Trendy But Casual

Pink Houses

Before my sister and her family left New Orleans, we drove down to the Lower Ninth Ward to see Make It Right's Pink Project. So far this project has raised enough money to build 69 new homes for former Lower Ninth residents: the aim is 150. We were there just before sunset. This is the area that took one of the biggest hits when the levees broke, because of its proximity to the Industrial Canal. Houses - and people - were swept away.

And this is how the pink houses have made it into local lore already - turned into carnival costumes. These two girls were standing on Frenchman Street during the Krewe de Vieux parade on January 19th. I have more pictures to post from this parade, but I'll put them up later.

Hillary

There's a great story in today's New York Times called Hailed, From Everest to Park Avenue: it's about Sherpas in New York City who are planning a memorial service for Sir Edmund Hillary. The article interviews Tshering Norbu Sherpa, who's the grand-nephew of Tenzing Norgay, fellow Everest conquerer: he's a taxi driver in New York. Around 2000 Sherpas live there, apparently, and they have a community association based in Woodside, Queens. On their web site, they invite members of "our Sherpa community to pay our tribute to the person who spent his entire life for the betterment of our community."

Dawa Sherpa, another taxi driver interviewed by the Times, said of Hillary: “In Nepal, we respect him as a great man, like a king.”

The article described Sir Edmund as "a New Zealander who spent his life in the farthest-flung corners of the globe." Far-flung is a Victorian term that means remote or widely spread: Merriam-Webster gives the phrase "far-flung empire" as its example of the latter definition. According to Fowler's Modern English Usage, it was first recorded in 1895 and once had "emotional value" to Kipling and his peers. "The far-flung Empire has been replaced by less stirring concepts, but the rich flavour of the adjective remains as a reminder of past grandeur."

(As I'm quoting from the New Fowler's, which is edited by R.W. Burchfield, a New Zealander, I'll stick to English spelling for the rest of this post.)

"Far-flung" is a little too colonial for my tastes, assuming, as it does, a centre from which the flinging occurs. What could be more remote to a child growing up in Nepal (or New Zealand, for that matter), than Woodside, Queens?

The word often gets used in relation to New Zealand. The Observer, for example, published a short travel piece in 2005 describing "Disney's far-flung Narnia." CBS, in a 2003 story about new words added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, reported that "Americans have ... taken increasingly to adopting slang expressions — such as "bludge" (goof off) — from other English speaking nations as far flung [sic] as New Zealand and Australia."

Growing up in New Zealand, I did not feel far-flung. New Zealand doesn't feel particularly far-flung to me now, living in New Orleans: I could get on a flight to LA tonight and be home in around sixteen hours, about as long as it would take me to drive to Iowa City, except with TV and free drinks once I was over the Pacific. True, I would not be able to stop at a Long John Silver's en route (in, say, Hannibal, Missouri), but life is full of sacrifices. And the cost is about the same as a long weekend in Miami. In fact, this is one of the reasons T. Middy and I talk about things like a long weekend in Miami, or San Juan, or somewhere in Mexico, but never make the trips: I always end up thinking that I could go home for the same amount of money (or often less).

I think this post has got way off-topic, i.e. has become far-flung. In the past few days I've been reading a lot of the original British newspaper coverage of Hillary and Tenzing's climb in 1953. Hillary was referred to as E.P. Hillary in most of the papers, and most of them rattled on at length about how it was a British expedition. There's a story in today's Times (the English paper) about the journalistic coup by Jan (then James) Morris, who sent a coded message via the British Embassy in Kathmandu so The Times could break the story the morning of the Queen's coronation. It includes this anecdote: "When Hillary and Tenzing finally appeared at 2.30pm the expedition leader John Hunt recorded: 'When we realised by their unmistakable gestures that they had been to the top, we temporarily went mad.'"

Matthew Parris, in another story in The Times, points out that "in 1953 New Zealand's Prime Minister called the ascent the achievement of 'a Britisher' while today's New Zealand PM called Hillary 'a great Kiwi'."

Times change, but Hillary didn't. This is how Jan Morris described him this week: "Edmund Hillary was a really good man. His life had such a wonderful shape. It was a colossal life, and a moral life, that had at its core a lifelong obligation to the Sherpa people. He was the very opposite of a celebrity."

The Sherpa memorial service is on January 20 at Queens Palace, Woodside, New York.

Q&A

I was wrong: it’s TWO years since I last went to the doctor’s, according to my new doctor at the Tulane Family Health Something or Other. My old doctor couldn’t see me until January 23rd, and if I’m still sick by then I should be hospitalized, probably. It’s so long since I’ve been, I’ve managed to lose my insurance card.

My old doctor was nice, but she was a little too into the bedside manner. She was always asking me things like “what kind of novels do you write?” when all I wanted her to do was give me medication with “may be habit-forming” printed on the label.

The new doctor confirmed the following: usually only children get ear infections like mine; Nyquil is the best thing ever; the antibiotics Dr. Sean gave me in Marksville are doing their job; and Tulane has a crummy health savings account. Something he told me without being asked: I have good teeth. Something I did not ask him, though I wanted to: do I have West Nile Virus? (I’m still getting bitten by mosquitoes, even now in what’s supposed to the depth of winter – twice this week in the night, and every time I go out onto the porch to play with Skittles.)

According to T. Middy, all the vials of blood drawn from my lethargic form today will not confirm or deny this self-diagnosis, because the new doctor is only checking my thyroid and liver.

Yesterday I went to the chiropractor because my neck is killing me; I can’t turn my head without pain. He asked me the following questions: have you been sleeping on your stomach? Lying on the sofa while you watch TV? Hunching over the computer?

Of course, I have been doing all three, some of them simultaneously, though I was non-committal when confronted. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and today with a bag of frozen peas (wrapped in a tea towel) clamped to my neck, as instructed. The chiropractor didn’t specify peas, just the frozen part. I had to go to Langenstein’s to buy a new bag of peas, because I’d been using an open bag and T. Middy was selfishly complaining about frozen peas in the bed. I expect Robert Browning was more supportive.

A friend e-mailed me yesterday to say he’d read my blog for the first time. He said he expected it to be my “musings on the great issues of our time or something,” and pretended to be delighted that it’s nothing of the sort.

Despite my near-death status, I’ve given this matter some thought today, in between reading short stories, watching “Everyday Italian” on the Food Network, and ordering re-fills online from The Republic of Tea. We are concerned with many of the great issues of the day here in the MM household, and perhaps I’m not sharing enough of them.

For example, we have followed my sister’s example and have renounced plastic bags at the supermarket: we take our own cloth/hessian bags on shopping expeditions. Last week,after watching an Oprah re-run (Oprah Goes Green, featuring Matt Damon, etc), I ordered some organic cotton eco-bags for fruit and vegetables. Today I got an e-mail telling me my order will be delayed because of a “large increase in demand” following the Oprah broadcast. This led to the following conversation with T. Middy.

TM: I can’t believe any wife I may have, now or in the future, would buy something because she saw it on Oprah.
PJKM: What do you mean, ‘now or in the future’?
TM: I have to keep my options open.

(Later he added: “That’s the kind of language they use in legal contracts.”)

During the nightly news, we had the following profound and intellectual exchanges.

Watching the television news (I):
(A report on Mitt Romney and the New Hampshire primary)
PJKM: What is Mitt short for?
TM: Mitten?

Watching the television news (II):
PJKM: Whenever I hear the words “blue chip,” I think about that place we went to in Santa Fe, where we sat at the bar and wrote postcards and we had those blue tortilla chips.
TM: You do realize that when they’re talking about “blue chip stocks,” they don’t mean tortilla chips?

One other question I’d like to ask today, before I retreat into the mists of Nyquil: why do my students not realize that just as they can visit my blog and read everything I write here, I can visit the Facebook page they’ve created in my (dis)honor? At least they used a cute picture, I guess.

With a Whimper

My new year has begun with a whimper: I’ve been sickening since Boxing Day, ten days ago, and what seemed like an annoying head cold has turned into a malingering malaise. On the flight back from Chicago last Sunday, my left ear closed for business and still hasn’t re-opened: at first it felt as though a colony of balled-up socks had invaded my head, but now the intruder feels more like a snow globe – substantial, fluid-filled, uncomfortable, obstructive. I’m sleeping most of each afternoon, and mope around the rest of the time. Two days ago I also managed to strain or pull my neck in some way, so that turning my head, or lying any way apart from on my back is painful. Last semester I managed to escape all the usual (and unusual) illnesses whirling around campus, but during the break I’ve been whammied. I have so much work to do, but only have the energy for some desultory reading (mainly of Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk, and the stories in the latest issue of the New Yorker). My sister and her family left New Orleans on Thursday: they’re in Monterrey, Mexico right now, visiting all the people and places from my nephew’s school year there. So maybe I’m just sick now because I can be sick – worn out with the excitement of Christmas, and their visit, chastened by the freezing weather in Chicago (and here, for the past few days), and exhausted by the thought of everything I’m hoping to accomplish this month and this year.

This is a long excuse for not posting, of course.

I’ve promised my parents that I’ll include pictures from my sister’s visit, so here are some of us doing touristy things (Café du Monde, watching the Saints play at the Superdome) ...

... and doing family-ish things (attending the Manikin family’s Christmas Eve festivities – only my parents will recognize the people in these pictures, sorry!).

And here we are in our house on Christmas Day, brandishing the gifts bought with money my parents sent – along with strict instructions for everything to be bought before Christmas and then placed under the tree and re-opened.

We had a great visit up in Marksville, where the ever-hospitable Rodney and Paige organized a pig roast for us on New Year’s Day, including the traditional black-eyed peas and cabbage (for prosperity and luck).

I spent the night before rubbing my aching ear until a doctor present at the party (Dr. Sean: is it bad when you only know a doctor’s first name, as in Dr. Phil, and when you receive treatment from him at a New Year’s party?) drove to his surgery and returned with antibiotics and medicine. So I began the new year by getting a shot in the hip from someone I met at a party – in the spare bedroom, with T. Middy acting as supervisory, unsympathetic- nurse-like presence.

Here are some pictures from New Year's Day. Pig roasts involve a lot of standing around and looking sage, while Glenn Laborde does all all work.

Sad news on our return: Kevin Greening, one of the best and brightest people on the radio, died in London just after Christmas. In the early 90s, I listened to him and Jeremy Nicholas every morning on GLR. They were funny and clever, and when I was the press officer at Virgin Classics, I managed to persuade them both along to a London Chamber Orchestra concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, on the South Bank. This was early in 1991, I think. The LCO manager was always annoyed with Virgin, like most of our artists at the time, so when we tried to find our seats we discovered we’d been placed way, way back – so far back, in fact, that there were many empty rows ahead of us. I was mortified, but Kevin and Jeremy didn’t seem to mind. They didn’t know why they were there, really; I’m still not sure why they agreed, as they never played classical music at GLR. This week I’ve been in e-mail correspondence with Jeremy, and he can’t remember why they agreed to come, either.

I reminded Jeremy that he asked me beforehand how he and Kevin would recognize me in the foyer of the QEH. My costume that day included pointy high heels, black shorts, and a sort of patchwork velvet waistcoat. I’d just come back from Los Angeles where, somewhere along Venice Beach, I’d had a hank of my (then very long) hair braided with yellow and red thread and tied with small bells. When I described all this to Jeremy, he said: “So you’ll be a figure of fun, then?”

He tells me he is not so rude these days; I hope I’m not so ridiculous. Too busy languishing in the manner of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, worrying when Skittles the cat disappears for a day, and deciding to keep the same New Year’s resolutions as last year.

Goodbye to Kevin, and that time, when we were all younger, and everything seemed possible.