Yum

If it's pouring with rain, or just cold, or otherwise exhibiting lasting signs of late winter, make this for dinner, Mark Bittman's quick polenta. Basically: cook about a cup of polenta on medium heat, adding a cup of water initially, and again, three or four times subsequently, as the cornmeal absorbs the moisture. Whisk before putting the polenta onto the burner and then after every addition of water, and whenever else it seems to need it. As you're cooking the polenta, throw some good quality sausages into a pan, and saute until done. When the polenta tastes almost done, add another cup or so of water, turn it down to low, and cook until it's tender. Then add a knob of butter, a generous amount of pepper, and a "boatload" of parmesan. Stir until combined. Throw some good sausages on top, and you're set to go. Add a vegetable on the side if you must, but it will interrupt the sheer pleasure of slurping up hot, cheesy polenta on top of little slices of sausage. This is comfort food, y'all. It will soothe your February fatigue.

A few more things need vindicating, Mary

So I've been watching a BBC series called The History of Britain, narrated by none other than Simon Schama, the wunderkind historian. Schama has truly strange delivery, and he never emphasizes the words you expect him to -- so if he'd said that phrase, he would probably have emphasized "emphasizes" and "words," all while moving his head very quickly and decisively back and forth. Even if this makes him easy to satirize, it doesn't mean he isn't an excellent and engaging historian. I mean, I say props to anyone who has enough knowledge to write his own script for a series about the entire history of England. This island has been at it for a long time!

Anyhow, a few nights ago I was watching the episode about the end of the eighteenth century, which contains a gutting section on slavery (and the irony of its existence alongside general Enlightenment calls for freedom), and goes on to talk about the French revolution, specifically about Mary Wollstonecraft's time in France. The production value for the series isn't the best: there's a lot of bad, sort of game-showey music, and really lame costume drama reenactment. So, for example, the narration frequently cuts from Schama, talking someplace historical (like in front of Wollstonecraft and Godwin's shared tomb), to this gauzily filmed sequence of Mary happily sitting across from Godwin. Any of you who are aficionados of history programs will know what I mean: when you're discussing history that happened pre-film and that doesn't involve lots of artifacts, you don't have an awful lot to work with.

So Mary was on my mind yesterday. Then I went to a C-18 reading group, and on to a pub afterward (it's customary here to go to a pub after workshop; it's a very nice tradition). About half an hour after we turned up, a legion of young women, dressed in costume, charged in. This made me think about Wollstonecraft's Vindication much more directly, because they were all, to a person, unbelievably scantily clad; at least four had garters, several others bunny costumes, or slender excuses for near nudity (a hat does not a convincing costume make...). All the guys they were with hadn't dressed up at all. This was obviously a special occasion, probably someone's birthday, and there seemed to be a vague circus theme. This kind of sight is by no means uncommon here. Fancy dress (the British phrase for costume) isn't a Halloween or bachelor party affair -- though one of the best costumes I've heard of, a banana, was used for the latter. Nor does it always involve young women wearing almost nothing and getting completely drunk. Last weekend, for instance, I saw a troupe of female ninja turtles happily charging down Euston road. But most times, fancy dress does involve young women dressing in nearly invisible miniskirts, bustiers, and drinking all night long, later to stumble along the streets. Maybe this is what enlightened womanhood looks like, but I don't really think so.

Feminism is a dirty word these days in many circles: when Manohla Dargis wrote about the underrepresentation of real women in Hollywood cinema, she made a point of saying she wasn't being a feminist. Um, ok, Manohla, but are you sure you really mean that? Here in the UK, it's something you'll hardly hear anyone admit to being. One of my friends had a young female student who said, "Isn't the work of feminism done?," and there seems more generally to be a sentiment that it no longer needs to be taught. Admittedly, feminism is such a multiple, variable thing that it cannot be considered as a monolithic concept; it encompasses a wide variety of approaches, ideologies, and claims. Not every feminist goes as far as the dugareed Dworkin. And I understand the misunderstandings that extreme feminism can give rise to: it's easy to think that all feminists are as radical as Dworkin. I'm equally sympathetic to the point of view that imagines that feminism is more or less over, and thinks we're post-feminist. I remember thinking this myself in college, and not really understanding what all the fuss was about. If I always used "he" as a pronoun, did it really have to mean something? Couldn't we just understand it as a convention?

In the years between undergrad and now -- six now, going on seven -- I've changed my mind about the importance of feminism. It's not because of anything particular that's happened to me, but it's been due, I think, to my (limited) exposure to the working world, and also to my continued exposure to the hypersexualization of women in the media. It's something that it's possible to notice even more clearly when you move to a new place: when I lived in Florence for a few months, I remember finding the car that advertised the strip joint really peculiar, and when I moved here, I've found myself repulsed by the postcards in phone booths, as well as by the apparent imperative for young women to dress and behave in a extremely determined manner. There are plenty of equivalents in the states, but you just get numb to them after a while. There's something quite stark about seeing how it breaks down in another country, because you notice it much more clearly.

I'm inured to the use of bodies in advertising -- there's a vacation poster for Aruba up in the underground that says "Arooooba" over some girl's boobs, and basically should say "A-boooooba" -- but I think that when the conventions, or trends, or whatever you want to call them, of young women's dress are so uniformly provocative in the UK, it's unlikely that all of these ladies have read their Mackinnon, had a think about it, and decided that they were going to put on a miniskirt. To be clear, the creditable strands of feminism tell you that you should put on a miniskirt if you want to. Feminism isn't, and shouldn't be, synonymous with prudery or with an aversion to sex. But as any smart person worth her salt knows, our desires are determined by forces outside of us, and I find it genuinely concerning that so many young women here seem to take this kind of personality on as their cause celebre without thinking about why it's become so ubiquitous, or what it means. Make sure it's yours, girls, before you take it on.

Englishness

I just spell-checked an article, and since my spell-check is set to 'US' -- in fact, there's a little American flag in the top right corner -- it caught my new dirty secret: sometimes I use British spellings without even noticing it. It's not gone so far as to make "colour" look okay; I can't imagine it ever will. Nor have I started wearing shorts with tights, which seems to be all the rage here. (Ladies, this is not ok!) But in any case, slowly the letter "s" is creeping in in place of "z," so I'll write "analyse." In fact, right now Blogger has underlined the word in red, so there you go.

Spelling is the tip of the assimilation iceberg. It's tricky, this business of assimilating, because England does and does not seem like a foreign country. Unlike Germany, where I don't even get the gender of bratwurst right -- I mistakenly ordered ein Bratwurst instead of eine Bratwurst; I had no inkling it was feminine, and was gruffly corrected by the sausage seller -- here I can get around no problem, and certain things, for instance the NHS, seem to run more smoothly (knock wood) than their American equivalents. Nevertheless, an American inevitably experiences occasional, or even frequent, puzzlement in the face of English traditions and ways. As Bill Bryson chronicles so well in Notes from a Small Island, which I was given as a (very appropriate) Christmas present, there's a long list of English things that stand out to an American. The variety of radio programming, for instance -- who's heard of a radio soap? or a show all about gardening questions? -- not to mention the ritualization of tea, the obsession with sparkly Saturday-night outfits, the fear of being overheard in public, and the tremendous population of urban foxes (and yes, I do mean the variety with four legs, not two, for any of you who are wondering...). There are nicer oddities, too, like the warmth of English families and the pub-to-pub walking you can do, in the countryside, or, if you like, in the city; plus Simon Schama's history programs, and any recipe by Nigel Slater. But for a nation that speaks English, it is a pretty different country. Even the word "pretty" means something different here: "pretty different" is the equivalent of "very different"; the meanings of "pretty" and "quite" are switched in British English.

That said, I think the pluses outweigh the minuses. I mean, flaming Christmas pudding? Pretty awesome. Lots of crazy tweed sold by old hat shops? Also nice. A general sense of community whenever it snows? Not so bad. Cadbury (soon to be Kraft) eggs, available from January through April, expressly designed to fatten us all up? A win. Debit cards with chips in them? Convenient. Everyone dressed in navy, grey, and brown? Easy to blend in.

Snip snip

Earlier this week, I realized I had been in London for three months already. More specifically, I realized that I had been in London for three months already and it was definitely, urgently, unquestionably time for a haircut. My bangs had grown past my eyebrows and then past my eyes weeks ago, and I'd adopted a swept to the side style that I hoped looked deliberate or even just passable, rather than like a feeble attempt to conceal my ill-kept locks. Previously, I'd attempted to trim my own bangs, but it didn't go well. Soon after I'd tried it I was told at a dinner party that I looked a bit like John Bunyan, so I decided not to try it again. Plus, much as I love Tom, I wasn't about to ask him to trim my bangs, so I decided to find a hairdresser.

In most aspects of my life I'm not superstitious or religious, but I am, I suppose, a bit religious about who cuts my hair. I figure that hair is one accessory worth investing in: you wear it every day, and it has the potential to make things look better, rather than worse, so why not? Plus I've been growing out my hair, and I wanted to find someone who'd restore order without chopping off too much length. I'm growing it out in part because I really want to have long hair again, and haven't since I was very young, and in part because my hair is finally longer than Tom's, and I'm not about to give up that hard-won victory just yet. It was cool to have hair shorter than his, and maybe I'll go back to it sometime, but not just yet.

So, I started looking around for a place. Everything in London is expensive to begin with, so I couldn't go straight to the place where Tilda Swinton gets her hair done. Mind you, I was sorely tempted, especially as it's called Tommy Guns. But instead I settled on Hair and Jerome in Spitalfields, in East London. I didn't know anyone who'd been there, but I thought, well, it's worth a try. It's run by ex-Parisians, and the walls are an amazing shade of dark yellow, with contrasting black trim. Everything is perfectly done, and the barber chairs are antiques. When I walked in, I thought, these are all signs of a place that will be too cool for school, not to mention for me. I was wrong, though: it was very unpretentious.

Anyhow, I was reminded of how the experience of going to someone new for a haircut requires complete trust. You have to cede faith to the scissors. It's been a while since I've had to do this, and there were a few moments when I found my heart in my throat, as Ismarie, the lady in question, cut off huge pieces of my hair. I kept thinking, wait, I thought we were going to keep it long, and here there are these four-inch-long pieces falling to the floor. But it turned out very well in the end, and I have to say, I dig it. Ismarie herself was amazing, and could have been right out of a Garance Dore blog post. She had effortless elegance, and was surprisingly hilarious. Telling me about going to a friend's house, but being warned that the friend's mother didn't like French people, she said to me, "I don't understand! It's not like I showed up all like this!" -- and she shoved her hand between the buttons of her shirt, Napoleon-style. Awesome.

The Holidays

In the past, I would not have described myself as particularly gung-ho when it comes to the holidays. I love the small family rituals we have, like putting the fat, old-style colored lights up on the tree, the sort that I'm not sure are even made any more, or eating lots and lots of stollen on Christmas morning, sometimes in combination with pannetone, or battling Dad about whether it's ok to have Mannheim Steamroller providing the soundtrack. I'm a naysayer on the last issue, just for the record. But in general, aside from my enthusiasm about seeing family and friends, and having a generally expansive excuse to eat, drink, and make merry -- plus an occasion to bake new kinds of cookies, like ones you shape in spoons -- I'm not usually holiday-crazy. You'd never find me wearing a headband with reindeer antlers (which I spotted at the airport a few years ago), nor a flashing necklace. I don't carol, and my interest in nativity scenes tends more towards stories about how churches have had to start installing GPS tracking devices in baby Jesus to prevent theft than towards strict scriptural interpretation.

Now, I'm not wearing an appliqued santa sweatshirt while writing this, but I have to say that living in England has made me much more keen about holidays. Usually Thanksgiving passes without too much fuss, but this year, when we had a Thanksgiving here with my parents and Tom's grandmother, one of Tom's brothers, and Kristian, I felt the full onset of holiday enthusiasm. I suppose I associate Thanksgiving and Christmas with the States, and so having a Thanksgiving meal with all the fixings is a way to feel as if I'm not so far from home. Cranberry sauce turns out to be much more important when you're in England: somehow it makes the States seem less far away. I'm not quite to the place of saying, admiringly, like a group of tourists I saw a few weeks ago, "Now that's an American car!" when a gigantic stretch Navigator rolled by -- that doesn't make me feel at home! -- but I am feeling especially keen about the holidays this year. But I'll keep it under control, I promise. And if I cave and get the headband, I'll be sure to wear it while singing carols out of the sunroof of a SUV limo.

The White Ribbon, or when the movies won't let you off easy

I don't know if Michael Haneke's film, The White Ribbon, is out in the States yet, so if it isn't, ignore this. It won Cannes and has generally been getting a lot of attention, I think -- there was an article about Haneke in The New Yorker (here's a snippet) and the BFI has organized a festival to celebrate Haneke's life and work. He's definitely made his mark: this recent film has been called his best, and it clearly develops the only other film of his I've seen -- Cache -- presenting an even more pared-down and relentless meditation on violence so systematic that it appears sourceless. In Cache, a French family keeps on receiving footage of themselves that has been filmed without their knowledge, and menacing things happen to their son. The basic conceit -- surveillance without a clearly-identified source, cruelty of and to children, and a preponderance of violence -- carries over to The White Ribbon. In other words, Haneke seems to have a basic form he's working with, and he keeps telling the same sort of story in different historical settings.

The White Ribbon is set in the Germany of 1913-14, as no viewer can fail to notice. The assassination of Ferdinand is important towards the end of the film, and while the first World War doesn't make a direct appearance per se, it's clear that Haneke is connecting the terrible things happening in a small village, dominated by a baron and populated by workers who staff the baron's estate and work the surrounding fields, to the way that WWI and WWII wreaked such havoc across Europe. It's clear, in other words, that the trauma of the twentieth century is something that Haneke feels we still need to process. The link that many have wanted to draw, having seen this film, is between the group of children at the center of the film's events, and the fact that they will be adults on the eve of WWII. The connection, in other words, is one between the (apparently unreasonable) cruelty of children and the (obviously unreasonable) cruelty of Fascism. But more than that, Haneke is trying, I think, to take an almost allegorical approach to the history of the twentieth century by presenting the viewer with a series of events that happen in one village to a handful of people. He suggests that these events -- which are unsolved crimes -- are paradigmatic of the rise of Fascism, but more importantly, he shows the problem with thinking about it this way, and suggests that it is necessary to harness responsibility for atrocities to human actors, rather than blaming larger systems or ideologies.

One thing I've found to be true of both Cache and The White Ribbon is that violence in each film appears paratactic. This is Haneke's way, I think, of representing the difficulty of understanding the points of contact between individual human intention or agency and events that are much larger than the work of one particular person. The gang of children who uncoincidentally show up at the door of the houses where injured victims of unsolved crimes are convalescing want to see "if they can do anything." They aren't there just out of curiosity, nor just out of atonement. It's hard to tell why they're there, and Haneke deliberately leaves it unresolved. But this atomizes the sense of responsibility such that characters seem to be harmed by things (a wire stretched across a field that trips a horse; a rotten floor in a sawmill) and seem to take their revenge on things (a field of cabbage). You as a viewer feel terribly unsatisfied with leaving the cinema not knowing who did what, and one way of making sense of this is to say that Haneke's films are polemics against not believing that humans have to be held responsible for harm to other humans that they have caused; that the idea of accident or contingency is unsatisfactory, especially in the context of a mass atrocity which was facilitated by active as well as passive participation.

I lay awake for a long time the night I saw The White Ribbon. In part, I was frustrated because I didn't think there was a reason for all the violence Haneke used, nor did I think that he deployed it sensitively, despite what the program notes suggested. But I suppose it made me think about the claim Adorno makes about the impossibility of lyric (i.e. a kind of poetry of beauty) after the Holocaust. I tend to be very resistant to Adorno, because I frequently find him a pompous ass and think he's subject to the worse sort of hypocrisy, living this hugely decadent lifestyle while decrying the fall of civilization and the bankruptcy of modern morality. But watching Haneke's film, which is beautiful but also horrible -- you can't take one without the other -- made me think that maybe, strangely, that claim about committed art and the impossibility of beauty as such after 1939: maybe that's right. There's another observation Adorno makes -- this time in the company of Horkheimer -- about cartoons being a kind of cathected humor which just makes you laugh at the brutality you're subject to. Haneke isn't cartoonish or antic, but he lures you in by giving you something beautiful and then showing it to be terribly destructive. This is, perhaps, the same kind of move, and regardless of how The White Ribbon fares, I think it's part of the longer conversation about how aesthetic possibilities are directly shaped by certain large and irreversible events in history.

Nigel Slater loves you

Make this. It shall not disappoint. It's from The Kitchen Diaries, Nigel Slater's fantastic chronicle of a year of cooking.

Onion Soup Without Tears

onions - 4 medium
butter - 40 g
a glass of white wine
vegetable stock - 1.5 litres
a small French loaf
grated Gruyere, Emmental or other good melting cheese - 150 g

Set the oven at 200°C. Peel the onions and cut them in half from tip to root, then lay them in a roasting tin and add the butter, salt, and some pepper. Roast until they are tender and soft, and toasted dark brown here and there. You might have to turn them now and again.
Cut the onions into thick segments. Put them in a saucepan with the wine and bring to the boil. Let the wine bubble until it almost disappears (you just want the flavour, not the alcohol), then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for about twenty minutes.
Just before you want to serve the soup, make the cheese croûtes. Cut the loaf into thin slices and toast lightly on one side under a hot grill. Turn them over and sprinkle with the grated cheese. Get the soup hot, ladle it into bowls and float the cheese croûtes on top. Place the bowls under a hot grill and leave until the cheese melts. Eat immediately, whilst the cheese is still stringy and molten.

Enough for 4.