No Posts: A Multiple Choice Exam and a Beautiful Sentence

Why no posts? In 25plus years of teaching, I have never given a multiple choice exam. Here goes. My first.

a. Because I was in California visiting my father-in-law.
b. Because there's no internet access.
c. Except at the public library.
d. The weather was cold and stormy.
e. I was VERRRRRY sick the whole time.
f. With various weird--and I hope unrelated--symptoms.
g. I could go on.

The answer, as so often on such exams, is ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Since I didn't go anywhere, I didn't spend any money. Oh, by request, we bought Miss Em several giant chocolate bars from Trader Joe's.

As always, the best things in life are free: we saw a rainbow and my father-in-law, a very brainy guy still at 92, uttered the following sentence:

I like the Prokofiev piece even though it lacks the structural transparency and integrity of the Beethoven

Is it not worth a plane ticket and several days to hear a sentence like that one?

My First Groupon! And a Good Gift Idea: Museum Membership

One of my colleagues who is kind of a shopaholic told me about Groupons (group coupons, but you probably know that). As someone seeking the attainment of TRUE--as opposed to FALSE--frugality, I tend to shy away from advice offered by indebted people who discuss how they "saved" $1000 on children's clothing (while spending how much?).

But I joined anyway, just to check things out. Groupons offers deals by your locality--hence, restaurants, massage therapists, and so on, will offer a discounted price IF (and only IF, as my math teacher used to say) a certain number are sold.

So far, I have deleted all offers without opening the email. But today came an offer for an inexpensive membership to the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. We've been meaning to do this anyway. In addition to its exhibits, the Ogden hosts Ogden After-Hours on Thursdays, with musical performances.

The membership should help us in our quest to get out and about more.

To tell you the truth, museum memberships are always worth the cost. Whether art museums (I have been a member of MOMA, Chicago Art Institute, and others) or children's museums or anything, the membership makes you go more. That's a good thing. Even if you don't go--shame on you!--you are supporting a cultural institution.

What a great gift too!

Are you a museum-o-phile?

Swap Your Closet and Other Frugal Tips

Like many others, we are cleaning up and cleaning out. Back-to-school time seems to inspire the task, especially for us, all in school in one way or another.

Yesterday, Mr. FS and I accompanied Lucy Marmalade to her yearly appointment with Dr. Guarisco, dubbed "my ear's father," since he performed two lengthy and complicated operations on a dangerous condition.

FRUGAL TIP #1: If you have to drive an hour to the big city for an appointment, at least try to do something else while you are there. We decided to have some family time.

FRUGAL TIP #2: After the appointment, we headed on over to Buffalo Exchange with 4 bags of stuff. We got a choice of $150 in cash or $250 in credit. Instead of taking the cash as we usually do, we took the credit to fund future shopping trips for Lucy. This is in line with our vow to buy mostly second-hand this year. Instead of shopping our closet, we are swapping our closet! Cool!

FRUGAL TIP#3: We then headed over to the New Orleans Art Museum, which has free admission for residents on Wednesdays. There are so many free and low-cost things to do in every community. Seek them out.

Can Iconic Design Be Frugal?

My blogroll is--to put it mildly--somewhat schizoid. In addition to faves who are living life in the frugal lane (Funny About Money, Revanche,Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Simple in France, Cubicle Wall, Shelley, Roomfarm), I also feature Duchesse of Passage des Perles, Deja Pseu of Une Femme d'un Certain Age, Hostess and, most recently metscan. The latter three write about style and design. They are the aesthetes of the blogroll. That Duchesse and Deja Pseu are francophiles is only a positive.

My most recent addition is metscan. Why is she on the blogroll? Today's post featured her Cartier tank watch, certainly an icon of design and style. But very very expensive, out of reach for many. You could argue, however, that such an item IS frugal, in that it will provide many years of use, and, in the event of financial disaster, could be sold for most of its purchase price.

Metscan is also from Finland (or Suomi). It happens that I went to Finland as an 18 year old. A friend from childhood mentioned that she was going on a trip for youth put together by Finnair: for $200.00, you got your plane fare, lived with a host family for a week, and then spent a week in Helsinki at a hotel. Even at the time (1976), this was a ridiculously low price. I got a rush passport (oh, those halcyon pre-terrorist days) and off I went.

My romance with Finland predated the trip. I loved art and design. In high school I had my student membership to the Museum of Modern Art, and spent many Saturdays moseying around their collections (And inevitably had to fend off the advances of older men. I did not realize at the time that museums were high-end pick-up spots). I just loved the Design Collection, many of whose items were of Finnish origin.

Recently, Metscan posted on her blog pictures of her daughter's Helsinki apartment. It was filled with iconic pieces of design: to wit, an Eileen Gray table. Now all these pieces are expensive. But I believe that they are also frugal, because they will last forever. In fact, some of the pieces in Metscan's daughter's apartment belonged to her great-grandparents.

The Eileen Gray table is $550.00 at Design Within Reach. You can buy a knock-off for much, much less. In this instance, however, I would probably go for the original. Over twenty years, the price difference diminishes.

I wrote a while back about how my parents pined for the iconic Eames lounge chairs. After 20 years of marriage, they bought two, for, I think $1000.00 each. That was 35 years ago, and the chairs are still in service.

I've already promised my son a Noguchi coffee table once he is settled. My daughter wants two of the Kartell Eros chairs.

So thanks to aesthetic bloggers on my blogroll, for all the inspiration. And to the frugality bloggers. Truly, if you take a look, many of the aesthetes are writing about frugality, even if not directly. Similarly, many of the frugal bloggers are writing about beauty in its various guises. Truly, beauty is frugal, just as frugality is beautiful.

I think John Keats would agree. Do you?

Frugal Food: What Would an Italian Peasant Do?

Thanks for your patience, Dear Readers. I am not quite "up to snuff," as my beloved dissertation director used to say, but I'll give this a try.

One reason I didn't want to write anything yesterday was because I was saving my strength for the 12 hour day I knew was ahead of me. In addition to my classes, I had to put in appearances at various events with a visiting writer: lectures, lunch, readings, presentations, ending with a pot luck at the home of my Department Head (to be known as DH in future mentions for reasons obvious to anyone who knows him).

As it turned out, the day was a delight. The writer, Richard Ford, was charming, and spent a lot of time with students, gracefully answering questions he must have been asked a million times (Did you feel you had to leave the South? Are your stories based on your life? What are your sources of inspiration?). The reading of the story Optimists was quite moving, and left me teary-eyed.

And, as for the pot luck dinner: we brought braised greens from our garden. Served room temperature with olive oil and lemon. This turned out to be a good choice because no one else brought veggies, aside from a salad left over from the lunch, and one of those vegetable trays with dip that you pick up at the grocery.

Of course, we were also motivated by the fact that we still have tons of greens in the garden and will have to pull them up soon. Plus we wanted to make something ahead that could be transported to school, hang out in the fridge for 12 hours, and be served without any further prep.

We have been eating greens without cease for the last few weeks. Except for one bunch of broccoli that I purchased in a moment of weakness, I have bought no other vegetable. Even with giving away bags of greens and offering some to various dog walkers who stroll by, we may still have to mulch some.

Some people are shocked by the fact that my vegetables have been lacking in variety. Tonight, after a rich dinner last night, we had potatoes with caramelized onions and--yes--greens! I am comforted by a vision from Under the Tuscan Sun. I must say that I absolutely detested that book, which seemed to me more about self-indulgence and shopping than anything else. But I seem to recall an encounter between the author and an old woman picking wild greens on the author's property. The old woman is my role model here. She probably ate greens every day too.

When I was engaged in a previous frugal enterprise that came to naught (reviewing the thrift stores of New Orleans--Katrina put an end to that project), I read a book that my then-partner suggested. It was about dressing from consignment shops. The author warned against the common problem of acquiring too much stuff because it was so cheap. She urged her readers to dress like a French person. The gist was that French women don't try to look different every day, they try to look good every day. Americans, as most of us know, have the opposite philosophy.

So I say, we don't have to eat different vegetables every day. We just have to eat good vegetables every day! Eat like an Italian peasant.

Any thoughts, Dear Readers?

Creativity and Frugality: Personal and Poetic Ties

The third post featuring the creations of the late mother-in-law of Frugal Scholar. Below is a coat made of ties. Clothing made of ties is nothing new: I remember reading an interview with Jane Gallop, an academic provocatrice (is that a word?), where she spoke of wearing a skirt of ties reputed to have been gathered from her sexual conquests. She refused, if I remember correctly, to confirm or deny those rumors.

These ties belonged to the late Henri Coulette, the closest friend of my father-in-law, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Henri died at age 61 in 1988. He was divorced and had no children. As I recall, a battle over his estate ensued; fighting it out were his ex-wife and a nephew, whom he had never met. Presumably, a Bleak House scenario followed. My father-in-law loved Henri and gathered these ties that no one wanted. Henri was known as a spiffy dresser. My mother-in-law made this coat from some of them.

Mr. DFS and I knew Henri was a poet. We looked him up on-line and learned that he suffered the tragic and accidental destruction of his second book. Here is a bit of what we learned:

Henri Coulette has the odd distinction of enjoying a cult, or underground reputation as an exemplar of what is often considered the most conservative mainstream of American poetry, the form-conscious, ironic academic poets of the 1950s, strongly influenced by the New Critics. Coulette's career foundered after the bizarre and accidental destruction of nearly every copy of his second book, but because of support from important admirers, and the resurgence of formalism in the 1980s and 1990s, he has come to be regarded as a poet's poet.

For more, see www.opus40.org/tadrichards/HCouletteGW.html




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Mother's Sweaters: Frugality and Art

By Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar

My mother was an indefatigable and creative knitter. She grew up with the early notions of frugality, which emphasized making stuff one needed, rather than trying to find new, inexpensive things to buy. She made almost all of her clothes, though she let us buy ours, and she built all our brick walks and stone walls, among other things.

But one of her real passions was knitting. This was partly because she could do it while reading. She was a fast and voracious reader, but I think she always felt that she should be doing something else as well—that “just” reading wasn’t sufficiently productive. (She and Ben Franklin would have gotten along very well.) My father built her a beautiful book stand so that she could knit and read at the same time.

She mostly knit sweaters (though once she made a 35 foot scarf—“for a giraffe,” she insisted). Although she could and did execute complicated patterns, her real passion was for creative combinations of various textures and colors, and no two of her sweaters came out the same. She would hunt out balls of yarn that had been discounted because there were only a few left—not enough to make a sweater, and so not worth much to most knitters. (Dr. Frugal Scholar scouted for her in Louisiana, and we still have a box of yarn in our closet that we never brought her.) She would use these remnants to make sweaters that were real works of art.

She also made other objects of what I suppose one would call art clothing, including a jacket made from zippers that she got a great deal on, and another constructed from the dozens of silk ties no one claimed when a good friend of my father died.

But her real passion, as I said, was sweaters. I’m not sure how many she knit; I know that she donated about 30 to be auctioned off to raise money for the Bandon, Oregon library. Others were given away, or auctioned off to support other charitable enterprises. There were really many more than she could possibly wear, but I don’t think that “use” was the motivation; knitting satisfied needs beyond utility, even though this might have been her overt rationale, and probably appeased her frugal conscience.

I took photos of some of the ones that we still have, and I’d like to offer a sample here, as a record of what can be made with the orphaned balls of yarn no one else wanted. So when I try to use every bit of my Meyer lemons, in some way I’m following in the footsteps of my mother.

Frugal Garden Art

(By Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar)
My mother was committed gardener, and after her children left home she gradually converted most of our small front yard (the only place with sun) into a fabulous cactus garden. (You can see photos of the garden at its prime in Desert Gardens, text by Gary Lyons, and photographs by Melva Levick [NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000]])

Louisiana, of course, is very different from California in all sorts of ways. It is not, for example a good place to go surfing or grow cactuses. I discovered the latter when, at the age of eight or nine, our son developed a keen interest in cactuses and we began buying one every month or so—the kinds in teeny-weeny pots that cost about a dollar or two. When a few outgrew their pots I tried planting them in a raised bed--specially prepared and exceptionally well-drained--but after a few months they began to rot. Too much humidity, too much moisture.
Eventually I built a long, narrow planter to put on the front porch. I filled it with a mixture of compost, sand, perllite, and vermiculite. This became our own little memorial cactus garden, and it has flourished (slowly) for the past decade and more. Since the planter is sheltered I don’t have to worry about too much rain and they get enough sun. I eventually built another planter and the two extend almost the entire length of the south side of our L-shaped front porch.


These cactus gardens have also proven the perfect place for all those beautiful little objects that you can’t throw away, but know won’t be taken at Goodwill: marbles, little plastic fish the kids played with in the bathtub toy cars, seashells, rock collection, dolls, Mardi Gras doubloons, etc. If it’s small and interesting (or has sentimental value), and I can’t part with it, out it goes into the cactus garden. It’s become a sort of magical space, the sort of place that, when I was young, I could have invented stories about all day. Some of the objects are a bit scary—the diminutive blond-haired doll stuck to the side of a cactus, the hologram of a human brain, now thankfully faded--but most seem just fragments of some other, perhaps better, world. I like to think that some child will eventually stumble on the fragments of this world and try to put them together again, as I would have done when I was under ten. And I’d gladly let her take a memento.


So if you have any little things—anything, really, from marbles to scissors to old doorknobs--just make a little temporary alternative universe.

At some point I’ll write about the lattice-work fence to which I wire the larger objects (often our children’s old art projects) that won’t fit in the memorial cactus garden.