Went & saw "The Glass Menagerie" — two hours, no intermission, and I didn't notice at all. It was the best play-going experience I have had since last year's "I Am My Own Wife".

What I did notice was the peals of audience laughter during the awkwardly painful encounter between Jim O'Connor and the Wingfields. Amanda Wingfield's deluded self-absorption is ridiculous enough, and the reminiscences between Laura & Jim has enough awkward airs — but it is their desperation & fragile sadness that stuck in the throat. I am not sure how one can laugh here — out of discomfort, perhaps. Or rather I am reminded of Daniel Mendelsohn's perceptive review of the play's recent Broadway revival:

As the audience at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre—the theater where Williams's Streetcar had its New York première in 1948—leapt to its feet for the by now ritual standing ovation at the conclusion of this meaningless production of a play that is, more than almost any other in the Williams canon, about the destruction of beauty and the inevitability of failure, I wondered whether the delicate emotions of such a play are beyond current audiences —whether great drama's demand that we identify with the helpless victims, and with the strident suffering made visible to us on stage, makes us so uncomfortable that it can only be played for laughs. As I got up to leave, a teenaged girl sitting behind me turned to her parents and said, "But I thought this was supposed to be sad." So did I. The only heartbreak in the theater that night was that there was no heartbreak at all.

My beloved beef noodles is in the news — in the New York Times. And no, there aren't any Lanzhou-style noodle houses in the US, there aren't any decent ones in Beijing either.

For a bit of perspective: 20 years ago a big bowl of noodles cost about 0.30 RMB, which was 10 cents (by the then official exchange rate), or 3 cents (by the then black-market rate & the current semi-free-market rate). Well, twenty years ago an lower-middle class wage is about 100 RMB ($30 or $10) a month, nowadays it is about 500 RMB ($60) — although with the large number of laid-off worker from closed-up heavy industries, there are a lot of poor people in Lanzhou.

Another installment of our occasional series on eating animals...

In the middle of reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Castello, in particular having just finished the two chapters: "The Lives of Animals"; these were originally given by Coetzee as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Princeton University in 1997.

When push comes to shove, sentiment beats reason every time, as any economist can tell you. This is why I find it impossible to rationally argue against Elizabeth Costello (vis-à-vis Coetzee?). Veal repels my sentiments, but not beef — not rational but my sentiment is what it is, I cannot justify it via reason but then I am as sure of it as I am sure of Socrates' mortality. Does there exist any consistent argument against veal that does not exclude beef at the same time? While we are at it, how rational is any argument against eating cats and dogs that do not at the same be against eating pigs? What is so fundamentally different between a cat or a dog, which I won't think of eating, and the pig which provided some of my dinner tonight, except on the level of sentiment?

There are the rational arguments for meat-eating, i.e. culture & evolutionary history, dentition, digestive tract, nutrition &c, and rational arguments against it, i.e. cultural & evolutionary history, health, ecology &c. These all seemed rather bloodless to me, in that I can't see how they can ever persuade a skeptic. Sentimental arguments, like Costello's, do not persuade either but they are the ones almost anyone can understand, and when well-put as is Costello's it is almost impossible not to sympathize. That is the power of literature and of art, which is fundamentally a sentimental power.

Back to meat eating: while a rational counter to Costello cannot be posed, I think I can pose a sentimental one. There is something so utterly pleasurable in a good bowl of beef noodles — indeed one of the chief pleasures of this life — how can there possibly be anything wrong with it?

Labels: eating animals