Cuisine de France

In reflecting on my post the other day (in which I waxed snide about French cooking) I realized that what I meant was “classic” French cuisine (whether haute or bourgeoise), and not necessarily the cuisine of France, which has evolved considerably in the half-century since I first experienced it and since Julia Child (and her French coauthors) first brought its gospel across the Atlantic.  Unfortunately most Americans still think of “French cooking” as what Julia Child, and such other apostles as Jacques Pépin, has taught them on television and in cookbooks.

I still remember hearing, from the French professor under whom I had done my postdoc at the Ecole Polytechnique, about his amazement at the salad bar that he had encountered when attending a symposium in Providence, RI, in 1962. Well, by now the buffet de salades is quite common in restaurants in France (though not in “French” restaurants elsewhere).  Under what foreign influence it got there, I don’t know.

What I do know is the influence on the cooking of France from her neighboring countries, whose cultures overlap into French territory. On its fringes, the population of France is, for the most part, not ethnically French. This is true in particular in the six corners of the hexagone: it’s Flemish in the north, German (Alsatian) in the northeast, Italian (Ligurian) in the southeast (Corsica is also ethnically Italian), Catalan in the south, Basque in the southwest and Breton in the northwest.  What’s more, the Camargue in the Rhone delta is populated by descendants of Andalusian Gitanos (it’s the homeland of The Gipsy Kings). The cooking of these regions reflects the influences. So, for example, all along the Mediterranean coast you can find, besides the overrated bouillabaisse, some wonderful Spanish and Italian food.

I still remember that, in the 1980s, the sidewalk restaurants of Port-Bou (on the Spanish side of the border on the Mediterranean) were overflowing with French gourmands gorging on tapas and paella. No more: you can now get great paella and tapas in France, at least in the south and southwest (and of course in Paris). Especially memorable is an exquisite assortment of tapas that I had as an entrée (i.e. appetizer, not entree in the US sense) at a restaurant in Montpellier in 2003. I have no recollection of the main dish.

And tapas are called, in French, tapas. Traditional French cuisine has no equivalent of the Spanish tapas, the Italian  spuntini, the Eastern Mediterranean meze, the Korean banchan or the Chinese dim sum/dianxin. In France, everything — cold cuts and other hors d’oeuvre, cheese, fruit, soup and fish and meat — somehow had to be crammed into the confines of a super-heavy meal.  I had only one such meal in my life, in 1961 at a restaurant in Dijon. It was tasty, but overwhelming. I could not eat for 36 hours, and it killed whatever enthusiasm I might have had for la cuisine française (originally kindled, before I had ever set foot in France, by the writings of Ludwig Bemelmans and Joseph Wechsberg). But la cuisine de France, de nos jours, c’est autre chose.

The most conservative President?

I am a socialist. I have never belonged to a socialist party, but I have considered myself a socialist since my teens, some 60 years now. Of the nonrevolutionary, social democrat persuasion, but a socialist nonetheless. And so, when I hear politicians and pundits of the American right wing refer to Barack Obama or his policies as “socialist,” I can only smile inwardly and say to myself, “I wish.”

Even when they call him a “radical,” the designation is pathetically absurd. To me, Obama is the most conservative American President in my memory, and probably since Herbert Hoover.

Don’t get me wrong. To the extent that, in American politics, “conservative” (in contrast to “liberal”) is a catchword (whether as an adjective or a noun)  for right-wing policies and their adherents, then Obama is a “liberal.” But in the common, nonpolitical sense of the word — meaning ‘cautious, averse to deviating from established norms’ — Obama is truly conservative. George W. Bush, by contrast, was quite radical.

In medicine, a conservative treatment is one that does not involve surgery or intervention.  And that describes rather precisely Obama’s attitude to curing the many societal ills that afflict his nation. Do nothing drastic; just keep Wall Street going by giving the banks money; keep gays in their military closets and don’t let them marry; keep healthcare in the hands of private insurers; keep the Bush wars going along with government secrecy and indefinite detention of suspects. To the extent that Bush policies — many of them radical departures from tradition — are merely cosmetic pimples, like allowing roadbuilding in the wilderness, then it’s okay to excise them. But deep incisions? No, at least not for now.

When it comes to dealing with other countries, including “enemies” like Iran or North Korea, I rather like Obama’s cautious approach, a welcome relief from the Bush-era swagger. But in matters of war and security, he shows undue deference to military professionals rather than listen to the wise old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals. In this respect he, a man with no military experience, resembles Lyndon Johnson, who despite his Silver Star saw virtually no action in World War II. (By contrast Harry Truman, a combat veteran of World War I, was not afraid to fire MacArthur when the situation called for it.)

Sometimes Obama sounds as if he wished that the situation he is in would allow him to pursue a bolder course. But he seems to have a visceral fear upsetting the applecart, even if it’s going the wrong way, lest his impeccably conservative attire be spattered by the applesauce made by the fallen fruit.

Elms and pears

An AP news story issued today begins like this:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama issued a withering critique Thursday of Wall Street corporate behavior, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” for Wall Street employees to be paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while their financial sector was crumbling.

“It is shameful,” Obama said from the Oval Office. “And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility.”

I beg your pardon, Mr. President? These are Wall Street types you’re talking about, not software moguls or aircraft makers. I can readily see a computer-science nerd with a great love for his subject making it big in Silicon Valley, or a kid with a love of flying going into the aviation industry and somehow soaring to the top. But finance? What reason other than greed would anyone have for going to work for a Wall Street firm? Spiritual fulfillment? What responsibility should they have, other than for filling their own wallets? (I was going to write “their own and their friends’,” but then I thought of Bernie Madoff.)

No, Mr. President, asking “the folks on Wall Street… to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility” is, as they say in Spanish, asking an elm for pears (pedirle peras al olmo).

Ignorance of history?

I have heard and read President Obama’s inaugural speech. And I am troubled.

Don’t get me wrong.  It was an inspiring and exciting speech.

What troubles me is that we now have a highly educated President of the United States who, seemingly, doesn’t know American history.

A minor quibble: Early in the speech, the President said, “Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.” Well, yes, if you count Grover Cleveland twice. But Cleveland, though he held the presidency twice, was, as far as is known to history, one American, not two.

Barack Obama first made his mark as a writer. Writers, as a rule, like to get credit for the words they write, unless they are presidential speechwriters, whose job it is to write words that will be attributed to their boss.

Near the end of his speech Obama quoted the famous lines from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense beginning “Let it be told to the world…” Only the President did not attribute the text to Paine; he only said that “the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people.” It would seem to me that the words were inserted by a speechwriter to whom Paine’s authorship didn’t matter as much as Washington’s use of them. Did Obama assume that his listeners would know that the words are Paine’s? Hardly likely. In fact, Neal Conan began his Talk of the Nation broadcast on NPR by saying that Obama had “quoted Washington.”

It’s more likely that Obama doesn’t know that Paine wrote the words. And that’s troubling.

In the paragraph preceding the quotation, the speech sets the scene: “In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river.” Obviously the reference is to the Battle of Trenton, beside the frozen Delaware. And then: “The capital was abandoned.”

What capital? Washington? It didn’t exist in 1776! Was the President confusing the Revolutionary War with the War of 1812?

Or did he mean Trenton? Well, Trenton was briefly the federal capital in 1784, but in 1776 it wasn’t even the capital of New Jersey yet. In any case, would someone making a speech heard around the world mean Trenton when they said “the capital”?

Maybe I’m wrong to be troubled. Maybe ignorance of history isn’t all that bad. Only history will tell.

Oy vey, another hoax!

So, yet another “Holocaust memoir” has been exposed as a hoax. This time it’s the “love story” of Herman Rosenblat (who, it so happened, was sent from the ghetto of Piotrków to Buchenwald, as I was) and his wife Roma. For over a decade the fairy-tale story of the boy who was given apples through a concentration-camp fence by a girl whom he later met on a blind date and married, as implausible as it was, circulated in the American media, including appearances on Oprah Winfrey’s show. Finally Herman Rosenblat has admitted that the tale was a fabrication.

Allow me to quote from an essay of mine, written in March 2005:

I have a rule of thumb that I have followed for sixty years: any Polish Jew’s account of his or her experiences during World War II must be taken with a grain of salt. So it is, for example, that the posthumous unraveling of the fraud that was Jerzy Kosinski’s autobiography only confirmed what I had already suspected. And when I saw the film Europa Europa I could only laugh at the subtitle “A True Story” that its poster bore; the filmmaker, intentionally or not, sabotages the film’s veracity with an epilogue in which the man whose tale is told is shown on a Tel Aviv beach, singing a Hebrew song and displaying a nose that was worthy of a caricature in Der Stürmer and would certainly make his passing as an Aryan less than plausible.

If any  literary agent, publisher, editor or screenwriter were to seek my advice, it would be this: if any purported Holocaust memoir from a Polish Jew sounds like fiction, it probably is.

My H problem

I haven’t posted since August. I spent most of September traveling, and since coming home I’ve been busy with other things.

A part of my travels was in Poland, the land of my birth. My previous visit there was in 1997, and before that I hadn’t been back in over fifty years — since 1944, when I left at the age of nine.

After six years in Germany, my parents and I ended up in Los Angeles in 1950, and soon thereafter they asked me to speak English with them. I already knew the language, and they wanted to learn it. As Polish Jews who survived World War II, we had no great attachment to Poland or the Polish language, and so the change came easy. (I continued occasionally to speak Yiddish with my father.)

On my first return trip to Poland I was surprised at how quickly my fluency in Polish came back. Polish grammar is notoriously difficult, but even without knowing the rules very well I somehow managed to navigate its treacherous waters. Since then I’ve tried to speak a little Polish on occasion, and to learn it a little better by consulting textbooks, teaching aids and books about the language. On my last trip I spoke it well enough to be taken for a Pole.

But in the process of reading about Polish I discovered something strange: according to all the authorities, in Polish the letter H and the digraph CH are pronounced alike, as the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (more or less the way most continental Hispano-Americans — Argentines, Mexicans, Peruvians — pronounce J).

This is not at all how I remember learning the language. In my speech (and my mother’s — she still speaks Polish, and I often overhear her), the sound of H is what it is in English (as in hotel), and that of CH what it is in German in such words as Loch or lachen. Actually, I modeled my pronunciation in these languages (and in others, such as Hebrew and Spanish), as I learned them, on the way I used the sounds in Polish.

When I have listened to Polish-speakers, it has always seemed to be that, with some striking exceptions, their pronunciation of H and CH has been the same as mine. I am now wondering if making the distinction between H and CH is a peculiarity of Polish-speaking Jews, and perhaps a holdover from Yiddish.

Thinking about this problem led me to reflecting about the many roles that the letter H, by itself and in digraphs, plays in the various Roman alphabets, and I turned the reflections into an essay.

The bra convention

I am not writing about a meeting of designers, manufacturers or sellers of women’s upper undergarments, but about the convention, common in American film and television productions, that a woman wears a bra while having sex.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the migration of major film actresses to television series, Mary McNamara wrote that “Holly Hunter is taking a fairly ridiculous concept – ‘Touched by an Angel’ meets ‘NYPD Blues’ – and turning ‘Saving Grace’ into a captivating character study.”

I never got a chance to be captivated. I watched only the first episode and saw only the ridiculousness, not only of the concept but of the execution as well. I found one saving grace in Saving Grace: the fact that when, at the beginning of the episode, Holly Hunter was shown in bed with a man, she was not wearing a bra.

The bra convention has become so established that exceptions to it are noteworthy. It is especially striking in series that flaunt their sexual frankness, such as Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives. What these two series, in particular, have in common is that they were created by gay men (Alan Ball and Marc Cherry, respectively), and at one time I formed the hypothesis that perhaps gay men simply don’t know the importance of bare breasts, and the process that leads to them, for horny straight men (since to my knowledge there is nothing comparable in gay sex), or the fact that (in my experience, at least) most women, except those with oversized breasts, feel more comfortable without a bra.

Now, I’m not talking about necessarily showing bare breasts on the screen, which is common enough in European productions (and also occurred, curiously enough, in a Hollywood film about gay sex – Brokeback Mountain, directed by the straight [to my knowledge] Ang Lee). All it takes for verisimilitude is what we saw of Holly Hunter: bare shoulders in bed and, out of bed, a nude view of her (or her body double’s) body.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on the paper’s blog: “In movies, if two people are really hot for each other, they jump into bed and, overcome by passion, they . . . leave their clothes half on. To be specific, the woman leaves her shirt or bra on. Now, am I missing something? Has any man in the history of the world ever been so hot for a woman that he’s not interested in seeing her NAKED? Probably not, and yet you see this in movie after movie. As a reader recently pointed out, this just happened in ‘Knocked Up.’” And in his weekly column, where he directly responds to readers’ columns, he wrote: “It has become a weird movie convention that first-time lovers become so hot for each other that they jump into bed without removing their clothes. This is Hollywood-style sex, where a man can get so attracted to a woman that he loses all interest in seeing her naked. (Huh?) Anyway, if someday this ever happens, somewhere in the known universe, Hollywood can take credit for starting the trend.”

Mick La Salle is a first-rate film historian, and if he gives no indication of knowing how or when the convention got started, then I certainly don’t. And of course I also don’t know if it was gay producers or directors who instigated it. I don’t remember seeing it in the post-code films of the seventies, when sexual frankness returned to Hollywood in the form of R-rated films. I have come across the rumor that certain actresses demand a higher salary for showing their breasts, and that this was why Kate Beckinsale wore a bra in Laurel Canyon not only when in bed with her husband (so that this was, presumably, not even first-time sex) but also when participating in an otherwise skinny-dipping pool party. (In this respect Kate Beckinsale is at the opposite end from her fellow Englishwoman Greta Scacchi, whose appearance in Robert Altman’s The Player was remarkable for her breasts not being shown). But, once again, I’m not talking about showing breasts, only indicating that a bra is not being worn.

I got a comment!

To my surprise, I got a comment within two days of my first post!

Manuel Romero disagrees with my statement that Michelle Rhee has (as I wrote, based on what I heard on NPR) “absolutely no management experience.” He asks me to “note that Michelle Rhee did not join The New Teacher Project but rather founded the non-profit in 1997 and was the CEO until she recently left for DC.”

Since, as I wrote, I knew nothing about Ms. Rhee, I did a little rudimentary fact-checking. I found on Wikipedia that “Michelle Rhee is [sic] the founder and President of The New Teacher Project.” I followed the link to The New Teacher Project’s Web site and discovered the Michelle Rhee’s name is nowhere to be found. The page giving the history says simply that “The New Teacher Project was formed in 1997.” Has Michelle Rhee’s name been purged, Soviet style, from the organization’s history? (I know that the Soviets didn’t invent the practice — Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors did it too.)

On the page describing the Leadership Team, Ariela Rozman is listed as the CEO and Timothy Daly as the President, so that the two positions are distinct; either Wikipedia or Mr. Romero is mistaken.

The descriptions of the positions don’t make it clear what the CEO’s functions are, but the current holder “began her six-year tenure… as Vice President of Marketing,” a position that seems no longer to exist. It also seems that “TNTP’s largest business line and a growing staff of over 60 individuals” are under the supervision of the Vice President of Teaching Fellows Programs, a position that was also held by Ms. Rozman.

What the President does is manage “TNTP’s efforts to engage the wider educational community in teacher quality reforms, including recruitment, selection, training, and staffing rules.”

Neither the CEO’s nor the President’s position seems to involve the kind of management that even remotely resembles the supervision of thousands of unionized employees and scores of thousands. So, once again, I say: Good luck, DC!

Glib self-promoters

Last Sunday, while I was driving north on Interstate 5 from Los Angeles to my home in Berkeley, I listened to an interview with Michelle Rhee, the newly appointed Chancellor of the District of Columbia Schools, on NPR’s All Things Considered. I had never heard of Michelle Rhee and of course knew nothing about her. But I think I know a glib self-promoter when I hear one, and what Ms. Rhee had to say about her background — which includes absolutely no management experience and is limited to three years of teaching in Baltimore before joining something called The New Teacher Project — left me no doubt. (You can hear the interview by clicking on the Listen icon here.) She says that she “took a group of kids who were very low-performing academically… taught them for two years… through their second- and third-grade year, and just saw incredible gains in their student achievements.” She does not say us how she achieved this miracle, but that after she spoke to a group of parents they went up to her to tell her “We believe in you!”

In the future I’m going to write more about the pernicious role that glib self-promoters have played in managing the United States’ educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. In the meantime, my word to the taxpayers and the parents of public-school students in Washington, DC, is “Good luck!”

Hello world!

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