When I checked out On Evil from the library, the librarian asked me, “Do you believe in it?” I stared blankly for a moment before realizing that she was referring to “evil.” I gave her my best intellectual answer, “I guess it’s definitional.” And then I added that I might have more to say on the subject after reading the book. I don’t.

On Evil is the fourth Eagleton book I’ve read this year. It is also—by far—the worst. I found myself annoyed through most of the book because he pointedly avoids ever saying what he thinks evil is. It was only on finishing it that I realized that he had not, in fact, promised me any such insight. The book is called “on evil” after all, and didn’t he spend 159 pages writing “on evil”? Indeed he did.

In the end, though, what is the whole point of this book? It seems that he most wanted to address the issue of terrorism and the stupidity of assuming people who fly airplanes into buildings cannot be understood. And he does an excellent job of this in the last four pages. So really he has a good solid (though short) magazine article.

All of this is not to say that the book isn’t a quick and fun read. It is filled with humor and insight, as when discussing the differences between the angelic (not necessarily good) and the demonic (not necessarily evil), “The angelic consists of high-sounding cliches like ‘God bless this wonderful country of ours,’ to which the demonic replies ‘Yeah, whatever.'” And again, when talking about the lack of true purpose to actions, “In fact any purposeful activity, if you push it far back enough, turns out to be in the service of some nonpurposeful state of affairs. Why did she run for the bus? Because she wanted to get to the pharmacist’s shop before it closed. Why did she want to do that? To buy some toothpaste. Why did she want some toothpaste? To brush her teeth. Why brush your teeth? To stay healthy. Why stay healthy? So as to carry on enjoying life. But what is so precious about an enjoyable life?” Or finally, on Aristotle’s notion that living is something that takes constant practice, but which we never succeed at, “It is just that most of us are better at it than Jack the Ripper.”

As I read On Evil, I kept thinking that there is one kind of evil that I do believe it: institutional evil. It is a system that allows mostly banal actors to produce deleterious results. Consider, for example, the recent Gulf oil spill. It is not that any person involved needed to be evil—be they employee, collaborator, or customer. Individually benign character flaws like greed and laziness are enough to fuel the system that leads to catastrophe. The same could be said for genocide, although such instances seem always to be additionally fueled by evil participants. How Eagleton, a neo-Marxist, could wait until page 143 to bring this issue up—only to drop it within a page—amazes me.

In the end, Eagleton’s evil requires both a soulless actor and a harmful act. This is a definition I can deal with, but not one that I find that compelling. This leaves me with nothing new to say about evil if that librarian ever asks me.

Schopenhauer

Eagleton is at his best when discussing Schopenhauer. For example, he writes, “Isn’t the material world incurably banal and monotonous, and wouldn’t it be far better off not existing? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer certainly thought so. Nothing struck him as more self-evidently foolish than the assumption that the human race was a good idea.”

Later, he quotes Schopenhauer from The World as Will and Idea, stating that life consisted of, “momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium [everyone against everyone], everything a hunter and everything hunted, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on in saecula saeculorum [forever and ever] or until once again the crust of the planet breaks.”

I read The World as Will and Idea when I was in high school, but I really don’t remember any of it. I do, however, think it had a profound effect on me because Schopenhauer’s view of the universe is very similar to my own. This is why whenever Eagleton talks about him it makes me laugh in a knowing way—like I’m laughing at my own foibles. Yes, Schopenhauer is unrelentingly depressing. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Now I have to get The World as Will and Idea. It’s going to be a bumpy week.

Update

The other day (8 September 2010), I was waiting at a bus stop and I saw a copy of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Awake! magazine. It caught my eye because of its secondary headline, “Also: What Makes Us Good or Evil? Page 20.” I couldn’t pass that up, so I picked it up and read it. It made me reconsider Eagleton’s book: this was not a subject that was easy to write about. I don’t expect much from the JWs, in general, but this was really pathetic. There was no mention of questions. They simply stated that, “Man is as good or as evil as he chooses to be”—as if John Calvin had never been born.

What also struck me was that of the nearly twenty bible passages cited, only two are Gospels (John 8:44 and Luke 6:43-45) and neither are actually quoted. The John citation tells us that Jesus thought the Devil was a destroyer of man and a liar. The Luke citation is a little more on target, telling us that Jesus thought that good begets good and evil, evil. However, Jesus isn’t exactly clear in Luke. One could certainly interpret Luke 6:45 to mean that we ought to help the poor out of the pit we relegate them to. In other words, that evil is not so much a function of soul as of environment.

The main thing is that Christians are always on about is Jesus and WTFWJD. And yet, when they make arguments, they almost never quote him. Why? Because his ideas were revolutionary. They totally go against the status quo, which is what modern Christians want to maintain above all else (even God).

My friend Andrea and I were discussing self-consciously intellectual writers and so naturally E. E. Cummings came up. We agreed that he mostly sucked, but she promised to send me two poems that she thought were okay.

As a kind of header, but perhaps more of a challenge, she wrote, “Life’s not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis.” That was curious, so I went and looked it up and found that it was from Cummings’ poem “since feeling is first”:

I like the word play and images in this poem. And unusually for Cummings, the rhythm is really interesting—more what we expect from the much more talented William Carlos Williams. That’s as far as it goes, however. The content of the poem is—as usual—really troubling.

It seems that Cummings never really made it out of adolescence. Here, although he does it with more style, he says nothing more than Joyce Kilmer did in his poem “Trees”:

Or as Cummings might have written

It isn’t just that this poem indicates a romantic outlook that Jane Austen was parodying over a hundred years earlier in Sense and Sensibility; the poem is preachy. This is what most defines Cummings’ work. He is always telling us—as only a youth can—about the secret of the Good Life that only he possesses.

The two poems Andrea sent me are just like this. Here is the first:

It does have the compelling ending, “nobody beautiful ever hurries.” But as I think is clear in that line itself, he pushing a romantic notion of existence a lot harder than it can bear. It has other problems, but I doubt it is necessary to go into them.

The second poem is “maggie and milly and molly and may.” It deserves a full hearing:

The rhythmic structure of this is maddening. It is kind of iambic pentameter, but frustratingly not. I really don’t know how to “read” it. This is not a criticism—at least not of Cummings. I don’t doubt that he is doing just what he intends. This is also true with the difficult assonantal scheme. Am I supposed to read “were” in the third stanza as “war”? I don’t suppose it matters.

What does matter is that Cummings is again here to delight us with another tired insight. This time: the world is what you make it. Wow! Where are the neo-fascist teenagers of today? No wonder our lives are so devoid of Truth and Beau

ty.

Tonight I am making Oven-Roasted Chicken Thighs with Carrots and Yukon Gold Potatoes from the March 2009 issue of Bon Appetit magazine. Or something like it; my oven is not nearly big enough to deal with the six servings of this recipe. So I am kind of winging it the way I often do when I am into my third sidecar. I’ve been drinking a lot of sidecars these days, but they still seem to affect me the same. But tonight I think I have done something different with the sidecar.

According to Mr. Boston De Luxe Official Bartender’s Guide, a side car is made as follows:

Juice 1/4 Lemon
1/2 oz. Tripple Sec
1 oz. Brandy

Shake with ice and strain into cocktail glass.

I disagree. To begin with, the glass must be rimmed with sugar to make the drink taste right and most bartenders know this. Rimming a glass is not as easy as you think it might be. If you are like me, you have always rimmed a glass by placing sugar (or salt) on a plate and putting the top of the glass down on it. This has several problems. First, the sugar attaches to the outside and the inside of the glass (which you don’t want). Second, the sugar clumps up and he get lots of sugar some places and none others. About.com—which is rarely a good source of information—has an excellent, illustrated article on this subject that I highly recommend you read—especially if you make a lot of sidecars or margaritas.

Apart from learning how to rim a glass properly (it sounds absolutely pornographic, doesn’t it?), I believe I have developed the worlds best sidecar, which I am calling an Archie Leach (or “Cary Grant” if you must) because of his film I Was a Male War Bride. Here it is:

1/2 part lemon juice
1/2 part orange juice
1 part Tripple Sec
2 parts Congnac

Yes, you could just use brandy, but as Lance says in Pulp Fiction, “But when you shot it, you will know where that extra money went.” Congnac is worth the extra cost—always. Try this recipe; it is quite good.

Jill Dupleix presents a dish she calls Bang Bang Chicken—a name I like because of the character Bang Bang in film The Brothers Bloom. I made it for the second time last night, because William came over and when I was out at the grocery store, I couldn’t think of anything else to make; this is perhaps because the first time I made it, it was so good. You can find the full video recipe on Dupleix’s DVD Good Cooking: The New Basics. Here I will just give you mom’s take on the recipe.

There are two parts: the salad and the sauce. They are both really easy.

Salad

Poach a couple of chicken breasts with some ginger, salt, chopped green onions in enough water to cover the chicken. Be careful here; if you just cover the chick, the water will evaporate and the top of the chicken will not cook (which is okay, just don’t use it). How long? I don’t know; until the chicken looks cooked; don’t over-cook it (whatever the hell that means). Set them aside and let the chicken sit in the pan with everything else while you do the rest of the cooking.

Julienne cut an English Cucumber, carrot, and celery stock. Why an English Cucumber instead of a regular one? It has fewer seeds and so is less bitter. Put all these cut vegetables together. By the way, I did all my chopping with a Santoku knife I just bought—I haven’t had a chance to use it enough to talk about it intelligently. Add to these vegetables (well, cucumber is a fruit, right?) some copped green onions, and a little bit of toasted sesame oil (yum), rice wine vinegar, and some sesame seeds—roasted if you like. Finally, remove the chicken from the water; shred the chicken into this bowl and toss that baby.

Sauce

In a mixing bowl, put in generous amounts of toasted sesame oil (yum, again), sweet chili sauce, and rice wine vinegar. Add even more peanut butter, soy sauce, and sugar. Finally, add a diced hot pepper to your taste; I used about a half a Jalapeño—I don’t care for food that is too hot. If you can get a red pepper, it adds a nice bit of color.

Mix this (what I admit sounds like an odd assortment of ingredients) until it is pretty smooth. Then pour it onto the vegetables (and fruits) and toss well. This is delicious and makes two servings (although at 125 lbs. I can eat it all myself; It’s that good).

This recipe creates tasty, very slightly sweet refried beans. It is a bachelor’s recipe; the kind of thing that a man who knows nothing of cooking can make. All you need is:

Two Tbs Vegetable Oil
One Onion: coarsely chopped
Two 15 oz cans of pinto beans
Some pepper

Put the oil in a skillet and turn the flame up to medium. When the pan is hot, add the onions. Cook them for 5-10 minutes, stirring occasionally; don’t let them burn. When they are done, transfer them to a separate container. Leave the skillet where it is and hot.

Pour the contents of the two cans of beans into the pan: juice and all. Be careful! Pour a little of the juice in the side of the pan; if it is too hot, reduce the heat and wait or just pour the beans in very slowly. Use a potato masher to crush and stir the beans. Make sure the heat is not too high; you should never have the beans boiling beyond the occasional release of a steam bubble. Keep crushing and mixing until most of the obvious liquid has evaporated.

Add the onions to the beans, mix, add pepper to taste and eat.

Today, I need to discuss the defecation and urination processes. I stress the word “need” because I really don’t want to. These days, I always carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer for general uses, but particularly so that I can get out of public restrooms; there is the old question about how one gets out of such a place; after washing your hands, you still have to open the door; answer: wash hands, open door, sanitize. Am I starting to sound a little crazy? Read on.

Close the Lid

Public restrooms are particularly bad places, regardless of how clean they appear. In the United States, over the past year, I recall seeing only one toilet that had a lid. Many people have studied the resulting spray from flushed toilets. The first study I heard about was over twenty years ago, but I can’t remember it now, but thankfully Sarah Tan has written a nice online article (probably for a class), Think Before You Flush or Brush; it is a disgusting subject, but she deals with it tastefully (mostly).

For me, this is personal. I don’t like being covered in fecal matter. Even more: I don’t like brushing my teeth with fecal matter. Even the idea of urine on my toothbrush makes me sick. So unless you are into that kind of thing (and I know some of you are), close the lid! And if you are in a public restroom, get fully dressed and flush and run.

Sit Down

An old joke…

Q: Why do dogs lick their balls?
A: Because they can.

Why do men urinate standing up? Because they’re pigs. Even assuming that a man lifts the toilet seat, some fraction of his urine stream will end up on the toilet and the ground around it. Krok7 has done a few calculations on his blog in an article, The Physics Behind Toilet Seat Splatter (in truth, he doesn’t do too good a job–I think he greatly understates the problem, but you get the idea). Yes, I know that urine is not so very disgusting, but it does have an unpleasant oder—especially as time goes on.

One of the comments to this article states that it is not practical to ask guys to sit down while urinating. Why is this? Don’t we sit down when we defecate? Are we so much more busy than woman that we can’t spare that extra 30 seconds in the bathroom. For God’s sake men, just sit down and shut up.

Gargantua

I am not alone in thinking about such matters. The 16th Century French writer Francois Rabelais thought about it a lot too. There is no doubt that he was the Joseph Heller of his day. I’m sure people couldn’t stop laughing while reading any of his five books Gargantua and Pantagruel. And I even find him funny sometimes. But the basis of most of his comedy is repetition. Case in point: Chapter 13 of Book 1.

In this chapter, Gargantua tells his father, Grangousier of the many things he used to clean his anus: 57 all told (really: all told). The satire is not lost on me; Rabelais makes it very clear when Gargantua uses a lawyer’s briefcase to clean his behind; or all the live animals he uses; or women’s clothing: “Once I mopped my scut with the velvet scarf of a damozel. It was pleasurable: the soft material proved voluptuous and gratifying to my hindsight.” [Caveat]

Despite all this hilarity, I do believe Rabelais was serious about the question of how one goes about keeping one’s anus clean. He does not provide a very good answer: the neck of a (I assume live) goose. But then, he did not have the luxury of a bidet. Then again, neither do I.

Howard Stern’s autobiography lists his approach (not surprising): three swipes with toilet paper and you are done. He does not go into details, but I believe he does this because he has learned from experience that making too many swipes will result in skin irritation if not bleeding. Despite the fact that all of this makes me very uncomfortable, I will propose my own solution.

A Clean Wipe

I suggest getting a small Tupperware container filled water as well as a hand sanitizer dispenser. Place them near your toilet. Remove the Tupperware lid. Make a couple of swipes with dry toilet paper. Wet a wad of toilet paper and make another swipe. Finish with one last dry wipe. Sanitize your hands and replace the lid on the Tupperware container. Sans a bidet, this is about the best you can do.

I am sorry about all this, but I do think that Francois would approve.

My mother was an excellent cook; she had her own restaurant for about a decade. There were several dishes that I wanted her recipes for: Chicken Cacciatore, her chili, and especially her Potato Soup. My attempts to get these recipes always went something like this:

“Can I get your Potato Soup recipe?”

“Oh sure,” she would say. “It’s really easy.”

“Great! Do you have it written down?”

“No,” she would say with a small frown. “But’s it’s really easy.”

“Okay,” I’d say. Then I’d get my notebook out and wait for the recipe she had memorized.

She would get a far-away look, like she was remembering cooking the soup. “Well, you just boil some water and add chopped up potatoes.”

“How much water? How many potatoes?” I would ask.

“Oh, I don’t know. Until it looks about right,” she answered unhelpfully.

“Okay. I can boil potatoes.”

“Then you add the pasta,” she said, continuing with the recipe.

“When?” I asked stupidly.

“Oh, I don’t know. When the potatoes look about right,” she answered unhelpfully.

“Okay,” I said. “So I add the pasta. When does the cream go in?”

“Oh! Not until you add the spices,” she answered somewhat helpfully.

“What spices?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Salt and pepper, of course. And a bay leaf. Maybe some Worcestershire sauce. Or paprika.”

“How much?” I would ask, almost giving up.

“Oh, I don’t know. Until it tastes about right.”

“Do you have approximate amounts?” I asked hopefully.

“Not really. But when that’s done, you add the cream,” she said.

I knew not to ask how much cream. Why? Oh, I don’t know.

When I was eighteen years old, I wrote my first song: a “gift” for a friend who was graduating from high school. The chorus of the song was: “Good-bye graduate / It’s the start of the end.” At the time, I thought this was very funny. It had other gems like: “You’ll get a job and work for Dodge / Then you’ll lie to your children.” I no longer think the song is funny (well, maybe a little); now I think it is a good sober warning. So, on this, your eighteenth birthday, let me put it plainly: the fun is over.

Yes, it is true: you will go on to do many things that you now think of as fun and which would be fun if you were to have done them before midnight tonight. But these “fun” things are in fact psychological crutches that allow you to continue to exist. The future is bleaker than you can now imagine, but do not worry, it will come into focus very quickly.

Up to this point the world has been nothing but possibilities; you could walk through any door you wanted to an exciting future. This is true, if by “exciting future” you mean a future in which you struggle your whole life to get by and not despair so much that you finally just give up either via long drop and sudden stop or just by refusing to get out of bed. But the moment you walk through that door, you will hear all those other doors slam shut. And you will be looking at… It’s kind of like Let’s Make a Deal except there are more doors and a llama is behind every one of them.

Still, there is a lot of room behind that door you chose, and the llama may be sweet and housebroken. But you won’t be able to see what good is in your life, so you will decide (probably unconsciously, like you live the rest of your life) that you’ve totally fucked up your life. And so you will have (another subconscious) idea designed to make yourself feel better. You will create a mini-you and put all of your failed hopes and dreams into it. The problem is that this mini-you is just like you. I don’t want to spoil the whole trip for you; just leave it at this: you sell the llama to buy Pampers; the llama buys its freedom, and settles down with a much better job, house, wife, and kids than you.

If you are like most people, you will not notice until you are very old that you are merely perpetuating an existence that makes you and everyone else miserable. At that point, you will be too weak to do anything about it. And anyway, on Sundays the old-folks home serves chicken and you kind of look forward to that. Plus, there is that one sexy nurse—and you like looking at her even though you couldn’t do anything even if she didn’t consider you a pathetic old man and even if you weren’t a pathetic old man. So you keep on keeping on, or more correctly, you limp on limping on (in more ways than one). Until you gladly die—though you may not notice this joy because it is so unfamiliar to you.

Or I could be wrong. Actually, other than the fact that I can’t get a hot girlfriend and even if I did she would talk too much, I’m pretty happy with my life. The thing about all those doors that slammed shut: the locks can be picked or you can just take a sledgehammer to them. The truth is the doors slamming? The kids destroying you? The displeasure at what the world has and does offer? It’s all you. And that sucks, because there is no one else to blame. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[9:56 pm, 12 January 2010]

I get great pleasure from accumulating information. This is just because I want to become a better person. I see myself as a great work of anti-art: I will try to become my ideal until I die, and then it will be for nothing more than the joy I had while doing it. Senseless beauty and random acts of kindness, my ass!

I have been looking for the perfect cream of tomato recipe for about ten years. I think I may be close with this one. Originally, the recipe was from Cooks Dot Com, but I have made some major improvements to it. Here is the base recipe:

Ingrediants

Two (2) tbs butter
One and a half (1.5) c chopped onion
One (1) tsp minced garlic
One-half (0.5) tsp salt
One (1) tsp minced fresh rosemary
Two (2) tsp minced fresh basil
One (1) tsp freshly ground black pepper
Two (2) 15 oz cans of peeled, diced tomatoes
Three (3) tbsp dry sherry
One-quarter (0.25) tsp agave (or honey)
Four (4) oz cream cheese
Heavy cream
Fresh parsley

Tasks

Pour the tomatoes in a large sauce pan and simmer on low. Stir occasionally. They are usually done by the time you prepare the onions, but I am a slow cook. It is better to over-cook the tomatoes, so start them early if you are an efficient cook.

Mince the rosemary. Or better: get out of the mortar and pestle. You do not want big chunks of rosemary in your soup; and the blending will not chop up these fine particles. Mince the basil; or not; it doesn’t so much matter with the basil.

Saute the onions and garlic in butter—at a lower temperature than you would normally cook when using (say) olive oil; the temperature should be low enough that you don’t have to worry about the butter turning brown or the garlic becoming the consistancy of bac-o-bits; I use medium-low to medium. When the onions start to get wilted, add the salt, mix, and continue cooking until the onions are transparent.

Add the rosemary, basil, and pepper to the onions and saute for five more minutes; or until the tomatoes are done.

Pour the contents of the onion pan into the tomato sauce pan. Mix the contents. Turn up the heat to medium-low. Cover the pan and simmer for about ten (10) minutes. Uncover and add the sherry and agave. Mix and test the soup. If it seems way off, add more agave, but don’t push it. Simmer another half-hour.

Cut the cream cheese into small pieces and add them to the soup, one by one. Make sure that the cheese is fully melted before moving on to the next one.

Transfer the soup into a blender in parts. Never fill the blender more than half-way, because the soup is hot and will likely expand when blended. Blend to a fairly fine consistancy, but don’t destroy it. Empty into a serving bowl.

Serve with heavy cream (to taste—a lot in my case) and top with parsley.

This may sound more complex than it is. I have put more instructions than most cooks would need. Basically, you just cook the stuff, throw it in a blender, and there you are: soup. And it is very good.

Rather than canned tomatoes, it can be made with over-ripe tomatoes you probably have around at the end of the summer. I wouldn’t recommend the kind of fresh tomatoes you find in the store most of the year. And it really isn’t worth paying for hothouse tomatoes.

Let me know if you try it.

Do I ever have egg on my face! For years, I have been extolling the virtues of the butcher knife for culinary purposes. No kitchen is complete without one of these knives; or so I thought. Just today, after years of pestering my sister about the lack of a butcher knife in her kitchen, it came to a head. “What is a butcher knife,” she asked. After several minutes of stammering and inept attempts at mime resulting only in bruised knuckles, I turned to the Internet. It was then that I saw just how ill-defined a term “butcher knife” is. Just check out the image on the left.

The dictionary definitions are especially useless in this matter. For example, Dictionary.com defines a butcher knife as: “a large, very sharp knife for cutting or trimming meat”—somehow the modifier “very sharp” doesn’t seem to make sense; is there an “idiot’s knife”, defined as “a large, very dull knife for kitchen accidents”? Typical of a dictionary: unhelpful in practical matters.

Most butcher knives do look very much like the knives that I have always used. In fact, most people would say that the image above looks more like a cleaver and that the following image is a butcher knife:

But this is not a butcher knife; it is a chef’s knife. (Note how the former refers to the verb rather than the noun butcher—interesting, don’t you think?) This is what I have always thought of as a butcher knife. In point of fact, I have always thought that a butcher knife was any large, relatively triangularly shaped knife that allows one to chop ingredients without bumping one’s knuckles on the counter top. Now I know better.

Even with a chef’s knife, one can get into trouble. There are two kinds of chef’s knives: German and French. (This is amusing when one knows that the chef’s knife is often referred to as the French Knife. Thus, one might be using a German French knife or a French French knife. Imagine the problems the owner of the latter would have had at the start of the Iraq War: “No, no. It’s a Freedom Freedom knife.”) The German version—pictured above—has a rounder tip, so that it can be used more easily with a “rocking” cut: up and down. The French version is straighter and is used by pulling the knife toward the chef’s body: back and forth.

There is a Japanese knife called a Santoku, which I have called a butcher knife during my ignorant youth (that is, before about noon today).

It differs from the Chef’s Knife, primarily by having a straight edge—it is closer to the French Chef’s Knife. In general, I have not liked these knives as much. However, I have learned (thanks to a brief, unreferenced article on Wikipedia) that these knives are particularly good for people with small hands. Also: a skilled chef may do more precise cutting with the Santoku. As a result, I believe my past displeasure stems from unfamiliarity. The next knife I buy will be a Santoku. And, of course, I will write about it here. (Can you stand the excitement?)

Update

It has been over a year since I wrote this. During this time period I have used several Santoku knives. The result: I’ve given up on them. I have small hands, and yet, I do not find them particular good. I just don’t find them useful. A chef’s knife, a paring knife, a bread knife: all of these are essential. It is never the case that I need a Santoku. In fact, I only use my Santoku when everything else is dirty and I need a knife for something I could just as easily do with a steak knife.