Elizabeth Perry | studio

I'm working on this year's Haggadah, and finding it difficult for a variety of reasons.

1. I thought I'd try moving the core & supplementary texts into Scrivener and assembling them in a collection, and that was super frustrating. I think I'm pretty good at Scrivener, and I still think this is a conceptually good approach, it's kind of how I approach poetry submissions, but it did not feel like I had made my life easier either now nor in the future, so now I'm back in Word, which I object to on pure principle, but I might as well take advantage of Past Me's hard work in the Styles pane.
2. I'm going to a friend's Seder this year instead of hosting, and I promised to send her a draft ahead of time so we can make sure it works for her and this is giving me weird performance anxiety.
3. I have so much poetry I could include and I can't decide what to cut even though I suspect that S.'s other guests will not be thrilled by the non-traditional content.

   a. Some of the poetry, e.g., Marge Piercy's "The Cup of Eliyahu", is longer than I actually want, especially that late in the Haggadah, but how do I excerpt??? See also Primo Levi's "Passover".

4. ( the real problem, cn middle east )
5. Also I'm sick of Garamond but every other typeface is worse.

I do not know enough about nineteenth-century English common law to know the answer to the question: what if Mr Collins predeceases, without issue, Mr Bennet? What happens to the Longbourn entail? (I'm not talking about common recovery.)

Because I was reading some fic, as is my wont, and musing idly on the idea of Elizabeth accepting his horrible proposal with an mind set on murder. I think she could pull it off, and would, and should. But obviously this doesn't work if the entail devolves on some other random, even less connected with her family; Mr Collins is Mr Bennet's paternal cousin, and makes no mention of brothers or nephews.

C'MON LIZZIE SLIP THAT ASSHAT SOME ARSENIC, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

previously in this series; more briefly

• workplace comedy about Internal Affairs in a police department, in which (and I cannot stress this enough) IA are the heroes fighting corrupt racist cops
• a heist movie wherein the thieves are Indige -- OH MY GOD, THIS EXISTS
• Schindler's List, but about Sugihara Chiune
• workplace comedy set in the atelier of a haute couture maison (I realize The Devil Wears Prada and Phantom Thread both exist) (I also realize this would have a horrifying wardrobe/set dress budget)
• historical drama about the labor movement around the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
• historical drama about Margrethe I and the Treaty of Kalmar (ideally, of course, a mid-forties Greta Garbo plays Margrethe)
• a deeply weird fantasy about Sycorax, Caliban, and Ariel on the island before Prospero and Miranda's arrival
• remake of A Fool and His Money (note: a Black woman must direct)
• drama about Jacqueline Kennedy in the weeks after JFK's assassination, from the point of view of Letitia Baldridge
• comedy-thriller about a traitorous Michelin inspector being hunted by the Michelin Man (Melissa McCarthy plays both the inspector and the Michelin Man)
• drama about the human trials of the Salk polio vaccine, aka the Francis field trial (why is there no Wikipedia page on this???)
• an absolutely deranged depiction of St. Francis of Assisi's captivity, visions, hermitage, etc.

Discussion and suggestions welcome. All of these, obviously, will pass the Furiosa test. (Is this documented anywhere that is not the Nazi hellsite?)

Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan. Decent! I'd have liked more information about the recovery/rehab process, which presumably Cahalan can remember (the information about her experience in the hospital is all second-hand). I would also love some investigative journalism digging into the doctors who failed her and if they've reconsidered how they interact with patients.

Embroidery by Arounna Khounnoraj. Well-done, well-photographed, as usual none of the projects appealed to me but I might take this out again to see if there's something I can adapt.

Earth Ponds Updated Edition by Tim Matson. There's honestly very little I love more than learning about a very niche subject from someone who is a gigantic nerd about it. Would you like to know about how to build and maintain a pond? Tim Matson would be DELIGHTED to tell you all about it, with a few quotations from sixteenth-century pond manuals on top for garnish. I sincerely wish there were more case studies, the first chapter about Matson's own building-a-pond process was truly enthralling, just because he is so into the whole experience.

What Happened To You? by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry. I am not the audience for this book. The neuroscience is generally familiar to me, and I yearn for true in-depth case studies rather than these anecdotes; I 100% do not believe that the content here is spontaneous conversation, and the moments when they are trying to make it appear as if it is are distracting. (Probably better in audiobook.)

The Ultimate Kogin Collection by Susan Briscoe. So here's the thing: this is almost exactly the kind of geometric thing I have been trying to find to embroider ever since I realized that all the cute birds-and-butterflies-whatnot weren't for me. But: counted-stitch embroidery drives me straight up the fucking wall. (Love that this includes an overview of the history of the — technique? style? and also talks about efforts to preserve it as cultural heritage.)

I was supposed to teach twice this week, so I spent the weekend making big batches of rice and masoor dal and pasta e ceci and baked oatmeal and sour cherry shortbread crumble, and then got notified that the big storm coming in means we're cancelling one of the sessions. Well, it's not like I'll be sorry to have the food when the weather's awful, and having to plan my meals less than usual will hopefully leave me with extra energy.

Having a day where I yearn for an old-fashioned hot-springs spa, the kind where you dunk yourself into hot water for a while, and then you get a massage, and then you eat some grapes, and then you float in the hot water for a while, and then maybe you take a cool shower, and eat some rice pudding and sip an herbal tisane and then nap for a bit before dinner. Why am I not a nineteenth-century aristocrat with a mysterious weakness (anemia, it's anemia) who has been sent to the Alps to recuperate????

Bluesky is probably "better" than Twitter was (in its heyday) and is (in its current Nazified incarnation), but it is not good for me, and I have therefore put it into jail, aka /etc/hosts (with some regret, there are some v. funny people there).

Tomorrow is the last Friday of the month and therefore I have taken it off; I will be going to see a condo and hopefully plowing through the various pieces of administrative mail that have piled up on my desk. And various outside-the-house errands, like the Indian grocery. Thank goodness it has crept above freezing this week, I was not enjoying the amount of ice on the sidewalks at all.

I have yet again flabbergasted a hairstylist with how goddamn long my hair takes to dry; I got my hair cut last week, and she stuck me under one of those giant overhead dryers for subjectively seventy years, and then diffused the curls with lukewarm air and kept being astonished that the roots were still damp. It's one of the many things that keeps tempting me towards a pixie cut; the primary reason I haven't yet is the prospect of more frequent haircuts to maintain it and avoid looking like a fluffy mushroom.

The red lentils that had been languishing in my pantry for *cough* have been turned into mediocre dal and now I can buy red lentils that are not agèd and will make better dal! The local culinary school has announced its upcoming classes-for-the-general-public and I am hoping that eventually a knife skills class will be added to the list (I have been wildly jealous of kaberett's experience at Leiths since 2019); the farmer's market is soliciting vendors for the summer and this suggests that someday it will not be winter; I think I am currently Sad Fruitless Winter Elizabeth and can give myself permission to delve into the stocks of fruit I stockpiled in the freezer for her, and I am kind of overwhelmed by the possibilities! I was hoping Lebovitz's fruit-focused cookbook would be inspiring but alas, nothing grabbed me by the throat.

Masculinity as an ideal to aspire to is regularly employed on the Homeric battlefield to injoin men to fight; leaders can mock reluctant troops by telling them “You’re girls, not men!”, and it’s frequent for leaders to push the men forward by telling them, “Be men!” “Be Women” is never used, even for women, because that’s not an aspirational category, whereas Homeric men have to work really hard to be men, and often aren’t sure if they’ve managed to attain it. Hector famously tells Andromache, “War is a task for men,” and presents weaving and woolwork as the equivalent for women. Hector presents the battlefield is the sphere where men are able to be most iconically masculine, just as the loom is where women prove their femininity.

Asymptote. “An Interview with Emily Wilson.” Interview by Michal Zechariah. Accessed January 18, 2024. https://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-emily-wilson/.

• as someone who have been living inside American higher education for literally her entire life (my mom was having contractions while she was teaching, it's one of her favorite stories), I have a lot of thoughts and opinions about how it is fucked up in multiple ways but also I fundamentally believe in the value of academic inquiry and research and a lot of the screaming about it at the moment has a real "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." vibe and I do not like it.
• having a weird reading experience at the moment, where everything I am reading is well-written and exactly what I want and also I am inching my way through it, teeth gritted, because I know Just Enough about how plots work to know that The Bad Things are about to start happening and I am feeling somewhat thin-skinned about Bad Things, even fictional ones
• there was a third thing but I can't remember it now

Chocolate chip cookies with a little rye flour and an overnight rest (and good chocolate chunks): oh my god they're incredible. Damn near a dupe for Levain. I might want to decrease the butter a little.

I made them for the downstairs neighbor who's looking after Cucumber while I am spending time with my mother (and in something of a social whirl trying to see my own friends), but now I want to hoard them myself like a dragon. (I will not actually do so.)