perfidy

As I noted earlier this week, one challenge when cooking vegetarian is in making your dishes as good as a meated counterpart. In some cases, this requires rethinking what the dish needs. In the case of chili, Southwestern-style bowls of red (or green! Don't forget green!) are right out because the flavor of those recipes derives entirely from beef and chiles. So when putting my veg chili recipe together, I chose to adapt a Cincinnatti-style recipe instead. Aside from overturning the faintly absurd Texas chili prejudice against beans, Cinci chilis typically contain a number of spices not present in more traditional recipies. Since the point of a chili is to achieve gigantic flavor this is clearly the right place to start.

The final result is actually a little more of an American curry than a strict chili. Before my gentle readers retch into the nearest trashcan, let me explain. Unlike Southwestern-style meat chili, which achieves depth of flavor by using several kinds of chile peppers and good meat and cooking them together for hours, good veg chili has to get the same results by layering subtle flavors on aggressive flavors until they all meld into a whole, much as good curry does. It still tastes like chili. In fact, I'm so proud of this recipe that I hereby assert that if made properly with good ingredients, it's the best meatless chili you can make.
Cincinnatti-style Vegetarian Chili

1 pound (about 3 cups) pinto beans, picked over and rinsed.
2 cups finely chopped onion
2 cups finely chopped bell pepper (chile peppers of any variety may be substituted for part of total)
6-8 cloves minced garlic
1-2 chopped canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (optional)
4 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons dried thyme
2-3 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon cocoa powder
1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon crushed saffron threads
(optional additions- red pepper flakes, cayenne pepper, Dave’s Insanity Sauce)
6 ounces malty beer (Dos Equis, Tecate, Negro Modelo, Sam Adams, Harp)
1 28-ounce can whole tomatoes, crushed in their juice
1 1/2 cups frozen corn
1/3 cup pearl barley
salt

In a large stock pot, put beans on to cook in 10 cups water. Bring to boil and reduce heat to simmer. Add 1 tsp salt. Cook gently until tender. Drain beans and reserve the broth.

In another large stock pot, sweat onion and bell pepper in vegetable oil with a little salt over medium heat until onion is translucent, about 10 minutes. Add garlic and chipotle pepper and cook 3 minutes more.

Add all the herbs and spices and cook 3 minutes more, stirring frequently.

Add tomatoes, beer, beans and barley. Add enough bean broth to cover everything well. (Reserve remaining broth to add if necessary.) Taste for seasoning.

Reduce heat to a simmer and cook partially covered for at least 1 hour, preferably for 2-4. Cover if liquid reduces too much. Add corn about 1/2 hour before finish.

This chili is rather spicy at first thanks to the chipotles, but calms down significantly after a stay in the fridge. Naturally, it's better the next day.

As I noted on Friday, I like food, especially vegetarian food. I actually think I should clarify something just so I don't go misrepresentatin' myself badly enough that under the inevitable Congressional inquest I don't crumble like a thin chip in onion dip. There is a moral dimension to my not eating meat, in that although I don't have trouble with creatures dyin' for me to nosh on, factory farming is too gross and cruel for me to spend my money endorsing. If there is a starker picture of the dark side of capitalism than a factory chicken farm, I don't know it, and I don't want any truck with that.

Besides, ever since I cooked for the vegetarian co-op back in college all those year ago, I've been intrigued by the special challenges that a serious vegetarian cuisine presents. How do you create a large array of satisfying and nutritious dishes without resorting to any of the dead-animal products from stock to gelatin? Without the expedients of chicken stock, bacon and hambone, soups are a special challenge. Without dark beef broth and access to animal-fat based fonds, pan sauces are as well. The goal is not to replace the meat ingredients one for one, but to create dishes that are as satisfying in every dimension as those containing meat. This involves not just simple taste but also mouth-feel or slip, heartiness, depth of flavor, and texture as well. In the early days of meatless cuisine, this meant generous helpings of cheese, cream, and butter. Although this is still a good way to go (who besides vegans and the lactose intolerant don't like a nice pound of cheese on the plate?), it's also rather unhealthy as the basis of a diet and a bit of a cop-out besides.

As one might expect, not eating meat means that my wife and I tend to consume a lot of beans. In fact, nearly every week I make a bean dish that my wife and I can eat for lunch every day. In the summer, we substitute in grain-and-vegetable gratins or something like that, but nine months out of the year it's pretty much bean central around our house. As a result, I have gotten pretty good at making meatless bean dishes that manage to equal their, erm, meated counterparts without trying to replicate them. That can be hard.

The trouble with most vegetarian baked bean recipes is that they lack that special deliciousness that bacon provides. Many of them are too thin in flavor, or too acidic, or too sweet. I think the following recipe which I accidentally threw together during a power outage last winter fits the bill pretty well. It combines several different recipes I'd used in the past and also features my secret weapons: allspice and liquid smoke. And ketchup. Not that ketchup is particularly secret, but quality vegetarian cookbooks can't always quite shake the knit-your-own-yogurt ethos and therefore sometimes shy away from using prepared foods where they are clearly the best way to go.

So, below the cut, please find Not Exactly Boston Vegetarian Baked Beans

1 lb dry small white or navy beans (about 3 cups), sorted, rinsed and presoaked.
2 bay leaves
2 medium onions, chopped fine ( 1 1/2 to 2 cups)
1 small red bell pepper, chopped fine (about 1/2 cup)
2 stalks celery, chopped fine (about 1/2 cup)
4 cloves garlic, minced
2/3 cup molasses
1 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon prepared brown mustard
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2-3 dashes liquid smoke
1 teaspoon dry mustard
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
vegetable oil
salt

Place beans in 10 cups water with bay leaves and 1 teaspoon salt. Bring to a boil and cook gently until tender. Remove bay leaves, drain, and reserve cooking liquid.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a bowl, mix molasses, ketchup, prepared mustard, vinegar, liquid smoke, and about 1 cup of the bean cooking liquid.

In a frying pan, sweat onion, peppers, celery and garlic in oil over medium heat until onion is translucent, about 10 minutes. Add salt, about a teaspoon. (Since this is a sweat, a tablespoon of water may be added to ensure that browning doesn’t happen.) When vegetables are soft, turn heat to high and add dry mustard, cumin, chili powder, cayenne, and allspice. Cook for about 3 minutes more, stirring frequently to prevent the spices burning.

In a baking dish, combine vegetable mixture and sauce with beans. Add more bean broth if the mixture is too dry. Cover and bake 1 1/2 hours. Taste for salt after 1/2 hour. If beans are too watery, uncover for last half hour of cooking time.

I don't eat much meat. This isn't so much a moral choice (in that I'm not a vegetarian because I can't stand the idea of something suffering so I can live) as an aesthetic one. Let me explain. I do eat a vegetarian diet on a regular basis and most of my cooking is vegetarian cuisine. (Don't laugh - give me one hour and the right ingredients and I will make you forget there's no meat on that plate.) There are three main reasons I don't eat much meat: my ongoing effort to maintain my svelte womanly figure; the fact that I'm a cheap bastard and gram for gram vegetable protein is cheaper than animal protein if you are willing to spend a little time cooking it; and aesthetics. The first two are, I presume, relatively self-explanatory.

But what do I mean by aesthetics? I mean this: the chicken you get in the shrink-paks in the grocery store is rubbery and utterly flavorless, an insult to the very idea of chicken. Beef from the grocery store, though sometimes very good, is generally totally unexciting. Moreover, all the hormones and drugs they pump factory-farmed meat fulla probably isn't good for you. Now, before you go whipping off a reply comment telling me that I am pumped fulla shit peddling that alarmist tree-hugger pabulum, hear me out. We're all mammals. There is some circumstantial evidence that the "stuff" they use to get a chicken to market in seven weeks makes it into the meat, and therefore into your body. Now, beyond the whiff of "false but accurate" creepiness that such a notion carries with it, that's just not how I roll. I eat meat very rarely, and when I do, I want it to friggin' count. Growth accelerants, hormones, and antibiotics affect the quality of the meat, and I don't like to pay to eat crap food. I live on the seacoast and as a consequence I eat a lot of fish. I am lucky enough to live close enough to working seaports that I can get up early on Saturday, drive over the bridge, and buy a slab of Arctic char that four hours earlier was fighting for its life. That's living, I tell you. If I lived in Dallas, you can bet I'd be eating me some steak. Good food is a gift to the body and the soul.

So why is it so damn hard to find good chicken? I just had a delicious lunch of half a roasted chicken at one of Boston's best restaurants. The dark meat was gamy and just slightly bitter, and the white meat was mellow and rich. In other words, it *tasted like chicken*. Why did I have to spend way too much money to get chicken that *tasted like damn chicken*?

And why is it so damn hard to find good beef? Well... strike that. If you're lucky you can pick up a six dollar steak at the local grocery that will satisfy your omnivorous blood-lust, be tender and juicy, and taste faintly of what the cow ate. America does beef pretty well. But more likely, you will pay six bucks and end up with a strip of shoe leather. These days, when it's time to eat my thrice-a-year steak, I go to one of the local farms who raise cows and pick up something they've killed themselves. I usually end up paying $20, but I also usually end up passing out in a pleasure-coma with a big goofy smile on my face. Why is that so hard to achieve? Cows is cows!

I would go into a whole tirade abou tpork at this point and how it no longer tastes like anything at all and yet nobody seems to notice, like a blank canvas some bullshit artist pimps in a gallery for $5000 while black-clad anorexics coo and ahh about her bold use of negative space, but I think I've made my point.

In a nation that has perfected consistency in preparation (the Big Mac always tastes like a yummy Big Mac), why is it exceptional to find quality meat? Is it market forces? As someone who wants their meat to taste like, um, meat, am I in a tiny minority? Help me out here, before I go home to a dinner of Buffalo-style tofu (which is, I have to say, delicious).

Frank Rich has a column in the New York Times today about decency, indecency, HBO's "Deadwood," and the new comedy film "The Aristocrats." Worth a read.

Can you imagine somebody making "All In the Family" today? What the hell has happened to this country?

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Can you believe that I'd never read this one? It's amazing! Even though it's not much of a "novel," in the sense that novels have plots/beginnings/endings/heroes/villains, and more of a picaresque road novel a la Don Quixote without any higher purposes, I'm still tempted to go ahead and dub The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel. Half the pleasure of a good novel is in the language. This is one reason I don't often care for books in translation. Removing Murakami's prose from Japanese, or even Chaucer's from Middle English, bleeds away the specific pleasures of pun, inflection, word choice. Although a very skilled translator can overcome these limitations and even retain the flavor, the "-ness," of an author's particular style and native tongue, good translators are as common as honest politicians. Twain's ear for dialect serves him well, as does his ability to combine screwball comedy with wry satire without apparent effort. In a way this is a very post-modern book (there's that goddamn word again) in that there are no white-hat heroes or black-hat villains, just people. Although Huck is good-hearted enough, he does fake his own death and then watches in wonderment as his friends and guardians grieve and search for his corpse. He also vacillates between hiding Jim (not his whole name) and deciding that a runaway slave is a thief whenever Jim is captured. Although the Duke and the King are bad men, their evil, such as it is, stems solely from greed and aspires to nothing more than being lazy and spending other people's money.

And then there's that word. You know: the big "N" word. Writing in an era when slavery was gone but casual racism was the American way, Twain's treatment of race and racism in the book in all its glory and splendor is important to keep around. In this PC day where you can get in trouble even for saying "niggardly," it's helpful to recall that there was a time when things were worse. It is also helpful to recall that even when things were worse, people were people and slavery was not a monolithic institution. It's hard to read Twain today without the uncomfortable experience of ubconsciously cringing every time The Word comes up (and I definitely had a hard time reading the book on the subway. You never know when somebody might glance over and take exception.), but flinching is our modern reaction to a bygone way of life.

But that's probably overthinking things. Twain was certainly a social critic and a satirist, but at the end of the day Huck Finn is just a stupid Missouri boy who ran away from home and got his ass in trouble. Good story. Next!

[wik] The whole "N" word thing reminds me of a bit I heard on Howard Stern a few years ago. He was running a "roast" contest in which listeners would send in their best roast of Howard or one of his crew members. The winner won something stupid and expensive. A fairly large segment of the submissions that passed the first screening were roasts of Robin Quivers, who as we all know, is black. Every single one of those indulged in crass and graceless material like riffs on watermelons, etcetera. It was painfully unfunny. But the strangest one of all - and one that Howard & Co. played repeatedly as a comedic treasure - was a guy whose roast of Robin consisted in sum total of the following: "N**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger n**ger!"

Is that funny? If so, on what level? 'Cos I don't get it. Discuss.

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

His critics might decry his tendency to make all his characters sound the same and his penchant for discursiveness, but I happen to love Neal Stephenson for those very things. Having now read the System Of The World trilogy twice through (the second time all out of order), I'm convinced that even if he is not a major author he is destined to become the patron saint of overeducated American geeks for at least a generation. Reading Quicksilver a second time through with the plot of the whole trilogy firmly in mind allows the reader to focus on the little things the discourses are explaining - the long description of the economics and logistics of siege warfare. The squalid premodern lives of German and Polish peasantry. The tangled pleasures of court politics and the education of the elite. Money.

There's nothing - nothing - better in this world than a thick swashbuckling novel you can learn from.

China Mieville, Perdido Street Station

Why is fiction that's not set in the "real world" dismissed as "mere" genre fiction? (Minister Buckethead, please excuse the use of scare quotes. I mean them in this case to point up the silliness of calling the world that is described in any book as real, and the silliness of dismissing a book about crime as less worthy than other books merely because you are axiomatically predisposed to dub such a book 'crime fiction.' In the first case, the map is never the territory. In the second, Raymond @#!?%ing Chandler. Q.E.D.)

China Mieville, a Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics, seems to be obessed with being original. If not obsessed, it still is certainly a main goal. With PSS he has created a world and a city, New Crubozon, that manages not to recall any prior fantasy/sci-fi setting particularly strongly. Writing ostensibly in the niche genre of "steam-punk," which seeks to fuse Victorian-era technology with new-school Science Fiction style (a la Gibson/Sterling), he convincingly brings across the history of New Crubozon and the cultures of the various races that inhabit it, fusing magic and technology and good old storytelling into a fairly grand whole. Mievelle says, "Two untrue things are commonly claimed about fantasy. The first is that fantasy and science fiction are fundamentally different genres. The second is that fantasy is crap." This statement may as well stand as a manifesto for all three novels set in the world of New Crubozon.

There are some things Mieville does very well. He has an eye for the grotesque. His invention of the "Remade," people who through magic have been punished to fit the crime they have committed, is a shining example. (People whose lower bodies are steam-powered machines who must continually feed their boilers with coal lest they die. People whose hands have been replaced with tentacles.) New Crubozon is a grubby, filthy city that feels actually lived in by its fictional residents. Mieville also knows how to move a story along and juggle multiple lines. Although PSS is only his second novel, and he still has trouble with pacing from time to time, he is better at finding a balance than many better known authors. Mieville also has a gift for metaphor, making extended riffs on trash and detritus, body and self, and the relationship between New Crubozon's residents and the patchwork of the city itself (the villain Mr. Motley brings all these threads together into one).

However, his relative youth as an author works against him. From time to time it seems as if Mieville's not writing a novel, but a 700-page script treatment. How else to explain the scene when the police blow up the printing press for the dissident newspaper the Runagate Rampant along with the aging automation that cranks it? The action stops for several paragraphs as we follow the automaton's head through the air and back down to the cobblestones of the city. What surely sounded like a poignant postscript in Mieville's head reads like a Michael Bay film on the page. His nose for the original sometimes leads him into cliche.

The folks at Crooked Timber did a seminar on Mieville a few months ago that's worth a read (spoiler alert). Although I think I may soon get tired of Mieville's heavy, rich prose and don't expect I'll wait for his latest work like I do for Dan Simmons or Neal Stephenson, he has a unique voice and style and the intelligence and imagination to convincingly update the shopworn tropes of sci-fi and fantasy. Just don't call it genre fiction.

It was only a matter of time before someone went and made a film about hippies who put on a pop festival only to have their minds consumed by Cthulu. Enter The Miskatonic Acid Test. Described by its creator, Dark Lord Rob, as "sort of like Monterey Pop, only at the end monsters attack everybody," the film concerns the time in 1969 when

a group of students at Miskatonic University in witch-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts decided to emulate the West Coast and put on their own sort of "happening", where "music and atmosphere could combine to create an alteration of consciousness", with the clandestine help of a little LSD. Or maybe a lot. Unfortunately, the professor they chose to serve as faculty adviser on the project had an agenda of his own; see, he was a philosophy professor, one who specialized in the "study of Evil", and one who saw the Miskatonic Acid Test as an opportunity for a little experiment. As the music and drugs reached their peak he ascended the stage and began to read incantations from the dread Necronomicon...

with sexy results!

The filmmakers have even gone so far as to put together fictional bands to play the festival, including folkies The Gyre Falcons, the proto-punk Barrow Wights, and "the heavy, spooky hard psych of the" Plasma Miasma. Personally, I would have hoped they'd have included a performance by The Golden Apples or The American Medical Association, but then we'd have undead Nazis rising from deep lakes to take over the world and that kind of throws us into another mythology altogether

Maybe it's because I live in witch-haunted Salem, Massachusetts, but I really want to see this movie. Maybe we could have a Perfidy Horror Festival Night Thingy come this Rocktober at which we show "Evil Dead II," "Bubba Ho-Tep," and "Shaun of the Dead" and top it all off with "The Miskatonic Acid Test." And then we all go insane.

An oldie but goodie from Ace, a rundown of every g-d d-mn FPS video game you've ever played.

Now turn on God Mode and walk across that lava like a man!

Just a random thought. A couple Sundays ago I was languishing on the couch recovering from my latest bout of catarrh and watching the Great American Race, the Daytona 500. My wife, a wonderful woman whose interest in stock car racing is as intense as my interest in podiatry (that is, not at all), consented to watch the race with me. After many years away from the sport, it was surprising how much I remembered. I was able to speak relatively learnedly to my wife's questions about pit strategy, driving, restrictor plates, cautions, etc. etc. Go me!

The ending of this year's Daytona was the most exciting I have ever seen-- a thrilling full contact three lap sprint after caution, eventually won by the technically perfect but squeaky-clean driving of Jeff Gordon. In the course of this, I was reminded inevitably of the most tragic event ever to occur during the Daytona 500. I speak of course of Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash in the last lap of the 2001 race.

Think about that for a second. Arguably the greatest driver in NASCAR's modern history (not to take anything away from Cale Yarborough or Richard Petty) died on the last lap of a race that he'd won only once, that he dominated but always lost thanks to cruel twists of fate. You can't write that ending.

My transformation into a Massachusetts Liberal wine snob continues day by day, yet this Ohio boy still gets a little choked up when he sees a "3" sticker on a pickup.

The Weekly Standard harrumphing its way through the "meaning" of Hunter Thompson's suicide is good for a few howls if you're into that kind of thrill.

If you don't feel like reading the whoooole thing, here it is in a nutshell:

"Your "revolution" is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost!

[wik] I really hate to harvest the low-hanging fruit, but this is a weblog, for pity's sake, and if we can't have the low fruit we may as well go hungry! Peep this quotation from the linked article

It has long been argued that lasting literature is an impossibility without imitation and emulation, and that although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities. But who can imagine a youthful talent beginning with an exercise in the gonzo style? Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse. One may go further and say they had nothing to teach the young, except to emit a cacophony.

If the tone of the piece weren't so stuffily self-satisfied, I'd be tempted to ask if Stephen Schwartz is high. William S. Burroughs an irrelevant writer? Sure, except for his enduring influence on the American literary scene. Granted, Pynchon, Roth, Eggers, Wallace, Franzen etcetera have their shortcomings and their detractors, but Bill Burroughs hardly represents a dead end in letters, unless you categorically dismiss all the major writers and trends of the last forty years as a dead end.

(This is not to mention the larger cultural influences that the Beats and Thompson have had. I surmise the Weekly Standard would also dismiss the film, art, music, poetry, and enduring references that their work generated as "cacophony," which would only prove my point. I assume moreover that this means that stream-of-consciousness writing a la Kerouac is right out, since he was a beat too, which means that blogging as a practice leaps directly from Pepys to Power Line with no stops twixt the two. And then there's poetry. Was Ginsburg really that irrelevant if amateur poets perform their own first-person primal screams at "poetry slams" nationwide, rather than their own reworked versions of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" over snifters? QED)

Leaving all this aside, this argument suffers from terminal laziness. To argue from this: "although young authors often produce works ridiculously imitative of their idols, real writers grow out of such mimesis to gain recognition for their own, individual abilities," this conclusion, "Thompson produced no others like him, for the same reason Burroughs and Ginsberg generated no schools of novel-writing or verse" is self-negating. If to become an author in one's own right one must reject one's influences, then both the following are true: Thompson et. al. were successful authors, ; and any writers descended from Thompson et. al. have also successfully moved beyond mere imitation. You can't use the absence of successful Thompson clones as evidence of his irrelevance any more than you can't use the absence of successful Noel Coward clones as evidence of his!

But it's unseemly to pick on the weak. I will sit tight and wait for the Standard to take down that awful jungle clatter the children call "hip hop." How do you even call that guttural gibberish singing?!

Wait... I f*cked that one up. That's the title of a Donnas song.

Via Bookslut, I am reminded of the bloggers' 50 book challenge wherein one promises to read 50 books in 2005. Some people have gone so far as to get sponsors for their logomania, but I, I! do it all for the love of the word.

So far:
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station
China Mieville, The Scar
Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver (again)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
George Plimpton, Open Net
Charles Dickinson, Great Expectations
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (which, by the way, is the best work of modern-era social history I have ever read. He is a monster. A beast. The king. This is the way it is done.)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer/Heart of Darkness (two novellas, count as one in my world!)

Man... I better get cracking. Moreover, the 50 books challenge requires that one blog about the books they read... man.... better get cracking...

DATELINE: WOODY CREEK, CO., 20 FEB 05

Surrounded by a retinue of giant lizards, fever-dreams, and hulking relics from his checkered past, Hunter S. Thompson, writer and professional drug voyager, revealed today his latest work of what he long ago dubbed "shotgun art.". His latest piece consists of his dead body, decorated by a single bullet hole to the head and whatever parts of his insides were carried with the bullet to the outside. It is currently believed that this art was self-inflicted.

He will be missed.

[wik] Depending on how you look at it, Hunter Thompson descended into schtick about the time Reagan re-upped for his second tour of duty, or he never transcended it in the first place. If there is anybody in the world who did not see this coming - at least in retrospect - then that person has rocks for brains. Thompson was one of the few artists who successfully parlayed their own self-destruction into a vital part of their own output. Rimbaud, Wilde, and Burroughs spring to mind, and even if you throw in the half-competent drug addled "transgressions" of Jim Morrison, all the names I just mentioned are all classifiable as poets (Morrison technically so, I guess). Thompson is one of the few "straight" writers - in the sense that he was considered a reporter and a writer of non- (or at least quasi-non-) fiction - to equal these exponents of the Grand Romantic Poetic Tradition (what with the drugs, garretts, starvation, ridiculous situations &c &c &c) in the quality of both his art and life. That he lived so long is fairly surprising.

His best work, like Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail manage through their wildness to scrape away at inner truths that more sobersided analyses could not possibly hope to touch. But the same distance that separates the Fear and Loathing books from later hackery like The Great Shark Hunt or Better Than Sex is the same distance that separates Beggar's Banquet from Black and Blue. The most dangerous thing in the world for an artist who relies on actual personal peril and chaos to fuel their creative process is to figure out how to bottle it without the hangover. Thompson certainly did this. Rather than doing as Christopher Lemann-Haupt feared and "laps[ing] into good taste," he lapsed into routine: drink Wild Turkey => take some pills => stay up late => wait for THE FEAR to come => shoot something with a high powered rifle, narrowly missing friend/spouse/dog => pass out at typewriter and wait for dawn. Once you can put this routine on your dayrunner, it's no longer creation. It's wanton self-destruction.

Moreover... suicide? Although my first instinct is to excoriate him for the cravenness that suicide usually suggets, I'm not so sure that's the right thing to do here. By rights, Thompson should have been dead a hundred thousand times over already if even a tiny fraction of his self-described exploits are true. If he hadn't already ended up as a long red streak on a highway somewhere intermingled with broken pieces of a Vincent Black Shadow and reeking of whiskey, then nothing was going to kill him. Thompson's way was to paint himself into a corner then bolt like a rabid wolverine. I guess this time his own indestructibility offered him only one way out.

Hunter S. Thomson was 67 years old. Now he is just a sack of meat.

Hunter S. Thompson died yesterday of a bullet through the head. Gonzo journalism is dead, because nobody, nobody did it like Hunter. It's a damn shame, if for no other reason than that I would have loved to play shotgun golf.

The most delicious carnival on the web (however misnamed, and ironically so for our Christian readers, this being Lent and such), is back, this week hosted by Inside Allan's Mind. Mmmmm! Frito Pie!

The folks at Crooked Timber have posted a long, rambling, and frighteningly erudite discussion of sci-fi/fantasy author China Mieville's works, especially his new novel, Iron Council.

I hadn't heard of him before last week, when Nathaniel of The Rhine River handed me a copy of his third novel, The Scar. Despite its 650-page length, many non-reading chores that required doing, and the great rewards that obtain from reading Mieville slowly, I finished the book between Thursday and Sunday. I have to say: it's been a long time since I've read a book that imagines with such furious creativity.

Does it irritate anyone else that science fiction and fantasy writers bear the stigma of being 'merely genre'? The same would go for crime writing as well, I suppose. The minute a writer deigns to set their story in a place not derived from a) New York City, b) Paris, c) a feverishly imagined Kansas where all the families engage in incest and every barn hides a bloody thresher, or d) a law firm, they get dubbed "fantasy," or if it's the future, "science fiction."

This is especially galling since the keepers of modern literatoor seem to be laboring under just as many conventions as the most hidebound space opera. (Gay protagonist! Unhappy families!) Why can't good writing be accepted as good writing, and good storytelling as good storytelling? Or am I being hopelessly naive?

Anyway, forget all that crap. Check out China Mieville.

And now, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy is pleased to bring you: "Tales From The Archives."

While going through his emails today, GeekLethal (who sadly cannot be with us at the moment as he is deep in, erm, negotiations with some of the dark forces assisting us with our software upgrade and data transfer: who knew the guys at Demiurge Data Mining would actually be demigods? Awfully touchy about the tentacles, is all I can say... you got tentacles, you should expect a remark now and then...) came across the following exchange between he and I about college admissions.

The discussion was spurred by this story from CNN about how legacy admissions at colleges are under fire on the grounds that they are unfair because they are racist.

GL sez:

I don't know many admissions people, but it is common knowledge that there are only so many spaces in a freshman class. Once you admit your athletes (through coaching channels), your rich kids development channels), your legacies (maybe development, maybe faculty/dean), your kids who maxxed SATs, etc, you're left with a bunch of applicants who are largely alike on paper- good test scores (or they wouldn't be applying), good extracurriculars, etc.

If you're one of those "alike" kids, you're best hope is that you are seen as sufficiently underprivileged in the eyes of the particular admissions officer who's reading your app, and harbors some appreciation of social justice. And THAT is where race can be a huge factor....especially if you are the proper one. Poor white or asian kids need not apply; ditto Jewish applicants (Lord knows there are enough of THOSE with college degrees around)(I do know this all differs depending on whether it�s Tiny College or Big U).

But I have a solution: I propose that White and Asian folks (of all religions) be denied all higher ed for the next 4 centuries. In addition, no one of European extraction can be considered for employment in any level of government or agencies thereof, to include services such as police and fire. Current members of those groups, including the judiciary and faculty, will be allowed to either serve remaining elected time or retire early. Jesse Jackson will create an agency that will develop a system to determine the "whiteness" of each member of the population, to ensure no closet Euros slip by. Finally, at the end of 4 centuries, these restrictions will be abolished as at that time we will all be equal; Utopia will have ensued.

Would that make everybody happy?

Then I says to GeekLethal I says:

GL, I knew you'd understand. Only when all have suffered like certain ancestors of some people may have suffered in an incompletely recalled much mythologized past, will the karmic balance of the world be set right. It's OBVIOUS.

My only question... I have family who came from England with the Mayflower, so there is a fair chance that at some point some ancestor oppressed an indigenous person. But, a greater number of my ancestors came from Wales, where they were miners, crushed under the heel of landed aristocracy and the English alike. Others, from Germany, where they fled religous oppression. Ditto my Hueguenot forbears. How does this calculus work out?

Does the putatative oppression of a New England indigenous person by one subset of my ancestors make me wholly responsible for this act, or only 1/16th responsible? And, as the descendent of oppressed minorities myself, am I empowered to claim reparations in money or kind from the Church of England, the Duke of Llangollwyn, the descendents of some functionary of the French Republic, and the distant relations of Rheinlander monarch in the early 19th century, and myself in turn because of my dual English-Welsh background? Do I have to kick my own ass? Because then, I'd have to kick it again in reparations for the first time, and I'm kind of a pussy and don't think I want to do that.

If you ask me, this whole dealie sounds like an awful administrative task, especially considering that the Germans would also be involved in a mutal reparations scheme with the descendents of Constantius, and vice versa, the Welsh in a mutual scheme with the English, Gauls, Saxons, and whatever Celtic tribe used to live up the river, the English with most of the known universe, and the French with themselves over that whole Reign of Terror thing.

Who's gonna handle the paperwork then? Huh? HUH? And, when they get rich managing this paperwork, do we get to collect reparations back?

You know what? Legacies should be automatically DENIED admission... every family should have an equal chance, over time, to go to Duke. No, better yet, no college should be allowed to refuse admission to any applicant for any reason, whatsoever. And it should be FREE. Harvard education, here I come!!! Only when college is available to all indiscriminately, and for free, will we all truly suckle at the teat of liberty. And you can quote me on that.

Get well soon, GeekLethal. I'm sure we can find a gnostic chirurgeon on the somewhere on the payroll to take care of the internal damage. Perhaps the Babylon office, if anyone survived...

It occurred to me the other day that there are a few actors who have a reputation for glorious creepiness on the silver screen. What would happen if someone came up with a vehicle to combine their exquisite creepiness into one divine orgy of creep?

I'm thinking Christopher Walken, John Malkovich, and Willem Dafoe as the lead creepsters, with Crispin Glover as their loyal journeyman creep. Michael Madsen could be an applying for a position on the team, and Jon Lovitz could provide the comic relief. Angelina Jolie and Glenn Close could be the distaff creeps.

Plot wouldn't matter all that much. Just let them improvise. The end result would leave you feeling dirty and greasy for months after seeing the film.

As in a parting with the flesh. Strip away the Christian/assumption connotations and one is left with the impetus for the single most popular New Year's resolution: leaving about five pounds behind so we can fit into our good pants again. With that most Amurrican of obsessions in mind, I propose a new definition for "carnival."

Carnival- USA colloq., v(i): American for "gee, I really need to get rid of this gut."

Feh. Love your fat, I say! Revel in it! Treasure your five extra pounds of winter fat as a glutinous reward for untrammeled gluttony, your birthright as a member of the class that can afford too eat too much. You belong to the select few, that minute fraction of humanity who are at risk of dying from having too much to eat. Take a minute, look at your new girth, and fricking love it.

Then go check out the new Carnival of the Recipes for some quick and easy ways to further enhance your lardass endowment.

Did you eat your sauerkraut on New Year's Day (or your black-eyed peas, if that's your bag)? Why do foods that make you fart also bring good luck? If that's really the case, I should by rights be the luckiest man alive. (Well... now that I think about it, I am. I love you, honey.)

This kind of thing sort of belongs better over at vodkapundit, but those dudes have been pretty weak recently so I shall pick up the slack.

ABC news is reporting on an Ohio company marketing a recipe for a sauerkraut martini. Ohhhh...kaaaaay. In truth, I'm sure that a K-Tini, as they have dubbed the concoction, is delicious. Good sauerkraut is phenomenal. But to think that anyone-- anyone-- is going to hit it big hawking partially digested cabbage as a suitable garnish for an ice-cold jigger of Hangar One or Belvedere is just dumb.

Personally I prefer my own recipe for the Filthy Martini. No sauerkraut, but plenty of bacteria. And it kind of looks like what the Department of Public Works calls "brown water":

5:1 excellent vodka
2:1 pepper vodka
1:1 dry vermouth
1:1 green olive juice
1:1 pickle brine from kosher-style lactose-fermented half-sours, lactobacilli alive and well.
Garnish with two green olives and a black olive and a teeny shot of pepper sauce.

Nummies!!