In Which We Finger Plush Towels

How To Be An Anthro Girl

by KARA VANDERBIJL

It is the query on the tip of everybody’s tongue these days: how can I become an Anthropologie girl? This boutique is Urban Outfitters’ older sister, eating disorder outgrown and T-shirts intact; she wears makeup, has a job, and travels the world instead of riding around the block on her seven hundred dollar bicycle. The business supposedly caters to 30 and 40-year-old professional women who can afford their sky-high prices, but their catalogue has become the holy scriptures of every self-proclaimed “twentysomething” woman who is trying to make her way in this world. Admit it, ladies: Anthropologie is your happy place, and if you make more than $20 a week you have probably spent more within their four walls than necessary.

For those of us who can only walk past their doors with longing or browse their endless mazes of delightful fashions and home goods until we are asphyxiated by the stench of their exotic candles, here are a few tips on how to become a little bit more like Ms. Anthro:

* Shun modernity. No e-readers, Helvetica, non-whistling teapots, or mp3 players for you. You bask in the glow of a million candles at your desk while you write with a delightfully scratchy fountain pen. You will paw anything that looks like it was made circa 1960. In your most vulnerable moments, you pull an iPhone out of your Katherine Hepburn-style wide-leg pants, and pay $300 for a pair of oxfords that you will claim belonged to your grandmother.

* Use the word ‘culture’ a lot. As an Anthro girl, you are in touch with all the peoples of the world. You wear the fabrics that they made with their hands, and although the average blouse on the rack will cost you half your week’s wages and only return about a dollar to its original makers, you feel as if you are one with them. You are Elizabeth Gilbert, reveling in your spiritual transformation, your connection with the world. You might be able to say, “I got this tunic on my recent voyage to Bali.” There, you played soccer with the natives and sat silent around a campfire while they grasped your hands in peace. Your mere white presence makes their lives more tolerable, and you give them meaning by blogging about them.

* Take up eerily attractive hobbies. Nothing comes to you more naturally than riding a bicycle or the study of ancient textiles. People flock to you like moths to a flame when you mention a proclivity towards interpretive dance routines of Out of Africa. You offer workshops on flower arrangement in wind instruments at a local coffee shop.

* Talk about how much you love your city. Waxing poetic about the cramped train, the humid concrete, and the skyline you observed at sunset while standing barefoot on your fire escape in a chiffon dress constitutes the average weekday post on your blog. On the weekends, a few obscure poems delineate your emotions about an unnamed and possibly non-existent male. You show up at neighborhood bars wearing organic cotton in colors that have never before been seen in bars, and when you ask for gin, nobody cards you.

* Be wealthy, but not the kind of wealthy that makes anybody feel bad. Rather, just chuckle softly whenever you mention your latest trip to Europe or the top of the Empire State Building. “Oh, we rode camels out to Petra,” is the phrase most often uttered at the end of your summer vacations. You justify long periods of inactivity on white-sanded beaches by making sure they took place in third world countries, and you donate a dollar or so to whatever charity is currently advertising on Tumblr.

* Speak to your house plants. No comment.

* Deserve take-out. Nobody understands your depth of soul or your unique suffering. The love you experience, which you calmly and resolutely reveal by missing a button on your blouse or by weeping softly in your local subway, undeniably entitles you to eat any sort of fried food of dubious origin in the porcelain abyss of your claw-foot bathtub.

* Be a ‘natural’ woman. Nothing about you is put on; nothing about you is askance. You are at all times completely genuine and completely within your element (earth or water). You respond to crises by lighting a candle, by fingering plush towels. Plucking is out of the question. You crochet on demand, but only in penumbra.

* Never match. Yellow shoes are always acceptable. Plain black? Never.

* Always have the right dish. You have bowls specifically for walnuts, hats for afternoons spent indoors, and cups crafted for lemonade. They are charmingly chipped in all the right places. The Upholstered Chaise Lounge represents you as a person, like it did for proto-Anthro girl Betty Draper. You search high and low for ampersand-shaped coat hooks, and live in rooms comprised completely of ottomans.

* Spontaneously sleep outside. That’s what your outdoor bed is for.

* Say things like, “We’ll honeymoon in Mexico.” “I’ll put her in an immersion school when she’s born.” “Oh, I don’t eat frozen vegetables.” “This? This is the child I’m sponsoring in Nepal.” “I made these earrings from turquoise I found in the Arizona desert.” “I’d like to illustrate children’s books.”

* Become a selective eater. Refuse to eat anything not dubbed ‘organic’ OR anything that was not made whilst wearing a frilly apron OR anything that cannot be eaten with a grapefruit spoon. Revel in food groups generally embraced by the average rabbit. When asked what you ate for breakfast, your eyes glaze over and you mention tea and great gulps of oxygen. Your friends rave about your spread, but they generally mean the tablecloth underneath.

* Store things in glass jars. For some reason people still use plastic?

* Embrace the occult. Your superstitions—such as which sweater to wear while reading the morning newspaper — extend to your unguarded preference of zodiac-inspired dishtowels. You practice food augury, which you understand to mean eat as little as possible so as not to hide the design of the dish. When your favorite tea saucer breaks, you buy a new one.

* Become too knowledgeable about something. When asked about your favorite Stendhal book, your effervescent enthusiasm borders on hysteria. Medieval Italian music, multi-volume science fiction novels, and alternatives to name-brand cleaning products cause you to spasm in delight. Your eccentricity borders on social-unawareness just as your backyard borders on a virginal forest preserve. When asked your thoughts on any subject you retreat to an adjoining room moodily wearing too many scarves. “Years from now,” acquaintances whisper of you, “people will say we knew her.”

* Never be in a picture with a man, ever. You roam alone, from room to room, lit golden by the chandeliers in your lacy nightgown. Your wallpaper is peeling at the corners near the ceiling. You like the culture it creates. Another living being would upset the balance, put the brightly colored throws in disarray.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. You can find her website here.

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In Which We Say Goodbye To Gryffindor

Multiple Personalities

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
dir. David Yates
130 min

Voldemort dies. Through a slightly confusing turn of events, Harry sacrifices the part of Voldemort’s soul that was imprinted on him, dies, comes back to life, and kills Voldemort. Voldemort has an issue with being killed, because he has been trying to kill Harry since roughly 1997. The flesh melts off of his face and turns into black smoke and disappears in the sky. Early on in the film, his bare feet are covered in blood as he passes through rows of corpses. His presence is unsettling, although perhaps not in the ways we would expect of him.

Harry’s life has quite literally led him to this moment, to face off with the most powerful wizard in the world amidst the ruins of Hogwarts. His parents, his friends and his classmates have all sacrificed something to preserve him for this moment. Somehow, he and Ron and Hermione are still alive after chasing the horcruxes and destroying them and meeting up with people who are not on their side.

Conveniently, it is easy to tell in the wizarding world when somebody is on your side: they don’t disappear trailing a cloud of black smoke or have skulls tattooed on their wrists. The only person in the story with ambiguous allegiance is Snape, but he doubles for Dumbledore at a high price: the woman he loves must be protected. We have no chance to wonder if losing Lily Potter will push Snape to the dark side — he simply crawls back to Dumbledore. When people say they learned more about doing the right thing from Harry Potter than from anything else, I laugh a little bit. What moral isn’t represented in this story? Take your pick.

Yates saw the final two parts as quiet, almost reverent in their solemnity, and bordering on restlessness. The action lacking from the first half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows manifests in short, dream-like sequences. Any dialogue is exceptional, and for the most part, useless. Near the beginning of the film Harry and his friends spend ten minutes talking to Olivander about Bellatrix’s wand, but only three minutes are devoted to Snape’s early memories of Lily, Harry’s mother.

Where was Ron’s comic relief, I wonder, and does Yates know anything about what happened to Ginny Weasley? Or the centaurs? Or Hagrid’s half-brother? Or Dumbledore’s back story? Or anything else that Rowling wrote about in the series, except for Voldemort’s face?

Yates is obviously not afraid of Voldemort or else so afraid of him that he must ridicule him. If he hadn’t given Mother Weasley her “Not my daughter, bitch!” before exploding Bellatrix into a million pieces, we might have all stood up and left.

Choice and its many consequences run like a silver thread through this messy little movie, the final part in the coming-of-age saga we were all beginning to search for circa 1999. People choose to die for Harry for no apparent reason other than they are biased against noseless wizards. Hermione randomly chooses Ron over Harry, although Yates’ tête-à-tête between Hermione and Harry in a tent in Part 1 would have had us believe otherwise.

Slytherin punks choose to spend the duration of the grand battle in the dungeons, Snape chooses to remain faithful to Dumbledore, Malfoy chooses to be the stock coward, the Grey Lady chooses to disclose the location of the lost diadem of Ravenclaw, and Harry chooses to die. Some of it is fate, yes, but most of it is just long shots of Harry looking into the distance with Ron and Hermione behind him and nothing but angst over what should be done.

It was simple when it started. Harry’s voice had not yet changed and Ron was vomiting frogs into a bucket and Hermione was still the obnoxious bookworm. They did things a certain way because they had been programmed to, maybe by their parents or just Rowling herself sitting alone in coffee shops writing while her baby slept upstairs. Maybe a curse had left a scar with a memory in it on their foreheads. Voldemort didn’t have a face back then, he was just pure evil, and when you are little it is so very easy to hate evil and be plucky and play Quidditch and do right.

In a heartbeat you are at King’s Cross station and it is a little bit like Heaven and Dumbledore is there, but there is also a screaming baby covered in blood that has Voldemort’s face, and you feel pity towards it or perhaps a little bit of love. “Do not pity the dead,” whispers Dumbledore. “Pity the living.” No one is totally clear on what that's supposed to mean.

Harry loses himself for a moment in the bright white light and forgets what to do. It is the only moment where he vocalizes any sort of self-doubt. Why go on living, if it is such a pity? Later, he snaps the most powerful wand in the world in two and throws it over the side of a bridge. Suicide. This strange and almost blissfully carefree behavior underlies every current of heroism in the film.

Do you choose your end, or is it chosen for you? Few people complained about the differences between Rowling’s books and Yates’ films until recently. This is so rare in screen adaptations that it would be an oversight not to call attention to it. Perhaps what is most shocking to us is that someone should choose to see a story differently than we have.

We grow up, and realize we have no idea what it means, so we grow our bangs to cover our scar and run around trying to destroy the evidence that we are here, splitting our possibilities in half with every step. There is another film, another Harry Potter, another J.K Rowling out there somewhere where the other choices — the ones we never picked — live until they have names we can say out loud and faces we can see.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about books to read in the summer. She reviewed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One here. You can find her website here.

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In Which We Read To Live And Vice Versa

Summer Reading

by KARA VANDERBIJL

It seems unnatural to read in the summer, when the only thing keeping us inside is the occasional electric storm. That is why it is of utmost importance that we find the books that enhance our experience of it rather than taking us outside of it. There are books that would prolong your best vacations and pillow your head in the sand. Do not read anything that you will take seriously. If you must, purchase a book on tape and listen to it while in your vehicle en route to a campsite in Vermont. The machines that keep us alive throughout the rest of the year become obsolete in these warm months. We are quick to believe the same of books. In reality this is the most beneficial time to read, outside the constraints of academic or meteorological obligation.

Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute

Most memoirs of childhood are summer watercolors. When we were children, summers were long — or at least we remember them as such. Most of Sarraute’s autobiography, penned when she was over eighty years old, takes place in the winter. Within it she converses with a failing memory. Questioning the significance of events one must recall using secondary sources or reconstruct with logic, she shares all the sensations of her earliest recollections: the color of a sofa she destroyed with a pair of scissors, the cool indifference of her mother.

Sarraute’s tendency to bend literary convention shines through in this, her last of works, as she uses her own life story to question the human ability to remember. Because she does not know for sure that the events of her childhood happened in the sequence or in the manner she recalls, she must use the gift of invention to create a life for herself.

Book of My Mother by Albert Cohen

Cohen disguises his memoir as a eulogy to his mother, which will irk you slightly as the book progresses. I had no trouble finishing this short reminiscence of a move from Corfu to Marseille, of marginalization as foreigners, of the complex relationship between a Jewish male and his mother — but I did have trouble liking Albert all the way through.

His mother represents nothing less than a female ideal, the connection to another world and the safety of traditions; his regrets about their relationship read like the ranting of a lovelorn teenager. One particularly poignant moment describes Cohen’s embarrassment about his mother’s accent and her insistence on knowing his whereabouts at all times. His shame transforms her into a bizarre conglomeration of the Madonna bending over her child in simple adoration, and of the Christ with stigmata. Plow through the overwhelming waves of sentimentalism to find his purpose; the story will soothe any tension out of a family vacation.

Losing North by Nancy Huston

“To be disoriented is to lose the east,” roughly translates the first line of Huston’s book. This is familiar to me. To lose the east in Chicago is to forget, almost absolutely, where anything is. Earlier I was trying to find a popular Italian ice shop in the neighborhood. “Where is the lake?” my companion reminded me gently when I very nearly lost my head at an intersection. We followed the grid of this city back to its steel giants and remembered. You will relate to Huston’s small essay best if you are a third culture kid, but even a small trip overseas will affirm the brilliance of its thoughts on the mottled cultures and languages of the expatriate.

Huston expresses this jet-lagged sense of vertigo better than any other writer I have encountered. She plays with her bilingualism like other writers play with literary allusion, claiming to have found her voice when she mastered French during her years at a Canadian university. As the most empathetic and amusing of travel writings, it should find its way into your carry-on.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert translated by Francis Steegmuller

It is becoming apparent that I am incapable of reading anything in the summer that was not first written in French. What Flaubert’s letters say about him and the intricacy of his art delights anyone who has spent significant time reading his novels. “I’ll try to arrive some evening about six,” he writes to Louise Colet, his longtime lover. “We’ll have all night and the next day. We’ll set the night ablaze! I’ll be your desire, you’ll be mine, and we’ll gorge ourselves on each other to see whether we can be satiated. Never! No, never! Your heart is an inexhaustible spring, you let me drink deep, it floods me, penetrates me, I drown. Oh! The beauty of your face, pale and quivering beneath my kisses!” Tell me if you can find the same man in these pages as the one who knew how to best kill his darlings.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

To read this fascinating account of the World’s Fair and the people who had a hand in it is to become a true Chicagoan, I soon found out. Not for the faint of heart, Larson’s book follows the architects who built the fairgrounds — the “White City” — as well as America’s first serial killer, H.H Holmes, who victimized young women at the fair.

Do not pretend you are not fascinated with death and the men who choose to bring it upon others. Why would Larson choose to parallel the creation of a monster and the creation of the World’s Fair? The comparison is obvious — men at their best, men at their worst — and it employs all the good-versus-evil jargon we appreciate in a summer read.

Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet returns to one particular scene repeatedly in his novel: on a tropical veranda, a husband observes his wife and their neighbor, hidden in the penumbra whispering while ice cubes melt in their glasses. Although the tale rests on that most piercing of suspicions — the suspicion of unfaithfulness — Robbe-Grillet visits the setting more often, describing in painstaking detail the banana plantation, the way the sunlight hits shaded windows and angles on the grass.

This hostile environment, and the constant revisiting of the moment on the veranda, illumines the husband’s jealous obsession, as much as Desdemona’s handkerchief did for Othello. There is quite a bit of fruit in this novel. Is it possible to eat anything else in the summer? Very little satiates in the heat except the inkling that some other truth lurks beneath the details of the tiles underfoot, the soft linens of your clothing and the exchange of words in a moist evening. The dialogue in the novel rings false, but what is there to be said in August?

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Some Southern acquaintances were telling me about how you cannot live in downtown Charleston unless you are of old money, and then proceeded to laud the Confederate flag. This story should be lesson enough to read Stockett’s literary debut, should you read any bestseller in the next months. It alternates between the first-person narratives of privileged white females and their black maids in 1960s Mississippi, thus exploring civil rights on almost every level of society.

There are practically no male characters in this book, but I have not yet decided whether or not Stockett did this on purpose or whether she does not know how to write them. What the novel lacks in profundity it makes up for with its unabashed treatment of themes we thought to let lie at rest forever with Harper Lee. Read it before August 12th, and then go cool off in a dark theatre with the movie.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

The land is a wild, unpredictable thing, which you will forget until you run out of gas somewhere in West Texas with no Dairy Queen in sight. In Cather’s short masterpiece, several immigrant families attempt to tame it. Two characters share the kiss of infidelity at a gypsy wedding. People die off regularly, and a kitten is rescued in the first few pages. Must I convince you of its other merits? I do not know if you have been to a place lacking in human presence, but I have. It is a frightening thing to be alone with nothing but the sky.

What Cather’s characters dream of most is security and protection — the very things that the earth cannot give them, and that their conflicts prohibit them from giving to each other. We do not love this book as much as we love Cather’s My Antonia, because we have forgotten what it is like to want soil and to live at the mercy of the land. In writing about people that are strange to us in culture and desire, Cather reminds us of our roots.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. You can find her website here.

This is the fourth in a series. You can read the first part here and the second part here. You can read the third part here.

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Our Novels, Ourselves

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

The 100 Greatest Novels

Why and How To Write

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)