Summer Playlist: Pink Skies, Blue Nights
carmel by the sea, california. june, 2021
‘Tis the season of beautiful sunsets. The following is a playlist meant for moments suspended in the space between day and night, which, in summer, is vast and wonderful.
The Smoothie that Starts My Day
I sometimes like to pretend that I am not a person who adheres to routines. I have operated for so long under the impression that to be routinized is to be incapable of going with the flow or trying something new. College has been a long exercise in trying to find balance between these two things. How do we create structure for ourselves that can also be strategically dismantled? I suppose it starts with a strong foundation, like if my life in college was Jenga tower whose early layers could never be toppled. This foundation for me is the mornings, the thing from which the rest of my day springs. A huge glass of warm lemon water, an equally large cup of coffee, and this smoothie, are the foundation, the crux of my routine. It is easy and consistently delicious and it is the perfect way to start my day.
Ingredients
1/2 banana
1/4 cup frozen mango
1 piece of frozen ginger, about 10 grams
1 handful kale or spinach
1 scoop @drinkorgain vanilla protein
1 stalk of celery
1 Persian cucumber (about 1/4 cup cucumber)
Filtered water (for desired thickness)
Optional: dash of cayenne, spirulina, chlorophyl or matcha!
March Escapism Playlist
I am finding it increasingly hard these days to be present. Maybe, that is because the present moment has been set, for a full year now, against the same, dreary backdrop of a global pandemic. Or maybe it’s because, one year ago, I was living in Paris and every day so much of the world felt at my fingertips. Or maybe it’s because its mid-term season in my final semester of college and Charlottesville’s perpetual overcast makes this corner of the world feel smaller, makes the days feel shorter, makes possibility feel confined to the four walls of my one bedroom apartment. Either way, this is what I have been listening to in the many moments throughout the day I find my mind wandering.
Banana Bread, Gluten Free and Vegan
Banana bread is perhaps the world’s most universal love language. It is the thing I make for my friends for wine nights and the thing I make for my family on cold and rainy New England afternoons. It is the bread equivalent of a golden retriever, reliable and comforting. Where there are a million iterations of banana bread, no two overwhelmingly dissimilar, it can be hard to know which recipe to use or even harder to try a new recipe after generations of using the same one. After my sister decided to go vegan and in an attempt to have an excuse to eat banana bread more often, I came up with this recipe that was a bit healthier than its alternatives and that accessible for people with diet restrictions. This recipe is a combination of many different recipes that I have either used or considered using and after experimenting with substitutions and different types of flours I was thrilled with how it came out. I hope you can enjoy too!
Ingredients
4 ripe bananas
1/2 cup coconut oil, melted
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup almond milk
1 tsp vanilla
1-1/2 cup gf flour (I use half almond flour, half gf flour mix)
1/2 cup gf oats
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
Optional: walnuts, dark chocolate chips
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare a bread pan with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
In a bowl, lightly mash bananas so that there some large chunks remain. Add in maple syrup, coconut oil, almond milk and vanilla. Mix to combine and set aside.
In a small bowl, mix flours, oats, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Add to wet ingredients and whisk until combined. Fold in nuts and chocolate in desired amount.
Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake for 35-45 minutes, until toothpick, when inserted, comes out clean.
Why Every Woman in their 20s Should Read Joan Didion
I came under the sway of Joan Didion’s writing somewhere in the fluorescently lit hallways of my college library. Didion, who is 86 years old, came into reverence in the 1960s and ‘70s with the publication of works, both fiction and non-, that captured the zeitgeist with an honesty that, at some point during the 20th century, was rendered unimportant. Her recent works, notably two autobiographical works about grief and loss, ring with that same honesty. It is the sharpness of this honesty according to which Didion has carved for herself a place in the modern canon of impactful writers generally, and impactful female writers specifically.
Play it As it Lays was one of her early works of fiction, published in 1970. And although it is a work of fiction set in the time at which it was written, it is not necessarily specific to that time, nor does it exist outside of any realm of possibility. From a New York Times review written upon its publication, “What makes the world of this novel…so heartbreaking and inescapable is Miss Didion’s selection of details. There is nothing superfluous, not a word, not an incident.” The world Didion constructs is that of aspiring actors and directors living in and around “hollywood” during the era of hippydom. What we come to know, or perhaps already did—maybe because Didion, in other works, paints this time very clearly—is that all of the “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” true to that time were just a means of subduing immense pain.
Maria Wyeth has been subdued. Maria, (pronounced “Mar-eye-ah”, she tells us) is the novel’s main character, if you can call her that, because really, the novel moves around her. The novel is told, for the most part, from the perspective of a narrator who peers into Maria’s life as if intrusively, but not in any commanding sort of way. This diverges from the other voices in Maria’s life, those of the people by whom she is surrounded, who are at once intrusive and commanding. Only at the beginning of the novel and then, increasingly toward the end, but in small ways, we hear Maria speak for herself. As Maria speaks, mostly, but not exclusively to men, you get the impression that she is speaking to no one. The conversation moves around her, avoids her words like one might avoid a pothole in the road and carries on unimpeded. (Opening of chapter 34) By what Maria has been subdued is described by Didion only as “the notion of general devastation.”
In some ways, Maria is what I fear most becoming, a passive observer of my own life. “Everything goes. I am working very hard at not thinking about how everything goes” Maria remarks somewhere inside the walls of a neuropsychiatric hospital. And in some ways, Maria is what women are at risk of becoming. “What no Didion heroine can entirely reconcile herself to is the split between what she wants and what a woman is supposed to do: marry, have children, and keep her marriage together, despite the inevitable philandering, despite her other hopes and dreams.” (The New Yorker) What we come to find out is that Maria never made for herself a decision. This is elucidated in a conversation with a woman who runs a small cafe in a small town on the edge of the desert in Nevada. Maria finds herself in the Nevada desert often throughout her life. It is where she was raised and where she returns to with her then ex-husband Carter who is shooting a movie there. There is nothing in Nevada. It is a cemetery of long-dead dreams, occupied by people for whom what came in on the next roll was not better than what went out on the last.” (3) It is the place where people become the product of choices that they did not make, the product of circumstance, the product of luck, or its absence.
It sometimes frightens me to think that we become our choices when I think of all the choices I have made that were not my own. Maria becomes the product of choices that were not her own. And she acts according to the interests of others. Carter wishes her to get the abortion, so she does. Les Goodwin wishes Maria to make him happy, and Maria does. The actor from that party wants to have sex with her, and so they do. There is no compliance in each of these actions, but rather a bone-chilling indifference as if Maria stopped caring about having autonomy in her own life many years prior to the story’s beginning. It is a sort of passivity, emotionlessness, that would be reminiscent of the man in The Stranger if only Maria had been a man. But it is in fact made sadder by the fact she is not. As if Meursault had the opportunity to care, but Maria never did. “Play It as It Lays…comes as close as any book has come to representing what repression does to the soul.” (The New Yorker)
At its heart, Play It As It Lays relays the reality that things happen, and there are no answers. What is so stark about this realization is that how it comes to be true for Didion in her own life upon the death of her husband, and the death of her daughter. “Life changes in an instant, the ordinary instant.” Didion herself is a starkly different character than Maria. Didion has made decisions. Maria has not. Didion was in a loving marriage. Maria was not. Didion became a success in her field. Maria succumbed to the pressures of hers. And nonetheless, the two find themselves equally at the mercy of life’s random, uncontrollable sadness. However, if it is true, as Maria claims, that nothing applies, then shouldn’t it be true of all things. What Didion exposes, then, is the rules we adhere to—from the side of the road we drive on to the roles dictated by gender and sexuality—are arbitrary. They don’t apply.
It is not inevitable that we, women, end up like Maria. In the same way that Didion used honesty as a means to carve herself into the literary landscape forever, we have the power to carve ourselves into the life that we most desire. All we have to do, it seems, is wake up and decide for ourselves what this is. Because ultimately, there are no rules but the ones we create.
Book Review: The Secret History
In the early hours of 2020, blissfully optimistic, I set out to read one book a month. As the goings of quarantine waxed and waned and as the beginning of the school year came, first into view, and then into startling focus, I was reminded why I had, in years past, been unable to successfully complete a year’s worth of reading as I had intended. That being said, as August came to a close and my reading list for the year sat at around seven books finished, I was most determined to not only finish this latest read, but to linger upon its every word. I decided to read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History after I read her more recent novel, The Goldfinch earlier this year, and I’m so glad I did. Where the books differ in almost every way: plot, pace, setting, character development, and conclusion, they shared one subtle but wholly significant undertone, that of profound philosophical reverence. In The Goldfinch, this played a role primarily in the book’s conclusion, with the last five pages unraveling moral reasoning like a spool of yarn that’s been dropped off of a cliff and which served as the context according to which the first 970 pages could be understood. However, in The Secret History philosophy played the part of a secondary character, the type who you come to realize, only in the end, was pulling the strings that made the main characters act in unusual and yet highly specific ways the whole time. The Secret History tells of the complex inner workings of a highbrow Greek class taught at a small private college in New England. The class is exclusive in nature and made so deliberately by its professor, Julian, whose past boasts celebrity dinner parties and extensive travels abroad. The students, of which there are only six, come from starkly different backgrounds themselves and are nonetheless inexplicably intertwined with one another. Henry is the only child of distant and extremely wealthy parents, who is the silent, but unquestioned leader of the group because he is also by far the smartest. Richard, whose life the novel tracks most closely, leaves behind his rather neglectful parents in Plano, California in the hopes of reinventing himself. The twins, orphaned at a young age, have a closeness between them specific to twins orphaned at a young age. Francis is loyal and honest with everyone besides himself. And Bunny, who comes from nearly nothing but acts as if he comes from much, carries himself with a certain confidence that masks his insecurities. It is their shared veneration for the classic Greek and Roman ideals which they study is so commanding, that, only in hindsight, may the story’s conclusion be seen as inevitable. As the eclectic and still harmonious group of six increasingly cut themselves off from the rest of campus, they form their own little secret society inspired by the ancient texts they study. Particularly, they become obsessed with Julian’s recounting of the Dionysian bacchanal — the orgiastic, hedonistic, drug-fueled rituals resulting in the dissolution of the ego — that the Greeks used to participate in. The group ends up successfully performing a Bacchanalian rite, shedding their rational minds in a quiet corner of the Vermont countryside. But trouble arises when, in their haze, someone in the group accidentally murders a local man and the group must collectively bear the psychological weight of murder, under which their bond begins to crumble.
Favorite Quotes:
“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”
“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
“ It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them.”
How Long Did it Take to Read it:
About a month. The pace at which I read the book ebbed and flowed to the pace at which the story moved. The beginning of the book took me much longer to get through than the middle, and there was a part toward the end where I almost gave up. However, the story never did come to a stand still, it always keeps moving, and as such, I kept reading. Worth sticking it out.
Where I Read:
Mostly outside at coffee shops once they began, slowly and then all at once, re-opening. Or stretched out on the futon couch in my college apartment.
Thoughts:
This is the perfect book to read at the beginning of a new school year as the close-knit, intellectual group at the center of The Secret History is in many ways the college ideal. However, as things fall apart for the students at Hampden College in a uniquely dark way, the book still moves along to the soft hum of the mainstream college experience we all come to know: parties and awkward exchanges in dorm bathrooms, late night studying and conversations about future plans. Central to the story, and arguably to the college experience itself, is the nature of relationships, their comings about and the qualities that make them enduring. However, as slow relationship building—the exchange of thoughts and stories, shared experiences—is replaced by feelings of obligation and blind loyalty, Tartt puts into perspective how lonely college can be, and what a person must sacrifice to feel embedded in a college’s social fabric.