So E and I went to the Hirshhorn this weekend. It’s my favorite DC gallery, but I hadn’t been in a few years. For some reason, I totally fell in love with the way the pinkish green floor looked in my iPhone camera. Then I got mesmerized by the marble floor on the upper level.
I think the other museum visitors thought I was autistic, or retarded, taking pictures of the floor.
Call me crazy, but I think that the age of open, free publication has done something to debase or weaken the domain of thought in the West. Where are the really powerful and amazing ideas?
I want to Prague in 1990 because I was in love with the idea of samizdat, of an underground culture where ideas had power and to share them was risky. Until just a few months before I arrived, there had been something really at stake in typing out a copy of a play by Havel on your manual typewriter, sharing a mimeographed essay by Heidegger with a few friends, or translating The Lord of the Rings into Czech. That world disappeared, of course, and no one I suppose thinks that’s too much of a bad thing. But where did the world of the spirit go?
The Internet has amplified a global tendency, created a world where ideas are everywhere, free for the taking. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an enemy of this. I’m suspicious of claims to “intellectual property” and despise the ridiculous controls that corporations would put on digital writing, music, and art simply in the interest of profit. And obviously I don’t think states should censor their citizens or invade their privacy. But the price of the freedom we now “enjoy” has been a kind of homogenization of thought, a loss of the feeling that there is much at stake in any idea. Everyone blogs or twitters their every thought and feeling, but does anyone worry that fewer and fewer of these thoughts and feelings have the power to actually shock or amaze?
In the free capitalist countries there is the loss of the vital underground streams that nourished thoughtful persons living in Totalitarianism. The bookstores are full of books on any conceivable minute topic, yet do we really learn anything? We eat mental oatmeal, because there’s no meat anymore. I don’t think people remember what it is like to be shocked and amazed by ideas.
Am I wrong? Is this a childish proposition?
When I write for an audience, it always seems cheap, stupid. My best writing was ever done “for the drawer.” Secrets, I am starting to think, are worth keeping. Or at least, silence.
Here’s a proposal: That there is some intrinsic connection between secrecy and truth. If something is really true, at least philosophically, it has to be difficult or hazardous to divulge. Its audience should be limited, tightly controlled, or it should be made so obscure that only a select few will pierce its veil.
This was understood perfectly by writers of Alchemy’s golden age—the hermeticists in Prague during the reign of Rudolf II, for example: Devastating ideas are kept secret, shared with a very few.
M.J. Harper and others at the lively and interesting site Applied-Epistemology.org are more than a little suspicious that Beowulf, and with it most if not all of the texts written in Anglo-Saxon (“Old English”), are forgeries created in the 16th century. It’s a really interesting argument. The Tudor period was a time of incredible cultural flowering and it was a time when the newly conscious nations of Europe, including England, were hungry for documents establishing their ancient heritage and, thus, legitimacy. Every nation wanted its Homer. The trade in forged religious relics had died with the Reformation, but a vigorous trade in national and literary relics took its place, and it is likely that the libraries of the gentry, whence the contents of the emptied-out monasteries landed, would also have been full of fabrications — many of them created by out-of-work former monks and scribes.
The Beowulf manuscript in the British Library is the sole source for the supposed Dark-Age story that everyone reads in English Lit, and its provenance can only be dated with any surety to right around 1700, the first time it actually is mentioned as part of the Cotton Library collection. The fire-damaged manuscript however bears the signature of a well-connected 16th-century Anglo-Saxonist Laurence Lowell, and is generally assumed to have passed through his hands sometime in the mid-1500s. If Lowell didn’t actually have a hand in creating the document, he may have acquired it via his employer, Sir William Cecil, when Lowell worked in his household tutoring Cecil’s ward, the young Edward de Vere (the later-famous Earl of Oxford, who in my view is the best candidate for the real authorship of Shakespeare’s plays).
Not unconnected to certain players in the story of the Beowulf forgery (if it is that) was the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, also known as Bishop Ussher. He knew Cotton and used his library for his own research, and he also famously dated the creation of the world to 4004 BC, providing fuel for centuries of Creationist absurdity about the young age of the world. He’s the one who said that fossils were put in the rock to test our faith. It is really in the sphere of literature and history that we ought to be “creationists.” Documents may well be younger than they seem, essentially cultural fossils placed in the rock, made new to look old. More and more, despite initial misgivings, I am excited by the possibility that Beowulf is a far younger creation than anybody ever realized.
One of the reasons I always loved Beowulf and tried to get friends to actually read it is that aspects of it feel so weirdly modern. It has such wonderful aspects of sci-fi horror, for example: a resentful outcast monster lurking outside the light of the cheerful halls, preying on people at night, part of a race of creatures who have acid for blood. There’s a battle at the bottom of a lake. How cool is that? It doesn’t exactly feel like mythology, but like a novel. And then there’s the final dark episode with the dragon, which is totally classic. It’s a really dark and cool story, full of twists and turns and beautiful imagery of a misty, ancient Northern kingdom. This is why, despite Woody Allen’s quip that you should never take a class where they make you read Beowulf, readers are often drawn to the story and keep trying to make (invariably terrible) film versions of it.
The “acid for blood” thing has always stood out in my mind as particularly anachronistic for a story supposedly written down somewhere on either side of the year 1,000 and based on older oral tradition. Consider how vividly the poet describes it (this is from Seamus Heaney’s translation):
Meanwhile the sword
began to wilt into gory icicles
to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing,
the way it all melted as ice melts …
its blade had melted
and the scrollwork on it burned, so scalding was the blood
of the poisonous fiend who had perished there.
Alien, anyone? I’m not a chemist, but this sounds like a description of nitric or sulfuric acid’s affect on iron. Those acids were discovered by the Arab alchemist Geber in the 8th century, though were not industrially produced and widely used in Britain until, well, the 16th century. I have a hard time imagining a Dark-Age Anglo-Saxon scop (poet) or even a 10th or 11th century scribe writing such a description. What kind of experience would someone in Britain at that time have with highly corrosive acids? I don’t think a writer necessarily needs to have seen or heard about a thing to be able to imagine it, but this is an awfully singular image that strikes me as out of place before the Renaissance. (I’d welcome hearing a dissenting view on that from someone more acquainted with the history of chemistry/industry.)
Even more anachronistic, to my mind, is the covert theme of Beowulf, which is melancholia. I’ve always felt that the Beowulf-poet was not just some bard reciting one of the favorite legends of his people, but an original creator of a poetic work about the sickness of his own soul. The monster that terrorizes the previously cheerful hall of Heorot reads like a model of clinical depression: He is an exile, condemned to lurk beyond the reach of the light spilling from the hall of men, forced to listen in bitterness to the sound of their harps, the clink of cups, and their laughter. Unable to join them because of his original guilt (he is one of the “sons of Cain”), he lives instead with his mother at the bottom of a murky, monster-filled lake.
Anyone who has suffered depression would recognize these images and identify with Grendel’s alienation from the cheerful happy people, the stocky, manly Beowulves of this world (and perhaps would even identify with the Freudian/Hitchcockian theme of unresolved bitter and dependent feelings toward a similarly alienated mother). Grendel is a brilliant portrait of the bitter self-exile of the depressed person. By contrast, Beowulf himself is nothing more than a comic-book caricature, a frat guy cum uber-hero. In describing this contrast between the noble hall of the cheerful heroes and the alienation of the monster, the Beowulf poet was describing his own painful alienation from his fellows. The poem was a poetic expression of that melancholy loneliness.
People have always experienced introverted sadness, but just as “clinical depression” is a cultural construct of our age, melancholia was a cultural construct of the Renaissance. It was in the 15th Century that this kind of socially alienated introversion began to be romanticized and explored as an aspect of genius by writers and philosophers and playwrights. To my knowledge, you don’t get sensitive, sympathetic portrayals of melancholics before this period; and while Grendel is not exactly a sympathetic portrayal, there is definitely something sad about him and his life. It is hard not to feel his pain as he runs off, sans arm, to die at home with his mother. It is this sympathetic aspect of his character that makes Grendel seem so modern, and so inviting to modern reimagining by writers like John Gardner.
There is the whole notion that J.R.R. Tolkien, entranced by the mysteries of Beowulf and its ancient idiom, wrote The Lord of the Rings to flesh out the ancient mythological world of the Anglo Saxons and, in the process, create a uniquely English myth. What if he wasn’t original? What if, in fact, that’s what the original 16th-century writer of Beowulf was himself doing? I’m reminded of the quote by Hegel: The mysteries of the Egyptians were mysteries for the Egyptians themselves. There is an occult recursion in history, if you look carefully, and Tolkien’s relation to Beowulf seems like an example of that process.
Some of the pleasure of the “Beowulf-as-forgery” idea is admittedly simply the thrill of conspiracy, an unsolved mystery. (Finding out the truth will require carbon-dating the manuscript–perhaps after Harper and his friends gain sufficient legitimacy for their theory that the British Library could be persuaded to perform the necessary tests on this British national treasure.) But I also find that it actually adds to my pleasure in the text to read it through the lens of its being a possible product of the age of Shakespeare or Milton. I actually think it adds to the genius of the work to see its mysteries as being part of an atmosphere of pastness created imaginatively by a Renaissance writer, rather than simply a more or less faithful recording of a Dark Age legend.
I never intended this blog to be about food and nutrition, but somehow it’s around this that I feel the strongest urge to share my thoughts. Lately on two occasions I have gotten into fierce arguments (under the influence of alcohol, admittedly) with people reciting the standard dietary philosophy of “eat low-calorie, low-fat, low red meat, etc.” I try to indulge them nicely and then explain how science is now learning that this health dogma is false, etc., and try to educate them that they should only be avoiding refined carbohydrates. But — shockingly! – they stick to their guns and get really emotional. And then I get emotional, and then somewhere along the line I pass out from the alcohol (a refined carbohydrate).
I’m really interested in how passionate people get about food — whatever their choices, whatever their basis for their choices. There’s no more fundamental existential choice in our lives than our eating habits, I’m discovering — it really is true that we are what we eat. One’s dietary philosophy really is like one’s religion, and I think in this day and age not talking about diet should be right up there with not talking about God and not talking about politics as rules for polite conversation in mixed company.
Here it is, the recipe you’ve been waiting for.
Lightly brown 1 finely chopped shallot in butter, then add one finely chopped garlic clove and saute a minute or two longer (without letting the garlic brown). At the secret, esoteric moment, add to your saucier pan about 3/4 C dry white wine, turn the heat up, and let the wine reduce. Meanwhile, chop up a box of mushrooms finely and saute them in butter in a separate pan, with some salt to help draw out the moisture. You’re going to want to reduce the mushrooms to delicious perfection, to add to the sauce at the very end.
When the wine has reduced nearly all the way (1/2 cm?), reduce the heat to low and stir 2 rounded tsp of Better-than-Bouillon chicken paste into the remaining wine and spoon in 1/2 can of creme fraiche. Use a rubber spatula to scrape the golden wine residue from the sides of the pan into the deliciously unfolding sauce. Slowly bring this to a simmer, while with your other hand you continue reducing the mushrooms to their delicious essence.
At about this point, stick 4 or 5 chicken thighs in the broiler (or on a grill, if you prefer). As the sauce is getting hot, chop a handful of curly parsley and either add it to the sauce or, if you want to be fancy, save it to sprinkle over the top of everything when you serve it. It pleases me to allow you certain freedoms, so this part is up to you.
When the mushrooms are reduced to little brown buttery wonderfulness, add them to the sauce and stir it together. You can take the sauce off the heat now. In the pan with the mushroom essence on the bottom, stir fry some rappini or asparagus, in a little olive oil and with a chopped garlic clove, to accompany the chicken. (The veggies will mingle on your plate with the extra sauce, which you will soon find is to die for.)
Don’t overcook the chicken! Ladle the mushroom cream sauce over the chicken, once it is on the plates, accompany it with the vegetables (and garnish with parsley, if you chose that path), and you’re done.
La tirette est la plus érotique des attaches, mais non? The zipper, she is violent, yet sensual–cold to the touch, yet promising–how can I say it?–Mystère illimité.
This dress, all from zippers, could not go without remark. It is to be found at the site of Sebastian Errazuriz.
(As I always am saying: L’extérieur est relié, détourné et répréhensible, à l’intérieur.)
E. and I are increasingly of the opinion that the healthiest possible food is fatty sausage, esp. kielbasa. No joke. So on weekends I am now cooking up batches of bigos, or Polish “hunter’s stew,” and bringing it for my lunch during the week.
Here’s how you make it (totally easy): Chop up three slices of raw Niman Ranch applewood smoked bacon and put it in a big pot on low heat. Let the fat render, until you have a bunch of nice pork fat in the bottom. Turn up the heat and add 1/3 to a 1/2 of a finely sliced yellow onion and one finely chopped garlic clove. Let the onion get a little brown in the fat (but make sure the garlic doesn’t burn), and then add a half of a big jar of Polonia sauerkraut (the good stuff–fermented cabbage, not just soaked in vinegar) and enough water to just cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat so it is just simmering. Add a lot of marjoram and crushed caraway seeds and a shitload (3 Tbs?) of paprika (if you can find smoked Spanish paprika, that is all the better), and about three teaspoonfulls of Better-Than-Boullion chicken boullion paste. Then chop up about 1 1/2 feet of kielbasa (I do half and half smoked and nonsmoked) and add it to the mix, and stir. Then just simmer the mixture, covered, for several hours … and maybe add some more paprika, and water as needed to keep the mixture just barely of a stew-ey consistency. Mmmmmmmm. Then stick in tupperware, in the fridge.
This, I shit you not, is just about the easiest, healthiest, and most tasty, lunch you can pack for yourself.
2009 is the year of paprika, especially smoked Spanish paprika–da bomb (as the kids say). You can get it at Whole Foods. Oh my god.
So, to make a killer, easy and delicious goulash, do the following: Finely chop a couple cloves of garlic and thinly slice about half a yellow onion (or a whole one, it doesn’t matter) and saute them in a pot with some salt and a Tbs or 2 of olive oil. Then add a sliced green pepper, or half a green pepper and half a red pepper. Stir those around for five minutes or so, until they are just getting brown on the edges, and then plop about four boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the pot and brown them on both sides but don’t let them cook all the way. Take them out and chop them up and replace. Add a small (8-oz) can of tomato sauce, a shitload of paprika (maybe 3 Tbsp–1 part smoked Spanish and 1 part Szeged Hungarian, is what I do, but whatever…), a Tbsp of Better-Than-Boullion chicken stock paste, and a little water. Also throw in a couple pinches of cayenne to give it some bite, but not too much. Salt as needed. Stir it all around and simmer just until thickened a bit and the chicken is cooked, and no longer. How many times do I need to tell you: Don’t let the goddamn chicken dry out!
Serve your goulash over mashed potatoes (or fake mashed potatoes, substituting the blessed cauliflower for those evil starch grenades beloved of the Irish). Mmmmmm.
A new article in Sky & Telescope magazine reports on a recent discovery of a highly anomalous “optical transient” detected by the Hubble telescope in the constellation Bootes. The object, in the location of no known star or galaxy, appeared and brightened to the 21st magnitude over a span of about 100 days, and then disappeared over the next 100 days. It didn’t behave like any known supernova (which is what the sky survey was looking for), and spectrographic analysis doesn’t match any known type of object. Because they don’t know what the object is, the astronomers can’t even say how distant it is — only that it must be at least 130 light years away because no parallax was observed (which can be used to pinpoint nearer stars). They don’t know if it is (well, was) inside our galaxy or in another galaxy.
The original article is way too technical for me to follow. But I gather that hydrogen is missing from the object’s absorption spectrum. This, according to Robert Zubrin (Entering Space), would be one of the telltale indications of starship exhaust, which could potentially be detectable by our telescopes over very long distances. Could the “optical transient” have been a distant interstellar spacecraft (perhaps propelled by antimatter) accelerating or decelerating? (A number of other exotic suggestions have already been offered by S&T readers.)
If anyone reading this understands spectrography, please enlighten me!
Ray Kurzweil and other techno-enthusiasts wax ecstatic over the coming “singularity” that will liberate humans from the limits of the physical body. Within a couple decades, through nanotechnology, we’ll be able to re-tool ourselves on the molecular/cellular level; ultimately, we’ll be able to upload our brains into machines and theoretically live forever. By “we,” I of course mean “they” — the tanned super-rich. One imagines future humanity ruled by an overclass of centuries-old Silicon Valley billionaires, orbiting the earth in laser-defended satellites, occasionally destroying a city or other “surface settlement” to scare the mortals into submission.
For now, it’s still on the drawing board. But in the distant past — 10,000 years ago, give or take — a singularity really did occur, a horizon beyond which human destiny was utterly and irreversibly altered. This was the transition to settled agriculture and the shift to a grain-based diet. The Neolithic Revolution is typically seen as a great advance, allowing people to settle down, create all the good things like cities and wealth and laws and writing and so on. But like biological evolution, social evolution isn’t ever simply a story of progress toward some ideal; it is adaptation to meet changing pressures and challenges.
The shift to cultivating grains didn’t happen because people finally figured out how to farm and thought it would be nice to stop being nomads; it happened because populations began to put too much pressure on the available resources. Resource scarcity drives technological innovation (think: overconsumption of oil–>rising gas prices–>demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles–>the Prius). Basically, beginning around 10,000 to 8,000 BC, migratory band-level societies living in the fertile equatorial and sub-equatorial areas all over the world started running out of resources, so they turned to the cultivation of grain. Put very simply, you can get more calories out of an acre of land by cultivating grain on it than you can by hunting and foraging on it. This principle “enabled” people to settle down, although in fact the life they settled down to was one of toil, and arguably worse in many ways than the migratory lifestyle they had given up.
Cultivating and storing grain crops meant the rise of central political authorities, and ultimately the rise of the city-state, with its huge divide between the rich ruling elite, the barely subsisting farmers laboring to produce the surplus needed to ensure year-round survival, and (often) slaves captured in war. Because the settled lifestyle was the beginning of warfare too. And we’re now learning that there was another big cost to the transition to an agricultural way of life: The so-called “diseases of civilization.” Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, as well as nuisances like tooth decay and acne can largely be traced to a diet based on “cheap” calories.
In my previous post I mused about how the world would never be able to support everyone returning to a Paleolithic diet that averted these health problems. All the bad or non-nutritive foods in the typical diet — refined carbohydrates, starches, factory-raised meat and poultry and dairy, etc. — are an effect of the global economic pressure to feed a higher population density than ever existed in the past. Even if new technological advances could theoretically enable high-quality, chemical-free meat and vegetables to be produced in factories, economics dictates that most of the world’s people will be induced by profit-motivated food producers to eat lower-quality food that sustains them but isn’t optimal for their health.
The inefficiency of a protein-rich diet — i.e., the fact that you can get more calories from scarce land by consuming grain grown on it than from feeding that grain to meat or dairy cattle, let alone pasturing those animals — has been part of the ecological argument against meat-eating for decades. (I’m thinking of books like Francis Moore Lappe’s Diet For A Small Planet, which was big when I was in college.) Yes, you can feed more people on the planet by giving up meat – for exactly the reasons I outlined as the basis for the Neolithic revolution — but when you see that the Neolithic lifestyle goes against what the human body is evolutionarily adapted for (i.e., a diet high in animal products), you see what a conundrum we face. The intersection of mainstream nutritional thinking with the ecological movement, and what this means for our society ever accepting (let alone embracing) anything like a Paleolithic diet, is fascinating to me.
As it now stands, “nutritionally sound” does not equal, and cannot equal, “ecologically sound.” That’s the hard reality. The solution of artificial, vat-grown meat, already being developed and encouraged by animal-rights organizations like PETA, may one day solve certain ethical issues of animal consumption; but even discounting the enormous R&D costs, the resources needed to mass-produce meat in vats are bound to be expensive — so, again, only affluent animal lovers, and the immortal super-rich in their space stations, will be able to afford to be clean-conscience carnivores.
What kind of compromise do we strike, as individuals and as a species? I wonder if the only answer is to nano-retool our bodies to better utilize refined carbohydrates. Maybe that’s the real solution.