Another Bill Bailey

Again, thanks to Sophie for sending this along--

A Winning Combination

One casualty of my current living situation is that some nights, it's tricky to find a suitable time to cook--not because I have such a busy schedule, but because my housemates--four boys and a girl, all undergrads--are avid cooks. I am consistently impressed by their efforts, even if some of them tend to rely on spice packets a bit--but in general, I think they get up to more extensive cooking than I do. For example, Richard made his own mayonnaise a few weeks ago! So kitchen traffic tends to be fairly heavy, and only two burners on the stove work. Because I have plenty of days where I just want to avoid people and get on with my work, I have been alternating my own cooking with meals that either don't need cooking, or--and here's where I hear the gasps of horror--eating Sainsbury's ready meals.

Those of you who know me know that I don't make a habit of eating ready meals at home in Brooklyn. For one thing, J & I consciously decided not to have a microwave in the house, which takes away the quick convenience of meals-in-a-box; when we need that sort of convenience, I often stop at the Whole Foods hot food bar on my way home.

The Sainsbury's meals are very uneven in palatability, and range from inedibly bland to quite decent, and to their credit, I almost always recognize all the ingredients. Tonight I had the chicken jalfrezi, which isn't my favorite Indian dish under the best of circumstances, but I definitely wanted Indian, and knew that the kitchen was going to be overrun. So I got it, and was pleasantly surprised--I'd compare it with a slightly better than average restaurant...certainly a great deal better than bad Indian!

But what really made the meal worth blogging about was the slightly weird way I augmented the jalfrezi. Thinking, "I really should eat something green with this," but not in the mood for a salad, I fecked a big handful of watercress into the jalfrezi while it was still steaming from the microwave. It wilted into submission, and the flavor complemented the chicken nicely. Who knew?

Risotto

I meant to blog about this in a more timely fashion, but better late than never. In the continuing saga of Cooking In One Vessel on an Electric Stove Whilst Dodging Undergrad Boys, I made lemon-arugula risotto the other night, and it was wonderful.

I adapted it from the back of the Sainsbury's arborio rice box, and was glad I didn't take that recipe as gospel, because if I had, it would have been altogether too lemony.

First, I sauteed an onion, several cloves of coarsely chopped garlic, and the zest of one lemon in a mixture of olive oil and butter. Then I did the usual risotto thing with vegetable stock, and at the end added the juice of the lemon and about 100g (several generous handfuls) of arugula, or rocket, as they call it here.

Good eatin'. Sarah, my housemate and the other NYU gender studies grad, made the salad and got the wine.



The next night, I got these very silly bedroom slippers at TK Maxx (another difference--it's TK, not TJ, here). Needless to say, the selection was limited, but these were so bad they're good. And of course I know how to dress them up!

Hillary and the Haters

Last night, I got into a bit of a rant on Rob's blog about the way the press have been portraying Hillary Clinton. Turns out I'm in the good company of Stanley Fish:

February 3, 2008, 8:02 pm
All You Need Is Hate

Stanley Fish

I have been thinking about writing this column for some time, but I have hesitated because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target. That is the agenda of Hillary Clinton-hating.

Its existence is hardly news — it is routinely referred to by commentators on the present campaign and it has been documented in essays and books — but the details of it can still startle when you encounter them up close. In the January issue of GQ, Jason Horowitz described the world of Hillary haters, many of whom he has interviewed. Horowitz finds that the hostile characterizations of Clinton do not add up to a coherent account of her hatefulness. She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them. “She is,” Horowitz concludes, “an empty vessel into which [her detractors] can pour everything they detest.” (In this she is the counterpart of George W. Bush, who serves much the same function for many liberals.)

This is not to say that there are no rational, well-considered reasons for opposing Clinton’s candidacy. You may dislike her policies (which she has not been reluctant to explain in great detail). You may not be able to get past her vote to authorize the Iraq war. You may think her personality unsuited to the tasks of inspiring and uniting the American people. You may believe that if this is truly a change election, she is not the one to bring about real change.

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

Horowitz warns that as the campaign heats up, this “type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long,” and he predicts that some of it will be made use of by Republican operatives. But he is behind the curve, for the spirit informing it has already made its way into mainstream media. Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.

None of those who say and write these things is an official Hillary Clinton-hater (some profess to like and admire her), but they are surely doing the group’s work.

One almost prefers an up-front hater (although he tells Horowitz that he doesn’t like the word) like Dick Morris, who writes in a recent New York Post op-ed of the Clintons’ “reprehensible politics of personal destruction” (does he think he’s throwing bouquets?), and accuses them of invading the privacy of opponents, of blackmailing and threatening women, and of “whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed.” Morris calls Harold Ickes, a Clinton aide, a “hit man” for the president, and he calls the president “Hillary’s hit man.”

This is exactly the language of the most vicious anti-Hillary Web sites, and here it is baptized by its appearance in a major newspaper.

Horowitz observes that there is an “inexhaustible fertile market of Clinton hostility,” but that “the search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary’s most fanatical opponents is a futile one.” The reason is that nothing drives it; it is that most sought-after thing, a self-replenishing, perpetual-energy machine.

The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.

Right up there with the Chevy No-va....

This from my friend Logan, who posted it on Facebook:

Shop pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls
Fri Feb 1, 2008 2:01pm EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active pre-teens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the web site selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita," a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting website.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told British newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

(Reporting by Peter Apps, editing by Paul Casciato)

Coco Van

...or so Jenny & I were calling it on instant messenger, in a fit of pun (a pit of fun?) around Continental philosophers/philosophies--Mr. Herman Nutix, Esq.; Sick Sue? I hope she feels better soon!; a good kick in the Derrida; etc. Well, we had fun with it. (You know you're a humanities Ph.D. student when....)

Anyway, tonight as the evening's recreation I made coq au vin, and it was fabulous, if I may say so myself. I'd show pictures, but as ye know, it's not really that photogenic a food, and besides, my housemate Sarah and I devoured it before it could pose for the camera.

I made it with an eye to Delia's recipe, but as usual I only used it for the structure of the thing. So I fecked in some carrots and diced new potatoes after it had been cooking awhile. My only complaint with her recipe is that her notion about thickening the sauce didn't work so well (she said to make a paste of butter and flour and add that to the reduced liquid, but I think I'd have done as well the flour-water way, since I wound up with some lumps in it using the paste, and I had certainly put in enough butter already).

I used the Sainsbury's version of beaujolais, which does actually come from France (unlike some of their other wines, which come from Bulgaria and Mars and places like that). More than adequate for cooking, decent to drink while cooking, but I found that it wasn't really worth drinking with the meal. It needed something to take attention away from it as a drinking wine--either a bunch of merriment & shite talk like a departmental w(h)ine and cheese, or a task at hand, like putting together the Coco Van. But at about 3.50 sterling (about $7) I have no complaints.

In other news, I realize I have been very remiss about indicating which Books I'm Not Reading lately. So....

The Book I'm Not Reading: Adriana Cavarero's For More Than One Voice

...and I think I may also start posting poems. If it's good enough for Jeanette Winterson, it's good enough for me!

Meanwhile, Back at Jesus....

I'm not sure I've mentioned that the college here at Cambridge with which I'm affiliated is Jesus College--a name that creates all sorts of opportunities for unintentional hilarity, as in, "Are you going back to Jesus soon?"

Name aside, I get a good giggle every once in a while at printed materials, like these:

From the Jesus College library rules:

"Please do not let the college cat into the library."

Yes, there is a college cat, and it's black and white--very attractive, and he (?) nearly came up to me one day, only to pass by nonchalantly as though I weren't sitting there clicking to him. It seems a fairly common thing, having a college cat, and I wish we had an NYU cat--except that it would certainly come to some terrible end.

And best of all:

This morning, as I was walking to the library, I saw the notices out for Chapel events this evening. Thinking I would see something about music, I looked more closely, but what I saw was a sign that said

"TONIGHT! Film of a potentially morally improving nature!"

The film is A Room With a View, and I would almost go, except that I'd be afraid of the sorts of people wanting moral improvement on a Friday night--they might potentially want to morally improve me! So I have decided that unless I meet a crowd at the LGBT drinks earlier who want to go and crash it in order to leer salaciously at Helena Bonham Carter, I'll sit this one out. HBC isn't my type, anyway.