My Latest Score: The $20 Face Lotion.
After raiding my mom’s cosmetics cabinet in Naples last week, I was inspired to test drive some new beauty products, and facial lotion was a natural opportunity since I was literally scraping the bottom of the barrel of my L’Occitane face cream. Though I’ve been partial to L’Occitane for daily facial moisturization for the past several months (more on that and other skincare and cosmetic staples right herrrr), I thought I’d test drive a well-reviewed, less expensive moisturizer: Weleda’s Wild Rose Renewing Day Cream. I’ll keep you posted on results, but I’m highly partial to rose as an ingredient given its anti-aging powers!
You’re Sooooo Popular: The Perfect Gift for a 1-Year-Old.
The most popular items on Le Blog this week:
+One of mini’s gifts for her upcoming birthday!
+Possibly the chicest flat of all time.
+Adorable, Marysia-like swimsuit for a fraction of the price.
+One of the most convenient additions to my list of items I never travel without.
+Discounted cashmere WUT WUT.
+A super chic sneaker for spring.
#Turbothot: The Heuristics of Homer.
OK, the title of this turbothot is a touch on the pedantic side, but I can’t resist an opportunity for alliteration. I promise I won’t be as stuffy in the meat of it here:
I’m halfway through An Odyssey, and I’m stuck. It has all the hallmarks for being a Mapgie Must Read, as it’s written by an English professor, in memoir form, about his relationship with his father. (Check, check, check.) And the writing is superb. But I’m ensnared by a nagging technical detail I can’t unsee:
I did not know or recollect this, but Homer’s widely-studied epics (The Iliad, The Odyssey) were not actually authored by a single person; rather, the versions we read today are a pastiche of oral traditions and interpretations and re-interpretations by multiple translators, students, and professors that handed down and edited and translated the stories over time. For this reason, it feels illogical and in fact rather absurdist to approach the text as a textualist would — that is to say, as a scholar solely concerned with the structure, diction, figurative techniques of the text itself, completely tuning out any of the historical context for the work, because it was not written by a single author with a focused stylistic intent. And Mendelsohn is a huge textualist. Almost nihilistic, to be honest — he picks away at every single element of any given line until there’s nothing left on the bone: “this line mirrors that line, and the word choice here is reflective of this literary lineage, and the description of the mother here parallels the use of this word there.” It feels futile, to be honest, to exert so much energy on stylistic matters that were unlikely to have been crafted with such care; rather, the style is the result of hand-me-downs and edits and this person’s intuition and that person’s word preferences. So, in a way, Homer’s magnum opus asserts its own heuristics — it’s own method for being read. And to me, that method is not a textualist one. It’s formalist, maybe: look at the broad plot points and the overall patterns that take shape in the narrative.
But then.
As I was explaining this to Mr. Magpie over dinner, I glanced up above our sideboard and noticed my Prada Marfa canvas print (similar one available here). (And if you don’t know the story of the Prada Marfa installation, check it out here.) And it occurred to me that so much of recent literary study has completely abolished the idea that the author controls the intention of the work itself; in the case of Prada Marfa, for example, most interpreted the artistic intent to be anti-consumerist, but there were those who viewed the installation as just the opposite: a celebration of capitalist values. It was a reminder to me that the prevailing sentiment nowadays is that the reader/viewer is just as involved in the construction of meaning as the author/artist. So far be it for me to criticize a gifted scholar like Mendelsohn, engaged as he is in constructing meaning from the organization of the Odyssey, a text that we have inherited from so many contributors and that he has ever right to interpret as he wishes.
Thoughts? Reactions? Should I go back to eating my dinner in silence as Mr. Magpie undoubtedly would have preferred?
#Shopaholic: The Straw Bucket Bag.
+For some reason this Muun bag is way less expensive than the rest…not a sermon, just a thought.
+Another contender for the floral hoop trend we chatted about yesterday! (Under $60.)
+OK, these pants are ADORABLE. I love the way they’re styled here, too — but they’d also look great with blush!
+I’m sorry for the deluge of shades in the past week or two (can you tell I’m ready for warm weather?), but these are SO FUN.
+I like the distressing on this affordable denim jacket.
+These crewneck sweaters are marked down to $41 and come in the greatest rainbow of colors — I like the blush pink and the heather gray, and imagine wearing them with distressed denim (<<these are my all-time favorites) and ladylike flats (<<at the top of my lust list).
+I already write a lot…like, a lot a lot…but I’m curious about this. Does anyone use one of these??
P.S. A true love story.
I didn’t know the Odyssey was a textual hodge-podge either, though my first and last experience with it was in tenth grade, and mostly, I recall feeling indignance on Penelope’s behalf–it seemed extremely unfair that she had to spend all that time on tenterhooks while Odysseus gadded about. I hadn’t heard of the memoir, but I’m going to send it to my mother, as she’s reading the new Wilson translation.
I am so not up on lit theory, but I do believe that readers with more experience (textual or otherwise) will tend to come away with their own interpretations and relations, and I’d imagine the same is true for other forms of art. And I think this is a good, and interesting thing, for the texts we engage with are the ones that stick around. I’d also imagine that this chew-vs-swallow mentality would become more common as literacy rates rise and media becomes more broadly available. Though, of course, there’s also the art world trend of deliberately instagrammable installations — I suppose these could be seen as engagement or at least, as a whole, a critique of engagement, but to me they mostly seem vapid.
I like that — “for the texts we engage with are the ones that stick around.” How true. How many of the canonical works did I read almost glass-eyed — “OK, just trudge through this boring tedium so that I can write a paper and be do with it?!?!” — and then promptly forget. I just could not get into Dickens or Emerson, for example. But Antigone stirred something odd in me, and I’ll never forget some of my heart-to-hearts with Coleridge.