On Reading and Life

Of late I spend an hour or two in the dark mornings reading a chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Perhaps by Spring I will have finished the novel, again. Today was the Lestrygonians: a population of giant cannibals who kill and devour the sailors of eleven of Ulysses’ twelve fleet of ships as they sail home to Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War. It is lunchtime and the chapter is filled with food. Bloom is hungry and stops first into The Burton but the sight, sounds and smells of the place sickens him. “Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy foot, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: masticated gristle . . . Chump chop . . . Smells of men. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarettemoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, piss, the stale of ferment . . . His gorge rose. Couldn’t eat a morsel here . . .” I think Joyce gets Bloom right here: though he liked to eat the inner organs of beasts and fowls, this scene seems too much for him. “Out,” he says. “I hate dirty eaters,” and he heads to Davy Byrne’s for a vegetarian meal. “After all,” he thinks, “there’s a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth . . .” He orders a cheese sandwich—gorgonzola—garnished with mustard, and to accompany it, a glass of burgundy. Bloom cuts his sandwich into neat, regular, and ordered slices. I am a vegetarian and I often dine on cheese sandwiches, be they cold or grilled. I garnish with mustard, usually Dijon. I like to dine in clean, well-lighted places
          Despite the fact that to read Ulysses I must sit up at my desk awake and alert, a full mug of dark coffee on a coaster beside me and a strong light on the pages of the text, there is something calming when I engage with Joyce’s novel in the early solitary mornings of this pandemic-infected winter. The world is quiet even though the novel is not so; I decide to leave the shades in my home drawn and there exists seemingly no world outside those in which the events of the novel take place or the endeavors of my reading experience. These undertakings are in the moments enough for me. Reading Ulysses demands attention, patience and a willingness to be at times baffled. Bafflement seems an appropriate state in these times. The quiet of the stilldark morning comforts me in these conditions. Ulysses is a difficult book: there are some pages that I study for upwards of ten minutes, and at the end I am still baffled as I turn the page. But I am despite some difficult perplexities happily lost in the world of Dublin, as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus make their way through the city, the former unconsciously looking for a son and the latter consciously searching for a father. I am, alas, both son and father.
          But perhaps, I consider, all reading requires such rigor. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy says, “My way is ever to point out to the curious, different tracts of investigation, to come at the first springs of the events I tell;—with the officious humility of a heart devoted to the assistance merely of the inquisitive;—to them I write,—and by them I shall be read,—if any such reading as this could be supposed to hold out so long, to the very end of the world.” Thoreau announces that this only is reading: that which makes one stand on tip-toes. Reading Ulysses causes me great muscle soreness. But the pain is a welcome outcome, as when after a long run my calf muscles became rubberyweak, Then I know I’ve worked hard and the pain is evidence of my growth. The educational challenge (For almost half a century I have been a teacher) has long seemed to me to be about how to invite students into the rigorous effort entailed in reading and even to enjoy the often difficult, sometimes bewildering and maddening experience of it. And it strikes me now that reading is not unlike living: one moves in life and reading into diverse communities populated by a varied assortment of mostly unexpected strangers who behave in ways and manners that require explanations and understanding, even sometimes sympathy or even antipathy; to deal with stories offered by sometimes very unreliable narrators. How to be comfortable entering these strange and even estranging communities of characters and the events that they provoke is for me the challenge and pleasures of reading. Of course, all communities are not for me, and there are some books I put aside, but without challenge in the reading there is little to keep me engaged. The search for communities in reading and in life never wearies me and even sometimes offers me great delight and reward. 

The Careless Cook 3

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He like thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, livers slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.” So begins the fourth chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am almost certain that I have tasted none of Bloom’s favorites, though once in England I ordered a pie that contained kidney. I did not finish the dish once I discovered to my horror my error. None of Bloom’s favored repasts interests me in the least..

I have been vegetarian for almost forty years now. I remember my last cheeseburger. I was on a bike trip with an acquaintance and crossing Massachusetts from Concord to Greenfield we stopped in Northampton, Massachusetts for lunch. A substantial portion of fries accompanied the large and juicy burger. I think this occasion might also have been the last time I drank soda pop: I ordered a Coca-Cola. 

            I have experienced a troubled relationship with flesh on the table. My parents kept a (mostly) kosher home. At some point my depressed mother did keep a supply of Swanson chicken pot pies in the downstairs freezer away from my father’s gaze, though I can’t imagine he didn’t suspect their presence or their place on his children’s menu. Our meat was regularly delivered by the butcher- husband of my mother’s oldest friend, and the standing command given to him by my mother was to trim the fat carefully and completely. We were at the table then instructed to cut away whatever fat remained. When we dined out I subsequently always found the meat too gristly, too fatty, too unsavory. As for fish: though at home we regularly ate Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, in the restaurants my parents always wondered if the fish I had ordered tasted too fishy. I thought the fish always tasted too fishy; again, eating remained fraught with anxiety. 

            I took to eating pasta and pizza. 

            And then I read Frances Moore Lappe’s book Diet for a Small Planet, and I found an ecological and humanitarian justification not to eat meat. Thoreau had written, “A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.” I agreed. And living in New York City where green grocers heavily dotted the streets made vegetarian cooking accessible and adventurous. There was on display fresh produce beautifully arranged the existence of which I had never heard. Eating became a discovered pleasure: it was all vegetables and I did not have to be concerned with too much fat on various cuts of meat or a too fishy taste of fish filets. For years I then steamed an assortment of vegetables and served them over brown rice and covered them all with a variety of sauces. Eating seemed a relatively humble and healthful activity, but I did not ask where these vegetables had been grown and by whom they had been harvested. “Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do,” Thoreau warned. I do remember boycotting lettuce and grapes, but there was exploitation staring up at me from my plates. 

But I learned how to prepare and cook my vegetarian fare, and I did not experience any worry or suffer too much guilt concerning any of my prepared dishes or my carelessness in preparation. Despite warnings of e coli bacterium in my greens and of protein insufficiency in my non-meat diet; and almost deaf to the outcry against exploitation in the fields, I did not pay enough attention, but from my efforts in the kitchen I remained healthy, vegetarian and careless in my purchases and menus. I had few qualms about the edibility of the dishes placed on my table or of the health of this eater. Sometimes I didn’t even mind the clean-up.

            I wonder how Leopold Bloom prepared the inner organs of beast and fowls. I recently watched a video of the culinary preparation of beef heart but I don’t have a sense that this type of effort would have been a part of Bloom’s techniques in the kitchen. I also don’t have a sense that he ate out in restaurants with his wife, Molly, and his daughter, Milly and ordered this type of fare. In chapter four of Ulysses Bloom does visit the local meat shoppe and purchases a kidney that he placed in the side pocket of his jacket. There he also ogles the girl who had purchased some sausage and whom he lasciviously follows down the street a ways. “To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams.” For lunch that day (June 16, 1904), Bloom purchased a cheese sandwich. No, I do not believe that this most famous protagonist of this most renowned novel in the English language, Leopold Bloom, was a gourmet cook! But perhaps he was a careless one.

             

 

The Careless Cook 2

 It is one of my favorite moments in Torah. It occurs after Pharaoh, despite the pain his stubbornness has caused Egypt, a consequence of the virulent intensity of the nine plagues that God has visited on them, has once again refused to free the enslaved Israelites. Now, in anticipation of the final plague God gives direction to Moses for the people concerning the preparation and consumption of that final meal of which the Israelites will prepare before the exodus. “You shall not eat it partially roasted or cooked in water; only roasted over fire—its head, its legs, with its innards. You shall not leave any of it until morning; any of it that is left until morning you shall burn in the fire. So shall you eat it: your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; you shall eat it in haste—" This fare will be totally consumed. I think this moment is one of great tension, and the meal must have been eaten with some degree of anxiety in the anticipation after 400 years of slavery, the Israelites will finally be leaving Egypt, albeit in a considerable rush. This final meal might be at any moment interrupted; but God’s directive demands that this meal must be wholly consumed and that there be no leftovers that might be packed and taken out with the people in anticipation of their desert wandering. Nothing must remain of the meal as the Israelites depart from enslavement in Egypt. What they cannot finish eating of the meal must at the end be burnt to ash. I do not think this meal represents a festive repastl though certainly it is one that anticipates a long-hoped for joy.  It interests me that the burning of the leftovers must take place in the morning when I would think that the Israelites would have long since departed in the night, but this refusal reflects a sense that regardless of how long the exodus will take nothing of the leftovers must be taken out of Egypt. Everything from hereon should now be fresh and new. I have wondered if this burning of what is left over is the derivation of the ceremonial burning of the last remnants of leavened food that has remained in the house on the morning before the first day of the Passover festival. The festival will begin without any leftovers in the house. In his directive Moses has insisted that nothing prepared in slavery should be taken with them when the people are freed—except, of course, for the memory of slavery. This memory provides, I believe, the core ethic of Judaism: to care for the stranger in our midst because we were strangers in the land.

I am not particularly fond of leftovers, and though sometimes I might burn the entrée I do not burn up what might be leftover. I try to offer them out. Perhaps leftovers remind me too much of yesterdays. Or perhaps I think that leftovers prevent the future. To reduce the possibility of the existence of leftovers, I’ve attempted with more and less success to learn to cook only what I and guests can finish in a single meal. Tomorrow will be time enough for another recipe. I favor an almost bare refrigerator filled with only the immediate staples: milk, butter, orange juice; fruits, vegetables and cheeses. In the freezer compartment I keep, well, mostly frozen foods, a supply that includes besides the vegetables sometimes containers of ice cream, though I find it dangerous to keep the latter about because I don’t have much discipline and am prone to consume the pint in a very few sittings. In the freezer as well I store breads that in my moments of anxiety I bake. I give many breads away. But mostly, I appreciate the clear view to the rear of the fridge and of the bottom of the freezer without having to move anything about that obstructs the clear vista. When I want to think about preparing the current meal I don’t want to settle for only what is left in the refrigerator. I prefer to make daily a list for shopping and then to visit the Co-op or supermarket for the items necessary for the chosen recipe. 

And I tend not to sit long at the dining table; I eat with my loins girded but I don’t wear shoes, though during the winters I do dress my feet in lined slippers. And I don’t yet (thankfully) have need for a staff to enable my walking. Eating alone or with a single companion I serve the meal and then haven eaten it, I (or we) arise. At the table we do not linger, During the meal we have usually engaged in pleasant and even serious conversation, but only until our plates are empty. Then we clear the table, clean the dishes and settle in for the evening. If by chance anything remains, if there are leftovers, I offer them out. With company we sit at table longer but I again attempt to dispense the leftovers liberally. 

Are leftovers a symptom of the sin of excess? I wonder why I have prepared so much more than we could ever finish at a single sitting? Is this meal a boast at my plenty? Or is the presence of leftovers evidence that we haven’t eaten sufficiently. And why, I wonder, have we not done so? What of ourselves aren’t we feeding because we have refused, even politely, what has been prepared for us and placed on the table? Or conversely, is the existence of leftovers evidence of some insufficiency—of appetite, say, or perhaps, as in the case of anorexia, a symptom of some other emotional absence, or maybe an attempt to assert some control over one’s self by choosing not to eat what is placed before one on the table. And what else is refused there? 

I wonder if there is some ritual I am avoiding in the avoidance of leftovers? Or is there some ritual in which I am participating in that avoidance?

 

 

6 January 2022

How stupid do the Republicans think the citizenry are? Or, how stupid is the citizenry to which the Republicans appeal and to whom they pander. Today—January 6—marks the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol. That insurgency was provoked, if not organized, by Trump and his sycophants as they attempted to subvert American democracy by throwing out the legitimate votes of the American people and calling into question the result of the election that Trump legitimately lost in the popular vote by almost seven million votes and in the electoral college tally by over seventy votes!  Lynn Cheney (and her father) are the only Republican lawmakers on the floor of Congress to memorialize the attempted coup by a Republican ex-President and his horde of proto-fascists.  And yet on Bannon’s podcast Gaetz and Greene lay the responsibility on the Democrats, the Capitol police, the federal government (that at that moment was headed by Trump and his dastardly horde), and others. But as the Times report, “There is no evidence that undercover agents or other outsiders played a role in the attack and fact checkers have worked to debunk similar claims aired on Fox News..” The Times says that Gaetz and Greene offered little evidence for their claims. Greene’s Twitter account has been permanently suspended, as has that of Trump. I mean, who believes these lies—or do they continue to espouse belief in the lies to disguise their remarkable blindnesses and credulity to the vicious fabrications espoused by the Republican so-called lawmakers. Are the believers just protecting their self-respect by continuing to buy into the falsehoods and deceptions of such ilk as Gosar, Gaetz, Greene, Gohmert. And what is the significance that each of their names begin with the letter “G?” And then what about Lauren Boebert and the letter B?

And now Lindsay Graham (another G), who on January 6 2021 cried, “Enough is enough, count me out” and laid the blame for the violence on Trump, today claimed that the Democrats are politicizing January 6. Damn! If the insurrection on January 6 wasn’t a political event then I certainly don’t know what occasion might be so termed. The events of January 6 were an attempt to pull down the legitimate government and replace it with demagogues and sycophants. That is politics simple, pure and very, very dirty.

This will all not end well. I wonder how the Republicans manage to hold onto any semblance of self-respect given their deceptions and cowardliness. I do not think they see themselves in the mirrors when they shave or apply their makeup; the sight would be too frightening if their image reflected their intentions. l I think of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that recounts how the character’s engagement with sordid and dangerous behaviors is not reflected in his visage at all but appears only in his portrait. And as long as he does not view the portrait he can remain steeped in his corruptions. Or perhaps the Republicans have not enough substance and there shows no image in the mirror. All they seem to be concerned with is grasping for power for the sake of having power. Isn’t that a definition of fascism? Because they seem not even to care even about getting the trains to run on time: they voted against the infrastructure bill! They support voter suppression. They support an ex-President whose best friends are dictators! All they seem to favor is the ending of all mask and vaccine mandates, even though most of them have been vaccinated, boostered, and are recipients of excellent health care coverage. The hypocrisy of the Republicans is so blatant as to be unmistakable. How stupid must we be to support such dangerous behaviors. How stupid must they think we are to continue to promulgate such lies. Or alternatively, how prejudiced is the citizenry to support such perilous rubbish. In any case, I worry.

This will not end well. For a start the threat the Republicans pose ruins my sleep and raises my blood pressure. I seem to be forever anxious when so much of my life is pleasure-filled. I bake too many loaves of bread and eat too many desserts. I’m wondering how I can avoid the news over the next year. I feel so powerless. And what about the children?

But It's Getting There

The year is but two days old and the news that I had unsuccessfully sworn to avoid knowing has exacerbated my already depressed spirit. Some numbers: almost three-quarters of Republicans still believe Trump’s Lie that the presidency was lost due to voter fraud; 80% of Republicans want Trump to run again in 2024; and a majority of Republicans think that too much time is being spent on investigating the insurrection. Trump plans to spew his viles lies all over us again on 2022 January 6 the one year anniversary of the insurrection that was meant to overturn the election and install the dictator a head of the government accompanied by his horde of sycophants. It has become gospel that complete loyalty to Trump defines a Republican and any deviance from that 100% devotion threatens the apostate with the label RINO, or Republican In Name Only. Sticks and stones, sticks and stones . . . The cowardice of the Republican congressional representatives is appalling. Those who would govern us daily speak to us untruths; those who would serve the government act to pull it down; democracy does not enter their thoughts nor emanate from their mouths. Montaigne says “Only lying, and a little below it obstinacy, seem to me to be the actions whose birth and progress one should combat insistently.” Republican legislators are guilty of lying and obstinacy, and what are we left to think of their ethical characters. Montaigne again: “At all events, if there should be such gross and apparent ignorance or cowardice as to surpass all ordinary examples, it would be right to take it as sufficient of wickedness and malice and to punish it as such.” Despite absolutely no evidence of voter fraud Republicans and Republican congress men and women continue to promulgate the Big Lie. And what about the punishment for their wickedness and malice.

I’ve returned recently to Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet, an historical narrative that novelistically traces the struggle between democracy and power that extends from the English Civil War in the 17^th century (Prisons) to West Virginia coal country in the 20^th century (The Killing Ground). I remember reading at least the first three novels in the 1970s and early 1980s when I was fascinated by the Puritans who eventually settled North America and especially Virginia in search of freedom from tyranny. I was so much older then . . . more idealistic then and I was desirous to understand the development of democracy in the colonies as it led to the Revolution, and I recall my discomfort in her portrayal of Oliver Cromwell as a demagogue disguising himself in the cloak of religion. I am so much younger than that now.

            What happens to democratic longings when the questers actually achieve a semblance of power. And what happens to the citizenry that follows these leaders when the latter turn to demagoguery and crude populism laced with ugly prejudice and hate. Trump’s minions despite all evidence to the contrary and the decisions of the courts denying his claim, attach themselves unthinkingly to his lies. Onto what do they continue to hold? I am thinking of Byron’s poem “The Prisoner of Chillon.” I believe that I read it originally in a survey of English literature in my second year at college,  As I learn from Wikipedia, the poem concerns the political imprisonment of the 16th-century Swiss patriot François Bonivard in the dungeon of the château of Chillon on Lake Geneva. Bonivard is chained to a post next to his brothers, whom he watches die one by one. But this is how it ends: “My very chains and I grew friends,/ So much a long communion tends/ To make us what we are:—even I Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.” The prisoner in his imprisonment has learned to love his chains. And that is how I understand the Republicans who at one point kept their political and personal distance from Trump and now have come to love their chains with which he holds them servile to his whims and lies and demagogic appetites.

Now there is yet another and more sinister explanation for the behaviors and beliefs of Republican citizenry and especially those of that party who sit in Congress and who have taken an oath to protect the Constitution but who now have seen how allegiance to Trump might actually secure for them absolute power. There is a cartoon by Mitra Farmand: in it four wolves stand about disguised in sheep’s clothing, and one wolf says to the others, “Now what?” Perhaps it is that Republicans didn’t know what to do with themselves when they pretended to act with a democratic agenda and a civil conscience, but now that Trump has unleashed them they feel free in recent years to act like the wolves they have in the past 100 years have been, at least since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Party of Lincoln? I hate how they defame that great man.

There is another cartoon I have kept since it was first published in the Village Voice in 1995. It is from Matt Groening. In it a guard looks through a slot in the prison door looking towards a prisoner sitting in a prison cell. The guard says, “I hope you realize that the more you call Republicans hateful and uncaring, the longer you’ll have to stay in the orphanage.”

Alas, I read the news today and I despair that the wolves will come out from their disguises and be again the dangerous predators I have long suspected they are. Alas, I think we will long remain trapped in the orphanage.