Second Breakfast

Alan and I are big fans of Iron Chef America, and Steingarten is one of the regular judges on the show. Steingarten is often paired with Queer Eye’s Ted Allen, and their mutual annoyance with one another adds spice to an already entertaining affair.

Steingarten himself is a Harvard-trained lawyer turned food writer for Vogue, and the book is a collection of his erudite and witty essays, mostly from the late 80s and mid 90s. He’s a very fine essayist, and his ironic humor pervades these little essays on topics such as how to make the perfect pie crust, finding the best barbeque in America, fruitcakes, and my favorite, the essay on the artificial oil Olestra, titled “A Fat of No Consequence”.

A taste (not for the faint of heart):

The [...] current version of Olestra has been manufactured to stay quite thick at room temperature — it looks something like Vaseline until it is headted– which is why [Proctor & Gamble] always demonstrates Olestra melted.

Why did they formulate Olestra this way? Because the early, more liquid versions caused gastrointestinal problems. One of these–”anal seepage”, or, in my preference, “passive oil loss”–occurs when fully liquid Olestra separates from the food with which it was cooked and slips along the inner walls of people’s intestines, bypassing everything in its way. Drops of Olestra show up on their underwear or floating in their toilets. (The FDA actually abbreviates this as OIT, or “oil in toilet”).

There are some wonderfully laugh-out-loud moments throughout, and some useful tips and recipes and I’d definitely like to try.

Today we observe an important fictional event, and an ancient feast in the Christian church.

In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, March 25th, 3019 T.A. (Third Age, also 1419 in Shire Reckoning) is the date of the destruction of the One Ring, and the defeat of Sauron and the downfall of Barad-dûr. I know this because I’m a total geek (albeit one with an imprecise memory). One year later Frodo and his friends returned home to the Shire, and year after that Sam and Rosie celebrated the birth of their daughter, Eleanor.  You’ll find these and other useful and entertaining facts at theonering.net.

March 25th is also the celebration of the Feast of the Annunciation, in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, is informed by the Archangel Gabriel that she is to bear the Messiah.  Mary’s response of obedience and praise to God is known as the Magnificat, or the Song of Mary:

My soul doth magnify the Lord.

And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

Because he hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. [Luke 1:46-55]

The timing of this feast conveniently aligns with nine calendar months before December 25th, when the Church celebrates the nativity of Jesus.

We will celebrate tonight with a feast of our own, and raise our glasses both to Frodo and Mary, whose obedience and faithfulness helped to liberate their people.

These are two more installments in Baker’s “Company” series of books, which I got turned onto by the lovely Kenneth over at homefries.org.

Alan got me these two for Christmas, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what order to read them in. Given the centrality of time travel in this series, maybe it doesn’t matter so much.

The central idea here is that there is this shadowy organization, Dr. Zeus, Inc., usually known as “The Company”, which has developed two fairly radical technologies: time travel and immortality. Of course there are some important limitations. For time travel, one can only travel into one’s own past, never the future, and one can only travel to a given exact moment in time and space once. Also, the general understanding among those in the Company is that history cannot be changed, so they must operate in the shadows of unrecorded history. In terms of immortality, it can only be inflicted upon children, and the resulting person is really more of a cyborg than a regular human. Dr. Zeus uses these cyborgs to basically preserve stuff that was otherwise be lost to history (art, books, cultures, you name it). This isn’t an entirely altruistic enterprise, and the Company becomes fabulously rich and powerful through well-timed investments, the power of compound interest, and occasional interventions.

Much of the series follows Preserver Mendoza, one of the Company cyborgs who is rescued by Facilitator Joseph (one of the oldest Company immortals) during the Inqusition and given the immortality treatment to become another permanent employee of the Company. Mendoza ultimately gets into trouble by falling in love with a mortal who dies tragically, and centuries later falling in love with another mortal who could have been the clone of the first. She ultimately gets banished into the distant past by her Company masters, and she is visited by a third mortal who is yet another clone of the first two, and falls in love all over again.

In “The Life of the World to Come” much of this is explained, and we see into our rather dismal and decrepit future some of the unimpressive mortals who seem to run the Company and whose machinations create the circumstances that control the lives of Mendoza, Joseph, and others. The big question that runs throughout much of this is “What happens in 2355?”, as no one in the Company has any information on the future after this time (since no one has sent any information into the past), and circumstances are set into motion that will obviously have enormous consequences for everyone involved in the Company.

“Sky Coyote” is something of a side-story, and follows Joseph and Mendoza as they work to preserve an entire 18th century Native American Chumash village from the impending arrival of Westerners. This book works mostly as satire, as Joseph is surgically altered to resemble Sky Coyote, the Chumash’ trickster-deity, who warns them of the impending disaster and who offers to lead them to safety. The Chumash turn out to be a savvy bunch, and much of the book involves convincing the Chumash that the sky is indeed falling, and keeping the plan in motion despite both humorous and serious attempts to derail it.

It has been some time since I actually read this, so I’m working through a whole pile of reading and trying to make some sense of my sometimes bad memory.  It all runs together…actually that was the original purpose of this blog to begin with, as a sort of aide memoire for my “literary life”.

Stark is by training and profession a sociologist, and by his own admission merely a “history buff”, who is interested in, among other topics, the history and development of religions, particularly the early Christian church.  In this book, which is scholarly but accessible, Stark examines the development of the early Church and attempts to answer “How did it happen?”  That is, how did this small movement around an itinerant Jewish mystic grow to become the official state religion of the very empire that executed him only three centuries later, and the dominant religion in the Western world?  Without restating all of his theses and evidence, I’ll give brief sketches of a couple of his ideas.

One central notion is that religious conversions do not generally take place en masse as the author of Acts might suggest (e.g. Acts 2), but rather via family and social networks.  Stark uses as his model two contemporary religious movements:  the Mormons/LDS church, and the Moonies, and assumes (rightly I think) that people today aren’t fundamentally that different from people in the ancient world.  In these contemporary movements, we see that people become adherents to these faiths in the ways that we would expect, that is by personal and family relationships.   Someone visits a new church on the invitation of a friend, likes it, invites another friend or their spouse, and so on.  Stark goes on to show that this pattern was likely most predominant among Hellenized Jews, that is Jews living in the Greek-speaking world outside of Israel, who would have found the early Christian faith not that different from their Jewish faith.

In looking at the LDS church, Stark points out that the Mormon faith has grown by about 40 percent per decade.  If one applies those numbers to the early Christian church, one can easily come up with a numerical progression that supports the historical evidence about the size of early Christian communities in the first and second centuries.   So we don’t need mass conversions to explain the spread of the Christian faith in the ancient world — basic arithmetic will do the job nicely.

Stark also shows the ways in which the new Christian faith was simply better than the competing pagan religions in the Greek world in terms of the quality of life it engendered.  Women were treated better, marriage was valued more, as was marital fidelity. Perhaps most persuasively, Stark shows how Christian communities, by their solidarity with one another and their treatment of the sick, would have survived much more effectively two devastating plagues that struck the ancient world and killed large numbers of people.  Christians would have survived in greater numbers because of their providing basic care for those who were ill, unlike their Pagan neighbors who would have fled at the first sign of disease and would have abandoned their sick family and friends to their own fate.   Likewise, non-Christians who were cared for would be drawn to this religion which had literally “saved” them from death.  Combine this increased survival rate with the documented growth rates, and one can quickly come up with very impressive numbers over a couple of centuries.

Stark also convincingly shows how Christianity was, at its inception, ultimately an urban movement that grew most rapidly among the educated and semi-elite, and less among the poor.  This is a surprising claim, and one that I found less persuasive, and it is certainly ironic given the central idea of Jesus’ message of resistance to the domination systems that were the source of enormous suffering among his people.

An interesting and mostly persuasive book.

I was inspired to put this one on my wish list from the now-defunct “We, Like Sheep” and was happy to get it from my mother as part of our family “draw-names-so-that-we-don’t-all-have-to-buy each-other-crap-we-don’t-want-or-need -gift-exchange” (which continues to experience great resistance in my clan despite the obvious wisdom of the idea).

Its a curious and sometimes charming little philosophy book, but I can’t decide whether it is really any good, just a restatement of the obvious for Gen X or Y, or what. Regardless, I didn’t find it as satisfying as one might hope.

The purpose of the book is to identify and name one of the primary causes of unhappiness in our culture, our obsession with our perceived (or actual) status relative to others. Towards this end, Botton divides his book into two (obvious) parts: causes of unhappiness, and potential solutions. Following Botton’s lead (his prose tends to reveal what I suspect are his initial outline-format sketches at times):

Causes

1. Lovelessness
2. Expectation
3. Meritocracy
4. Snobbery
5. Dependence

Solutions

1. Philosophy
2. Art
3. Politics
4. Religion
5. Bohemia

The “Causes” section is a nice examination of the issue of status seen through the five lenses he supplies, and is kind of a cherry-picking trip through Western history of ideas in a mile-wide-and-an-inch-deep format (something obviously suitable for a public TV adaptation).  I was particularly struck by the Meritocracy section, which lays bare the fundamental flaws of American ideals of a merit-based economy (viz. in a society whose rewards are distributed based on merit, if one does not possess those rewards, one must not have merited them, or more simply put, the poor are poor because they deserve to be so).  Throughout the causes section he identifies the powerful meta narratives that subtly inform much of our thinking on these issues, and I was struck by how pernicious and invisible some of these assumptions can be.

The “Solutions” section essentially offers an alternative set of narratives to which one can subscribe to counter the pernicious effects of the “Problems” section.  What I find less satisfying is that Botton’s point seems to be 1) the counter-narratives are as arbitrary and “unreal” as those they are opposing, and 2) the comfort they provide are essentially coping strategies.  I suppose what seems unsatisfying to me here is that Botton doesn’t suggest ways to put the counter-narratives into practice, although obviously these are such expansive and important topics that such instruction would be vacuous in such a short work.  His “Religion” section is also exclusively focused on Christianity, and perhaps a broader view would provide some extra “heft” to his Solutions.

I suppose that’s my problem with this book — the Problems seem more substantial and powerful than the Solutions, at least as he has presented them.  Perhaps this is due to the situations in which I was reading this book (travel), and an uninterrupted reading might give me a different perspective.

Regardless, worth reading.

Of course, the larger question of such a book is how it applies to one’s own life.  I tend to avoid self-analysis here, but perhaps worth reflecting on in written form.