Big Brother Parody

Hoy Ma-lang-poo Pad Num Prik Pao-Stir Fried Green Mussels with Roasted Chili Paste

This recipe will have you thanking me till the cows come home. Don't be lazy, make the effort and get down to you local market for fresh mussels to make this delicious dish. It will be worth it; I promise.

Ingredients
450 grams fresh green mussels, cleaned well

1 teaspoon sugar

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/2 cup sweet basil leaves

2 tablespoons roasted chilli paste

4 fresh chillies, cut into long strips

2 teaspoons garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fish sauce

Preparations
1. Heat water in a pot until boiling. Then scald green mussels in boiled water until cooked. Remove and drain.

2. Heat oil in a wok over medium-high heat. Add garlic in the hot oil and fry until it becomes golden.

3. Add cooked green mussels and stir for a 20 seconds. Then add fish sauce, sugar, chili and roasted chilli paste.

4. Before removing from heat, sprinkle with sweet basil leaves and red fresh chilli. Stir-fry for another 10 seconds. Transfered to a serving dish and served with hot steamed rice.

Mike

Impression Sunrise 1873 - Claude Monet

The sun is set against the dawn, the orange color against the gray and the vibrant force of the sun against its motionless surroundings. To many spectators, the sun undulates or pulsates slightly. Why is this so? The sun is nearly the same luminance as the grayish clouds. I am in two minds whether Monet's work fills me will hope or helpnessness. On one hand, it could be seen as the beginning of a new day filled with hope and promise, or perhaps the beginning of another drab, dark and monotonous twenty four hours of life; no fills no thrills, only bare existance. Saying this, the sun does seem to provide a focal point in the painting, perhaps reminding us that in life there is always a bring light of hope somewhere in the distance.

Do you have any views on this work?

Mike

Coming up for Air-George Orwell

Like most people, I had heard of George Orwell long before I had read any of his books. ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm' have achieved such fame that Orwell is known through them and associated with them from early age to anyone with the slightest interest in reading. So much so that it is easy to overlook the main body of his work, which, given its quality and importance (both to an understanding of the author, but also of the time in which he lived) would be a mistake.

‘Coming Up For Air’ was the last book that Orwell wrote before the second world war, and there is a pervasive, oppressive air of threat throughout the narrative that forebodes the great cataclysm that was to come. Written and set in nineteen thirty nine, it is the first person narrative of one George Bowling, a fat, middle aged insurance salesman (earning ‘five to ten quid a week’), trapped in a desperate life of suburban mundanity.

George is a family man, in hate with his wife and father to two children he could happily live without. He lives in the suburbs of London, on a road which he memorably describes as ‘A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.’

The opening of the book thus sets the scene for the reader. George is appalled by the times he is living in, choking on them. Eating a revolting fish-flavoured frankfurter inspires him to sum up his feelings thus: ‘It gave me the feeling that I’d just bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else… Rotten fish in a rubber skin.’ George’s only hope and joy lies in his possession of the princely sum of seventeen pounds, won on the horses, and kept secret
from his wife, as he tries to decide how to spend it.

Orwell’s prose is electric in this section of the book. There is so much disgust for the pre-war world here that one has to wonder whether the words were written in bile rather than ink. Whether describing the slavery of a mortgage, or the tyranny of petty shop floor managers, Orwell hits his mark with deadly accuracy. In these early chapters are clearly visible the beginnings of the train of thought that would ultimately lead to ‘1984’.

In parenthesis, it is interesting that Orwell’s sympathy when he considers the evils of modernism seems to lie entirely with the middle classes. He writes: ‘There’s a lot of rot talked about the suffering of the working class. I’m not so sorry for the proles myself. Did you ever know of a navvy who lay awake thinking about the sack?’ As in ‘1984’, the author seems to be thinking of the poorer classes as a vast herd of cows, contentedly chewing the cud, never having the imagination to see the bleakness of their lives. It’s certainly a harsh judgement, and perhaps a surprising one, when one considers Orwell’s experiences on the bread line as a 'plongeur' in Paris, as described in ‘Down and Out in Paris and London’. However, I recall a line from that book where Orwell says of his desperate circumstances: ‘One talks so often of going to the dogs. And here are the dogs, and you are among them, and you can bear it. It takes off a lot of anxiety’. For Orwell, the physical hardships of the poor are lesser evils than what he sees as the hopelessness of the middle class. Having never been to the dogs I can’t truly say if I agree or not, but I don’t think I do.

Inevitably, from his sickness with the present, George Bowling seeks escape in nostalgic reflection. A newspaper headline propels his mind back into the past as he remembers his childhood i
n the town of Lower Binfield. Orwell’s pen suddenly runs out of venom, and colour an warmth flow into the world of the past he describes. Part one of the book ends as George muses ‘Is it gone forever? I’m not certain. But I tell you it was a good world to live in. I belong to it. So do you.’

In the following chapters Orwell describes the world Bowling comes from. I don’t know how much of this section of the book is autobiographical, I suspect not that much of it, as what I know of Orwell’s life does not tally with the reminiscences of George Bowling. However, the result is never less than believable. And while the author is more renowned for the savage satire of his later books, he manages to paint a picture of the past that seems nostalgic, but without succumbing to the temptation to give soft focus and rose tint.

I think the reason that he is successful in this is that Orwell is charting what he sees as a sea change in the way life was lived that took place very early this century. It is easy to cynically dismiss nostalgia as a failure of the ageing to keep up with modern life, but I think that it would be a mistake to classify this part of the book in that way. It strikes me that what in this case the author is describing is the birth of the modern era. The beginning of a time when to simply subsist was no longer enough, when competition began to destroy livelihoods that had supported families for generations, when people learned to strive. Orwell takes as a powerful example George Bowling’s father, a seed merchant, who watches in bewilderment as his business slowly starts to fail, destroyed by competition as market forces reach even to this countryside idyll. ‘None of us had any grasp of what was happening. Father had had a bad year and had lost money, but was he really frightened by the future? I don’t think so. This was 1909, remember. He didn’t know what was happening to him. He wa
sn’t capable of seeing that these Sarazin people would systematically undersell him, ruin him, and eat him up. How could he? Things hadn’t happened like that when he was a young man.’

Bowling describes his formative years in detail, his hobbies and day to day life. We learn that his passion used to be fishing, (most apt, for a man who would grow to spend life floundering on the end of a hook) and he recalls a lost pool in a forest near to his home town, where swam the most enormous, beautiful fish a fisherman could dream of. Spurred by this reflection he decides to spend his seventeen pounds on a trip back to the village he grew up in, to spend a week there, to fish in the pool, to get back his nerve ‘before the bad times begin’. In short, on coming up for air.

What he finds in Lower Binfield on his return I will leave to the reader to discover, but suffice to say that Orwell clearly did not believe that the clock could ever really be turned back. Perhaps it was the impending war, perhaps just a general and genuine horror of the modern way of life, but Orwell clearly felt at this stage of his life that civilisation was leading mankind to ruin. In another passage that can be seen as a precursor to the thinking in ‘1984’, Bowling attends a lecture given in which he watches an anti-fascist speaker, himself driven by hatred and a burning desire to smash faces, ‘trying to work up hatred in the audience’. And as some of the audience are drawn in, George realises ‘They’re the long sighted ones, the first rats to spot that the ship is sinking. Quick, quick! The fascists are coming! Spanners ready, boys! Smash others or they’ll smash you. So terrified of the future that we’re jumping straight into it like a rabbit diving down a boa constrictor’s throat.’

That after the war Orwell wrote ‘1984’ would seem to indicate that it wasn’t just the imp
ending conflict that made the author feel so bleak. Orwell’s nightmare of the future of mankind was that fear, the fear engendered by the way we modernists live, and the hatred that inevitably grows to help us bear that fear, will drive those who should know better to extremes of barbarism and evil, as personified by the rule of Big Brother. Needless to say the herds of unthinking proles will be drawn along, without protest. Thank goodness that so far it has not come to pass.

To finish, then, ‘Coming Up For Air’, while in no wise a cheery novel, remains worth reading for any number of reasons. I would recommend it to anyone who has read ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ as a fascinating insight into the development of Orwell’s ideas. For anyone else I’d recommend it as a superbly written account of a man’s life, as an insight into the psychology and mood of the world as it is dragged inexorably toward war, and as a meditation on the dawn of the age in which we live.

Fromage doyoo.co.uk

Washington Square-Henry James

If there is any writer in the history of American literature who is a testament to the fallacy of category, it's Henry James. During a 50-year career in which he tackled the art of the novel, short story and essay with religious fervor, he established a persona that meant many things to many people, but nothing that anyone has able to peg upon him convincingly. Too often his detractors partake in sloppy, self-indulgent reading that is synonymous with the decline in the literacy of the times. Yet too often his defenders trot out tired cliches in defense of him, ("Art for art's sake," "Style works as form," etc. ) marginalizing James profound and introspective search for human nature and character in the process. Yet again, I take umbrage with the scores of second-rate novelists who throughout history thought they were crafting their own "Bostonians" and "Ambassadors" by putting a half a dozen commas and semi colons in every one of their sentences (with a sprinkle of bad psychological analysis in between).

So am I writing you with any definitive answers about who many believe to be the leading man of American letters? Hell no. But from reading five of his novels, two books of essays, and two short story collections, I have my opinions and reasons why I consider myself a Jamesophile.

To me, reading James is taking a glance of the limitless possibilities of the English language. The beauty of his prose doesn't come from a cohesive whole, but sentence to sentence, sometimes terse and concise, sometimes extending to a half a page. Yet his style wouldn't have as much meaning if it didn't augment his sophisticated theories on fiction. James established a detached, high flown literary style that gave him a distance from his characters, which in turn enabled him to give them numerous ambiguities, shades of personality, and depths of thought. The result is a highly powerful and wildly imaginative brand of realism exemplary of the power of great fiction. Although I haven't read all his oeuvre, Washington Square is a great introduction to James, showing the full range of his creative powers.

The book centers on the three person dynamic of the Sloper family. There's Austin Sloper, a semi-wealthy doctor whose two parts disdain, two parts sardonicism and one part charm. He has a daughter named Catherine, who he kinda loves between his fits of misogynistic contempt for her. Catherine isn't, in James portrayal, the most attractive person in a world, but she has a warm humanity to her that is easy to like. Lavinia, the aunt, serves as a buffer between the two, comforting Catherine and charming the mercurial Austin.

Entre Mssr Morris Townsend, a charming, amorous huckster, who is a toxic mix of seduction and bullsh*t. Before he entered the world of the Slopers, he was a grifter who relied on his wit and good looks to steal and gamble away women's fortunes. He originally doesn't look on Catherine too kindly, but upon hearing that her father has a steep trust fund for her after he dies, Morris suddenly deems her to be his Beatrice. Their courtship is a torrid yet fraudulent one, so transparent to all but Catherine that by the time he asks for her hand in marriage, I found myself yelling at the book for her not to. Upon hearing that a two-bit con man asked for her daughters hand in marriage, Dr Sloper becomes apoplectic and demands that Catherine not see him, sending their father/daughter relationship into a steep and brutal downward spiral. Lavinia is torn between her love for Catherine and the chance of a wedding and a bigger piece of the Dr Sloper trust fund pie.

As the story unfolds, the immense depth of the characters give it great intrigue and nuance. James masterfully sidesteps the temptation of typecasting by letting their actions speak for themselves. There are no easy enemies here: although Dr Sloper is at times a loathsome cur, you get the sense that deep down inside he really cares for his daughter, but is a member of his times and subject to the sexual morays of them, which were the presupposed inferiority of women and the demand for their submission. Even Morris, who by his own words and actions can be quite a slime ball, has an youthful, angst-ridden charm to him. Lavinia is no simple saint either, as in the course of this novel she ends up conning her niece nearly out of house and home.

But there is one "saint " in this novel and her name is Catherine Sloper. Throughout the arc of the story, she loses almost everything that she holds dear in her life except her sense of self. Her father, scared that his money is going to be wasted when Catherine marries Morris the degenerate gambler, decides to not give her a dime. Upon hearing that the fiduciary petals had been clipped from his newfound rose, Morris decides to ditch Catherine. And all the while Lavinia, her loving aunt, hustles her until there is almost nothing of Catherine left, financially or spiritually. But Catherine survives, her innocence gone, bank account depleted but soul intact. In the end, she's more than a plaster saint, she's a real, brave and vividly written woman who's been through a lot and come out a survivor. Few female characters by male novelists I have read have been more believable.

Again, I must admit that I am only a rank amateur in the scope of Jamesophiles. My personal favorite James era is between 1881-1890, in which the psychological thought was married to his prose and the prose became psychological thought in itself. While The Golden Bowl and some of his later stories have many moments of brilliance, they are works that are too insular and don't have the deft craftsmanship of James at his very best. But I could read another one of his late era novels and be proven dead wrong. Henry James is a writer that all people should read, and Washington Square is a good place to start. To those who want to obtain a high amount of coherence in American literature, or literature in general, his is a bridge that you must pass.

Blog Critic

Thai Masaman Chicken-Gaeng Masaman Gai

The "massaman" indicates that the recipe is of a "musselman" or islamic origin. It probably owes
something to early Portuguese influences, and is similar in concept to the "sour and hot" Goan style
vindaloo dishes. By Thai standards this is usually a fairly mild curry, so I find it is a good starting point.

Ingredients

about 1 pound chicken (you can also use pork or beef), cut into the usual "bite sized pieces"
3 cups of coconut milk.
2 tablespoons roasted peanuts (unsalted)
5 peeled, but whole, small onions.
5 small potatoes, peeled and partly boiled.
3 bay leaves,
5 cardamom seeds
a small piece of roasted cinnamon stick
2 tablespoons palm sugar
1 tablespoon tamarind concentrate mixed with 2.5 tablespoons water
3 tablespoon lime juice
2-3 tablespoons Masaman curry paste.
about 1-3 teaspoons crushed garlic. (optional)

Method

Peel potatoes, boil them partly in a cooking pot for 10-15 minutes, and cut in 1 to 2-inch pieces.

Allow the coconut milk to separate and you will have about two cups of thick "cream" and one cup of
thin "milk". In a small saucepan bring the milk to a simmer and add the chicken or pork. If you are
using beef you will need another two cups of milk. Simmer the meat until it begins to become tender
(beef takes longer, hence the additional milk).

Put the coconut cream in a wok and bring to a boil, add the massaman paste and "stir fry" until the
flavor is brought out and maximized. Add the remaining cream and curry paste to the meat.

Add the peanuts. Taste and adjust the flavor until it is (just) sweet (by adding sugar), sour and salty
(by adding tamarind juice, lime juice and fish sauce).

Add the remaining ingredients and cook until cooked.

Note : the potatoes used in Thailand for this dish are a yellow fleshed sweet potato of the type sometimes
called a yam in the US. Western style potatoes can be used, but absorb less of the sauce and flavor.
The potatoes act as a "moderator" to reduce the heat of the curry, and should not be left out.

You can either serve it on a bed of Thai jasmine rice, or double the amount of potato and serve it alone.

Accompany it with a dressed green salad and a bowl of "ajad" (pickled cucumbers--see recipe below). The
traditional Thai table also offers chilis in fish sauce (Phrik nam pla--see below) chilis in vinegar (prik dong,
see below), and ground chilli (not to be confused with the powedered chilli mix sold as chilli powder in the US),
sugar, and often MSG. You can if you wish add about a teaspoon of MSG to the above recipe to bring out the
flavors, but we don't think it is necesary.

Ajad

4 tablespoons white rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
2-3 tablespoons cucumber, very coarsely chopped, or sliced
2 shallots (purple onions) chopped
3-4 Thai chile peppers, thinly sliced

Combine the ingredients, and leave to stand overnight.

Nam pla prik

Put two thirds of a cup of Thai chile peppers or jalapeno peppers in a 1 pint jar, and fill with fish sauce.
Seal and keep for a week before using.

Prik dong

Put two thirds of a cup of sliced Thai chile peppers in a 1 pint jar, and fill with white rice vinegar.
We also offer a ready-made prik dong.

Enjoy cooking.

Mike

Hitchens debates.

Fantastic debating by Hitchens.

Mike