriends from church for a girls’ night at Salut Bistro on University.  The restaurant is a little hard to find, as it’s in the first floor of what seems to be a tall office building, and the entrance isn’t clearly marked.  I had a yummy $6 glass of Kung Fu Girl riesling from Washington and enjoyed a beef brisket sandwich with a side of fries.  The sandwich was tasty, and the fries were well seasoned.  The menu was a bit scattered, but the food was good, and I think everyone I was with enjoyed their meals.  They also have a late-night menu that looked pretty good– might have to go back and see what that’s like sometime.

food for thought

  • I’ve been meaning to try my hand at making my own pitas for a while. Now I’ve got my eye on making some tzaziki sauce to go with them (Serious Eats).
  • My favorite restaurant in Charleston was the Glass Onion.  Located just around the corner from our house, the GO was a regular haunt for us. I liked things there that I wouldn’t eat anywhere else, including biscuits and gravy and meatloaf. Their delicious Southern food is also deeply local, and they served as the pickup point for our CSA. All this to say, they have a blog, and word is they’re going to be putting out a cookbook.  I was happy to see they shared their Country Captain recipe and plan to make it soon. It’s a Southern curry dish– yes, there is such a thing!
  • I’ve also been dreaming of replacing my non-stick KitchenAid cookware for a stainless steel set. Serious Eats says the Tramontina sets sold at WalMart are basically as good as 5 x’s pricier AllClad sets.
  • First cupcakes, then macarons, then whoopie pies. Apparently the next big dessert trend, according to The Kitchn, is Moon Pies.
  • From The Atlantic, a theory about why we love food TV so much.
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Dr. Laura & Racism

So, last night Jon and I happened to catch some of Anderson Cooper on CNN and learned about the whole Dr. Laura racism-on-the-radio debacle.  If you haven’t heard the scoop, here’s the basics: a woman called into Dr. Laura’s show for advice (if you ask me, anyone who would call that horrible woman for advice is less than bright, but certainly not deserving of what came next).  The woman, Jade, said that she’s in an interracial marriage, she’s black and her husband is white, and that she has been hurt by her husband’s friends and family making racist comments, while her husband does nothing about it.  Dr. Laura managed to call the woman hypersensitive, dismiss the idea that the comments were racist, make gross generalizations about black people as a monolithic entity, use the N-word many times, and suggest that people who can’t put up with racist comments from friends and family members shouldn’t marry outside their race.  While many outlets are simply focusing on Dr. Laura’s use of the N-word, as you can see/hear, the rest of the exchange is really what drips with racism.  You can hear the whole audio and read a transcript over at Media Matters.

Before I respond, here’s Jamelle Bouie:

What Dr. Laura said was RACIST.

Dr. Laura asks Jade, the caller, for an example of a racist comment she’s been hearing from her husband’s friends and family, and Jade replies:

CALLER: OK. Last night — good example — we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor — when every time he comes over, it’s always a black comment. It’s, “Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?” And, “Do black people really like doing that?” And for a long time, I would ignore it. But last night, I got to the point where it —

SCHLESSINGER: I don’t think that’s racist.

CALLER: Well, the stereotype —

SCHLESSINGER: I don’t think that’s racist.

Memo to Dr. Laura: that IS racist. Assuming that all people of a certain race think/act alike and expecting an individual from that race/group to be able to speak for/represent the whole group, well, that’s racist. Just like people who think all women are alike and expect any one woman to represent/speak for the entire sex are sexist. Seeing an entire group of people as if they aren’t as diverse and individual as your group of people is racist. Full stop. There’s no hypersensitivity there, and I can see where this woman would feel hurt by her husband’s friends and family constantly making generalizations and stereotypes about her race and expecting her to be the ambassador for all black people.

Then, after stating that generalizations about black people aren’t racist statements, Dr. Laura forges ahead and makes a couple of generalizations about black people, namely that they all voted for Obama simply because he’s black, and that they’re all good at basketball:

A lot of blacks voted for Obama simply ’cause he was half-black. Didn’t matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That’s not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says — we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here — the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, “White men can’t jump; I want you on my team.” That was racist? That was funny.

Nope, Dr. Laura, that entire paragraph is racist. And after that, as if her words are a little racist snowball rolling down the hill, Dr. Laura decides to get something off her chest: how deeply jealous she is that “black guys on HBO” can use the N-word but she, a white person, cannot.  She literally says the N-word over and over again.  It’s a common racist/sexist tactic to get upset that minority groups take words previously used to oppress and hurt them and turn them into something they use for their own power.  It’s not quite the same as the N-word, but it reminds me the way I and some of my favorite blogger friends have reclaimed the word “harpy.” If some man called me a harpy, I’d be downright pissed. But I jokingly call myself a harpy all the time.

After a commercial break, Jade, the caller, makes some very wise observations about race relations in this country.  She points out that older white people in this country seem more frightened and emboldened about racism after Obama’s election to the presidency.  This isn’t crazy stuff, folks like the Southern Poverty Law center have been pointing this out for over a year now.  You only have to look to footage of Tea Party events to know that some racists in this country are flipping out and feeling comfortable expressing very racist ideas in public.  But Dr. Laura tells the caller that she obviously has a “chip on your shoulder” and suggests she has “too much sensitivity.”

After a bit of arguing about the N-word, Jade hangs up and Dr. Laura concludes:

SCHLESSINGER: All right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Can’t have this argument. You know what? If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race.

Talk about an epic fail from a professional advice giver!

If Jade had called me for advice, I’d definitely answer differently.  I’d validate her feelings that her husband’s family and friends are making racist comments.  I’d affirm that yes, expecting one person to represent her entire race, with the belief that the entire race thinks/acts alike, is racist.  I’d tell her that whether her husband agrees with her that the comments are racist, it’s her husband’s job as her spouse and as the one with the primary relationship with these people to tell them to cut it out.  If your spouse says your friends/family are hurting his/her feelings, you tell them to knock it off. You refuse to tolerate it in your house.  You inform them they will not be welcome in your house so long as they continue to say things that hurt your spouse.  Period.  It’s not that difficult to see that that’s the right answer to that question.

Because Dr. Laura did not take this opportunity to state the obvious, that spouses should have each other’s backs when someone is hurting one of their feelings, I can only conclude that she’s had these feelings of racial resentment, the ones that came bursting through in the exchange, for a while.  I’m not saying that Dr. Laura hates black people, or that, as a person, she’s a complete and total racist. But that exchange definitely revealed her racial resentment, and her words were racist.

To top it all off, Dr. Laura’s “apology” is of the “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings”variety rather than the I’m sorry I said what I said variety.  She primarily focuses on the use of the N-word.  Her use of the N-word wasn’t even the half of it! She needs to do more than apologize for using an abhorrent word, but for the entire hateful exchange.  And she needs to examine her issues surrounding race, perhaps with a licensed therapist.