With particular respect to those of us in the Northeast/New England, from Twelfth Night:

[Clown sings:]
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With tosspots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

I was home in Washington D.C. last week, but was also trying to recover from my trip to Delaware. Still, cooking continued at a reasonable clip. Here are two of my favorite efforts, driven by the re-emergence of summer flavors and weather good enough to accomodate the grill.

Zucchini and Tomato Tart - Before I say anything more about this recipe, let me just note that part of my hitherto massive problems with photos and food were apparently caused by the camera. Using my parents' much more powerful digital camera, I got a better result. Check it out here. My mother's tasty bean and tomato salad lurks in the background.

In any case, this recipe was shamelessly stolen from Richard Olney's delightful little book, Ten Vineyard Lunches. (incidentally, I recommend this terribly under-known volume even though I can't afford the wines he mentions. The meals, and more importantly, the book's intentions, make it all worth-while). The recipe caught my eye particularly for its evocative, Provencal flair. It is precisely what I imagine I would want to eat in the garden of the small house my family once rented in Bandol, a less well known (and thus cheaper) town in the Cote D'Azur.

To make the tart, just blind bake (that is, bake without any filling except for some parchment paper and some rice or beans) a short crust, and fill it with a pound of grated zucchini (which have been salted and left to drain to remove some of their liquid) Pack well into the cooled crust, and top with slices of tomatoes, which have also been drained of liquid. Top each tomato with a thin square of gruyere cheese (good cheddar or emmenthal will also do, of course). Finally, fill the pie with a mix of heavy cream and eggs (I think it was three eggs for a pint of cream), and cook gently for 50 minutes. Eat lukewarm, with a tangy salad.

Brisket - I'm not a champion barbecuer by any means, but I love long roasted meats. So I made a rub with cups of our middle eastern paprika like red pepper, and brown sugar, and other spices. That was left to season the meat for a night, leaving it ready for the grill's cool 200 degree fire the next morning. Eight hours of delightful smoking later (of course, soaked hickory chips were added to a pan in our unfortunately gas grill to add flavor), and I was ready to eat.

Oh - I should add that I bought the barbecue sauce. And paid for it with sugary dreck. The meat was good, though.

Generally, I ignore the New York Times editorial pages. Mostly, this is because I don't like editorials--600 words is too long for a bon mot, but too short for any sort of substantive analysis--but also this is because I don't like New York Times editorialists in particular. Nevertheless, every once in a while I get sucked in by an engaging headline, like John Tierney's (also blogged about by my co-blogger, trumpeting that it holds the secret to "What Women Want."

(The very image of a male columnist holding forth on what women want always brings to my mind the image of a prosperous late Victorian gentleman holding forth in public that his wife certainly doesn't want to vote--she trusts him to look out for her interests in the dirty world of politics--while the wife in question takes advantage of her husband's absence to attend a Suffragette ralley.)

According to Mr. Tierney, what women want, or at any rate what most women don't want, is competition. He cites a psychology experiment in which men demonstrated a preference for a competitive payoff, while women preferred not to compete, even when they seemed likely to win.

He then glosses over the possibility that the women's reluctance to compete could result from people like him hammering into their heads that competition was unwomanly by saying, "You can argue that this difference is due to social influences, although I suspect it's largely innate, a byproduct of evolution and testosterone." On the basis, apparently, of one psychology experiment Mr. Tierney seems to think it appropriate to conclude that it's just not in women's natures to enjoy the rough and tumble world of competition.

(I am again reminded of that Victorian gentleman claiming that women's brains are simply not up to the rigors of serious study, while his daughter simpers and giggles in public company, because everyone knows that men don't marry bluestockings, and women who don't get married are failures.)

Mr. Tierney then claims "There will always be some jobs that women, on average, will not want as badly as men do. Some of the best-paying jobs require crazed competition and the willingness to risk big losses - going broke, never seeing your family and friends, dying young." If he really believes that women in significant quantities never willingly choose "crazed competition", he clearly has not met any aspiring actresses, models, or dancers--female-dominated fields in which the time commitments and level of competition required make the business world seem about as strenuous and risky as an afternoon stroll in the park. Or how about getting a Ph.D. in comparative literature (female-dominated, fantastically competitive)?

One wonders if the researchers were to redo their experiment with the activity involving answering SAT-style analagies rather than mental arithmatic if women would have chosen competition in greater numbers? What if it had been a dance competition--anyone care to bet that the men choosing to compete would have outnumbered the women?

I agree with Mr. Tierney's central point--that a business world organized as a tournament is neither healthy for women nor for business generally--but chalking that up to women's innate lack of competitive drive is unbelivably simplistic. Incentive structure (the age at which the rewards for winning the business tournament start to kick in is generally the age at which women either have to slow down at least somewhat, or forego hope of having children), lingering gender discrimination, and deeply ingrained societal expectations about what it means to be feminine (hint: they most certainly don't involve a trading floor) all most likely play a role as well.

Gerald Howard of fave imprint Penguin has a retrospective in Bookforum on Gravity's Rainbow, amidst a host of others' recollections. There is much here to smile about, not least Howard's obvious and boundless passion for real live fiction, a consuming, consumptive embrace of the stickyness of good prose. Two amusing diversions:

V. and The Crying of Lot 49 had each sold more than three million copies in their Bantam mass-market editions. (Let us pause here to contemplate what these numbers say about the extent of literacy in the America of the '60s. Then I suggest we all commit suicide.)

And also the funny note (for those of us still immersed in youthful Veenish adoration):

After six weeks of pounding the Manhattan pavement in search of "college graduate" positions—carrying with me, and I wince at this now, a remaindered hardcover copy of Nabokov's Ada as my downtime reading matter—I got a job as the most sullen and undermotivated advertising trainee in the history of hucksterism. Bluntly put, I was a big problem to myself (and my poor parents) and the world wasn't coming to the rescue.

Well, there's no accounting for taste... and here I mean mine. Mr. Howard's is quite well formed. As much as Nabokov and Pynchon are the two great post-War American prose stylists, two adopted tongues (English and Naval radio) with ebullient catalogs of Americana, each singing in multivocalic registers, Pynchon's grasp of the secret machinery that undergirds our dreamed historical America, its scat and its scatology, will always trump Nabokov's gossamer America, a haze of motel rooms glimpsed briefly through a trailing butterfly net.

This is not to diminish Nabokov—whose works are in many ways better suited than Pynchon's to stand the arbitrary test of time—but Nabokov's resolute atopicality can sometimes feel the product of a resigned retreat rather than an independent ahistoricity, and his turn away from the political in the American novels, especially after Bend Sinister, more an unfortunate posture than a principled stand. In Pynchon, especially in Gravity's Rainbow and V., there is a sense that one stands in front of the American Aleph. This is not just standing without, but standing athwart history, and damn the torpedoes. As the many reviewers in BOOKFORUM note, everything is there. And so there is much to parody—the long uneven sentences, the sometimes imprecise glossolalia that erupts as waves of different lingos, syntaxes, patois flood the zone like so much radio chatter—and much to imperfectly emulate, as adopting the ostensible ease of Pynchon's accumulations without his paranoiac sense of their underlying narrative, the ethical tug of action that solos around the spillage, is a recipe for disaster. After Pynchon have come floppy listless erudities, as with Neal Stephenson, historical accumulations without the dark noise of the soul, as the later DeLillo, and whirlwinds of knowledge anfracted inwards, as with Infinite Jest.

Howard speaks highly of David Foster Wallace, calling him "the only certifiable genius in American fiction besides Pynchon," but his work, however brilliant, remains detached. It is a detachment perhaps particular to our post-analytic age of psychobabble, not absent a notion of soul, but presenting a soul frozen by its own contemplation of significance, as if actual laughter could shatter the humans we've become. This is not to criticize Infinite Jest overmuch; in its lesser success, we can glimpse Pynchon's greatness.

Pynchon offers us humans who not only live with shit, but embrace it, live in it, fuck in it, and ultimately laugh at it (Slothrop's toilet diving is intricately linked to Pudding's coprophagia: Tyrone follows the turd down the rabbit hole of American culture, to its masking of the racial politics of culture in America, while British Pudding erotically devours it without analysis or acknowledgement). His ever fluent discourse ("quicksilver shifts of register" has Howard) doesn't float above the real, but within its kinetic undercurrent. That the novel is seized by Pynchon's continuing insistent relation to the real, not just a plot (it is the novel against plots, against plotting) but an attitude, an independent sense of history, rehabilitates its length, for Gravity's Rainbow is overlong, with most of its most powerful and startling connections rooted in the beginning of the book (under Allied control, where Pynchon's ear is on firmer ground). And this is perhaps the lesson we might draw from Pynchon's fiction (falling, as Howard notes, further away from relevance, even to young editors and their brood).

Gravity's Rainbow is by no means post-structuralist, even if its pastiche lies within the post-modern affect. It demands a particular attention and it grants a particular world-view. And it is that brashness, that rage for order in the midst of the cacophony, from which our fiction should learn. It is perhaps impossible to write an American novel, now, that does not acknowledge our cosmopolitan heritage, our particular ship's chorus of fools and liars and dreamers. But our authors should take care to be captains rather than mere chroniclers. We should acknowledge Pynchon's immense encyclopedic breadth, but it is his moral consciousness, as when we read Bellow and Roth, that within us should resonate most strongly.

Gravity's Rainbow, in the fourth decade (!) since its publication, retains its narrative identity. Its continual ethical responsiveness (its refusal to settle for the anodyne explication of reduction, the politics of historical and moral equation) does not stem from Pynchon's architectonic historiography of the war, but from his faithful inhabitation within and determination to see through the sea of data. As with Moses Herzog, or Nathan Zuckerman, or Oskar Schell, it is the mind questing through the inexplicable that provides our moment of recognition, although it is Pynchon, himself, rather than any of his characters, that generates this will. And although this rage for order must go unsatisfied, its echoes, its ghostly demarcations of deeper norms remain fiction's best offering.

I too love subway games, maps, and broadly speaking, representing dense information in readable ways. Post-college, I discovered that there's a name for this field: information design.

Edward Tufte, the field's godfather, hosts a fascinating discussion (check out the links!) on transportation maps with an emphasis on what, exactly, we want our maps to do. The designers on the website concentrate on the London Tube. Several maps point out possible additions or changes. One could add walk-lines to stops (places where it's faster to walk above-ground than take the Tube). This 2-part map switches from a geographically accurate account of London's city center (the better to move around dense neighborhoods) and a "radically schematized" version of the area around London. (Geographic inaccuracy can be sacrificed for visual clarity when distances between stations are far and most of what one wants to do is commute to one place, namely, London). The page of scaled subway maps from around the world benefits no commuters nor tourists, but, at least for me, gives an indication of a city's skeleton, particularly for cities I've been to. (Check out the San Francisco map, for instance--sprawling Bay Area is well represented even when Mexico City's dense confusion fades back in comparison.)

So I'm curious, for Will and any other subway-game-players, what would you like your subway maps to do? I can imagine a thick book of subway maps, each guiding one through the same system with different puzzles to be solved or choices to make. (It would certainly make more entertaining those morning commutes on trains too crowded for reading).

Comments.

With the recent blogospheric chatter about the uselessness of the Bar Exam and Legal Profession/MPRE in particular, it occurs to me that a major problem with teaching legal ethics in law school is that students with radical ideas are highly unwilling to push the envelope.

Because 1, their professor's opinion of their morality is crucial to their chance of working in the field of law, and 2, the state engages in the arguably unconstitutional practice of conditioning the ability to practice law on one's willingness to espouse a set of state-generated moral beliefs, people who think radical things are (rightly) wary about saying so, especially when they have not thought out their ideas too carefully.

This is very unfortunate, because there are a lot of interesting debates and arguments one could have (and that I have had in private) like the obligation of government officials to betray their government if the Constitution says so, the nullification doctrine, the right or obligation to lie for your client, the conflicts of interest endured by public interest lawyers when cause and client conflict, and so on and so on. Some academics (e.g. Michael Stokes Paulsen, Robert Cover) write about this stuff, but law students really can't, not if they want to be unorthodox.

A partial solution, of course, is to dramatically strip down the ethics requirements imposed by the ABA and state bars, but even that wouldn't solve the entire problem-- people whose future employment is highly contingent have a strong incentive to hide certain unorthodox views, especially views about the morality of role, which necessarily infect just about any job.

UPDATE: This is, in retrospect, a rather ill-crafted post. What I mean to say is that legal ethics seems to consist of two different things. 1, the highly boring questions of exactly what rules apply to practicing lawyers in what jurisdictions. You need to know this to pass the bar, and it's a silly thing for law schools to teach. 2, the highly interesting questions of what rules should apply to practicing lawyers, how to mediate between the ethics of role and personal ethics, what to do when obedience to a legal text conflicts with obedience to something else, &c. Students are rightly wary about expressing a lot of controversial thoughts here, because who would want to hire somebody who suggested that employees should march to their own drum if they think their employer is wrong? Whatever the merits or demerits of these particular views, the result is that (2) is just as boring as (1) when taught to a bunch of status-conscious law students who fear for their futures. Why bother to make law schools do this? Just put it in BarBri.

Picking on TNR/NYTimes writer and Law Professor Jeff Rosen seems to be something of a sport in the blogosphere, even among his friends. This piece at the Columbia Fed Soc blog is no different.

I should note, though, that I happen to know how Professor Rosen would rule in Roe v. Wade (he'd be to the right of Justice O'Connor), and you will too if you buy What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said. This isn't necessarily inconsistent with the Rosen-smearing going on, but it's important to note that this differentiates him from what the poster calls "the conventional media liberal."

The more spies one gets in the blogosphere, the easier this game becomes. Jacob Levy is in Belle Waring's comments here, snarking on Singapore's chinatown. (Thanks, Raffi).