Generalising

I am not a great fan of salads as actual meals. In my view, a salad counts towards your daily calorific intake the way oxygen does, and I probably consume them both with the same enthusiasm.

(And while I’m here, a quick thought. Nightline, that bastion of journalism, did a televised debate about whether it’s “okay” to be fat. Er. Anyway, anti-obesity activist MeMe Roth said this:

“We’ve gotten ourselves to the point where we’re behaviorally and neurochemically dependent upon food.”

Seriously. Seriously, she actually said that. Dependent on food. Like, I am so dependent on food, I can’t go a whole day without a fix of it. Sometimes my physical and emotional health suffers because I haven’t had any!

…ah, you get it. That people can actually say things like that – yeah. This comes entirely courtesy of Kate Harding’s Shapely Prose, which, for what it’s worth, is one of my favourite feminist blogs out there. I’m not much of a fat activist – to my sorrow and exceedingly large dollop of privilege, I pretty much resemble the societal ideal for how women should look in terms of body shape, only shorter, smaller breasts and a bit too brown – but certainly I agree with the central tenet that the media preoccupation with obesity, and body size, and the purported health dangers of the former, is not value-neutral science but comes with its own assumptions and prejudices. At its worst, it’s a well-disguised way to damage women, to make them sweat and obsess over their bodies, to drive them to constant distraction as a means by which they can be controlled. (Hey, the population is fifty-one percent women, the patriarchy can’t be everywhere.)

And more than fat acceptance, Kate Harding writes well about feminism, really well – unlike the mainstream blogs, she doesn’t tolerate racism, ableism, or in the case of Feministing a couple of days ago, just plain information fail. Consider this a rec.

This was going to be a recipe, wasn’t it? Normally I don’t approve as salads as main courses. Normally. But this one has lots of protein, and is tasty, and just about passes muster if you weren’t that hungry to start with. And, hey, it is tasty and you can always have some cake after.

You need:

-one large pepper, preferably red;
-handfuls of rocket, or baby spinach, or both, or anything else green and leafy;
-feta cheese, about 100g;
-a couple of slices of good ham;
-cherry tomatoes, a few;
-pine nuts or sunflower seeds or both;
-a small red onion or half a big one;
-nice olive oil.

De-seed the pepper, chop into rough chunks, halve the cherry tomatoes, cut the onion into slices. Put them all in a baking tray, douse well with lots of the nice olive oil, stick them in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty minutes. (You’re not trying to roast them properly – just till the onion is edible and the tomatoes a bit squishy.)

Cut the feta cheese into chunks and crumble those into a big bowl. Rip the ham into small strips, and after the twenty minutes, add the ham to the baking tray and put it back in the oven for another five minutes, until the ham is curling at the edges.

Then, pour the contents of the tray into the bowl with the feta, mix well and be sure all the oil gets into the bowl, it’s lovely. Stir well, pour in some pine nuts or sunflower seeds, add handfuls of rocket or spinach, keep stirring until it’s alll mixed. Presto, done. And have some cake afterwards for the carbohydrate.

I have just discovered a new blog: Geek Feminism. What a fabulous idea, sayeth I – it’s a great mish-mash of women in science, women in engineering, women in Star Trek fandom, women in all of those and more, and how their experiences are different from men’s experience, and how geek culture can be viewed through feminist eyes.

I’ve been reading back through the archives, and just read this post: On geekitude, hierarchy and being a snob. It’s a interesting post in itself, and worth reading, but there’s an insight in it that I don’t think the author gives the weight it deserves, so I’m going to talk about it. It goes like this:

I think that what I do is easy. Simple as falling off a log. Anyone could do it. Yeah, I know a lot of things that allow me to do what I do, but they’re just things you could learn if you took the time.

Now the eagle-eyed among you can spot imposter syndrome a mile off, and while I know in a vague intellectual sense that I must be at least competent at what I do – otherwise, why would universities have admitted me to study it and organisations have employed me to do it? – it’s an astonishingly hard thing to internalise. And particularly, particularly for women. Women who are told all the time that math is hard, and that excellence is not for them.

Now it is true that if you knew what I knew, if you had read the same books, you’d realise how easy some of my daily tasks are. But, notes the author, but an expert also confidently says, “No. That’s far harder than you realize.”

I’ve never thought of that before. But I know when someone says something about my field – usually, “But why don’t you just sue them?” or “But surely that’s illegal?” – that is patently stupid. I can prove the negative. And I can know something because of my feel for what I do – because of my abilities, training and instincts, and not (just) because I’ve read a lot of textbooks.

So maybe I’m not terrible at what I do. Maybe I’m as good at it as the rest of the world thinks I am. And if I am, imposter of imposters, maybe you are too.

I am a native Hindi speaker.

This is both factually accurate and entirely misleading. My parents are native Hindi speakers (well, one has it for a mother tongue and the other has it almost), and until I was five I spoke nothing else. Then, of course, the usual story – I learnt English fast, it displaced my Hindi almost as fast, pretty soon I was speaking English at home, etc., etc.

Nowadays I’m luckier than some and I haven’t forgotten it entirely, but my grammar is shaky and my vocabulary more so, and in a lot of ways it’s stalled at the five-year-old level. (I suspect this would have changed if I’d been educated in the language, but of course I wasn’t. I have at some point or another been formally taught English, French, Spanish, Italian, Welsh and Latin, but not a word in my original tongue.)

I learned how to read and write Devanagari script around ten years ago, and while it’s also at a five-year-old level, it means I can at least muddle my way through a dictionary. I have therefore decided that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and am going to use the dictionary to Learn Words. They are going to be Excitin’ Words. (In all seriousness – I lack the vocabulary, in Hindi, to function as an adult. “Water”, “sleep”, “house”, “tree”, “cold” – I’m fine with those. “Law”, “government”, “engineering”, “history” – any abstract noun or two-syllable adjective is beyond me. How do you address a lack this significant? By picking pages at random out of the dictionary!)

Today’s words:

लघुगणक (laghuganak) – “logarithm”. Why anyone would ever need this in conversation is beyond me, but that is what the dictionary provides. (So does Wikipedia!)

रदर्शनी (radarshan) – “fair”, as in a World’s Fair or expo. A fair that you go to eat candy-floss at is a mela, मेला.

मछली की जनता (machli ki junta) – which is not three words, and may not even be right. In my defence, “shoal” is one word in the English half of the dictionary, and one does often refer to shoals of fish is one is in the habit of discussing such things. However, in Hindi we apparently use a construction that translates to “the general public of fish”.

…I don’t even know. But, look, I learned words today! I shall update as and when I learn more.

(Also, one day I will learn IAST transliteration, but today is not that day. Please bear with me.)

This is a collection of short stories: four or five stand-alones, and then three connected stories at the end that together are about novella-length.

On the whole, this is very familiar territory. Believe me, I wrote that sentence intending no pun whatsoever; the “unaccustomed earth” of the title is the immigrant’s land, both a new world and the New World, and in Lahiri’s case, it is invariably Boston and New England. Her immigrants arrive on the eastern seaboard from Calcutta, another coastal city, and they speak Bengali, and they become professors at Harvard and MIT. They are simply, evocatively depicted, the details of their lives lovingly and, in my limited experience of the same narrative, accurately rendered. Lahiri’s style is always, always engaging, the simplicity of it turning from mundanity to devastation in a quiet sequence of sentences.

And each story is, alone, both lovely and deeply affecting – the title story gives us a young mother being visited by her father after some time apart, and how he plants her a garden; “Only Goodness” is an unflinching look at how easy it is to destroy a family; the linked Hema and Kaushik stories track a son’s life after his mother dies young – but it’s taken all together that they start to worry me. These familes, their stories, they have two things in common: they are immigrants from India, settling themselves down on that unaccustomed earth, and they are unhappy. Each story has that awful, echoing, hollow sense of loss, with time taken over the lines and caverns of that empty space, care taken to describe the ubiquity of that despair. Here is what worries me. Lahiri’s protagonists marry in her stories, some in arranged marriages, some marrying white Americans, and all are loveless and unloved. Some lose their families to death and to distance, and there is no redemption for them, either. There is always a sense that something, somewhere, is irreparably breaking. I ask not for the saccharine happy ending, but for the notion, however obliquely expressed, that there is hope for the Indian disaspora, that all is not lost at the moment of leaving – and this is not something I can find, here.

Perhaps it really is the author’s opinion, that the immigrant experience is fundamentally a heartbreak, and in that case this is an honest book – but it is neither happy, nor hopeful, and I hope that it is not true.

This is a better book than A Long Way Down. Admittedly, every book ever published is probably better than A Long Way Down. This is quite a good book.

To put it another way – well, I have read all of Hornby’s novels save Slam, which suggests I’m a fan, doesn’t it? I read the first three in a breathless teenage rush, thinking grand thoughts about transformative and meaningful and zeitgeist, and then I read How To Be Good much much later, and changed my mind with almost the same rapidity. Hornby writes well, but I rather think he thinks too much of himself, tries too hard to be both funny and profound, and it comes across as forced, particularly the grand-hollowness-at-the-centre-of-middle-class-existence schtick. His characters certainly do suffer from that sort of hollowness, but that’s because they’re characters in a Hornby novel and not real people. Nowhere does this manifest more than in A Long Way Down, which has a wonderful idea at its heart, and an excellent first few chapters, and then quickly becomes a plotless, heartless mess.

So I wasn’t surprised to pick up Juliet, Naked and find myself thoroughly enjoying the first couple of chapters, but I was more surprised when I carried on enjoying it after that. The plot centres around Annie, a middle-aged woman living in a northern seaside town, and her live-in boyfriend of fifteen years, Duncan the feckless nerd. Duncan has been obsessed for a decade with one obscure, reclusive singer-songwriter, Tucker Crowe; when he releases a new album and it’s not that good, Annie suddenly realises she wants out. Having wasted fifteen years of your life, though, is not something you can throw off in a hurry; somewhere in the American Midwest, Tucker is thinking the same thing.

And that’s…. it, really. Hornby isn’t good at plots, but here he works that to a positive advantage, taking his time over the very simple progression of events, and taking pleasure in getting you to like Annie and loathe Duncan a little bit. (He’s a little bit of a caricature, but not much of one; I certainly admit to having met this particular kind of obsessive, strident, hiding-in-internet fan.) And Tucker, too, is drawn well, likeable even if his interior monologue does seem to contain a lot of faux-profundity, and all the supporting cast have their time in the sun, too.

In the end, it’s a little bit of a fairytale. I suspect it’s not supposed to be one. I suspect it’s meant to be a savage attack on middle-aged loneliness and the evils of the internet, or else a maundering on the ways in which people waste their lives. It’s meant to be depressing. But, you know, it’s not the nineties any more, and this is a nice little book about some people falling in love.

“I was born twice.” It’s an epic beginning for a novel, which is in itself epic in its twists and turns. Middlesex is the story of Cal Stephanides, a forty-year-old man who was born a girl called Callope; at the age of sixteen, his hermaphroditism was discovered. A second birth, as he explains it, and a large chunk of the novel is the story of Calliope’s trials and tribulations as she’s socialised into a gender that doesn’t quite fit.

But to get to that point, we have the story of the previous two generations of the Stephanides family, Greek-Americans living in Detroit by way of a tiny village in Asia Minor. It’s also the story of how Cal came to have the requisite genetic condition and surrounding circumstances for such a transformation. It’s a long story, entwined with a great deal of history: the Turks’ burning of Smyrna, the Second World War, the 1967 race riots, the Nation of Islam, all forming a backdrop and context to the family’s story. They move through the burning of the harbour, speakeasies and hot dog stands, moving to the suburbs, and I recognise the greater narrative, the story of an immigrant family and their identity, their homesickness and their difference, their gradual assmilation, and finally, their loss of what’s left behind.

There are discordant notes in this grand tapestry, of course – sometimes the inner life of the teenage girl isn’t particularly well rendered, and occasionally things get a little too soap-operatic – but on the whole, it’s an achievement. I could have done with a little more about Cal’s life post-”second birth”, actually – a little more on how he deals with a life lived male, and how he deals with the family secrets he inherits, but as it is, it’s a substantial, solid achievement – a warm bath of a novel, just the right level of comedic, and full of insight into identity.

In the winter of 1939, Josef Kavalier stumbles into his cousin Sammy’s cramped bedroom in New York City, having escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague. They share a cigarette, and something begins: a friendship, and a partnership,that will last years. Between them they create the Escapist, a superhero who can escape from anyone and anything, who travels the world as an agent of the League of the Golden Key, helping others to escape from oppression and tyranny.

The theme could be predictable and hamfisted: in America, Josef becomes Joe, and Sammy Klayman has already become Sam Clay; they escape from their Jewish backgrounds into the mainstream American middle classes just as Joe has already escaped Prague. But escape in itself isn’t the only theme – it’s also the failures that surround it, the way Joe and Sammy, in a way very reminscent of Angels in America, fail to be anything but their Jewish, troubled selves. Sammy can’t escape from his own sexuality, Joe can’t escape from anything he’s left behind. And as a counterpoint to the escapes, there are the absences left behind: the absence of Sammy’s father, Joe living with the daily absence of his family, and later, the absence of Joe.

The language is lyrical and indulgently expansive, the moods perfectly evoked, but interestingly, there is nevertheless an appopriate comic-book aspect to the way the novel is written: events have a ka-pow! quality, especially in the earlier part of the novel. Joe bounces through a young lady’s window, to screaming, Sammy kisses his his first love on the roof of a building with thunderstorms exploding around them, and later, Joe’s adventures in the Antarctic cold, complete with grim madmen and sudden death have the overblown comic-book feel.

What to say, in the end? I wasn’t sure what to take away from this novel. It is too heavy and sad to read once, but there’s something beautiful and altering in it, and something compelling about the way history and religion are threaded masterfully throughout. It stays with you, with all its weight.

Easy as pie, this one, but surprisingly nice.

Ingredients:
-three sausages, good ones – I used pork and caramelised onion;
-one baking apple;
-one red onion;
-olive oil;
-honey.

Peel and chop the apple into rough chunks and throw into a deep baking tray. Add the onion, chopped into fair-sized chunks (not slices). Toss with olive oil, and stir some honey through it all. Put in the oven at 180 degrees Centigrade for twenty-five minutes.

In the meantime, grill or fry the sausages – I recommend grilling, because this is already a fairly oily mix. When done, the apple and onion ought to be done as well (check to see the apple is soft enough to turn into goo in your mouth). Chop the sausage into bitesized pieces, toss in a bowl with the apple and onions, mix well and add a sprig of parsley if you’re feeling decadent. Done.

This is enough for one hungry person, but it scales perfectly – just double everything. It really is rather nice.

Seriously? This book is truly excellent. I mean it. Yes, it’s slight, yes it’s yet another of those blog-turned-book-deal things, but it’s razor-sharp and poignant, hilarious and sometimes sad, but always engaging and frequently educational. It’s a treat.

The premise: thirty-year-old Julie Powell, a secretary living in the outer boroughs of NYC in apartment that her mother is convinced she’s going to die in, decides apropos of not much that in the space of one year, she is going to cook her way through the five-hundred-plus recipes in Julia Child’s famous cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Of course, she blogged it – but this was in 2001, when such things weren’t quite ubiquitous – and, something I think is enormously in her favour, the book is not simply a rehash of the greatest hits of the blog but tries to tell a complete narrative, with some blog entries merely reproduced where appropriate.

And, well, it’s fabulous and compulsively readable. While she writes reams about the recipes – all of which feature tonnes and tonnes of butter – she punctuates it with tales of her own life, her work for the government agency clearing up the debris after 9/11, her long-suffering husband, her romantic-hero brother, her mother, her friends, and she brings all of them to life. She’s cheerfully rude about her Republican colleagues, at one point feeds them a cake filled with ceramic shards and antifreeze, and is relentlessly cutting about the Bush administration, in and around her adventures cooking marrowbones, calves’ brains and apples in aspic and other such horrifying delicacies. She writes very well indeed, and with a kind of intimate familiarity; in any case, in her description of herself as a foul-mouthed hysteric with misanthropic tendencies, she rang very familiar for me.

The one flaw of the book, I think, is the attempts at vignettes in the real life of Julia Child – while these aren’t bad, per se, I really think they’re unnecessary and a sign of lack of confidence in her own story, which is entirely unjustified.

In short: please look beyond the provenance and the cover, and don’t be afraid for a minute that this is going to be one of those cook-yourself-thin horrors (not only is it all butter all the time, nowhere does anyone discuss diets in this book). It’s one of the best I’ve read this year.

NB. I see after publishing this review to LibraryThing that a lot of people think Powell is boorish and swears too much, and so you shouldn’t read her book. Coincidentally, most of those people are fucking cunts.

In brief: the US House of Representatives passed the health care reform bill. It is called the Affordable Health Care For America Act and expands federal healthcare provision enormously – 36 million more people will be eligible for Medicaid, most employers will be required to provide healthcare coverage for their workers, and there will be a government-funded “public option”. Also notably, health insurers will be prevented from refusing coverage based on medical history (no more gender-based “pre-existing conditions” such as pregnancy, rape and domestic violence) and the exemption for insurance companies from antitrust legislation will be repealed.

So far, so hoopy. The Stupak Amendment, with which this Act has been passsed, is as follows:

“No funds authorised or appropriated by this Act… may be used to pay for any abortion or to cover any part of the costs of any health plan that includes coverage of abortion, except in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury or physical injury which would… place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed… or unless the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”^[1]

In other words, to get this Act passed, someone had to be the sacrificial lamb and 150 million American women were it. (Also, something else I have just spotted – the obvious women are excluded, women who want abortions for what are nauseatingly called “social” reasons, because pregnancy is not the right thing for them, but also, women who have mental illnesses which pregnancy would exacerbate are excluded, too.)

I actually have no further commentary to make on the issue, and I wondered if that were just me, but actually, I think there is nothing very profound to say about it. Institutional politics, particularly in the United States, is boring and it doesn’t yield to analysis. Feminist analysis of the narratives of privilege and oppression, that is interesting; so is sociological thinking about why people think the way they do such that amendments like this are seen as a good idea, but on the institutional level of why, in the specific instance, the House of Representatives has voted like this, I’m coming up with nothing. They voted like this because they’re misogynists, fundamentalists, or spineless; you can lobby them, but to be effective, you either run for the House of Representatives or wait for the current incumbents to die, or both. You can’t argue, you can’t write about women’s rights to their own bodies, you can’t talk about restriction of reproductive options as a form of control of women. Well, you can, but it’s a category error to think you can convince an edifice of misogyny to change their minds because that, I think, fundamentally misunderstands why they hold the opinions they do – it’s not because they arrived at them through logical argument.

(Evidence in point: thirty-nine Democrats voted against the reform bill. Twenty-one of them, besides Stupak, voted for the amendment. Institutional politics defies logical analysis.)^[2]

It will go to the Senate, but I’m not optimistic.

[2] From here. And yes, lawyers are allowed to run a defence in the alternative, but I suspect it’s not the same thing.