So Many Books

Emerson’s address, Woman, was a lecture read before the Woman’s Rights Convention in Boston on September 20, 1855.

Emerson agrees with all the standard beliefs about women. Women are more delicate and more impressionable than men. They also are keepers of some kind of secret wisdom:

In this sense, as more delicate mercuries of the imponderable and immaterial influences, what they say and think is the shadow of coming events…all wisdoms Woman knows; though she takes them for granted, and does not explain them as discoveries, like the understanding of man. Men remark figure: women always catch the expression. They inspire by a look, and pass with us not so much by what they say or do, as by their presence. They learn so fast and convey the result so fast as to outrun the logic of their slow brother and make his acquisitions poor…And any remarkable opinion or movement shared by woman will be the first sign of revolution.

If I were sitting in the audience, my hand would shoot up into the air and I would have to interrupt. Erm, ’scuse me, Mr. Emerson? Um, yes, well, you certainly allocate quite a lot of power to women. I mean with all that wisdom, quick understanding and ability to incite revolution, maybe you could explain then why it is women have to hold a women’s rights convention? With all our supposed power, why is it women don’t already have the right to vote, own property, and have an education?

Perhaps it’s because women are all about sentiment while men are the ones with the will?

Man is the will, and Woman the sentiment. In this ship of humanity, Will is the rudder, and Sentiment the sail: when Woman affects to steer, the rudder is only a masked sail. When women engage in any art or trade, it is usually as a resource, not as a primary object. The life of the affections is primary to them, so that there is usually no employment or career which they will not with their own applause and that of society quit for a suitable marriage. And they give entirely to their affections, set their whole fortune on the die, lose themselves eagerly in the glory of their husbands and children. Man stands astonished at a magnanimity he cannot pretend to.

Erm, Mr. Emerson? Astonished? Personally, I’m astonished you dare trot out that line of bull. I don’t see men lining up for the title of domestic god. So spare me the women live for their husband’s and children crap.

Of course the women have not produced any masterpieces baloney crops up. But that shouldn’t matter because women are the best creators of conversation. Besides, women don’t need to decorate canvas with paint or paper with words when women themselves are ornaments and decorate “life with manners, with properties, order and grace.”

Emerson agrees with the charge of the newspapers that women are “victims of temperament”

They have tears, and gayeties, and faintings, and glooms and devotion to trifles. Nature’s end, of maternity for twenty years, was of so supreme importance that it was to be secured at all events, even to the sacrifice of the highest beauty. They are more personal. Men taunt them that, whatever they do, say, read or write, they are thinking of themselves and their set. Men are not to the same degree temperamented, for there are multitudes of men who live to objects quite out of them, as to politics, to trade, to letters or an art, unhindered by any influence of constitution.

Right, men never think of themselves. They are completely objective and never make any kind of decisions out of self-interest. Uh-huh.

But in spite of all our failings and delicacies, Emerson declares that women “have an unquestionable right to their own property.” Very generous. It is always easy to give something when it was never your to give in the first place.

As far as voting goes, women should not be kept from it with the argument that they know nothing of the affairs of the world. A good number of men know nothing either and it is not uncommon for them to be told how to vote before they walk into the polls by their party. Emerson is certain women couldn’t do any worse.

The other argument that allowing women to become involved in politics would unsex and contaminate them, well, Emerson says,

that only accuses our existing politics, shows how barbarous we are, - that our policies are so crooked, made up of things not to be spoken, to be understood only by wink and nudge ; this man to be coaxed, that man to be bought, and that other to be duped. It is easy to see that there is contamination enough, but it rots the men now, and fills the air with stench.

I can agree with Emerson on that point. He also goes on to argue that in the US we have laws against taxation without representation, therefore if women are not allowed to vote, to represent themselves, then they should not be taxed either.

One more reason why women should be allowed more rights–they are so good and moral and have such a civilizing influence, that their increased presence in the public sphere can only further “improve and refine the men.”

The real root of the reason women want more rights however, appears to come down to the fact that men are falling down on the job of being men:

Woman should find in man her guardian. Silently she looks for that, and when she finds that. he is not, as she instantly does, she betakes her to her own defences, and does the best she can. But when he is her guardian, fulfilled with all nobleness, knows and accepts his duties as her brother, all goes well for both.

I was thinking of calling this post “Emerson Makes Me Want to Throw Up” for the way in which he describes women in such a stereotypical way. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why the women at the convention didn’t tar and feather him. But then I remembered it was 1855, Emerson is a product of his times, and it was meaningful that he was speaking at the convention in support of women’s rights at all. So while I can’t forgive him his “angels in the house” praise of women, I do appreciate his attempt to support women in becoming educated and moving beyond the purely domestic sphere, though I wish he could have managed a more enlightened argument.

Next week’s Emerson: Address at the Opening of Concord Free Public Library

The plant sale today was marvelous. We arrived to wait at about 9:30 for the doors to open at 11:00. Gardeners with their carts and wagons and wheelbarrows milled about. There was the low hum in the air that comes from hundreds of people talking. My Bookman and I found an unoccupied bench and parked our cart beside us. We had forgotten to bring books with us. How could we forget? Since we couldn’t read we talked about what books we were excited about reading.

My Bookman is looking forward to a new book by Matthew Woodring Stover, the author of Blade of Tyshalle which he loved. The book won’t be out until the end of the year. We are both looking forward to the Carlos Ruiz Zafon book to be published next spring that is a prequel to Shadow of the Wind. I was looking forward to reading a lot of things, but at the time, I was anticipating picking up A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the library later in the afternoon.

The time waiting flew by. We entered the building about 11:05 and had all of our plants and some we were picking up for friends, found, selected and paid for by 11:35. My orderly pre-planning aided by a numbered map handed out while we were waiting upon which we drew our path through the fray and my Bookman’s astounding cart handling abilities allowed us to purchase every single plant on our list. Now we just have to plant them. Which we began doing this afternoon. Every year we dig up a little more lawn with the goal of someday being lawn-free, at least in the front yard since the dog rules the backyard. Perhaps I will take a picture once we get everything in, though it won’t be very pretty since the plants are all very small, that’s why we can buy them so inexpensively (most are $1.50).

But enough about gardening. I did get to read a little bit last night. I luxuriated in Margaret Atwood’s poetry. I am almost two-thirds of the way through The Door and finding it absolutely fantastic. I swear there is nothing that woman can’t write.

This afternoon while taking a gardening break I began reading the book I was anticipating, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, and I am thus far loving it and I am only on page 19. She is currently mulling over what it means to be lost while circling around a quote by Meno:

How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?

She has also liberally quoted Thoreau and Virginia Woolf. Yup, this book and I are going to get on just fine.

Ah, vacation has begun. I can feel the stress already beginning to melt away. I have more LexisNexis searching to do for school tonight but I hope to be able to spend some time reading too, enough time for me to be able to have something of interest to post about tomorrow other than a quote or links. Of course, Maybe I’ll have a made gardener story to tell too.

In the meantime, I was not surprised to find this article in the New York Times that reports on a Department of Education report that has reviewed the results of President Bush’s $1billion a year Reading First program and found it wanting. Reading First is intended to improve the reading comprehension of of low-income children. The program, according to the Department of Education report has not improved reading scores. Can’t say that it’s much of a surprise really, I mean look whose idea it was. And to top that off there are allegations that federal officials and private contractors with ties to publishers “advised” educators on what reading materials to buy. There are also emails in which educators who wanted to follow an alternative curriculum as “dirtbags” who were “trying to crash our party.” Nope, no surprise that the program is a failure.

If that has gotten you down, check out the high school kids at the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest. These kids memorize and perform poems to compete for a $20,000 scholarship. The are bright and love poetry and totally get the poems they are reciting. They are truly inspiring.

I’ve not been able to do much reading lately. Or rather, when I have been able to read, I have been pouring over the big plant sale catalog (an annual fundraiser for the Friends’ school) and mapping out my plant-buying trajectory for Friday. In order not to get bogged down in the mass of mad gardeners, one has to have a plan.

School has also kept me busy. We have now moved on to learning how to use LexisNexis Academic. I can’t say that I like it very much. Instead of being able to type in the commands, I have to choose from drop down lists and check boxes. Blech. I know that’s supposed to make it easy and user friendly, but I hate it. It looks messy and I feel like my search is not entirely in my control.

I did get to read more of Larry McMurty’s Books: A Memoir at lunch the other day. It continues to be enjoyable. He writes like we’re talking over coffee; the conversation hops from here to there and then over there and then winds its way back to where it started only to move out from there in a different direction.

Since I’ve not had much chance to read of late, I thought I’d toss out a bit of the passage I mentioned not long ago–last week was it? or the week before?–on Homer in Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations. The passage is very long and involves Golberg expounding on The Odyssey and the character of Odysseus and why Homer depicts Odysseus as a liar. After doing some comparing and contrasting of Odysseus, Achilles and Hector and why Odysseus finds lying necessary (homecoming, it’s all about homecoming and very well put too), we come to this:

You ask me, Goldberg says, why Homer makes Odysseus a liar, and how he can square that with his presentation of him as the hero of his epic. The answer, I suspect, is that only he who holds firmly to a course of action he knows to be right can lie well. Mētis, cunning, requires the ability to keep silent when need be, and the ability to lie convincingly when that is required. However, I am sure you are right in suggesting that Odysseus seems to take pleasure in his lies in ways we would perhaps find reprehensible today. But is it not perhaps we who are at fault? asks Goldberg. Do we not have too anxious a relation to truth? Earlier ages, which trusted more in providence than we do, were not afraid of lies, saw them, in fact, as being necessary as speech itself to man in his dealings with others. The source of Odysseus’ lies is the same as the source of his cunning and endurance: an energy which is confident in its goal and relishes all challenges. For there is no doubt that Odysseus goes out of his way to seek adventures, whether in the den of the Cyclops or even, disguised, in his own home. The protection of Athena gives him the confidence to scheme, disguise himself and lie. Or perhaps Homer merely calls such confidence the living of a life under the protection of a goddess.

I still don’t like Odysseus, but after that, I feel like I understand him a little better.

Last week when I asked for suggestions of great books for armchair traveling I had no idea I would get the response I did. My TBR list has grown exponentially because of all the great recommendations. Because I shouldn’t be the only one with a list like this, here it is.

• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskel. Victorian England
• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. Kenya. I read this after the movie came out and loved it.
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Bombay/Mumbai
• Peony in Love by Lisa See. China
• Death at La Fenice: a Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon. Venice
• Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski. India, China, Africa
• Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron. The Silk Road, China, Iran, Turkey
• Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk. Istanbul
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. 1920s Paris
• Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris by Sarah Turnbull. Paris
• Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia by Chris Stewart. Spain
• Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From by Fred Pearce
• Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes. Russia
• From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, In Xanadu: A Quest (following Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu), City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters, all are by William Dalrymple
• The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I’ve read this one and can say it is marvelous.
• Yoga for People Who Can’t Be bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer. Amsterdam, Cambodia, Rome, Indonesia, New Orleans, Libya, and places in between.
• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, both by Rebecca Solnit
• The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. Afghanistan
• Kilvert’s Diary, 1870-1879 Francis Kilvert. Welsh borderlands, Victorian era
• Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson. Pakistan and Afghanistan
• Travels into the Interior of Africa by Mungo Park. 1795 West Africa
• Travels in West Africa by Mary Kingsley. Unmarried Victorian lady in Africa.
• Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean by Paul Theroux
• A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller by Frances Mayes
• Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World by Paul Bowles
• Man Who Walked Through Time: The Story of the First Trip Afoot Through the Grand Canyon by Colin Fletcher
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail and In a Sunburned Country (Australia) by Bill Bryson
• Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam by Andrew Pham
• Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines by Anthony Bourdain
• Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman by Alice Steinbach (Paris, Oxford, Milan)
• Don’t Let’s Go the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood and Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller
• Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude by Dava Sobel
• War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, Señior Vivo and the Coca Lord, and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman by Louis de Bernieres (fictional South American country)
• The 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames (following Agatha Christie from London to Baghdad on a train)
• 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe by Mark Jacobson
• Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton (Matterhorn, Gibraltar and other places)
• Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir by Ella Maillart and News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir by Peter Fleming (Maillart and Fleming were companions on the same trip in 1935)
• Frontiers of Heaven: A Journey to the End of China by Stanley Stewart
• Sahara by Michael Palin
• In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Blue Highways: A Journey into America by William Least Heat-Moon
• Around Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks

And if that’s not enough, for more ideas there is Longitude, recommended reading for travelers and World Hum, travel dispatches from a shrinking planet.

Whew! That’s enough to keep me “traveling” for years! Thanks for all your suggestions.

For my vacation, I’ve decided to read one of my books for the Science 2008 Challenge, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost. And, of course, Herodotus. I wish I could read all of these books they sound so good! I’m halfway through my quarter at school so I will have to plan another “trip” when I get two-week break between classes.

Emerson’s Editor’s Address was published in the first issue of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, December, 1847. Through the miracles of the Internet and Google’s Book Search, you can read the while magazine. Emerson, Theodore Parker and James Elliot Cabot were the editors of the quarterly which was, to an extent, the successor to The Dial. It was a literary, philosophical, and humanitarian journal whose pages hosted James Russell Lowell, Julia Ward Howe and Henry James (the elder) before its demise in 1850.

In Emerson’s inaugural address, he writes on themes that will be familiar to anyone who has been following along on this Emerson journey of mine. He begins by praising the ingenuity of Americans and the progress technology has brought–trains and telegraphs moving people and information faster than ever before. He marvels at the power such things bring to a country and its people. But of course we are waiting for the other shoe to drop, and, of course, it does:

The aspect this country presents is a certain maniacal activity, an immense apparatus of cunning machinery which turns out, at last, some Nuremberg toys. Has it generated, as great interests do, any intellectual power ? Where are the works of the imagination - the surest test of a national genius ? At least as far as the purpose and genius of America is yet reported in any book, it is a sterility and no genius.

But, on the one hand, as Emerson bemoans the lack of a “profound voice speaking to the American heart,” on the other hand he suggests that moral and material values are “always commensurate” and no one yet knows what new purpose Destiny has for those involved in “this sudden creation of enormous values.”

As Emerson moves from delighting in American prosperity to surveying the political scene, he flips again to complaining about a missing intellectual class. The sad and funny thing is, he sounds like he could be describing the current state of politics in America. The “intriguers” who only care about victory are in power and have “put the country into the position of an overgrown bully.” And in a time when the country needs leaders with the honor and strength to do the right thing, we have instead “a snivelling and despised opposition, clapped on the back by comfortable capitalists from all sections” whose governing philosophy is

Rely on us for commercial representatives, but for questions of ethics, - who knows what markets may be opened? We are not well, we are not in our seats, when justice and humanity are to be spoken for.

Eerily familiar.

Emerson soon moves to another favorite topic, religion. Emerson has mentioned many times about how his era is one that seems to be without a high degree of religion. In fact, many people appear to be searching for a religion. He didn’t see this as a bad thing since Emerson himself, though very religious, was not religious within the common framework of an institution. So it isn’t surprising that he doesn’t see searching as a sign of moral decline. On the contrary, he says,

that man need not fear the want of religion, because they know his religious constitution, - that he must rest on the moral and religious sentiments, as the motion of bodies rests on geometry. In the rapid decay of what was called religion, timid and unthinking people fancy a decay of the hope of man. But the moral and religious sentiments meet us everywhere, alike in markets as in churches. A God starts up behind cotton bales also. The conscience of man is regenerated as is the atmosphere, so that society cannot be debauched.

So, to sum up, in his first essay as editor of the new Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Emerson manages to set the tone of things to come by covering, in about 1,000 words, the state of American culture, politics, and religion. Lewis Lapham, eat your heart out.

On a side note, Emerson hasn’t been much in the way of tossing out words I have never seen before in the last dozen or so essays. He is back in form with this essay. I had to look up at least three words. My favorite: caoutchouc - unvulcanized natural rubber.

Next week’s Emerson: Woman

A few bookish goodies for you on this fine Friday.

But before we get to the books, all you Dead Heads out there may be interested to know that the band’s more than 30 years of memorabilia will be housed at UC Santa Cruz. My husband still has peace signs he gave out at Grateful Dead concerts. I wonder if UC Santa Cruz wants some?

Now for the books. Thank you to everyone for all of the armchair traveling book suggestions. I will be putting them all in a tidy list and will post them so everyone’s TBR pile can get bigger.

If you are wondering what books teenagers liked best last year, here’s a list of nominations for the 2008 Teen’s Top Ten, a teen choice award for books.

I’m not sure what to think of the UK Telegraph’s list of 50 best cult books. I’ve read and enjoyed a good many of them. Does that say something about me, the books, or the Telegraph and their definition of “cult book?”

And to conclude this brief posting, a video of the Austin, TX library cart drill team. They won the state competition and will not be competing at the world championships at the ALA convention next month. When I’m librarian, I think I might have to join a drill team just so I can get a hat.

And in case you didn’t catch the words to that last song, it is called “Librarian” by Haunted Love, a New Zealand band. And here is the music video. It both creeped me out and made me laugh.

I got the coolest book in the mail yesterday from National Geographic. Novel Destinations by Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon will be a perfect read for my approaching vacation. Since my vacation is just a vacation from going to work everyday and I am not actually going anywhere (a good chunk of the time will be spent working on my final project for school), I can play armchair traveler.

Via the book, I will be “touring” more than 500 literary landmarks in the United States and Europe (including Emerson’s house!). I will be making stops in Key West, Monterey, Dublin, Paris, Prague, London (how I wish I could live there!), and take afternoon tea at the Pump Room in Bath. It’s sure to be a lovely trip. There will be no lost luggage, mosquito bites, sun burn, bad reactions to food, or jet lag.

Going to grad school year-round sort of puts the kibosh on actually traveling anywhere–too busy, not to mention most all of my disposable income is paying for tuition. And I really do need an escape. So this book has got me thinking and planning on what other books I can read on my time off. I have Herodotus of course. I have also requested Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us from the library. Having grown up a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, living in landlocked Minnesota leaves me sometimes longing for crashing waves and salty air. So a “trip” to the ocean will be quite nice.

If I somehow manage to breeze through all that, I also have on hand Riding with Rilke by Ted Bishop. Touring the American West and parts or Europe on a motorcycle while also meditating on literature, hard to go wrong there.

Now, kind reader, it’s your turn. I have another two years of armchair vacations ahead of me unless I manage to inherit millions from a long-lost uncle or aunt (if you have millions, one foot in the grave, and would like to be my long-lost aunt or uncle, please send me an email!). So, what book would you recommend for an armchair vacation? Fiction or nonfiction, doesn’t matter, just as long as it “takes” me somewhere.

And one more thing, happy Beltane!

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia is a novel about memory–remembering, forgetting, trying to forget and attempting to find peace when forgetting is impossible–and about the past and how it affects the present.

Celia del Pino lives alone in her house on the beach in Cuba. She believes fervently in the good of El Lider and the revolution. She keeps watch at night to guard against another Bay of Pigs invasion. The way she sees it, the revolution has allowed women to do things other than stay at home and have babies. It has also given everyone food to eat and health care. Celia’s devotion to Castro (she has a framed photo of him on her nightstand), drives her daughters away. She also spends a good part of her married life writing letters to her first lover, a man from Spain, who left Cuba just before the revolution. The narrative takes us back and forth through time, moving fluidly between past and present, making it evident that, as Celia notes at one point, “memory cannot be confined.” She is right. We are our memories and our past, we carry it all with us into the future and pass it along to our children and grandchildren.

Felicia, one of Celia’s daughters, still lives in Cuba but suffers from bouts of mental breakdown. She despises the revolution but she is powerless to fight against it. She is a woman filled with pain and anger. She was always second fiddle to her sister who was their father’s favorite. To get out of the house and to get back at her father, she marries Hugo Villaverde and is banished. They have three children but their marriage does not go well. He cheats on her and does nothing around the house. He travels the world on business but it never seems like he contributes much to the household. In one of her delusional and anger-filled moments, Felicia sets Hugo’s head on fire. Her little way of telling him to get out and never come back. Felicia eventually finds comfort in santeria and is even initiated as a saint. Her mental break downs seem to arise as a sort of coping mechanism for her life. She loses herself in her imagination, but as she tells her son, Ivanito, “Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths.” However, she fails to see how her own imagination recreates the world.

Lourdes, the eldest of the sisters (there is a brother too, but this is not his story), married into a rich family. When the revolution came she lost everything. Not only was the family’s ranch taken from them, but one day when her husband was away Lourdes was brutally raped by three revolutionaries. She tells no one, not even her husband. She carries the secret inside her and even when she has the opportunity to tell her mother many years later, she can’t let it go. Lourdes, her husband, and baby daughter, Pilar, escape to New York. Lourdes buys a bakery and stuffs herself with pecan sticky buns. She is a bit of a tyrant and can’t understand why her employees always quit and why her daughter constantly fights against her. Her daughter says of her mother, “Maybe in the end the facts are not as important as the underlying truth she wants to convey. Telling her own truth is the truth to her, even if it’s at the expense of chipping away our past.”

Finally, Pilar, Lourdes’ daughter. She is a rebellious punk rocker and a talented artist. She has a connection to her Abuela Celia. When Pilar is still young she and Celia can communicate in dreams and thoughts. The connection gets broken during Pilar’s teenage years but is re-established when she is college-aged. It is Pilar that wonders most about the past and about memory. She has to come to terms with her Cuban heritage and what it means to her family. She sees the past as a fluke:

I think about the Granma, the American yacht El Lider took from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 on hi second attempt to topple Batista. some boat owner in Florida misspells “Grandma” and look what happens: a myth is born, a province is renamed, a Communist party newspaper is launched. What if the boat had ben called Barbara Ann or Sweetie Pie or Daisy? Would history be different? We’re all tied to the past by flukes. Look at me, I got my name from Hemingway’s fishing boat.

While Celia worries that no one has loyalties to their origins any longer, Pilar struggles to understand “who chooses what we should know or what’s important?” And finally realizes,”I have to decide these things for myself.”

I could go on and on. Dreaming in Cuban is a rich book and a pleasure to read. It contains some lovely gem-like sentences that encapsulate a thought or idea that have kept me, and will continue to keep me, thinking about this book.

Pop over to the Slaves of Golconda blog to see what others who read the book have to say about it. Then join us at Metaxucafe for the discussion.

Short and sweet tonight.

First, if you are in the Philadelphia area, the Frida Kahlo exhibit that was in Minneapolis over the winter is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Go see it is you can. The last day is May 18th and then it is off to San Francisco. The exhibit is breathtaking. I have never felt so emotional while viewing paintings before. And in case you are wondering why you should see the exhibit, or can’t go but wish you could, there is a great write up about in the New York Review of Book.s

Have you seen the Ecojustice08 Challenge? It’s not a reading challenge, it’s a self-challenge. Challenge yourself to finally take the steps you’ve always been meaning to to make your daily life a little bit greener. And, of course, blog about it. C’mon, join up! What are you waiting for?

To conclude with something bookish, Dante’s Inferno Test. Take the test and find out what circle of Dante’s hell you can look forward to spending eternity in. Me? I’m going to the first level of Hell–limbo:

Charon ushers you across the river Acheron, and you find yourself upon the brink of grief’s abysmal Valley. You are in LImbo, a place of sorrow without torment. You encounter a seven-walled castle, and within those walls you find fresh meadows illuminate by the light of reason, whereabout many shades dwell. These are the virtuous pagans, the great philosophers and authors, unbaptised children, and others unfit to enter the kingdom of heaven. You share company with Caesar, Homer, Virgil, Socrates, and Aristotle. There is no punishment here, and the atmosphere is peaceful, yet sad.

This virtuous pagan thinks that Hell’s LImbo sounds rather heavenly.