Pink Freud

I took this snapshot of a flyer for my "Core Café" discussion salon for work last week. I hand out flyers at each week's faculty meeting, and by the time I walk into my classroom at 2 o'clock to teach my second class, a flyer's always tacked up on the grungy bulletin board in the back of the room. A circuitous way of getting things done, but one less thing I have to do myself (i'm so lazy) -- excellent! Thank you mystery instructor who teaches in my room at 12:30!

Freud in the American university classroom: so many penises.

An even bigger thank you to the super helicopterita who agreed to make the flyers for me in the first place. The first link in the chain of posting flyers for Core Café is, of course, the flyers' creator: Claudia! Did you know Clo Blanco is an internationally renowned art director, graphic artist, and painter? Did you know that she designed the NYC Condom "Get some!" campaign? Well she is and she did, and you should see her online portfolio on Behance.

The best part of the fact that I somehow suckered (badgered) Clo into making these flyers for me is that she designs a new one for each week's salon meeting and emails me each week's design on Sundays. It's a fancy surprise every Sunday evening, almost as much a surprise for me as is it for the rest of the faculty and students. Clo, everyone at Stevenson College loves the flyers. They want to mail you cookies as a thank you.

I'll post new photos each week, and then photograph the wall in my office where I put up each week's flyer at the end of the academic quarter -- a grand total of nine flyers! Marx and Nietzsche through Marjane Satrapi! It's quite the canon.

This week coming up is Virginia Woolf!

new books, tarot play, and a nesting bird

I've been doing some spring cleaning, both at home and at the office, and recently took an enormous bag-load of books I no longer wanted* down to Logos Books to sell. I made $50 and took a $20 trade coupon as well, then immediately blew a good amount of it on two new books I scoped out while walking through the store towards the exit. IT'S LIKE LOGOS IS BOOBY-TRAPPED. WITH BOOKS. SPECIFICALLY TAILORED TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE ME. 

Uh, did you know that Jules Verne wrote a gothic novel that was serialized in 1892 in a French magazine entitled The Magazine of Education and Recreation? That it was first translated into English as The Castle of the Carpathians in 1894? That it was "the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead [emphasis mine], in Transylvania"? And that this purple little paperback is the newest translation in over 100 years? Neither did I, and you know what? I was so bewildered and astonished -- by all of these things -- that I had to buy it. It looks like it would be really fun to read aloud (perhaps as originally intended?) and enjoy with an audience. 

I also bought this book from semiotext(e), Sergio González Rodriguez's The Femicide Machine, on the various converging socio-historical mise-an-scenes and cultural and political apparatuses that have caused the horrific and ongoing disappearances and murders of tens of thousands of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez. Guess what? Neoliberalism, NAFTA, and the war on drugs have a lot to do with it (DUH), as do a breathtaking lack of infrastructure and blatant governmental corruption. The writing isn't the best (and I hope that's due to the translation, sorry Michael Parker-Stainback**, man with a name that sounds made up), but the analysis is certainly thought-provoking and I always appreciate a book (title) that plays it as it lays: the mass murders in Juárez are femicide, plain and simple, and only an intellectual hop-skip-and-a-jump away from genocide. Let's just call a spade a spade. We'll see how it reads out; the text is something I may want to work with when planning for the course I'll be putting together for the fall. 

I've also been messing with a friend's tarot reading. It's private and so I won't go into it -- but don't my cards match the crazy 70's carpeting in my office nicely? Beautiful colors, had to take a photo. 

Lastly, I found this sign right outside the entrance to the New Leaf Market in Felton earlier today. HOW NICE AND POLITE AND THOUGHTFUL FOR EVERYONE/BIRD INVOLVED IS THIS SIGN? Mountain people, they're considerate and I like it. 

* I'm very serious about books, and tend to covet and then hoard them, but even I have my limits. Unless a book serves a special purpose, is of a particular subject or genre of interest, was a gift, or has special sentimental value, it's up for elimination from the collection. Case in point: The beautiful little hardcover copy of the I Ching that I bought close to ten years ago... THAT I'VE NEVER USED OR ACTUALLY READ. It's finally gone, and I hope it finds a home with someone who will love it and use it every day very soon. 

** Check out photos of his swanky 60s-fabulous DF apartment at tarde o temprano's site here. It'll kind of make you feel like a creep, but hey, the profile's title is "Closet Voyeur" and there's a mesmerizing video with family photos and old typewriters and it plays swing music.

Kitchen (mis)Adventure: Fracas de quiche

Oh man, it started out as such a good idea and ended up being such a goat-cheesy no-no. I made my first quiche this morning. Consulting Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (my favorite cooking "reference" and not "recipe book", this is relevant, just wait), I pulled out everything in my refrigerator that Mark Bittman told me would likely go well together in a quiche and got to it: steaming broccoli florets, "gently warming" milk on the stove-top, adding dried marjoram to my beaten and room-temperature eggs, chopping up a couple rounds of herbed goat cheese that had been hiding in the back of the fridge, bla bla bla. I was so proud of myself. And the quiche turned out looking pretty good, have a see for yourself down below: 

Pulling it out of the oven, it smelled good, too. Well, at first. And then, just as I put my nose to its surface to better savor the aroma, I was immediately overcome by the most horrendously vivid olfactory memory: 

I loathe foods cooked with goat cheese. Like, the smell/taste/texture of cooked goat cheese kind of makes me gag. Fresh goat cheese -- in a salad, on a cracker, by itself, whatever -- is fine and great and I love it. But all warmed up and cooked with other things and I just think it's really, really gross. 

The problem is, just like this morning, I forget this all the time. I have made the mistake of cooking with goat cheese -- of finding a recipe and being honestly, earnestly, excited about cooking with goat cheese -- more than once. It probably happens every 12-18 months.* Just enough time goes by for me to completely forget about how revolting I find cooked goat cheese, and I don't remember how awful it is until I've used up all the ingredients and the food's been cooked. 6 local, free-range eggs; half a bag of organic broccoli florets; and the last of the also organic milk gone. Not to mention perfectly good goat cheese I would have enjoyed fresh and cold and un-cooked. 

Part of the horror is that I won't let it go to waste. I'll hate it -- and Jason, too, by the way, will hate it -- but we'll eat it all in the end. We'll smother it in hot sauce and hold our noses and agonize and torture ourselves, but I'll make sure we don't throw any of it away.**

Looks like we have just enough for two more servings each. 

In better news, I'm taking the rest of the afternoon to enjoy a couple new books I just bought. WHY NOT: Stephen T. Asma's On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears was on sale, as was Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Some texts that you refer to again and again really are worth just investing in. The Halberstam I've had checked out and repeatedly renewed from the library for YEARS. I'm sure there must be some person part of the campus community who would like to stumble across it at the library again. The Asma I've been reading online through Amazon.com's "Look Inside!" (don't judge me) for quite some time as well. I'm looking forward to having them both to enjoy and reference at leisure, without feeling guilty. The final book is the latest Oxford edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, collected with "Other Tales", which I purchased in order to read a collected short story in particular: "Olalla" (1885). The story was recommended by Carlos, and I aim to read it, contemplate it, and write on it soon. More on that to come. 

* Now that I think of it, the last instance was the "Summer Squash with Baked Eggs" fracas of summer '11. 

** Jason says, by the way, that he would have remembered. Not very helpful unless he's cooking, though.