Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

In honor of Fathers’ Day…

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…here’s my dad, Murray Devine, who was far too rarely the subject of photos. Most often, he was the one holding a camera, trying to get all the people and places and things he loved to hold still so that he could preserve us forever.

This early Polaroid shot was so overexposed that my dad’s face is almost eclipsed by a pale, pale blur.

So thank you to Photoshop for bring my dad’s face back to me, many years later. I still miss him so much.


Oh–and here’s a shout-out to so many other dads I love and admire–Frank A and Frank J and Kevin and Bill spring to mind. You are the Babe Ruths and Mickey Mantles of Dad-hood. You stepped up to the plate and took your best swing–not just once but again and again. Sometimes you hit home runs–other times tried just as hard but your luck was against you. Thank you for your love and your courage and your perseverance. Those of us with dads like you are lucky indeed.

English breakfast as served at Oxford’s New College

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

…the breakfast toast-destroyer known as a toast rack.

In my NH growing-up family, we liked our toast hot–fresh out of the toaster and quickly slathered with butter. So your first bite of toast would be hot with a dab of still-cool butter on top, while your last bite would be warm, all the non-crust somewhat sodden with melted butter.

My first encounter with an English toast rack left me incredulous–was this a machine for cooling off hot toast and creating cold dry bread slices?

Now years later, I think I understand. It’s not a machine to make the toast lose heat, it’s a machine to keep toast from getting soggy. The English prize crisp toast that crunches. My family didn’t mind soggy if it came with buttery. The English way is healthier–but of course I like my way.

Suw Pre-event

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Or should that be, guess whuw is coming tuw Boston?

Suw Charman! The always charming Chairman of Britain’s Open Rights Group. (Does this make her an ORG-head?)

I’ll show you my wedding dress, Suw, if you’ll show me your tiaras!

Just finished writing a (rave) review on Amazon–thought this bit on its author might have general interest:

.. June Howard can discuss race, gender, and class while assuming a reader’s intelligent, sensible interest. Far too many academic authors treat these issues as if they were glowing chunks of kryptonite that might damage the morals of ignorant readers everywhere unless placated by an Author’s whimpering and trembling on our behalf.

The book is Publishing the Family by June Howard. To summarize my review: if you liked Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, you will enjoy reading Publishing the Family.

rex

Originally uploaded by simbi0tic star bubbles

In 1903, Mark Twain was already poking fun at his era’s version of Intelligent Design. For example…

According to Kelvin’s figures it took 99,968,000 years to prepare the world for man, impatient as the Creator doubtless was to see him and admire him. But a large enterprise like this has to be conducted warily, painstakingly, logically. It was foreseen that man would have to have the oyster. Therefore the first preparation was made for the oyster.

Very well, you cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster’s ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety of invertebrates, to start with — belemnites, trilobites, jebusites, amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen. Some will be a disappointments – the belemnites, the ammonites and such; they will be failures, they will die out and become extinct, in the course of the 19,000,000 years covered by the experiment, but all is not lost, .. and at last the first grand stage in the preparation of the world for man stands completed, the Oyster is done.

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it is reason ably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen-million years was a preparation for him…

Thanks for sharing to Tingilinde, where you can read the rest of Twain’s inspired nonsense.

Wonderful Tshirt hand-painted for Frank

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

what the back of this Tshirt says?

Thanks to Luis and Cinzia for Frank’s new favorite Tshirt.

Bloglines and Twitter underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
With good wifi, ’tis Paradise enow!

??
No, Omar, I don’t think so!

Originally uploaded by Orange Cremecicle

Susan Mernit astutely diagnoses her own reading shift to (more and more) on the internet. The New York Times and (more recently) Newsweek now look like problems in paper disposal rather than information–but Susan finds one very interesting exception:

“I am still a huge fan of monthly magazines–the womens/shelter/travel magazines that I get–Country Living, Oprah, Domino, Lucky, Sunset, Food & Wine, Blueprint–are tremendous fun and I enjoy browsing through them and savoring the photos, travel ideas, and things I like but will never buy.

So where’s the paradigm shift? Information versus entertainment.

Very astute, but let me shift her shift some more. I see the difference as more like fast food drive-through versus gourmet picnic basket.

Paper can’t compete with pixels on serving up small bites of information to people hungry for information that’s new–now!

Text on a computer screen can’t compete with printed take-anywhere pages that you savor slowly anywhere you want them–from deep in your favorite chair or on a beach blanket.

Mmmmm! Which not to say I don’t love RSS!

I was born just a couple of months before she died. My godmother and namesake, Elizabeth Jordan–a tiny woman, well-known in her long-ago day for her writing and editing, for her ostrich-plume hats and theatrical gestures. (Rumor claims she inspired the outspoken Henrietta Stackpole in Portrait of a Lady.)

By late 1946, when I was born, Aunt Jean (as our family mysteriously called her) had long outlived many, many admirers–for example Mark Twain (1835 -1910), Henry James (once rumored to be her fiancé(!)), and Frances Hodgson Burnet (1849-1924).
But when was Aunt Jean born? That was a family mystery, my mother told me, a deepest secret. My mother’s first clue to the mystery came when she brought her new baby, recently christened Elizabeth Jordan Devine, down from Massachusetts (where my father, post-World-War-II was finishing up at Harvard Law School) to New York City, where “the aunts” lived on Gramercy Park.
Aunt Jean was in bed, very sick, when we arrived–I was slid into the bed with her. She looked at me with great pleasure and whispered–though my mother heard–“Who would have imagined that this little baby is 83 years old?”
Even then, as so often before, my Aunt Jean was exaggerating. Because she herself was a mere 81 years old, having been born on May 19, 1865.

Toni Morrison

Originally uploaded by Careliu

From an amazing short talk I heard today by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, about the humanities in general and her writing in particular:

• “Standing on the outside looking in was a big advantage for me as a writer.”
• “We have all spent a lot of time and thought at the boundary, the border–at the edge. It’s a place the rich have to police. Those outside study the edge and plot to break through it. Those inside fight to maintain belonging or to belong someplace else.”
• “Literature is full of writers who betrayed their class (Harriet Beecher Stowe or Mark Twain) — who ran away from it to live in exile (Henry James) — who stood at the border so they could critique it (Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville)”
• “A ruthless gaze at the center, whether from within or without the circle–that is the strength of the humanities. It has been my way to be at home in the world.”

Many thanks to Al and Bethellen for inviting me, as their guest, to today’s ceremony to see and hear Drew Gilpin Faust awarding the 2007 Radcliffe Medal to Toni Morrison.

p.s. And my sincere apologies to Ms. Morrison that my reconstruction of notes scribbled onto my program fail to do justice to her own Nobel-quality eloquence.

Well, maybe not totally Polish, but now I’m *in* Polish, and so is Frank (who was half-Polish to start with) in a new translation of our book Longing for the Harmonies. More on my newly discovered Polish attributes: Betsy Devine Z wykształcenia jest informatykiem, studia ukończyła w Princeton. Regularnie prowadzi w Internecie blog „Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar” poświęcony różnym zagadnieniom z pogranicza nauki, polityki i humoru. Od 1973 roku jest żoną Franka Wilczka.

Thanks–I think! What a handsome cover design–I hope we get one of these. Thanks to Ewa L. Łokas and Bogumił Bieniok [sic] for this translation and to the busy bots of Technorati for letting me know the book is now out on the Internet.