Migration to .com

Happy New Year! 

It's time for change, for opening doors and for starting new projects.

 As of  February 1, 2011, this site will be closed.

The New Purlieu Review will no longer exist as a blog written by one person.  

Instead, it is being reconstituted as an online journal that will feature essays, poems, short fiction and artwork that will come from the larger creative community.

I hope that you will follow this digital migration and visit the site at http://www.newpurlieureview.com/ .

And please consider submitting your work by the end of March 2011!

Contact: newpurlieureview@gmail.com 

Suddenly, this summer

Summer came too fast to the Delaware Valley.  I'm backed up on obligations, constrained by heat, finding it hard to fit all that I need to do into these long days.  Seems like the perfect time to rethink The New Purlieu Review, which needs a burst of inspiration, infusion of others' input, and some old-fashioned shameless self-promotion.

Check back in July for the new New Purlieu Review.

The Poor Atlantic

We spent time at the Atlantic shore every summer when I was a kid, and one of the sense memories I can still recover from that time is the smell of kerosene.  We used it to clean tar off our feet before we came inside the cottage.  That ritual seemed normal, like showering off sand or leaving starfish on the porch to dry.  Below is a poem I wrote two years ago after visiting Lewes, Delaware. 
It appears in Freshet 2010.



30 Lines about the Atlantic

You might think it’s like this big tub of pickling brine,
aerated and wildly churning, able to hold every exotic
and unwanted thing – parrot fish, behemoths, barges
of municipal waste – so vast, accommodating and
cleansing, that when you stand on one shore under
a blue sky and watch coquinas wiggle down into wet sand,
you see only goodwater that nourishes magic – God-made,
cerulean, able to paint bivalves with yellow and purple
stripes; wash jellies and stars, horses and urchins to your
toes; make pearls; fill a bay with moony phosphorescence.


But from that clean edge you sense there’s spoiling
going on: upstream pipes pointing effluent into rivers, sick
watersheds and dying sea grass, oily sediment. An Aquafina
bottle, caught in kelp. Ulcerated flounder. Hermit crabs
scuttling aimlessly in the estuary. Horseshoe crab shells
everywhere, their primordial exoskeletons collected, made
into doorstops. A BP tanker on the horizon. Syringe
or two on the island. Coral, oysters, blue crabs, shrimp –
exhausted from filtering the relentless sludge and metals.
Even the herring gull seems glassy-eyed and frazzled.

You wonder when this happened, when something so poetic
on its frothy surface got fouled. How the ingress and egress
of humanness gummed it up – laid down boats and planes,
concrete and diapers. Whether our trash might hold back its
rise and retreat with the moon; why we build where barrier
islands shift; don’t notice that the water’s warmer – sense
only how it quenches the empty spirit – clear and sweet, azul.
We feel how sunlight rushes over its surface. Think nothing bad
can penetrate our pores, that we can lift its sweet foam in our hands
as the hot dolphin leaps, as the tired snail closes its pearly operculum.

200 Days of Galaktoboureko

My daughter, who is half Greek and a marathon runner, likes challenges and shared adventures. In the spring of 2007, we decided to attend all of the Delaware Valley’s Greek festivals – which in 2010 total 19 -- and evaluate their culinary merit based on their execution of one dish: galaktoboureko.

Unlike other Greek pastries, galaktoboureko is perishable, a delicate milk custard thickened with semolina and sandwiched between soggy-sweet phyllo. It comforts -- like lemon chess pie, cheesecake, tapioca or rice pudding. We loved the thick, generous rectangles of custard that were served by the ladies of Evangelismos of Theotokos, and the syrup-drenched phyllo that wrapped the servings we bought at the Annunciation festival. But best of all was the country version that came from the St. George Cathedral, baked with a chewy, thick dough that made it similar to a sweet kugel.

One Styrofoam carry-out container after another came home from the festivals and went into the fridge. We were specialists, evaluating quality, and unconcerned with quantity. Had we been less impressionistic, we might have learned that each 2x2-inch square of galaktoboureko represented at least 400 calories’ worth of research. The bathroom scale suggested that we abandon the project, and with some disappointment, we complied.

That anecdote is one of many that I’ll recall on this Mother’s Day, because it illustrates the nature of the relationship that I share with my adult daughter. In spite of the geographic distance that now separates us, we share enthusiasms and cheer each other on.  We recommend good stuff to each other: British mystery series on public television, short stories in The New Yorker, skin care products, flatbread pizzas and clever gadgets. We enter into self-improvement pacts, create challenges and consider joint projects. Some of them, like 200 days of galaktoboureko, don’t work out. Others, like producing a piece for This American Life, await us – ideas glistening, sweet as pastries.

At twenty-nine years my junior, and with a love of long-distance running, I admit that most of the energy for these new projects is being initiated by my daughter. But there was a time when I tried to plant seeds of inquiry and imagination that might ignite her interest: sharing the story of Miss Rumphius, the lupine lady; encouraging her to document the streets of Tarpon Springs with her camera; investigating the origins of a mysterious statue found in the Alleghenies; experimenting with the pottery wheel; making up stories about a family of Klutzes.

I was thinking, she said, earlier this spring, that we might both enjoy a trip to Ireland this fall.

The Cliffs of Moher! I said. And within the hour, she’d sent me the link to Galway Tours.

I am going to research Irish deserts. Imagine, eight days of apple barley pudding.

Darwin's Bra

My first was a combination of stiff cotton strapping with Banlon inserts that the ads said could grow with a girl. Like maybe you’d go off to camp, worried that people could see the unmistakable outline of hook-and-eye closures through your polo shirt, but by the end of summer, you’d be proud of your new body, cured of slouching, and you’d step off the bus to meet your parents wearing a hand-woven lanyard over fully-stretched cups.

By college, all that pubescent shame had been replaced with the timid exhibitionism of the lacy demi, that jiggling French cut that we had never seen our mothers wear. We liked how they looked under winter sweaters: a visible softness moving under the wool as if we were walking on the beach, instead of across the quad. We liked how they looked draped over a chair or drying in the sun. We had traded utilitarian garments for real lingerie, for an adult femininity that required girl gear.

In the next decade, many of my sisters – mostly in the English Department -- experimented with the option of going without. I made my own furtive runs to the grocery store in just jeans and a t-shirt, more self-conscious than liberated. I had passed the anatomical “pencil test,” read Erica Jong and Marge Piercy, but never mastered the detachment required to stand in the checkout line without remembering what I wasn’t wearing.

Flash forward to the summer of 2009, when I learn that the axis of the underwear world had flipped while I was sleeping and that someone has brought back not Sexy, but Shame. Silicone petal tops, built-in modesty petals and foam-lined T-shirt bras – a merchandizing movement motivated not by body acceptance but by loathing. Enough to make Don Draper crush his cigarette on the desk and stomp out of the room.

Nippies silicone petals allow you to convert any immodest bra into one that will “Let you wear today’s fashions and still keep your modesty,” one Amazon reviewer notes. The Bali Concealers Collection (genus, T-shirt Bra, species, built-in concealers) promises that if you wear their “revolutionary” bra, you’ll feel confident and look flawless. And for the most modest, there are Privacy Petals, ten-to-a-pack stick-ons that allow you to pass through an airport body scanner with your dignity intact.

Basically, the message is: erase the indecent evidence of mammalian function. Wrap yourself in foam or slap on adhesive tape. Engage in refining, not binding. Delivered within the shame-based modesty pitch, these garments speak to a new aesthetic that celebrates perfect globes, rounds them out with implants, displays them with deeper than ever cleavage cuts, presents them to the world streamlined, marble-smooth and stripped of nipples. Barbie boobs. Flawless.

Does the mysterious inhibition of the American bra recapitulate our attitudes toward female anatomy? Three decades after women were encouraged to fling off or burn their Maidenforms, stop shaving body hair and revel in being natural, they are being encouraged to encapsulate and streamline their waxed-clean bodies in spandex, plump up their lips and lashes, eschew natural as immodest and inferior.

It makes you wonder what may come next on the phylogenic tree of foundation garments.

Cultural Anthropology Gone Wrong

In a January issue of The New Yorker, TV critic Nancy Franklin, writing about MTV’s “Jersey Shore,”says, “Unless the show manages to make us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees, it hasn’t done its job.”

For those of us whose first introduction to anthropology was National Geographic, we know that there is a difference between how its photographs introduced us to the nomadic customs of the Maasai, and the way that MTV, TLC and Bravo have pulled aside the trees and invited us to watch. But even more alien than those fist-pumping Shore kids are Bravo’s contrived tribes of Real Housewives.

And yet, we sense that if and when we watch the Housewives chronicles, we can learn something rare and available only to those with special observational access. Not that what we learn is true; we realize that it’s more like a collection of stereotypes that allow us to feel better about ourselves, but for a moment, it often feels as though we know something.

For example, at any given time, we may feel that we know that the nouveau riche housewife is amazingly shallow, destructively catty, surprisingly stupid, or embarrassingly dependent. We buy into a scripted study of dilettantes who imagine that they should make a record, even though they can’t carry a tune; that they should launch a clothing line, even though they have nothing but sketches to exhibit; that they should create and sell jewelry, which seems like a shortcut to personal branding. That they should pose for Playboy because “it’s such an honor” to display your breasts at forty-one. And for another moment, we feel really good about ourselves because we are more realistic, less narcissistic.

And we also are led to discover that for the affluent women of Orange County, New York, Atlanta and New Jersey, the central focus of their lives is stirring the pot, back-biting, ruminating over real and imagined slights, investigating their friends’ pasts and engaging in endless neurotic competition.

Yes, their kids and their mostly bland but rich husbands are also worthy of their attention, but their focus is almost equally split between their wildly fluctuating loyalties to each other and their search for something that will make them feel, well, real. And then there are the lesser obsessions – with marble, wigs, dieting, breast enhancements, decorating, who has crazy eyes and who doesn’t, who used to be a prostitute or is still a gold-digger. Who says the most hurtful things.

I admit that I have watched each of the Housewives shows and that I have gazed through the trees too long. But unlike a real anthropologist, I have judged, not just observed, which is what Bravo wanted me to do. What could possibly be the point of these shows if not to give us a cast of real characters to examine, dissect, judge?

I think the New York Housewives are the smartest and the craziest. I like Bethenny Frankel and Jill Zarin, who don’t like each other. I think Kelly and LuAnn and Alex represent a less-evolved life form that somehow manages to dress up and go to parties and make chit-chat, but who will never, ever be Real.

And that’s basically all that I will ever “learn” about them or myself. That I respect most the women who have a strong work ethic and that I respect least the women who are kept and bored and mean.

I also learned that I feel unclean after I allow myself to be lulled into the moral superiority that Bravo has programmed viewers like me to feel: I don’t have money but I have my integrity; I’m not missing anything by not having money because having money didn’t prevent most of those women from being shallow, callow, vapid -- even stupid.

I see Alex McCord’s face on the screen and want to tell her how ridiculous her husband looked in those red leather pants, and then I realize that someone is watching me through the trees, making notes, and smiling.