On Head Butler: 5.12.11

I can’t be the only person smitten by Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason. The New York Public Library has forty-one copies of the book in branches from 67th Street to Todt Hill-Westerleigh, and as of this writing, only thirteen are available. Forty-one copies! Why do so many people want to read Roiphe’s book?

Read my review of Roiphe’s memoir on Head Butler — my blogging home away from home.

This week on Bookpod Audio: Loving a mentally ill mother. Linda Appleman Shapiro talks about Four Rooms, Upstairs, the memoir she wrote about growing up in the 1940s and 1950s with an immigrant mother who suffered from depression. 6-min. mp3

Here’s where I’m coming from.

I wish every movie I saw had the effect on me that director Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street, Crossing Delancey and Chilly Scenes of Winter have whenever I see them (three times each so far).

Read my essay about Joan Micklin Silver on Head Butler.

Silly, vain creature that I am, I am reprinting word for word Jesse Kornbluth’s introduction to my guest Head Butler essay

As I write, there have been 200,000 Google entries about Amy Chua — and her book has only been out for a few weeks! After all that blather, why should you read one more take on Chua? Because — alone among commentators, it seems — Barbara Finkelstein did her homework. She not only read Chua’s controversial new book, she went back and looked into her previous writing.

Are you familiar with Head Butler? It’s a wonderful newsletter and website I subscribe to that makes recommendations about books, movies, music and even products. When I like it, I really like. It introduces me to popular culture I might otherwise miss. Like Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Michael Caine’s Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Moviemaking.

When it rankles me, though, it really rankles me. In mid-January, for example, the Head Butler, aka Jesse Kornbluth, published a glancing swipe at long novels. Now, a woman can take but just so much. So I fired off a (polite) note to JK telling him that I, for one, read long books that are well-written and interesting and named several I had just bought through Amazon. JK took my comments like a gent and graciously invited me to write a guest essay.

So, here’s In Defense of Long Books. I wouldn’t mind if you let JK know how delighted you were with my essay so that he can put me in touch with other culture websites that actually pay something, if only in the high two figures, as Calvin Trillin famously said about Victor Navasky’s pay scale. Not complaining a whit, JK! Happy to do it.

Note: In a couple of weeks, I’m going to publish an audio essay by Jessie Sholl. She wrote a memoir called Dirty Secret about her mother’s compulsive hoarding. All I can say is you’ll be itching to get to the last page.

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Borges was talking about Spanish literature, but he could  also have been talking about serious writing in the age of  the Internet.

In this Skype recording, translator and editor Suzanne Jill Levine (pictured) talks about Borges and his five volumes  of nonfiction and poetry published by Penguin Classics.

Read the transcript (pdf)

The Penguin Classics series: On Writing, The Sonnets, On Argentina, On Mysticism, Poems of the Night.

This episode is part of Bookpod, an audio podcast that features short audio essays by writers of lasting value.

Related links

The Borges behind the fiction: Colin Marshall talks to Latin American fiction translator Suzanne Jill Levine

From The Subversive Scribe by Suzanne Jill Levine

The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction

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The first time I saw Maecenas Norman,* he was sitting in on a presentation by a Yale professor who had devoted her career to the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. One of my graduate school professors had told us that

I figured that if Maecenas was teaching eighteenth-century literature at a university in New York City, he had to be smart. To me, though, he looked like a dumpy leftover from the early ‘seventies. The wire-rimmed eyeglasses, the button-down shirt and faded corduroy pants signaled that Maecenas Norman was one of these big intellects who could explain what happened in London on December 31, 1659 but couldn’t tell you what a carton of milk cost at ShopRite.

I ended up taking Maecenas’ “Politics in Restoration England” class. I still remember sitting to his left on the first day of the course and leaning away from him lest he gesticulate an arm into my nose. I remember too that the class did a close reading of a diary entry by Samuel Pepys, and I discovered that an alternate meaning of “secular” is “occurring or celebrated once in an age or century.” I remember all of this stuff because I had gone from seeing Maecenas Norman as a shlump to thinking he was a wonderful man.  He had the kind of expansive personality I love, and he really was as smart about the English Restoration as he was about shopping at ShopRite.

Hence began a crush that lasted for five years.

I wasn’t alone. Sandy, my closest friend in grad school, felt the same attraction to Maecenas, and apparently, so did the professor who said Maecenas was smart. Sandy said she saw her give Maecenas a more than platonic kiss.

I became so enamored of this man that I dreaded and yearned for my weekly Monday night class. I always came prepared to discuss the texts, but I also deliberated over what clothing to wear. For an oral presentation on Joseph Addison, I wore a black knit shirt with a lime green jacket, black pants and tiny Roman glass earrings. In addition to my talk, I brought along a sheet I created that compared 1660 (Charles II) to 2000 (Bill Clinton). Maecenas commented that the sheet I passed around was delightful and much “under-utilized.” I committed the expression “under-utilized” to memory, and until Maecenas utilized the word, I couldn’t imagine ever utilizing it myself.

You can always count on my delusional self to kick in

A couple of times, I fancied that Maecenas was as smitten by me as I was by him. One time, I thought he said “hello” to me in a low, confidential voice. Another time, when I visited him at his office to discuss a book idea, we had what I took to be a thrilling conversation with an undercurrent of desire.

The truth is that Maecenas never initiated any inappropriate personal conversation with me. In fact, he either blew off or forgot about a couple of my scheduled appointments with him.

“Maybe he’s not so great in real life,” Sandy said. “Maybe he leaves his underwear in the middle of the floor for his wife to pick up.”

Yes, you see, there was a wife. But Sandy and I hoped she would leave him for a woman, or for a man in the Office of Public Affairs at the government agency where she worked. Then Sandy learned that Maecenas had pursued this wife for at least a year, pleading with her to marry him. She thought the wife came from money too. How else could the Normans — one a college professor, the other a City government employee — afford the two-million-dollar Wave Hill-area house they lived in?

“Can’t love trump all of that?” Sandy wondered.

I came down to earth on the day I bought my co-op apartment. I passed Maecenas in front of the neighborhood Chase Bank and flashed him a big happy smile. He did not look nearly so happy to see me. I even had the distinct feeling he wanted to pass me by, but in the obtuse way of people who suffer from an unrequited crush, I buttonholed him anyway. He encouraged me, glumly, to get in touch with him if I wanted to talk about my book idea. When I saw what a hurry he was in to get going, I was cured. Just like that. By the time I rounded the corner to my new apartment, my crush had evaporated in a steam of humiliation.

Tess’ last amble at Stonehenge

Sort of. Until last summer, I was still taking an occasional walk past his house. Now and then, I would check online to see if he was still teaching at the university. And when a good friend of mine moved around the corner from Maecenas, I craned my neck to see if I could catch sight of him.

Even though I have run into my professor in the neighborhood only two times in eleven years, I still keep an eye out for him. Which explains why it was easy for me to spot him recently walking across a Henry Hudson Parkway viaduct, dragging a trolley full of books behind him. He looked so wretched that I wasn’t sure it was him. This fellow’s white hair was unkempt and he had a roll of fat around his middle. For the first time, I understood that my old emotion for Maecenas was powerful but empty. In a second, he had gone back to being the shlumpy professor I saw at the Mary Montagu lecture more than a decade ago. By now, though, I had a feeling that the shlumpiness I observed was more a part of me than him.

I thought, “How lucky for you, Maecenas Norman, that you married a woman who did not leave you for a woman or for a man in her agency office, and who stays with you whether you are adorable or chubby. Because what is caprice compared to a lifelong commitment?”

True, true. But, you know, a crush is one of those navel-gazing viruses that never completely leaves the body. It keeps you fantasizing about “what might have been” if you had met him first. You flatter yourself that he would have preferred you, and that you would have loved him better than his wife does. The crush itself is a sign that, sadly, you were always more interested in your own desires than in the guy as a real human being who, in fact, will get shlumpier, more white-haired and sicker as time goes on.

And yet the virus remains. I expect always to be curious about Maecenas, his family, his scholarly pursuits and his appearance in the neighborhood, as mysterious and iconic to me as Tess of the D’Urberville‘s last amble at Stonehenge.

A literary mind is a terrible thing to waste.

* All names in this post, except for those of public figures, are fictionalized to protect me from looking like a complete idiot.

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If you are just learning how to cook, you are probably overwhelmed by the number of cookbooks, food blogs and eating philosophies competing for your loyalty.

In this Bookpod clip, Tom Hudgens gives a brief overview of the recipes and basic food philosophy that went into the production of The Commonsense Kitchen: 500 Recipes and Lessons for a Hand-crafted Life.

Listen to Tom Hudgens’ Cooking and Eating Tips

Cooking and eating tips (pdf)

Listen to Tom’s longer audio essay on Bookpod: Cooking with commonsense

I interviewed Tom Hudgens at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, a farm-cafe on the Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills, New York. You can find out about the Center’s workshops, tours, celebrations and performances on the program calendar. If you’re in the NYC area, visit Stone Barns and see how the farming philosophy adds flavor to the word “sustainability.”

Related link:

Driven by flavor, a Krista Tippett interview with Dan Barber, the chef at Stone Barns.

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My most recent bout with insomnia came over Thanksgiving at my parents’ house. I got into bed around 11:30, which is more than an hour earlier than I usually go to bed. By two I was wide awake, tackling my problems, humanity’s and the world’s.

I should have gotten up to read. Fifteen years ago when I had insomnia, I read Crime and Punishment, Washington Square and A.S. Byatt’s Possession. I was freelancing back then and didn’t worry much about slogging through the next day in a stupor. I used to wonder what I would do when I had to work at a full-time job. Sure enough, at IBM, I had plenty of sleepless nights, and some afternoons I had to sit with my head in my hands while I dozed for a couple of minutes. Even more challenging was my rush-hour drive home on the Saw Mill River Parkway. I got to know a lot of music by Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen, Eva Cassidy and Schubert really well because they helped keep me awake.

At my parents’ house, though, I didn’t get out of bed to read. I lay awake thinking about everything that is wrong with my life, humanity and the world.

Gee thanks, Assange

The deficits in my life are few but provoking: No man, no second novel, and in a couple of months, maybe no job.

Humanity? I wouldn’t go back to sleep until I understood why the German people who were so bloodthirsty in my parents’ generation are so cooperative today that they are even willing to bail out Ireland. The fact that they do so begrudgingly doesn’t matter. So, they’re irritated. But nobody’s talking about putting the Irish in concentration camps. I was awake until seven in the morning and I didn’t come up with an explanation for the German psyche. What a wasted night!

The world? The problems here only underscore how powerless I am to solve global warming, a nuclear Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, an uncompromising Hamas and a weapons-amassing Hezbollah, to name a few dilemmas that gamboled across my mind. The fact that even people with power and influence do not have answers for any of these problems didn’t help me fall asleep, and I only have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to thank for that.*

Oh, and by the way, is there a God? Ask yourself that at two in the morning and chances are you won’t fall asleep until the new year.

Getting to the bottom of insomnia

On my sleep-deprived trip north on the New Jersey Turnpike, I tried to look insomnia square in the face. I decided my mistake was to tamper with my routine. Besides going to sleep earlier than usual, I also had skipped exercising in the morning and evening. I had sat in traffic on Thanksgiving morning, which added an hour onto my trip. And I ate meat twice in deference to my mother who insists that vegetarianism, even for one meal, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Maybe if I stuck to a routine, I would be able to get through any night with my eyes closed and my mind shut.

How’s that working out for you, you may ask?

Comes 4:30 this morning, after three solid hours of shut-eye, and good morning! I was able to fall asleep again, but I couldn’t turn off a dream about looking for my car in Manhattan. I scoured my parking receipt for an address, but this was a mess-with-yo-mind receipt, Dreamland’s specialty, and I couldn’t find it.

In charges my conscious mind with sensible advice: “You’re dreaming. Wake up!”

Hello, Conscious Mind! I’m an insomniac! Don’t tell me to wake up!

So, I’m fighting my conscious mind, which gives my unconscious mind an opportunity to butt in, and the next thing I know, I’m dreaming about a terrorist aiming a bazooka in my direction. People on the street duck for cover, and slowly, slowly, I do too. The terrorist looks black and somewhere between my unconscious and conscious mind, I realize I’m a racist. I can’t deal with that, so I start counting backwards from a thousand. By 5:00 I am blotto and still awake.

With three hours of sleep, I’m not ready to take on the day, so I do what I often do: I listen to WNYC. Even though I like the programs, I can count on the BBC World Service, the annual Hanukkah Special and Krista Tippett’s Being to tire me out. It’s one thing to worry about yourself, humanity and the world in the middle of the night, but who wants to think about them first thing in the morning? You might actually have to do something — and action in the real world is so tiring… zzzzzz.

* Here’s the SNL segment about Assange.

The photo credit in this post belongs to LOL Pups.

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“Insomnia” by Jorge Luis Borges

Of iron,

of bent struts of enormous iron the night must be made

to hold in all the things that have crowded my eyes

ll the hard things that try unbearably

to burst her sides and bottom.

My body has roamed through levels, temperatures, lights:

in cars on long trains,

in a banquet of men who hate one another,

on the jagged edge of the suburbs,

in a warm villa with dripping statues,

in the full night where man and horse abound.

The universe of this night

is as vast as oblivion, as precise as fever.

In vain do I try to distract myself from my body

and the vigil of an incessant mirror

which multiples it, lying in ambush,

and the house that repeats its courtyards

and the world that extends to the last broken-down

neighborhood

of clumsy mud and alleys where the wind grows tired.

In vain do I await

the disintegration, the symbols that come before sleep.

Universal history goes on:

the tiny course of death through the cavities in our teeth,

the circulation of my blood and of the planets.

[I have hated the crapulous water in a puddle,

the bird singing in the early hours.)

The tired, incessant miles of this suburb in the South

the miles of garbage-strewn, obscene Pampa, the miles of

execration

refuse to leave my memory.

Flooded lots, slums huddled like dogs, puddles of fetid silver;

I am the hateful watchman of those unmoving placements.

Wire, embankments, dead papers, scraps of Buenos Aires.

Tonight I believe in fearful immortality:

no man has died in time, no woman,

no dead person, for this inevitable reality of steel and mud

has to traverse the indifference pf all who are dead or asleep

– though they hide in corruption and in the centuries —

and condemn them to a ghastly sleeplessness.

Rough clouds the color of wine lees will stain the sky,

and dawn will come to my tightly closed eyes.

From Poems of the Night by Jorge Luis Borges, a dual-language edition with parallel text. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Efrain Kristal. General editor: Suzanne Jill Levine. “Insomnia” was translated by Christopher Maurer.

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This weekend when Pesha and I were visiting my parents, we binged on Scrabble the way other addictive personalities abuse gin. By the third game, my sister used my aptly placed “U” from my own seven-letter mop-up — U-N-S-A-V-O-R-Y – to play the word “S-Q-U-E-A-L-E-R-S. That’s a nine-letter word netting two triple-word scores for a total of 203 points. She slid into home plate with a final score in the 440s. I too had my best-ever score in the low 420s. Yet once again my efforts were feeble in the face of the Scrabble-meister.

One of my shortcomings as a Scrabble enthusiast is my disdain for so-called Scrabble words, mutations such as “na” — a variant of “nah” — and “tipi” instead of “teepee” — that serve to block your opponent from building out more conventional high-scoring words. Just because a romance writer once wrote about the steamy passion of an Arapaho maiden for a Nebraska cattlehand in a plains “tipi,” should the Scrabble dictionary legitimize the unauthorized spelling? On the grounds that orthography, not to mention human comprehension, profited greatly from standardized spelling, “tipi” ought to be banned from play. What’s to stop somebody — me, for example — from putting down “potatobird” if I can define it as a finch that flits from potato plant to potato plant? True, the word hasn’t made it to a standard dictionary, but maybe now that I’ve used it on a blog post, some Web crawler will ferret it out of the WWW and include it in the next edition of the Scrabble dictionary.

Pesha’s magnificent Scrabble score got us to talking about our small, unwitnessed victories. She consistently plays like a devil, peeling off two seven-letter words in a row, dropping the “Z” and “J” on triple-letter spots that catapult her leagues ahead of me, yet as long as she plays in such recondite venues as our parents’ home, nobody will ever know how good she really is.

In the same vein, it may well be that a Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded sound seventeen years earlier than Thomas Edison. But Edison had the pluck to grab the spotlight. Many of us little people indeed have a speck of singing ability, literary skill or Scrabble prowess, but unless we record it for posterity, nobody will ever know how we excelled. You cannot help but wonder what feats of intellect, artistry and athleticism occur routinely and privately without ever boosting us past the anonymity of our own lives.

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Speaking of unsung talents, this weekend I saw The King’s Speech, a movie about the struggle of England’s King George VI to overcome a lifelong stammer when the English people needed to understand him the most. The unsung hero in this case is the King’s speech therapist, Lionel Logue. He was an Australian expat without academic credentials of any kind, and yet he succeeded in helping George VI find a voice that inspired the British to fight against Nazism. I dare say most of us Americans never knew a thing about him. Go see this wonderful film and you will understand why Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth are such brilliant actors.

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Wherever you look — on TV, radio, newspaper or the Internet — just about every pundit worries about the economic and social decline of our country. It’s not only that we are living through the aftershocks of the credit default swap system, where banks, insurance companies, homeowners and brokerage houses played hot potato with each other’s mortgages. We also are living in a country where a mere ten percent of the workforce draws a paycheck from manufacturing jobs.

Some analysts argue that these jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor pools. Some say computers and robots have replaced semi-skilled work. While I don’t have the credentials to unravel cause and effect, I can say that I pay attention to the consumer goods I buy, and few of them are still made in the United States.

I did a little experiment. On Friday, I paid attention to the products I bought or used from the time I got out of bed to the time I went to sleep. In this post, I have made a list of these products and their point of manufacture as noted on the products themselves. When I couldn’t find this information, I noted the distribution center. I am still trying to figure out why some consumer product companies are shy about telling you where they produce their goods. Aren’t they proud of their factories?

I perform my morning ablutions

White Rain Shampoo. Corporate headquarters for Sun Products, White Rain’s manufacturer, are in Wilton, CT. Manufacturing centers are in Salt Lake City, Utah; Bowling Green, Ky.; Baltimore, Md.; Dyersburg, Tenn. and Houston, Texas.

VO5 Hair Conditioner. Made in USA.

Dove Soap/Unilever. Distributed from Trumbull, CT. Place of manufacture not noted.

Chandrika Ayurvedic Soap. S.V. Products. Made in Kerala State, India.

Colgate toothpaste. Made in U.S., Canada or Mexico.

Conair blow dryer. Made in Costa Rica.

Conair ceramic paddles. Made in China.

Clarin eyeliner. Made in Germany.

Decleor moisturizer. Made in France.

I am determined to age gracefully, so I do yoga, Pilates or Zamba at least once a day

Victoria’s Secret, yoga pants. Made in Vietnam.

Victoria’s Secret, tee shirt. Made in Sri Lanka.

Socks. I threw out the packaging a while ago and there’s no mention of the manufacturer on the sock itself.

Nike, sneakers. Made in China.

IBM logo product, neoprene yoga mat. Distributed by  Global Identity, a division of Staples Global Markets. It is not in the “Assembled in America” category.

Hand-made area rug, Persian-style (underneath the yoga mate). Made in China.

Nintendo, Wii. Made in China.

Netflix, streaming. Made in USA.

I try to be fashionable

Talbot’s, corduroy pants. Made in Bangladesh.

Talbot‘s, knit shirt. Made in Indonesia.

Victoria’s Secret, underwear. Made in Thailand; made in Sri Lanka.

Franco Sarto, ankle boots. Made in Italy.

Calvin Klein, jacket. Made in China.

I would prefer a bagel with cream cheese, but no can do anymore

Key Food Rolled Oatmeal. Distributed from Staten Island, New York. These are mushy, by the way. Better stick with Quaker Oats.

Bob’s Red Mill Flaxseed. No manufacturer noted, but you can write away for a free catalog at Milwaukie, Oregon.

Elite coffee. Distributed in Safed, Israel. No provenance noted. I don’t think coffee beans grow in Israel.

I put time and effort into cooking for friends

Ocean Spray, dried cranberries. Made in USA.

Ocean Spray, cranberries. Made in USA.

Manischewitz, Jason bread crumbs. Made in USA.

Naturally Good Kosher, pepper jack cheese. Red Apple Marketing, Farmington, CT. No provenance noted.

Schmerling’s of Switzerland, chocolate. Made in Switzerland. Can you believe it?

Chicken. No manufacturer noted.

Cream-O-Land Dairy, milk. Packaged at “Plant 442-169.” Distributed in Florence, NJ.

Tropicana, orange juice. Contains OJ from U.S. and Brazil.

Oneg, mozzarella cheese. Schiller Park, Illinois. I assume this is the distribution point. Do milk cows live in Schiller Park?

San Giorgio, pasta. Distributed by New World Pasta, Harrisburg, PA.

Bertoli, extra virgin olive oil. Contains oil from Italy, Greece, Spain and Tunisia. Bottled and packed in Italy.

Egg Starts. Distributed by Key Food Stores, Staten Island, NY. No provenance.

Spice Classics, garlic powder. Made in China.

International Spices, granulated onion powder. Packed in Yardville, NJ. No provenance.

Sweet paprika. Product information is in 6-point Hebrew type. I can’t make it out.

Fresh Express, baby spinach. P.O. Box 80599, Salinas, CA. How do they get the spinach to grow in a P.O. box?

Bought at Garden Gourmet, Bronx
Avocados, asparagus, mangoes, purple grapes, beets, limes, lemons, potatoes, one pear, garlic, one eggplant, mushrooms (Crimini, white and shitaake), walnuts. No provenance noted for any produce.

For the time being, I’m still producing Bookpod

MacBook Pro, Apple Computer. No manufacturing information on the machine or on the “About” tab. It may be manufactured either by Quanta or Asustek, both headquartered in Taiwan. (I am not including information about microchips or software.)

HP laptop with Windows Vista. No manufacturing information on the machine or on the “About” tab. (I am not including information about microchips or software.)

Rode Podcaster microphone. Made in Australia.

K-55 stereo headphones. Made in China.

Kensington mouse. Made in China.

Herman Miller Aeron chair. When I turned the chair upside to look for the manufacturer, all I found was dust — a lot of it. (I was mortified.) I did find a sticker that says the chair is approved for use in California, but you should not drop a lit cigarette on it. Incidentally, the ergonomics of this chair are over-rated — unless you do an hour of rigorous yoga before sitting in it. No other manufacturing information.

I drove to the food stores in a Honda that has Sunoco gas in the tank. It’s beyond the purview of this blog post to dissect how and where the Honda is manufactured.

As for Sunoco, it has refineries in Tulsa, Albert (Canada), Ohio and Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo, among other locations. The company is headquartered in Philadelphia.

I dress for dinner

Ann Taylor, skirt. Made in Thailand.

Ralph Lauren, shirt. Made in the Northern Mariana Islands (USA) of imported rayon and elastane.

Franco Sarto, shoes. Made in Brazil.

Nordstrom, pantyhose. Made in Canada.

How are we doing?

In 1714 Alexander Pope wrote about the “globalization” of commerce in The Rape of the Lock. Back in the early eighteenth century, the “various offerings of the world” in Belinda’s toilet come from India, Arabia and Turkey, consumer goods that were emblematic of Britain’s wealth and imperial reach.

In the early twenty-first century, our consumer goods come from the East too, but, sadly, they only confirm how little Americans are producing.

Are you starting to worry too?

From Canto I, The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, 1712-14

“And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed,
Each silver vase in mystic over laid.
First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores,
With head uncovered, the cosmetic powers.
A heavenly image in the glass appears,
To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;
The inferior priestess, at her altar’s side,
Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride.
Unencumbered treasures ope at once, and here
The various offerings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil.
This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Transformed to combs, the speckled and the white.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.
Now awful beauty puts on all its arms;
Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace,
And calls forth all the wonders of her face;
Sees by degrees a purer blush arise,
And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.
The busy Sylphs surround their darling care;
These set the head, and those divide the hair,
Some fold the sleeve, whilst others plait the gown;
And Betty’s praised for labours not her own.”

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