Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff vs. Cleopatra: A Legend by Hollywood

I'm thick into reading Stacy Schiff's recreation of first century BC Alexandria, the opulent Egyptian coastal city that was home to the ancient world's greatest library and a 300 foot tall lighthouse that brought home fleets of quinqueremes, war vessels powered by five tiers of rowing slaves. The city itself was dressed in walls of alabaster, ivory and red granite and played host to elephant parades, political intrigue and extravagant banquets served on gold plates and scented with incense. And ruling over all, the legendary Pharaoh Cleopatra.

Schiff's new biography Cleopatra: A Life tells a true story as wondrous as science fiction, of a woman ruler believed to be divine. Brutality, excess, and marriages between immediate family members were the rules of the game. Fratricide, filicide, uxoricide and all the the other -cides were commonplace in efforts to keep ultimate control of the country and its wealth.

Schiff's accounting of this world is astounding, not just by the jaw-dropping subject matter, but by her work of faithfully tracing the story itself. The record is full of holes, the ancient accounts colored by contradictions, slander and sexism. "As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman," writes Schiff, and Cleopatra's education and power proved so threatening to her first historians that her early image had to be smudged out, then recreated as that of a sexy vamp, a seductress of great beauty, luring great men to their doom with her kohl-lined eyes.

But that is the Myth, the kudzu of history, as Schiff describes it, that rushes in to fill where facts are absent.

There is little evidence that Cleopatra was a great beauty, but much that she was intelligent and well spoken. Rich, resourceful, flattering, clever and witty, yes. A sexy seductress? Eh.

The mythologizing of the history-makers works to diminish the pharaoh queen who in life was capable of raising armies while exiled in the Syrian desert. Making Cleopatra's sexuality the source of her power instead of her considerable intellect, inspired leadership, extensive education or natural talent reduces her to a less threatening figure to the male power structure. Making her a seductress makes her morally suspect.

Schiff: "What unsettled those who wrote her history was her independence of mind, the enterprising spirit." To the first century poet Lucan, she "whores to gain Rome."

Modern movies did not originate the Myth, but have done much to perpetuate it. In a 1999 TV miniseries, a young and sinuous Cleopatra makes rolling out of a rug in front of Caesar as sexy as a veil dance. No surprise that the HBO miniseries Rome has Mark Antony calling the queen a wh0re before they preside over throne room orgies.

Even the supposedly "educational" video, "How Beautiful Was Cleopatra?" from the UK's Open University uses overtired sexist stereotypes and Playboy-style silhouettes to make its Neanderthal point:

"She did what women have done for centuries: used her sexuality to manipulate men."



While many films have exaggerated Cleopatra's sexual powers to the diminishment of her intellect, one movie seems to have gotten at least part of her culture correct - the opulent Alexandrian spectacle of which she, as one of the richest women in history, wholeheartedly took part.

I saw Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1963 production of Cleopatra years ago and all I remembered was

1) it was long;

2) it was overwrought;

3) it had less kitschy pleasures than my favorite sword and sandal epic, The Ten Commandments;

4) the two stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, began their tumultuous relationship on set, although both were married at the time; and

5) the excessive budget nearly bankrupt the 20th Century Fox studio. (Actually, the film recouped its $44 million budget - about $300 million today when adjusted for inflation - after a few years of theatrical and TV showings.) And...

6) ...there was this one scene, where Cleopatra makes a dramatic entrance in front of the Romans. The pageantry was out of control, with a wild parade of animals, dancing girls, colored smoke, a bird flock release and hundreds of men pulling a Sphinx-like parade float bearing Cleopatra and her young son dressed in gold. The first time I saw it, the scene looked to me like wildly inaccurate Hollywood exaggeration.

What a surprise to read in Schiff that Mankiewicz got it about right. She describes an Alexandrian parade: "a Dionysian procession had introduced gilded twenty-foot floats to the city streets, each requiring 180 men to coax it along. Purple-painted satyrs and gold-garlanded nymphs followed, along with allegorical representations of kings, gods, cities, seasons....Fires erupted and died down; lights flickered from statues' eyes; trumpets blared spontaneously." Seems the only thing anachronistic in this movie scene was Elizabeth Taylor's wink!

It has been refreshing to read Schiff's revision of Cleopatra's Myth that parses the legend into less simplistic likelihood. I can't wait to see what she does with the bacchinalia and the asp.

You can read more posts about Cleopatra: A Life here. I received a copy of the book from the publisher with no obligation.

Slime Envy: The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is the first June book for the From Left to Write book club.

Bailey contracted a mysterious and debilitating virus on a trip to Europe and spent several years in difficult recovery. Her book is not a memoir of her own illness, however, but the story of a tiny woodland creature, found by a caretaker, moved to a violet plant at Bailey's bedside and observed by the author who had nothing but time to study her temporary pet.

To a bed-ridden young woman for whom simply turning over was agony, the slow gentle movements of the snail were a perfect object for her entertainment, diversion and observation. Deathly ill and enervated, the author found the naturally slow snail offered lessons on its fascinating and unique physiology and habits. The book grows into a meditation on how the tiniest of creatures can alter one's perception of time itself and one's purpose within it.

The small book moved at, well, you can guess its pace, and yet every detail of the snail's behaviors, as told by Bailey, fascinated me. Thanks to her lovely prose (and perhaps my contrarian nature,) it was her loving and detailed description of slime that intrigued me the most. Yes, snail slime.

Did you know that snails secrete various types of mucus for different purposes? Did you know that when injured, they will produce a medicinal mucus full of antioxidants for healing? And a different kind to help them float over the irregular woodland floor? And yet another that allows them to adhere to vertical surfaces? Did you know slime protects a snail's eggs, keeps its skin moist, reveals its sex to potential mates and repels predators with its awful taste?

As I read these amazing abilities, all made possible by a secretion of water, salt and protein-sugar, I started to get a little envious of this molluscular super-power.

If only I had a thick gelatinous covering on which I could glide over the travails of my path! I could resist the tiny tickling fingers of my little Nora who still, in a last vestige of breastfeeding, sucks her thumb while massaging my belly. It's kind of sweet, but can set my teeth on edge too.

Oh for leaving a trail behind me of glistening grossness, instead of being the one who cleans the trails left by my little ones, their rooms of constructed toy cities, their bobble head metropolises and stuffed animal islands, the stair railings bound up with masking tape bridges for the tiny Squinkies to cross, the bathroom littered with dollops of toothpaste and webs of dental floss.

Oh for a thick protective coat that made me unappealing to menacing creatures. Not that I have predators trying to eat me up, but I do wish I could have left that young suit at the bank with a mouthful of bitter slime after he subjected me to his clunky attempts at small talk today.

"So... Do you have a job or are you just a stay at home mom?"

(This is the same bank where another Frat Boy In A Suit invited me and my daughter into his office with, "Come on in, girls!" Slime to you, Buddy. I've got twenty years and a degree or two on you. The name is Ms. Fey.)

Today I sighed and answered slowly, "I am a mom but there is no 'just' about it."

"Yeah!" he giggled. "I heard on the news that if you added up all the work that women do at home, they should be getting a hundred thousand a year!"

Yes, Blithe Young Man with your first job and and your no dependents and your probably equally unencumbered roommate, that's about right. Personal chefs can earn $50K/year. Event planners about the same. Cleaning crews charge $100/hour. Tutors are $50/hour. Caregivers get $200-300/day. Sedan driver rates start around $50/hour. Cipher it all up, add and multiply times two little extra-challenging sweethearts, carry the seven and you're got...a labor of love and an institution of inequality.

Instead of multipurpose slime, I may be better served by the lessons of patience offered by Bailey as her book's last words:

"Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail."

You can read more posts about The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating here. I received a copy of the book from the publisher with no obligation.

Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard

I started thinking about culture shock even before we left for Mexico.

Our little family had just breached the departure doors at O'Hare Monday morning a week ago to find a solid mass of travelers standing in indecipherable lines that snaked through the lobby. No signs or borders. Baggage check in? Security? I wouldn't interrupt the chattering teenagers who made up most of the crowd massed in front us to ask a question -- high schoolers lose half their IQ points waiting in groups.

A lone besieged airline worker offered information in the middle of a scrum of travelers. My dear husband Randy, too polite by half, waited patiently to cross the line of spring-breakers and began with "Good morning...."

I barged forward, barking, "International baggage check in!" I got a pointed direction and the reply, "Six."

It may not have been my best moment, but our flight was scheduled before 9 a.m. and I'd had four hours of nervous sleep. Hey, this is Chicago. We get the job done. We just elected Rahm Emanuel with 56 goddamn percent of the fucking vote, baby. Deal with it.

Still, an episode from Elizabeth Bard's charming memoir Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes rang in my head, chiding me as we found our way to check-in kiosk #6.

Bard falls in love nearly simultaneously with her French boyfriend and the cuisine of his native land. After months of soaking up and in Paris culture, she visits a cookwear shop with her mother, who has not yet learned the ways of the true Parisienne. Bard's mother approaches a salesman with a piece of pottery and announces, "I want to buy this." Wincing, Bard escorts her mother out of the store and conducts the transaction herself in the properly French way, polite and correct.

"What?" asks her mother on the sidewalk.

Where to begin? "You didn't say 'Good morning,'" replies Bard, who writes of feeling like she has "centuries of catching up to do."

The scene, like so many tales of culture clash in this memoir and in most travelers' memories, is about much more than a simple misunderstanding. Entering a foreign world means occasionally facing a volatile mix of cultural pride, personal desire, and the needs of the group versus those of the individual.

I was feeling what Bard calls "a cultural jet lag" as I drove the desert highway that leads into our destination town of Todos Santos later that day. Some portions of the road are dinky single lane with steep gullies on either side and occasional chunks missing from the white line on the edge. Some stretches are recently refinished blacktop, eight lanes wide, but with no markings, no yellow or white lines, and little guidance when your lane suddenly disappears and you hope the cars coming the opposite direction stay to the right.

Our host laughs at this and tells us a story of a town in the Netherlands that took away all their stop signs and streetlights. Car accidents became rare from the subsequent eye contact and caution.

Courtesy and care - it's not a bad way to move through the world, especially where you don't yet know the rules, but you already feel yourself falling in love. The trick is knowing how to execute that courtesy.

Brent tells another story of when he first arrived in the little town, keeping his head down as he passed people on their porches, until he learned, quickly, the abundant response his hellos would receive.

My little Nora calls a chirpy, "Hola! Hola!" to strangers out the car window. I wince, like Bard.

Two little old ladies in knee length dresses and black pantyhose walk slowly arm in arm up the hill in the neighborhood of Los Pinos. "I've learned to say, 'Buenos dios, Senoras,'" Brent explains, as he demonstrates a slow turn to face their precious and terrible dignity with a deep nod. Some early mornings on holy days, he and Serena can hear them singing, fifteen or so ladies, in a procession to the orange stucco chapel down the road.

The publisher of Lunch in Paris sent me a copy of the book with no obligation. You can read more posts about the memoir at From Left to Write.

Mrs. Seraponas Dreamed in Chicago

Natasha Solomons's lovely first novel, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English, is the latest book read by the From Left to Write Book Club. The title character Jack Rosenblum is a mensch, an irrepressibly optimistic Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who escapes with his wife and daughter to England in 1937. In love with his adopted homeland, Mr. R. desires nothing more than to naturalize completely and become a proper English gentleman. He becomes convinced to best way to do this is to create his own perfect golf course, never mind his near complete ignorance of the game nor his inexperience with landscaping manual labor. The first day he begins work to fashion his course from sixty acres of rocky hillside, Mr. R. wipes his hands delicately after each shovel of dirt. Such is the gentle humor of this sweet book, that by its stirring ending, had me cheering on the would-be duffer.

Author Natasha Solomons cites her grandparents' rural Dorset cottage as an inspiration for the book. The writer still lives near the former home of her grandfather and grandmother in rural southwest England, and fills the book with the charms of the county's folklore, with odd characters written in rich dialect who call our hero "Mr. Rose-in-Bloom" and with glorious depictions of the Dorset countryside.

By happy accident, I finished Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English this week, around the same time I completed reading my maternal grandmother's diary of the year 1933-1934.

My strongest memories of my mother's mother, Amelia Seraponas, are of her regal bearing and the beautiful white hair that she wore in a soft bun at the nape of her neck. Reading her diary for the first time, I have the chance to see her as a young woman, a twenty-eight year old with a new baby and a sick mother to care for, newly married to a man with an insecure job and mood swings of dark to light and back to dark again.

Set in gritty Chicago, rather than the bucolic hills of Dorset, England, my grandmother's diary tells a fragment of the hardscrabble story second generation Lithuanian-Americans lived during the cold heart of the Great Depression, yet omits the satisfying and triumphant climax of Mr. Rose-in-Bloom's epic undertaking.

In the winter of 1934, my grandfather Tony had left a milk delivery job to sell cookies door to door for an outfit with the deceptively sweet name of Mama's Cooky Company. Times were tough and sales were so slow, Tony had to add his own savings to keep up the appearance of meeting his sales quota.

Grandma tended my infant mother, Bernadette, cooked herring and eggs for Lenten dinners, cleaned the house, sewed and ironed, and worried about money. Her goal was to save $4.00 a month.

On a Thursday in April, Amelia writes of taking the baby to the grocer to pay $2.00 toward their bill, then to the coal company to do the same and order more heating fuel. Tony came home that night to tell her his bosses had been fired and that he would be laid off in a week.

After four months trying to sell cookies to households as strapped as his own, Grandpa Tony, along with twenty other salesmen, was fired the Saturday after Easter, 1934. "What are we going to do now?" writes Grandma. "Heaven only knows." My mother was five months old.

The next day, Amelia took the time to write the diary's last entry.

"What a beautiful day. Tone went out to look for a store. It seems Al Segreti is fired for being caught drunk, but he was still working on his milk wagon." So Grandma didn't write her happy ending, but she did fashion one with grace notes of hope. Perhaps her young husband would start his own business. Maybe he could snatch up Al Segreti's job. Even with the despair of Tony's firing, it was still a beautiful day.

I am left in suspense, but only because I want to read every day of the Seraponas's climb to self-sufficiency and safety, not because I do not know it happened.

The happy coda for the story of my grandparents lies in my treasure of memories of visits to their home when I was a child. Grandpa Tony went back to work as a milkman and he and Amelia had a second daughter, my aunt Joan. They saved enough money to move out of the city to Clarendon Hills, a western suburb with curving streets and enormous elms whose roots split the sidewalks into angled slabs. Aunt Joan remembers feeling as if they had moved to the country. Grandma worked at a nearby Montessori school.


To me, their home was as magical as the idyllic picture Solomons paints of the Rose-in-Blum's thatched roof home in the Dorset countryside. Grandma and Grandpa's front door with its dark wood panels and rounded window seemed the entrance to a fairyland cottage. My sister and I swung from the tire swing in the side yard and explored the musty basement where a homemade doll house hid under a white sheet. Grandma had made the back yard into a verdant paradise of raspberry and gooseberry bushes, mature fruit trees, and lush peonies. One day she showed me how to cut a giant stalk of rhubarb from the garden border, then set up a work space in the sun porch where I could cut the purple stem into bite-sized pieces with a paring knife. I washed the rhubarb pieces one by one in a small bowl of water, then dipped them in a bowl of sugar, and bit into their sour-sweet wet crunch. A taste of goodness, as full of love as the simple lunch Grandma made for me from a boiled egg with butter, salt and pepper next to a sweet glass of tickling Fresca.

Remembering the love infused into these simple foods takes me back to the other story line of Solomons's book, that of Jack's wife, Sadie, who initially does not share his enthusiasm for all things English. She sees his eagerness to assimilate as a betrayal of those loved ones left behind. To remember her father, mother and brother, lost in the Holocaust, she bakes recipes from her mother's old cookbook. In a bit of magic realism, the cakes turn out four feet high and those who taste them feel Sadie's sadness. This sharing of Sadie's grief gives her comfort.

The publisher of Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English sent me a copy of the book with no obligation.

The Earth-Bound Cook and the People Who Grow Her Food

Our friends Brent and Serena are coming for Thanksgiving! The entire family is thrilled, although the girls are a little disappointed that their dog Trixie and the baby burro won't be able to make the flight from Mexico.

We spent our spring breaks in 2007 and last year at Brent and Serena's village of Todos Santos ("All Saints") on the west coast of the Baja Peninsula, about fifty miles north of the tourist magnets Los Cabos. If all goes well, we'll return this March. We've fallen in love with Mexico.

A natural spring makes Todos Santos a literal oasis in the middle of the sun-baked yet beautiful Sonoran desert.

In Todos, agriculture not only supports the economy, but meshes with the landscape. Orchards and farm fields pop up between houses as you take the short drive off the single paved road of "downtown" Todos toward the residential neighborhoods to the north. Pepper plants rustle in the sun across the street from the hotel where gringos take yoga lessons. On our last trip, Serena described the scout troups who camped out in the mango orchard we'd pass every day. Rows and rows of tomatoes flourish next to the gravel road that leads to the unswimmable stretch of the coastline we called Killer Beach. I ran this route nearly every day of our trip last spring.

Sometimes the fields I passed when I ran would stretch away from my view, entirely empty of any life but the lush green plants, but occasionally I'd see a worker or two, fiddling with the water lines or doing other farmery work. Once I saw a man spraying the plants from a canister on his back. And sometimes those workers brought the kids, like the two boys who messed around in the back of their dad's pickup. They stopped their play to watch me jog by.

"They have parties in the fields," said Serena, who works in a school for the children of the migrant farmworkers who travel up and down the coast picking crops. She described the relaxed gatherings at twilight, where families bring picnics and the children play in the rows.

I thought again of the fields of Todos and the children who played there when I was reading and cooking from Myra Goodman's new cookbook The Earthbound Cook.

In between her intriguing and delicious recipes, Goodman offers mini-essays on the healthy planet lifestyle. Her "Twelve Reasons to Choose Organic" included this: "Choosing organic protects farmworkers, wildlife, and nearby homes, schools and businesses." She goes on to quote a 2009 study from the Annals of Neurology finding twice as many instances of Parkinson's disease among people who lived near homes sprayed with pesticides compared with those not exposed.

Farms are not operated by robots. They are worked by real people, often parents, whose children may need to come along for the day. It's no secret that the manual labor required to produce and harvest the crops that end up in our grocery stores and on our tables is often performed by vulnerable populations, who may have limited options and resources for child care and health care. According to the Migrant Clinicians Network, pesticide exposure may be one of the highest risk environmental hazards for migrant farm workers and "children especially are at risk." Even if they do not work or play in treated fields, the children of farm workers can be exposed to pesticides from their home, the surrounding environment and even the clothes their parents wear home from work.

I cannot find a more compelling reason for choosing organic produce than to lessen the risk of pesticide poisoning for children.

The other writers for the From Left To Write website are discussing Myra Goodman's book today. You can find their posts here. Emily, from West of the Loop, had this to say: "...the cookbook is all about cooking in a mindful way that is healthy for your family and for our planet — because aren’t those two things inextricably intertwined? For example, eating more vegetarian meals is both good for our bodies – because those meals tend to be lower in fat and higher in nutrients — and good for the environment because eating lower on the food chain consumes fewer resources."

The more I learn about sustainability, the more I see its theme of connection, like the intertwined benefits that Emily describes. And the more I learn, the more I believe a greener, more sustainable lifestyle is one that tries to connect more with the world, one that tries to examine where the products we consume originate, how they are made, and who are the people who benefit or suffer because of our choices.

By the way, I used Goodman's recipes for a beautiful apple pie with sweet crust, a chocolate-pecan cake with milk chocolate ganache icing and a delicious summer squash-tomato stir fry that used up the last of our CSA vegetables and herbs. I'll be trying her cauliflower "couscous" recipe soon.

This post was inspired by Myra Goodman's cookbook, The Earthbound Cook: 250 Recipes for Delicious Food and A Healthy Planet, which I received with no obligation from the publisher.

Interview with Emma Donoghue

The From Left to Write website has an interview with Room author Emma Donoghue today, including questions from yours truly!

Her novel Room was stunning to read and it's very exciting to have this added insight to her process. I love her voice and her sense and her candid advice so much. Here's a great quote: I find the parent-child relationship infinitely interesting; it changes every week, it’s never stable or symmetrical, it can swing between tyranny and zen-like acceptance, passion and banality every couple of minutes.

You can read the entire interview HERE and my original post here. And here is a round-up of all the posts inspired by Room from From Left to Write contributors. Writer-Mommy's post comparing mothering as a verb to motherhood as a noun is particularly moving.