How to do Thanksgiving, from two greenhorns flushed after a modest success

So we had our first ever "on our own" Thanksgiving last Thursday, which was a blast. A few people brought drinks and starters--including a lovely tart by Anne and a salad by John--but we handled all the classic dishes, which is no mean feat when you don't have a car and live in a country that: (1) doesn't understand the use of pumpkin in desserts and the wonder of cranberries, and (2) thinks stuffing ought to be little balls of gluey breadcrumbs.

Well, it all came off ok, although I still find turkeys stressful. And we learned a few things for the record. First of all, I realized how much can be done ahead of the day to make the day easier! Second, I realized the IDEAL Thanksgiving is a potluck, where everyone brings a part of the show, and the host just handles the bird. So here's what we did:

Wednesday PM
- make cranberry sauce
- bake sweet potatoes and puree
- prepare pie crusts

Thursday AM

- finish pies
- make up and bake: stuffing, sweet potato casserole, honey-roasted parnsips

Thursday afternoon
- pop in turkey and prepare gravy
- peel potaoes

Just before dinner
- take out turkey and pop in rolls to warm/bake
- boil potatoes
- take out rolls and put in stuffing, sweet potato casserole, parnsips in oven to re-heat
- finish gravy
- warm peas and any other veg
- carve turkey

then...FEAST!

So here's the deal - if other people bring the stuffing, sweet potatoes, veg, potatoes, rolls, cranberry sauce, and pies, then all you have to do is pop other peoples' work into the oven for the 30 minutes while the turkey is resting. Then all you've done is turkey and gravy! OR if you're 'people' all you've done is one casserole or some such. Ahhhhh....sweet bliss...

For us, it all turned out amazingly well, although not the hottest food ever, and one of the 3 (!) small birds for 22 people+ was a leeeetle underdone, but no matter. We expected bumps in the road, so that when they came it was quite all right. The pumpkin chiffon pie plooped on us, but still tasted nummy. It was a great feast too, lovely atmosphere, good friends, lots of wine but never too much quaffed, just good fun, and much generosity of spirit.

Art in Everyday Life

Here's just an example of Drumstick's ability to see the art in everyday life.
His eye turned a piece of pragmatism into a composition:

Woman, with headpiece and flowers in the morning. 2006.

Moroccan food, anyone? - updated

In other news, I'm working on a Moroccan feast for Friday night's graduate student Christianity Explored course. I'll try to take a camera and post a picture on this post then! Here's the plan so far:

• hummus, marinated olives, and spiced carrots, served as a starter with warmed pita bread (closest I can get to Moroccan flat bread and broad bean dip)

• lamb and date tagine for the meat eaters, pumpkin and lentil tagine for those veggies, served with buttered couscous with raisins, pistachios, roasted almonds, pine nuts, and cinnamon

• figs with a dollop of greek yoghurt, topped with honey and pistachios, and served with macaroons. I'm going to quarter the figs lengthwise so they look like flowers with honeyed yoghurt pistachio centers - pretty!

• coffee, tea, etc.

UPDATE: Here's the main course! Click here for more

New Criticism, 3

5. “Our reading of a work should be ‘disinterested’….In other words, our reading should be neutral, impartial, not distorted by prior ideological assumptions” or preconceived ideas. This idea is traced to English empiricism and the notion that “We should experience the text directly rather than applying ideas to it.”

Again, we have here in New Critical ideals the presumably detached, neutral observer of the ideals of modern science. There remains something to recommend in this position, insofar as it also grows out of a firm commitment to trying to listen to the text as much as possible on its own terms instead of only appropriating it to one's own interests. The difference now is our sense of how much this is possible, our awareness of the limitations and challenges faced when trying to engage with the otherness of the text (please excuse the trendy invocation of the word 'other' but I couldn't think of a better word -- suggestions welcome!). All reading is now commonly regarded as interested, filtered, and--at its most pessimistic--partial and distorting.

The pendulum has swung from the objectivist ideal of the New Critic to the subjectivist distopia, from the denial of the self to the rejection of the another self. Note also that a corollary of the objective observer is the possibility of neutral, objective evaluation potentially capable of dispassionate, universal acceptance; likewise, the dominance of hyper-subjectivity renders evaluation of worth an impossibility, even should such worth be granted to exist.

Other, more measured ways of voicing an ideal similar to the New Critic's disinterestedness but without modernist baggage would include the concept of reading with 'good faith' or reading charitably, a notion whose various forms dot Christian history all the way back to Augustine at least (as with so many other things, good ol' Augustine). Both the idea of 'good faith' and 'reading charitably' attend to reading as an interpersonal encounter which can indeed produce knowledge--both interpersonal knowledge and otherwise--even though the mystery of that encounter precludes anything like Cartesian certainty. For myself, I can neither read as an everyman nor an island; neither depersonalized nor radically isolated; the former is at best a god-like illusion, the latter a vice masqueraded as necessity.

Current thinking on 'preconceived ideas' stresses without them, one cannot read at all. Not my bag to prove that here (haha!), but just a brief comment: the problem with preconceived ideas seems to me to be not that we have them, but that we bring to bear on the text ones that don't belong. And, despite appearances to the contrary, doing so outside certain set limitations and fashions is still called bad, far-fetched, or just plain silly in degree programs. What I aim for, at least, is to fill out my intertextual knowledge of the text's historical moment so that I have more and more at my fingertips the preconceptions and even some of the sensibilities that are more likely to belong that those natural to my own cultural and personal moment. I am under no delusion that I can be a 15th century reader, but neither do I despair of sharing some of that reader's means of approaching the text. In fact, such a practice as I have outlined is not merely an exercise of historical imagination or literary appreciation; it is also potentially an act of charity. I think I have Augustine and many others in the Church with me in preferring to try and love. So with this assumption of New Criticism, I would partly accept the goal of taking the text somehow as much as possible on its own terms, but change the language of objective detachment to a language of charitable interpersonal encounter.

New Criticism, 2

3. “Human nature is itself unchanging, and it is because of this that certain works have a timeless and universal appeal, since they issue from and appeal to this unchanging human nature. We each have our own unique individuality or unique ‘essence’, yet there is also a common store of ‘humanity’ which we all share.”

This tenet attempts to negotiate between a sense of common humanity and a sense of the individual…and thus the age-old question of the One and the Many enters into literary study. With some of the insights offered by reader-response, one could also add that a reader brings both her humanity and her individuality to a text, rather than just her humanity alone, and the two interact together in the reading act (as, presumably, they do in all other human acts). “Unchanging” is the flashpoint here, especially if you feel you must link up a discussion of human nature to a Darwinian model of speciation. However, it should be noted that one can take human speciation on board without dumping human nature into the primordial slop; see Leon Kass’ work for an example of retaining both. Without a relatively stable human nature, though, it seems to me at first glance that only radical individuation remains, and the reading encounter becomes yet another chimera to disguise the self.

--

4. “The best literature carries its meanings within itself; the ‘words on the page’ are enough for a true appreciation of a literary work. We do not need to know about an author’s life or intentions or about the historical or cultural context of a work to appreciate its literary value.”

Let’s set aside the way this statement assumes that a major reason to read is to appreciate literary value, which in turn is predicated on the idea that literary excellence exists (see previous post) and can be apprehended as such. Thus we’re back to the issue of evaluation with this one.

Of all the statements so far, this is the one I would most readily part company with. In an attempt to avoid biographical or intentional fallacies, it thoroughly isolates the text from both author and reader (whether that reader be the author’s contemporary or no). Such a strategy is perhaps partly indebted to a certain sort of modernist attempt at scientific objectivity, which separates the object of study from its environment and reduces as much as possible the variables at play in order to get at the ‘object in itself’ (e.g. the self in Descartes Mediations). What I find problematic with this approach is that understanding this ‘object in itself’ does not also give one an understanding of the objects’ being in relation. It is of course the temperment of our age to emphasize the object/text’s place in a network of relationships, contexts, etc., and this so even in theology with the advent of personalism. I personally find this to be a healthy correction of New Criticism. The opposite to the fallacy of ignoring the relational aspects of a text—its context, intertexts—is taking one of those aspects, say material circumstances or power relations, and making that the sole key to unlock the significance of the text. Both oversimplify.

We should not regard the text as a gnostic might, radically separating it from its embodiment in this time and place, speaking with and to this culture and textual antecedents, by this author (when known); nor should we come to it as materialists, subsuming the text (and its ideas) to its material and social con-texts. Embodied imaginations is what we have before us, not disembodied minds or infinitely permeable bodies.