Sunday with Soil, Sustainability, and Cinema

We went to the garden center today and picked up some more seeds and soil. There was a lot to be done in the garden this weekend. First order of business involved stabbing a number of holes into the bottom of a forlorn and lidless rubbermaid tub thus transforming it into a cuke-topia! There are two fair sized cucumber plants comfortably situated in there now. I also re potted another bean plant, harvested a crop of baby carrots, re-tied the tomatoes and trimmed the fuscias, tomatoes, and strawberries (which have amazingly started flowering again).  By the end of the day there will be some newly planted peas and lettuce.

Since it is Sunday I thought I'd put my dos centavos in about sustainability. On my mind at the moment is soap. We really love the new citrus Dr. Bronners. We use it for hands, dishes, and laundry. We've even cleaned the toilet with it. We get the liquid in bulk which saves on money and plastic. We also have a few Ecocloths that we recently picked up. This link is for a similar product since at the moment my memory on the exact brand we own escapes me. Oh, another thing about cleanliness and sustainability is the issue of chemical hazards in soaps, shampoos and beauty products. The website called Skin Deep will tell the consumer what products contain potentially harmful chemicals.  (cha-ching...maybe more next Sunday)

Tonight we're watching the film version of The Age of Innocence. I'm hoping it will be as well done as Ethan Frome.

Review and Updates etc...

So Ethan Frome (the film version) was not a letdown. It was actually quite good.

Nella Larsen's Passing was fantastic. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. If one were looking for a quick and interesting read I highly recommend it. 

Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" on the other hand is not my thing at all. We graduate students were instructed to read it for Women's Literature. We're discussing it tomorrow. Although I have a fair grasp of Freudian / Lacanian theory, at least the basics of it, I am not all that interested in it since I find myself unable or unwilling to commit to the underlying assumptions of the theories. Thus, my experience with Mulvey was tainted by my inner resistance to her premise. Nevertheless her rant regarding voyeurism and Hitchcock was fascinating.

I gave my presentation on Chopin's The Awakening in class today. It went reasonably well. The final product was a look at intoxication and archetypes as portrayed in both the novel and visual arts produced during the late 1890's. This topic will likely end up as the basis of my long paper for this class. 

Tomorrow I have a long day of meetings. Tonight I'll start another Wharton novel. 

Completion and Contemplation

Some what recovered from my first week of class I took the better part of today to finish reading The Fruit of the Tree. I was pleased to finish it and am happy to think that I have now completed six of Wharton's novels. Of course there are many more to go before I could claim to have read all of them. She completed 16 novels in her life and many other works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. I was somewhat perplexed by the ending of the novel, but I am sure it will make clearer sense to me in time.

In class we have moved on from Chopin to Nella Larsen. I am excited to be reading a work I have never heard of before from the Harlem Renaissance. This is a period in American Literature which I dearly love and have had little exposure to since Steve Brown's Modernism class several years back. Part of me wants to write about Larsen for my final paper but I am concerned that such a decision would result in a massive increase in work for me, not something I particularly need at this moment. 

Tonight though I want to forget everything class related and focus only on Wharton, whom I feel deserves as much weekend attention as I can offer. Tonight we're watching Ethan Frome. Although I was grossly dismayed by how The House of Mirth was adapted to film, I have hope for Frome. We shall see.