J. M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize acceptance speech — a reminder that if you are doing what you do in order to win prizes, you are doing it for the wrong reasons.

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen; Distinguished Guests, Friends:

The other day, suddenly, out of the blue, while we were talking about something completely different, my partner Dorothy burst out as follows: "On the other hand," she said, "on the other hand, how proud your mother would have been! What a pity she isn't still alive! And your father too! How proud they would have been of you!"

"Even prouder than of my son the doctor?" I said. "Even prouder than of my son the professor?"

"Even prouder."

"If my mother were still alive," I said, "she would be ninety-nine and a half. She would probably have senile dementia. She would not know what was going on around her."

But of course I missed the point. Dorothy was right. My mother would have been bursting with pride. My son the Nobel Prize winner. And for whom, anyway, do we do the things that lead to Nobel Prizes if not for our mothers?

"Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!"

"That's wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold."

Why must our mothers be ninety-nine and long in the grave before we can come running home with the prize that will make up for all the trouble we have been to them?

To Alfred Nobel, 107 years in the grave, and to the Foundation that so faithfully administers his will and that has created this magnificent evening for us, my heartfelt gratitude. To my parents, how sorry I am that you cannot be here.

Thank you.

Sage, garlic, and potatoes make a proper combination. The following is a simple but effective recipe, particularly for colder weather.

Potatoes
Flour
Fresh sage
Garlic
Tomatoes

Peel & quarter potatoes, boil until cooked through, about 20 minutes. Mash, mix with eggs and add enough flour to form a firm & non-sticky dough. Knead dough & roll into a cylinder about the thickness of a finger. Cut into small pieces (gnocchi). Dust with flour and set aside.

Put a half dozen or more garlic cloves, unpeeled, into a shallow saute pan. Roast covered at medium/low heat on the stove for about 15 minutes; turn once halfway through. You can do this while the potatoes are boiling. Once roasted, remove skins from the cloves, mash the cloves, which should be very soft, into a paste with a fork.

Melt butter in a saute pan over medium/low heat. Add mashed garlic & finely julienned fresh sage leaves (chiffonade) to butter, cook until aromatic, about a minute. Meanwhile bring a pot of salted water to boil.

Add diced tomatoes. Season with salt and white pepper. Cook until it forms a stiff paste, about 5 minutes.

Turn heat to low. Add half and half or heavy cream, stir constantly, until the sauce is thick and coats a spoon, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat.

While reducing the sauce, toss gnocchi into boiling water. Remove with a slotted spoon once they float.

Toss the cooked, drained gnocchi in the sauce; coat well. Garnish with fresh sage chiffonade and grated cheese (Romano, Parmesan, Asiago, &c.). Serve immediately.

—

I like Yukon gold, which makes for a pale yellow gnocchi; but any starchy potatoe will do. 1 cup of mashed potatoes (=1 large potatoe) plus 1 egg and about 1 cup of flour makes enough gnocchi for two.

Don't worry about the garlic; once roasted they are very mellow. But make sure they don't burn.

The tomatoes do nothing except add body to the sauce, so in fact the milder the tomatoe the better; cheap commercial tomatoes with no flavour is perfect. I like yellow tomatoes, which are sweeter and not so acidic, and also makes the sauce a pale yellow which looks very buttery. I imagine you can substitute yellow bell-pepper, pureed, for the tomato. You can omit the tomato altogether and stirr in grated cheese at end to give the sauce body; it's a bit heavy for me though.

Half-and-half is a compromise. Can also use heavy cream or milk, depends on how creamy you want it. Figure 1 cup of chopped tomato and 1/2 cup of half-and-half.

From The New York Times, "Live from Miami, a style showdown":

What Mr. Kerry should do, she [Susan Batson, a longtime acting coach] explained, is open himself up. If he tries to be like the resolute Mr. Bush, he'll fall into his old trap: woodenness.

His greatest opportunity, she said, is to laugh more, to radiate a vulnerability with his eyes, a sense of compassion and wisdom, as opposed to single-mindedness and aggression. He can be "sort of a combination of Henry Fonda and James Stewart," she said.

—

Equally important to Mr. Kerry, she [Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania] said, is to refrain from using words like "gilded" and "panoply" at the lectern, as he has on the stump.

"Words found on the SAT verbal exam," she added, "should not appear in candidate's speeches."

Goddamn it — who the bloody hell are these people — and why does anyone pay any heed to this kind of inane, so-called "advice"? A political leader needs fore-mostly to be able to change and shape public opinion, i.e., to lead; those who can't, but instead pander to the public with a total lack of judgement and intelligence, are not fit to govern. Which is depressing, since on this regard Bush and the Republicans have been doing such a better job.

This amuses me.

福寿禄

From a new photo weblog BadJianZhu (jian zhu 建筑 is Chinese for architecture): "An investigation of the not-so-subtle in Beijing architecture." More on the Chinese architecture glut here and here.

Below: the controversial new Grand National Theatre in Beijing, locally known as the "stainless steel duck egg".

Haller's Round Ray
Urobatis halleri

Photograph from the Department of Ichthyology, California Academy of Sciences. More here.

Labels: fish

"Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt", a short essay by Umberto Eco.

A pair of remarkable and remarkably somber novels, W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz and Age of Iron, by J. M. Coetzee, speak with very different languages on the same idea: the Exile, dislocated within and without, at once struggling furiously against the fractured history that uproots him (her), and drowning by it.

Whereas an Expatriate is at home where-ever he happens to be, his present locale woven into his past narrative, a history which is seamless despite the removal of time and distance, the Exile is nowhere at home. He does not have a homeland. He is stranger even to the place of his birth, even if he should be able to return to it, even if he has never left. What the Exile has is an idea of home, in his head, much like Paradise of religion, an idealised place of pure and complete belonging rather than a place to live the less-than-pure, less-than-complete life full of compromise. And he does not have a history. Or rather, his history is broken into a Before, which in time slowly withers away, becoming transparent from recall; and an After, which since it is disconnected, weightless, is easily swept away in the daily flood of minutiae — detritus, as it were.

Sebald, who died in a car crash in 2001, was a German exile, albeit voluntary, teaching German language and literature in England. Born during WWII, in 1944, he grew up in the western part of the divided country trying at once to come to terms with its Nazi past and to leave it behind. Coetzee, born in 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa, coming to age just as the Apartheid regime came into full force. He emigrated to Australia in 2002. It may seem strange that both chose to be exile, when Germany reunited has repudiated its Nazi past and Apartheid is dead; but an Exile can never go home again.

From 沙祖康 Sha Zu-Kang, head of the Chinese delegation to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, remarking on the failed motion, brought by the US in April this year, criticising China's human rights record.

我公开讲过，中国今天的人权状况就比美国的人权状况要好，中国人口比美国多五倍，如果按照人口比例来讲，我们问题至少应该比美国多五倍，那才说明我们人权状况和美国一样。但现实是，我们目前人权状况比美国的好，说明中国人权至少比美国好五倍。我在大会上讲这话引起会场上哄堂大笑，大家都鼓掌，也可以看出美国不得人心，他们把人权问题高度政治化，为本国政治服务，把人权问题作为工具，做法很不得人心。

As I have said publicly before: the human rights situation in China today is better than that in the US. China has five times the population as the US, on a per capita basis, we should have five times more problems as the US and only then can we say China and the US have similar human rights situations. But in reality, the current human rights situation in China is better than that in the US, meaning human rights in China is at least five times better than in the US. When I made this remark at the meeting [of the UN Human Rights Commission], it was met with great laughter and applause from everyone. From this we can see the US position has no support. The US's stance on human rights is a highly politicized one meant to serve its own interests; the human rights question is only a tool for US policy, and they have no broad support in this.