Why Women Aren't Funny, by Christopher Hitchens

What makes the female so much deadlier than the male? With assists from Fran Lebowitz, Nora Ephron, and a recent Stanford-medical-school study, the author investigates the reasons for the humor gap.

by Christopher Hitchens

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: "He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … " (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, "Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.") However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: "She's a real honey, has a life of her own … [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] … and, man, does she ever make 'em laugh."

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a "funniness scale." To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens … which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully's attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: "the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows … " But have no fear—it gets worse:

"Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon," said the report's author, Dr. Allan Reiss. "So when they got to the joke's punch line, they were more pleased about it." The report also found that "women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny."

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously). Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren't like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?) Greatly daring—or so I thought—I resolved to call up Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: "The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what's more male than that?" Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)

In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Substitute the term "self-defecation" (which I actually heard being used inadvertently once) and almost all men will laugh right away, if only to pass the time. Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone's expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. (Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch.) Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is. Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province. It must have been a man who originated the phrase "funny like a heart attack." In all the millions of cartoons that feature a patient listening glum-faced to a physician ("There's no cure. There isn't even a race for a cure"), do you remember even one where the patient is a woman? I thought as much.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don't want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson's comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about "intelligent design." The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. ("Think they'd wear this? Well, they're gonna have to.") The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That's what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there's another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. "Men obviously like gross stuff," says Fran Lebowitz. "Why? Because it's childish." Keep your eye on that last word. Women's appetite for talk about that fine product known as Depend is limited. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. ("Premature for whom?" as a friend of mine indignantly demands to know.) But "child" is the key word. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Female of the Species." After cleverly noticing that with the male "mirth obscene diverts his anger"—which is true of most work on that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling insists:

But the Woman that God gave him,
every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue,
armed and engined for the same,
And to serve that single issue,
lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be
deadlier than the male.

The word "issue" there, which we so pathetically misuse, is restored to its proper meaning of childbirth. As Kipling continues:

She who faces Death by torture for
each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity—must
not swerve for fact or jest.

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, "Madam, I cannot conceive.") It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called "the glory of slaves." So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

The ancient annual festivities of Saturnalia, where the slaves would play master, were a temporary release from bossdom. A whole tranche of subversive male humor likewise depends on the notion that women are not really the boss, but are mere objects and victims. Kipling saw through this:

So it comes that Man, the coward,
when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council,
dare not leave a place for her.

In other words, for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. Whereas with a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humor department.

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise. H. L. Mencken described as "the greatest single discovery ever made by man" the realization "that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother's bodies by the gods." You may well wonder what people were thinking before that realization hit, but we do know of a society in Melanesia where the connection was not made until quite recently. I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. Anyway, after a certain stage women came to the conclusion that men were actually necessary, and the old form of matriarchy came to a close. (Mencken speculates that this is why the first kings ascended the throne clutching their batons or scepters as if holding on for grim death.) People in this precarious position do not enjoy being laughed at, and it would not have taken women long to work out that female humor would be the most upsetting of all.

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren't that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she's just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)
For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because "women get funnier as they get older."

Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn't that rather a long time to have to wait?

Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

How the Underground Economy Works, by Robert Neuwirth

Why Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy

• By Robert Capps
• December 16, 2011  | 

Soon, two-thirds of the world's workers will be part of street economies, Neuwirth says.
Photo: Jessica Dimmock

Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.

“There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. The guys who get it across the border. The truck loaders and unloaders. All working under the table.”

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that.

Wired: You talk a lot about wares that are sold through tiny kiosks, street stalls, and little informal markets. Where do those goods come from?

Neuwirth: The biggest flow of goods is from China. It’s no secret that China is the manufacturing engine of the planet. In a lot of ways, they’re more capitalist than we are. If someone wants something made—even if that person isn’t licensed—a Chinese factory will make it. It’s also easy to deal with China. You can go to the local Chinese consulate and get a tourist visa within a couple of hours. You can’t say the same about coming to the US. So African importers, for instance, travel to China and commission Chinese firms to make goods for them to sell in Africa.

Wired: But it’s not all Chinese manufacturers, right? In your book, you write about how huge international corporations want to get their goods into informal markets.

Neuwirth: Sure. Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive: They sell lots of products through the little unregistered and unlicensed stores in the developing world. And they want their products in those stores, because that’s where the customers are.

Wired: How does that work?

Neuwirth: Basically, they hire a middleman. Procter & Gamble, for instance, realized that although Walmart is its single largest customer, System D outposts, when you total them up, actually account for more business. So Procter & Gamble decided to get its products into those stores. In each country, P&G hires a local distributor—sometimes several layers of local distributors—to get the product from a legal, formal, tax-paying company to a company willing to deal with unlicensed vendors who don’t pay taxes. That’s how Procter & Gamble gets Downy fabric softener, Tide laundry detergent, and all manner of other goods into the squatter communities of the developing world. Today, in aggregate, these markets make up the largest percentage of the company’s sales worldwide.

Wired: You write that there are even street-vendor-specific brands.

Neuwirth: Absolutely. A good example is UAC Foods, which is based in Nigeria but active throughout West Africa and traded on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. It’s a highly formal company that was originally incorporated by the British more than 100 years ago. UAC Foods owns hotels and restaurants, but it also has this product called the Gala sausage roll. You never find Gala being sold in normal stores. It’s sold only by unlicensed roadside hawkers and at roadside kiosks. Basically, UAC recognized that this product wasn’t going to sell well in a normal store. But sausage rolls are in demand where people are on the go, when they need a quick snack on the side of the highway or in a traffic jam. So UAC relies on this informal phalanx of thousands of unregulated hawkers who sell Gala sausage rolls all over the streets of African cities. This is UAC’s distribution channel for this one product.

The Pleasures of Home Cooking, by Jonah Lehrer

Why I like making pasta at home

Posted on: October 7, 2009 12:52 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

 

The closing of Gourmet magazine is a sad event. I won't just miss the lush pictures and Paris travel tips - what I'll really miss is the food journalism, from DFW on the suffering of lobsters to Daniel Zwerdling on the tragic life of an industrial chicken. I hope other magazines can fill the void, because our food supply is messed up.

But this blog post isn't just another lament for the glossy. I had a short essay scheduled to run in the January issue of Gourmet on the pleasures of home cooking. Since that issue will no longer see the light of day, I thought I'd reproduce the essay below. (Note: the article was still in the process of being edited, so it comes with all the usual caveats: too wordy, flabby, imprecise, etc.)

I discovered the pleasure of home cooking while working in a restaurant. It was a fancy French place, and I was a lowly line cook; most of my days were spent laboring over a cauldron of veal stock. After ten hours in the kitchen, I'd reek of meaty bones and sweated onions; my hands ached from all the chopping and cutting. Even my tongue was tired.

But I was still hungry - staff meal was a long time ago. And so, although I was sick of the stovetop, I'd begin the ritual of my late-night dinner. A clove of garlic would be added to a pool of hot oil; the canned tomatoes would splatter as they entered the pan. I'd boil the spaghetti, watch the starch thicken the sauce and always add just a little too much parmesan. And then I would taste, and then I would reach for the salt, and then I would eat.

Why was I making pasta at midnight? We eat because we must, but we cook for a more mysterious set of reasons. When I entered my tiny kitchen - it was little more than a hot plate overlooking an airshaft - I was doing more than putting food on the plate. I was enacting a ritual, reminding myself that every appetite is an opportunity, a chance to wring some pleasure from a basic human need. We might start with a pantry of tin cans and a box of hard durum wheat, but if we stir and simmer and season then we end up with something else: a bite of stained red pasta, twirled around a fork. A moment of repose. An ounce of happiness.

I didn't appreciate it at the time - I just wanted to feed myself - but those bowls of spaghetti taught me something important. It was late and I was tired, but I was slowly learning how to enjoy the process of cooking, and not just the finished product. The eating, after all, is the easy part. The difficult secret is finding a way to enjoy everything else, from the peeling of garlic to the stirring of the sauce. Although we obsess over the adjectives and nouns of cooking - the things we eat and the way they taste - the pleasures of home cooking are all about the verbs. Because it's the doing that one must celebrate; the dinner speaks for itself.

The problem, of course, is that cooking is hard work, an act of manual labor after a long day of labor. We toil to make a meal and then, in a matter of minutes, the meal is over, leaving behind a mess of crumbs, dishes and grease spackled counters. Perhaps we'll conclude that the microwave would have been easier, or that next time we'll curl up on the couch with takeout. There were many nights when I'd look at my dirty kitchen and be filled with regret. Why make pasta when I could just eat pizza?

But the work, I assure you, is worth it. If you only looked at recipes, with their elaborate instructions and long shopping lists, you'd probably conclude that cooking was nothing but a procession of strange chores. We do something to a piece of protein, and then we do something else, and then we stick it in the oven for a vague amount of time. Voila!

If home cooking were merely those culinary mechanics - if it looked, in other words, like a cooking show on television - then it really would be a dismal labor, best left to the French experts and fast-food chains. But interwoven with all that chopping and roasting and cleaning is a more subtle activity, which is the real reason I enjoy the act of making dinner. This verb doesn't require fancy copper pans or a big stand mixer; we don't have to make a mess or trek across the city for duck fat. All we have to do is pay attention, to focus, if only for a few minutes, on the food right in front of us.

This was the enduring lesson of my first beef stew. The dish was too ambitious for me - I was a total amateur, with a crush on Julia Child - but there was something deeply thrilling about the experience, which was so full of new things to notice. There was the sound of sizzling onions and the way their sizzle accelerated when they started to brown. There was the stickiness of wet meat coated in dry flour and the purple wine that I wasn't old enough to drink. There was the wooded perfume of the herbs, tied together with string, and the way the flavors I could name mingled into a taste I could not. These were all such minor observations that I'd normally ignore them; life is too noisy to listen to onions, too busy to watch a sauce slowly simmer and thicken.

But what I learned from that stew is that these trifling details - the precise shade of brown on the beef, the thickness of the cut carrots - weren't just details: they were the difference between a tasty triumph and a disappointing failure. Unless I concentrated on the food above the flame, I'd never get the dish right. I'd burn the roux and undercook the meat. I'd add too much pepper and not enough salt. I'd have missed a chance for pleasure because I indulged a distraction. Because my mind was somewhere else when it should have been here, staring into the bottom of the pot.

Most things in life become more automatic with time. This, after all, is the gift of experience - it allows us to pay less attention, so that we don't have to think about maintaining our balance on a bicycle, or shifting gears in a car. But with cooking the opposite happens - the more time we spend in the kitchen the more we notice. The act is intensified, layered with new subtleties. The first time I cooked beef stew, I was merely obeying a recipe, counting off the minutes until the mirepoix was sweated and the meat was seared. But now I don't need the clock - I've learned how to smell the dark sugar of cooked onions, how to see when the stew is viscous with the richness of bones. The dish is the same - beef bourguignon is too perfect to ever change - but my sense of it has become much richer.

This is the moral of the kitchen: even the most mundane rituals deserve our attention. And maybe they deserve it most of all. To cook is to insist that every hunger is a potential occasion, not just for something delicious (because deliciousness can be easily bought), but for that quality of experience that comes when the flame is on high and the last knob of butter is being whisked into the sauce. The tough meat is finally tender and there's the pile of parsley, waiting to be sprinkled over the stew. It's all so fleeting - the food will soon be eaten, the mess will be cleaned up tomorrow - but Virginia Woolf was right: "Of such moments the thing is made that endures." We have taken a need and made a meal.

And then there's the next meal. Who knows what we'll want to eat? Because we cook, we don't just see things as they are, raw and tough and fibrous. We look at what is and we glimpse the possible - that ugly fish can have crispy skin, and that bitter broccoli rabe would be delicious with garlic and oil. The pretty radicchio belongs in a risotto and those leftover scraps of meat will make a perfect stock. The world, it turns out, is a pretty delicious place. All it needs a little attention, and maybe just a pinch of salt.

Why do so many people dislike atheists?

Good Minus God

By LOUISE M. ANTONY, The New York Times


I was heartened to learn recently that atheists are no longer the most reviled group in the United States: according to the political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, we’ve been overtaken by the Tea Party. But even as I was high-fiving my fellow apostates (“We’re number two! We’re number two!”), I was wondering anew: why do so many people dislike atheists?

Atheism does not entail that anything goes. Quite the opposite.

I gather that many people believe that atheism implies nihilism — that rejecting God means rejecting morality. A person who denies God, they reason, must be, if not actively evil, at least indifferent to considerations of right and wrong. After all, doesn’t the dictionary list “wicked” as a synonym for “godless?” And isn’t it true, as Dostoevsky said, that “if God is dead, everything is permitted”?

Well, actually — no, it’s not. (And for the record, Dostoevsky never said it was.) Atheism does not entail that anything goes.

Admittedly, some atheists are nihilists. (Unfortunately, they’re the ones who get the most press.) But such atheists’ repudiation of morality stems more from an antecedent cynicism about ethics than from any philosophical view about the divine. According to these nihilistic atheists, “morality” is just part of a fairy tale we tell each other in order to keep our innate, bestial selfishness (mostly) under control. Belief in objective “oughts” and “ought nots,” they say, must fall away once we realize that there is no universal enforcer to dish out rewards and punishments in the afterlife. We’re left with pure self-interest, more or less enlightened.

This is a Hobbesian view: in the state of nature “[t]he notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law: where no law, no injustice.” But no atheist has to agree with this account of morality, and lots of us do not. We “moralistic atheists” do not see right and wrong as artifacts of a divine protection racket. Rather, we find moral value to be immanent in the natural world, arising from the vulnerabilities of sentient beings and from the capacities of rational beings to recognize and to respond to those vulnerabilities and capacities in others.

This view of the basis of morality is hardly incompatible with religious belief. Indeed, anyone who believes that God made human beings in His image believes something like this — that there is a moral dimension of things, and that it is in our ability to apprehend it that we resemble the divine. Accordingly, many theists, like many atheists, believe that moral value is inherent in morally valuable things. Things don’t become morally valuable because God prefers them; God prefers them because they are morally valuable. At least this is what I was taught as a girl, growing up Catholic: that we could see that God was good because of the things He commands us to do. If helping the poor were not a good thing on its own, it wouldn’t be much to God’s credit that He makes charity a duty.

It may surprise some people to learn that theists ever take this position, but it shouldn’t. This position is not only consistent with belief in God, it is, I contend, a more pious position than its opposite. It is only if morality is independent of God that we can make moral sense out of religious worship. It is only if morality is independent of God that any person can have a moral basis for adhering to God’s commands.

Let me explain why. First let’s take a cold hard look at the consequences of pinning morality to the existence of God. Consider the following moral judgments — judgments that seem to me to be obviously true:

• It is wrong to drive people from their homes or to kill them because you want their land.

• It is wrong to enslave people.

• It is wrong to torture prisoners of war.

• Anyone who witnesses genocide, or enslavement, or torture, is morally required to try to stop it.

To say that morality depends on the existence of God is to say that none of these specific moral judgments is true unless God exists. That seems to me to be a remarkable claim. If God turned out not to exist — then slavery would be O.K.? There’d be nothing wrong with torture? The pain of another human being would mean nothing?

Think now about our personal relations — how we love our parents, our children, our life partners, our friends. To say that the moral worth of these individuals depends on the existence of God is to say that these people are, in themselves, worth nothing — that the concern we feel for their well being has no more ethical significance than the concern some people feel for their boats or their cars. It is to say that the historical connections we value, the traits of character and personality that we love — all count for nothing in themselves. Other people warrant our concern only because they are valued by someone else — in this case, God. (Imagine telling a child: “You are not inherently lovable. I love you only because I love your father, and it is my duty to love anything he loves.”)

What could make anyone think such things? Ironically, I think the answer is: the same picture of morality that lies behind atheistic nihilism. It’s the view that the only kind of “obligation” there could possibly be is the kind that is disciplined by promise of reward or threat of punishment. Such a view cannot find or comprehend any value inherent in the nature of things, value that could warrant particular attitudes and behavior on the part of anyone who can apprehend it. For someone who thinks that another being’s pain is not in itself a reason to give aid, or that the welfare of a loved one is not on its own enough to justify sacrifice, it is only the Divine Sovereign that stands between us and — as Hobbes put it — the war of “all against all.”

This will seem a harsh judgment on the many theists who subscribe to what is called Divine Command Theory — the view that what is morally good is constituted by what God commands. Defenders of D.C.T. will say that their theory explains a variety of things about morality that non-theistic accounts of moral value cannot, and that it should be preferred for that reason. For example, they will say that atheists cannot explain the objectivity of morality — how there could be moral truths that are independent of any human being’s attitudes, will or knowledge, and how moral truths could hold universally. It is true that D.C.T. would explain these things. If God exists, then He exists independently of human beings and their attitudes, and so His commands do, too. If we didn’t invent God, then we didn’t invent His commands, and hence didn’t invent morality. We can be ignorant of God’s will, and hence mistaken about what is morally good. Because God is omnipresent, His commands apply to all people at all times and in all places.

Whatever the gods love — bingo! — that’s pious. But what if they change their minds?

That’s all fine. It would follow from D.C.T. that moral facts are objective. The problem is that it wouldn’t follow that they are moral. Commands issued by a tyrant would have all the same features. For D.C.T. to explain morality, it must also explain what makes God good.

The problem I’m pointing to is an ancient one, discussed by Plato. In his dialogue “Euthyphro,” the eponymous character tries to explain his conception of piety to Socrates: “the pious acts,” Euthyphro says, are those which are loved by the gods.” But Socrates finds this definition ambiguous, and asks Euthyphro: “are the pious acts pious because they are loved by the gods, or are the pious acts loved by the gods because they are pious?”

What’s the difference? Well, if the first reading is correct, then it’s the gods’ loving those particular acts that makes them count as pious acts, that grounds their piousness. “Pious,” on this alternative, is just shorthand for “something the gods love.” Whatever the gods happen to love — bingo! — that’s pious. If the gods change their preferences on a whim — and they did, if Homer knew his stuff — then the things that are pious change right along with them. In contrast, on the second reading, pious acts are presumed to have a distinctive, substantive property in common, a property in virtue of which the gods love them, a property that explains why the gods love them.

Translated into contemporary terms, the question Socrates is asking is this: are morally good actions morally good simply in virtue of God’s favoring them? Or does God favor them because they are — independently of His favoring them — morally good? D.C.T. picks the first option; it says that it’s the mere fact that God favors them that makes morally good things morally good.

Theories that endorse the second option — let’s call any such theory a “Divine Independence Theory” (D.I.T.) — contend, on the contrary, that the goodness of an action is a feature that is independent of, and antecedent to God’s willing it. God could have commanded either this action or its opposite, but in fact, He commands only the good one.

Both D.C.T. and D.I.T. entail a perfect correspondence between the class of actions God commands and the class of actions that are good (or rather, they do so on the assumption that God is perfectly benevolent). The two theories differ, however, on what accounts for this congruence. D.C.T. says that it is God’s command that explains why the good acts are “good” — it becomes true merely by definition that God commands “good” actions. “Goodness,” on this view, becomes an empty honorific, with no independent content. To say that God chooses the good is like saying that the Prime Meridian is at zero degrees longitude, or that in baseball, three strikes makes an out. D.I.T., on the other hand, says that it is a substantive property of the acts — their goodness — that explains why God commanded them. Indeed, it says that God’s goodness consists in His choosing all and only the good. D.I.T. presumes that we have an independent grasp of moral goodness, and that it is because of that that we can properly appreciate the goodness of God.

D.C.T. is arguably even more radical and bizarre than the Hobbesian nihilism I discussed earlier. On the nihilistic view, there is no pretense that a sovereign’s power would generate moral obligation — the view is rather that “morality” is an illusion. But D.C.T. insists both that there is such a thing as moral goodness, and that it is defined by what God commands. This makes for really appalling consequences, from an intuitive, moral point of view. D.C.T. entails that anything at all could be “good” or “right” or “wrong.” If God were to command you to eat your children, then it would be “right” to eat your children. The consequences are also appalling from a religious point of view. If all “moral” means is “commanded by God,” then we cannot have what we would otherwise have thought of as moral reasons for obeying Him. We might have prudential reasons for doing so, self-interested reasons for doing so. God is extremely powerful, and so can make us suffer if we disobey Him, but the same can be said of tyrants, and we have no moral obligation (speaking now in ordinary terms) to obey tyrants. (We might even have a moral obligation to disobey tyrants.) The same goes for worshipping God. We might find it in our interest to flatter or placate such a powerful person, but there could be no way in which God was deserving of praise or tribute.

This is the sense in which I think that it is a more pious position to hold that morality is independent of the existence of God. If the term “good” is not just an empty epithet that we attach to the Creator, who or whatever that turns out to be, then it must be that the facts about what is good are independent of the other facts about God. If “good” is to have normative force, it must be something that we can understand independently of what is commanded by a powerful omnipresent being.

So what about atheism? What I think all this means is that the capacity to be moved by the moral dimension of things has nothing to do with one’s theological beliefs. The most reliable allies in any moral struggle will be those who respond to the ethically significant aspects of life, whether or not they conceive these things in religious terms. You do not lose morality by giving up God; neither do you necessarily find it by finding Him.

I want to close by conceding that there are things one loses in giving up God, and they are not insignificant. Most importantly, you lose the guarantee of redemption. Suppose that you do something morally terrible, something for which you cannot make amends, something, perhaps, for which no human being could ever be expected to forgive you. I imagine that the promise made by many religions, that God will forgive you if you are truly sorry, is a thought would that bring enormous comfort and relief. You cannot have that if you are an atheist. In consequence, you must live your life, and make your choices with the knowledge that every choice you make contributes, in one way or another, to the only value your life can have.

Some people think that if atheism were true, human choices would be insignificant. I think just the opposite — they would become surpassingly important.


Louise M. Antony teaches philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She writes on a variety of philosophical topics, including knowledge gender, the mind and, most recently, the philosophy of religion. She is the editor of the 2007 book “Philosophers Without Gods,” a collection of essays by atheist philosophers.

Strunz & Farah - "Candela"

Lana Del Rey singing "Video Games"

What is the best distance for watching a 1080P HDTV set?

The devil in the details

Consumer electronics: Changes in technology mean that choosing a big-screen television has become more complicated than ever. Should you pay extra for 1080p resolution, LED backlighting or 3D? We crunch the numbers

 

Dec 3rd 2011 | from the print edition of the Economist

 

IF YOU have not gone shopping for a new television set for quite a while, enough has changed to require some serious thought. So before splurging on a new high-definition television (HDTV) set, it is worth considering which features make sense and which do not.

Start with the viewing angles available in the room that will be used. THX, a technical standards-setter for the video and audio industries, requires the back row of seats in a home theatre to have at least a 26° viewing angle from one edge of the screen to the other. Seats nearest the screen should have a viewing angle of no more than 36°. These subtended angles correspond to a viewing distance of roughly 2.2 times the screen width at the back row of the seating, down to 1.5 times the screen width at the front. Within these limits, viewers should be able to enjoy the most immersive experience.

The question, then, is how to relate viewing distance to a person’s visual acuity. In other words, what is the maximum distance beyond which some picture detail is lost because of the eye’s limitations? Visual acuity indicates the angular size of the smallest detail a person’s visual system can resolve. Saying that someone has 20/20 vision (6/6 in metric terms) means that they can resolve a spatial pattern (a letter of the alphabet, say) in which each element subtends an angle of one minute of arc when viewed from a distance of 20 feet (six metres).

In other words, a person with 20/20 sight should, in normal lighting conditions, be able to identify two points that are 0.07 of an inch (1.77mm) apart from a distance of 20 feet. Twenty feet is taken because, as far as the eye is concerned, it is in effect infinity. Beyond this distance, some of the detail in the picture can no longer be resolved by the conical receptor cells in the retina of the eye. It will simply blend into the background instead of being seen as a distinct feature. Thus, it is a waste to make individual pixels—the tiniest elements in a display—smaller than 1.77mm across when viewed from 20 feet.

The problem with viewing images on a television screen—especially the “progressively scanned” 1080p HDTV sets in use today—is that most people sit too far back. At the typical distance of nine feet, a 1080p HDTV set (with a screen 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high) needs to be at least 69 inches across (measured diagonally) if viewers are to see all the detail it offers. To see all the detail on a 32-inch set with 1080p resolution means sitting a little over four feet from the screen—great for video-gaming on your own, but hardly conducive to communal viewing.

In other words, viewers are not enjoying the full benefits of the higher pixel count of 1080p televisions if they sit any further back than 1.8 times the screen width. At a distance of 2.7 times the screen width, they might as well buy a cheaper 720p set, as the eye cannot resolve the finer detail of a 1080p screen at that distance.

The next choice that must be made is between plasma display, liquid-crystal display (LCD) or the latest light-emitting diode (LED) variety. Plasmas, with their rapid switching and deep blacks, have long been the favourite for sports fans and movie buffs. Apart from their lack of blur and judder when tracking fast-moving objects and their freedom from wishy-washy greys, they can be viewed from wider angles than LCDs without the picture changing colour. But plasmas have lately fallen out of favour because they are bulkier and more power-hungry.

To lick the LCD’s motion problems, manufacturers have developed special circuitry to predict and compensate for any rapid movement within a scene. This increases the screen’s frame rate from the 60 hertz (Hz) of conventional television to 120Hz and even 240Hz. A few manufacturers have begun offering sets with refresh rates of up to 480Hz, with 960Hz on the horizon. Unfortunately, the motion-compensating circuitry can make filmed content look like a cheap video—a glitch known in the trade as the “soap-opera effect”. The source of the problem is the way film shot at 24 frames a second has to adjust to the television’s much higher refresh rate of 60, 120 or even 240 frames a second.

One way of doing this is to analyse first one frame of film and then the next, and calculate an average of the two. This interpolated frame is inserted between the first and second frames, and the process repeated for each successive frame of the film. The interpolation process is good at removing blur and judder, but it can make the motion appear unnaturally smooth and disconcerting. Be warned: 240Hz sets are the worst offenders. For sports fans in particular, this gives plasma the edge.

Lastly, there are the LED sets. These are simply LCD televisions that use LEDs for backlighting instead of the usual fluorescent tubes. The LEDs can be either along the edges of the screen or spread as an array behind the whole of the display. Edge-lit displays have problems with uniformity of brightness, as well as a limited viewing angle. Apart from giving more uniform brightness, a full array of LED backlights allows the screen to be dimmed selectively in places where a scene needs to be dark. The effect is to make the LCD’s blacks appear almost as dense as a plasma’s. Only top-of-the-range LCD sets from Sharp and Sony currently have this feature. Expect to pay dearly for it.

2D or not 2D, that is the question

So, what to choose? All things being equal, plasma televisions are about two-thirds the price of their LCD equivalents, which are themselves up to a third cheaper than LED sets. Meanwhile, the premium that 3D sets once commanded has all but vanished. They are now worth buying, not so much for their ability to show 3D content, but because they display 2D even better than conventional plasma or LCD sets. 3D sets have special features to reduce “ghosting” in the image and maximise the 3D effect—and this ensures sharper 2D images, too. Happy viewing.

Why a water bath is important when cooking custards and flans

From Harold McGee's

The Surprising Science of Water Baths

Most cooks know that oven heat can be moderated with a water bath.  Though the oven may be at 350°F, the liquid water can't exceed 212 °F/100°C, the temperature at which it boils and turns from liquid into vapor.  Less well known is the fact that the water temperature can vary over a range of 40°F depending on the pan containing the water and whether it's covered.  A pan of water is heated by the oven, but it's simultaneously cooled as water molecules evaporate from the surface.  The actual water temperature is determined by the balance between heating of the water mass through the pan, and evaporative cooling at the water surface.  More heat accumulates in a thick cast iron pan or passes through infrared-transparent glass than is transmitted by thin stainless steel.  So in a moderate oven, a cast-iron water bath may reach 195°F/87°C, a glass bath 185°F/83°C, and a stainless one180°F/80°C.  If the pans are covered with foil, then evaporative cooling is prevented, and all of them will come to a full boil. 

Custards are tenderest when heated gently, and so are best cooked in an open water bath---one, however, that is sure to reach at least 185°F; otherwise the mix may never completely set.  Many cooks take the precaution of folding a kitchen towel in the bottom of a water bath so that the custard cups or dish won't be in direct contact with the hot pan, but this can backfire:  the towel prevents the water from circulating under the cups, so the water trapped there reaches the boil and rocks the cups around.  A wire rack works better.

How to make Pineapple Flan, by Rozanne Gold

Adapted from Rozanne Gold's

Pineapple Flan

This quivering custard of tropical intensity is made like a traditional crème caramel.


1 cup sugar
5 large eggs
5 large egg yolks
2 cups unsweetened pineapple juice 


Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Put 1/2 cup sugar in a small nonstick skillet. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until sugar melts completely into a dark liquid caramel, about 3 minutes.  Immediately divide caramel among cups (pouring to coat bottom of each.) Caramel will harden.

In bowl of an electric mixer put 5 whole eggs, 5 egg yolks, and remaining cup 1/2 cup sugar. Beat for 1 minute, until eggs and sugar are well blended.

Slowly add pineapple juice, little by little, and continue to mix until juice is incorporated. Do not let mixture become too frothy. (Use a strainer if the mixture becomes too frothy.) With a ladle, divide mixture evenly among custard cups.

Place custard cups in a large, deep pan. Create a water bath by adding boiling water to pan so that water level comes two-thirds up the sides of the cups. (To prevent accidental burning of the top of the custards, cover the whole pan LOOSELY with foil that has been pierced in lots of places to let steam escape.)  Carefully place in oven. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until firm. Remove cups from water bath. Let cool, then refrigerate until very cold, preferably overnight. When ready to serve, carefully unmold custard onto dessert plates, loosening the sides with a small sharp knife if necessary. Caramel will coat the top and sides of the flan. Serve immediately.

Serves 5

© Rozanne Gold

How to Make Broiled Bass with Garlic-Parsley Bread Crumb Sauce

From Great Fish, Quick by Leslie Revsin

This sauce is vibrant with garlic and a touch of vinegar, and we have Spain to thank for it!  When first made, it's a lovely pale green liquid, thick with bread crumbs.  When you gently warm the sauce for serving, it thickens to a wonderfully soft texture that is as good with sauteed monkfish, red snapper, or halibut fillets (Jimmy:  salmon also works) (and as a dip for grilled shrimp hors d'oeuvre), as it is with bass.  If you have even a tablespoon left, make yourself a soft-scrambled egg lunch the next day with a little dollop on top.  Yum.

1/4 cup dry bread crumbs

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

1 large garlic clove, roughly chopped

1/4 cup packed fresh flat-leaf or curly parsley leaves, rinsed and dried

1 tablespoon + 2 teaspoons olive oil

1/2 cup chicken broth (cool or room temperature)

Salt and freshly ground black or white pepper to taste

Four 7-ounce bass fillets, each 1/2"-3/4" thick

TO PREPARE:  Preheat the broiler with the rack at the top rung.

     Put the bread crumbs in a small mixing bowl, stir in the vinegar, and set aside.  Put the garlic and parsley in the bowl of a food processor and process the ingredients until they're fairly well chopped, scraping the bowl down once or twice.  Add the vinegared crumbs and process until the parsley is in very small pieces, scraping the bowl down once or twice.  Add the tablespoon of olive oil and, with the motor still running, gradually add the chicken broth.  The sauce should be a lovely pale green and slightly liquid. If it seems very thick, add a few more drops of chicken broth.  Season it with salt and pepper, to taste, and set aside.  Or cover and refrigerate it for up to 3 days.

     Season the bass fillets with salt and pepper.  Rub them with the 2 teaspoons of olive oil, put them in a pan skin-side-down, and set under the broiler.  Broil them, without turning, until lightly browned and just cooked through, about 5 minutes. (Jimmy:  if you have a thick or heavy gauge pan, the time may be longer.  In any case, check so you don't overcook the fish.)  To check, make a slit in the thickest part of one fillet to see if it's opaque throughout.  If necessary, broil for another minute or so.

TO SERVE:   Put the garlic-parsley bread crumb sauce in a small saucepan over low heat, stirring occasionally.  Heat until just warm.  While it's warming, place the fillets on warm dinner plates.  Place a spoonful of thickened sauce next to each fillet and serve right away.

How to roast your own coffee

By Betty Hallock

SOURCES FOR ROASTERS

If you're gearing up to roast coffee at home, here are some of the growing number of websites that sell home roasting equipment and green coffee beans:

Seven Bridges, a Santa Cruz cooperative, sells home beer brewing equipment but also offers a selection of organic green coffee beans from Central America, South America, Africa and Asia, as well as roasting equipment. www.breworganic.com

Burman Coffee Traders sells green coffee beans in 1-, 2-, 5- and some in 50-pound quantities, along with a variety of home roasting equipment. www.burmancoffee.com

Roastmasters.com offers a few dozen varieties of green beans, with background information, cupping characteristics and roasting notes (including occasional notations for specific roasters). www.roastmasters.com

Sweet Maria's website, based in Oakland, is considered a home coffee roasting resource, selling roasting equipment and green beans and offering a coffee roasting forum. www.sweetmarias.com

The Coffee Project lists green beans by country of origin, along with descriptions that include growing conditions, bean size, flavor notes and roasting recommendations. www.thecoffeeproject.com

Also, check for more coffee roasting classes at www.instituteofdomestictechnology.com.

**************

Roasting coffee beans at home

By BETTY HALLOCK — Los Angeles Times

Posted: 3:00am on Dec 5, 2011; Modified: 8:08am on Dec 5, 2011

Four students are standing over a hot stove in the creamery of the Institute of Domestic Technology on a late-October Sunday at the Zane Grey Estate in Altadena, Calif. Each one is manning a hand-cranked Whirley-Pop popcorn popper filled not with popcorn but green coffee beans from Costa Rica. The raw coffee beans turn golden, then brown, then start to expand and crackle.

A moment or two later, as the beans sizzle: "You hear that? That's second crack!" says instructor Ian Riley, explaining the point at which the coffee's woody cell walls fracture and its sugars continue to caramelize. "The smoke is fine," he adds, as a fan next to a window over the stove pulls toasty exhaust into the yard where several Nubian goats are roaming. "Second crack sounds more like Rice Krispies."

Riley's a professional roaster at coffee company LA Mill in Alhambra, Cailf., but is enthusiastic about home roasting. "I hope you all go home and become amateur roasters and then professional roasters."

A new generation of home coffee roasters already is energized by taking raw beans and transforming them into fodder for their Mazzer grinders and Clever drippers. As the DIY movement that has propelled kitchen crafts such as pickling meets "third wave" coffee (or the vanguard of the specialty coffee industry), roasting beans at home is the next frontier.

"This is one more step in my do-it-yourself quest," says Ryan Gillespie, a 35-year-old production planner for Herbalife who signed up for the two-hour class. He's wearing a T-shirt that reads "Haikus are easy/But sometimes they don't make sense/Refrigerator" and has a manual coffee grinder tucked in his tote bag. The Koreatown resident also brews beer, bakes bread and lately has been canning dilled carrots and sweet pumpkin pickles.

Gillespie bought a Whirley-Pop and a sampler of green coffee beans from a website four months ago and now roasts coffee every few weeks. "When I started, I read a book and followed the instructions and came out with coffee that was pretty good, but I want to keep improving."

The class, says Joseph Shuldiner, founder of the new Institute of Domestic Technology, was inspired by a roaster at the erstwhile Altadena Urban Farmers Market who was making small batches in a popcorn popper. "I'm a coffee snob, and it was really good. I was excited by the craft of it," Shuldiner says, "and blown away by how simple it is and how much control you could get from it."

The institute "is about food crafting, about making your own food, making your own ingredients and learning how ingredients are made. We're so used to buying coffee beans, one rarely thinks about where they come from and how are they roasted," Shuldiner says.

You can roast coffee in a pot or pan, certain hot-air popcorn poppers or a dedicated machine. Green beans are heated to draw out moisture, caramelize sugars and bring out aromatics. (You can't grind green coffee beans and make coffee as we know it.)

Basically, roasting occurs between the time the beans start to color and two significant stages: first crack (a cracking sound), which indicates the bean structure is breaking down as water escapes, sugars caramelize and oils are released, and second crack, when it's said the roasted character starts to eclipse the beans' original character.

The "sweet spot" depends on your technique and taste, whether you prefer a light or dark roast.
Bad coffee or limited access to great beans might have compelled previous home roasters to take matters into their own hands. But the latest wave comes at a time when consumers have access to better-than-ever commercial coffee. Indeed, here in Southern California there's a local roaster boom, with the coming of Handsome Coffee downtown and True Beans in Long Beach, for example.

Yet DIYers, who know their Finca La Fany coffee from Finca La Maravilla and the nuances of "city roast" from "full city-plus roast," have embraced the thrill of cooking their own beans, whether with an electric hot-air popcorn popper or even small commercial machines that turn out pounds at a time. Green coffee beans generally cost about half the price of roasted beans.

Sweet Maria's, the Oakland, Calif., company that sells green beans and roasting equipment online, started in 1997 as a source for those who "we thought would be in tiny towns and didn't have access to local roasters," says co-owner Maria Troy. "I guess it's funny - but a lot of our customers are in the Bay Area and other urban areas. They just like it, being involved in the roast and determining the process."

She estimates that the company, which includes a wholesale business, sold 850,000 pounds of beans (most of them green) last year, up 10% from the year before. "It's steadily grown despite the fact that we don't advertise."

Christopher Schooley, chairman of the Roasters Guild (a trade guild of the Specialty Coffee Assn. of America), says roasting has become much more accessible "because there's a lot more information about coffee in general out there." He also notes that home roasters can get the same quality of beans as professional roasters and admits that you can get good coffee out of an air popper sold for popcorn.
But he doesn't downplay the experience it requires. "It takes skill. Knowing what to draw out of that coffee is important. You can't just walk up to a machine and do it."

He also notes that more professionals are coming from a home roasting background.

"I started with a cast iron pot and a wooden spoon" two years ago, says Greg Thomas, who works in information technology at KNBC and KVEA and now roasts coffee at his Atwater Village home on a Diedrich IR-1 commercial roaster, making enough to sell a small amount to anyone interested in bags he labels Trystero (it's a Thomas Pynchon reference).

"My personal grail is to have my own cafe," Thomas says. "I'm as serious (about coffee) as the big names but want something just old-school and funky."

He's been roasting a caramel-y Rwandan (a few bags recently were sold at Demitasse cafe downtown), which is also part of his Lot 49 blend and "a Guatemalan bean that's actually on the brighter side for pour-overs and French press," he says. "We've got an Ethiopian bean on the way, and we have our Sumatran. I don't push the Sumatran on people a lot - it's got some forest-y flavors that a lot of people don't get."

One day Thomas' friend Nicholas Rucka, a 36-year-old commercial editor, stops by to show off his Behmor, a home drum roaster he bought in March that looks like a toaster oven. He's got it plugged in outside in the frontyard as Husker Du and the Fall play over the speakers. A couple of hangers-on joke about his setup: "You guys could have a roast-off. You know, like a latte throwdown or a chili cook-off."

Rucka checks the timer on his Behmor while listening for first crack. "You really can just get a roaster, have half a clue and be interested, and get a good cup of coffee," he says. "I roast 1 pound once a week. It's an hour of my time, and I have a really fantastic cup of coffee all week. It's really fun....

"This solves what I'm going to give for holiday gifts. I'll just roast a ... load of coffee. Everybody loves a good cup of coffee."

The Essential Tao of Travel, by Paul Theroux

1. Leave home

2. Go alone

3. Travel light

4. Bring a map

5. Go by land

6. Walk across a national frontier

7. Keep a  journal

8. Read a novel that has no relation

to the place you're in

9. If you must bring a cell phone,

avoid using it.

10. Make a friend.

Rebecca West's vast, complex book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is more than a timeless guide to Yugoslavia - it is a portrait of the author's soul and of Europe on the brink of war

 

Journeys into history

Rebecca West's vast, complex book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is more than a timeless guide to Yugoslavia - it is a portrait of the author's soul and of Europe on the brink of war. Geoff Dyer explores one of the neglected masterpieces of 20th-century travel writing

• Geoff Dyer
• The Guardian, Friday 4 August 2006

The author of guide- books should have no artistic personality. Entirely at the mercy of the place being written about, he or she is ideally an anonymous conduit of reliable information about bus times, places to stay and museum opening hours. At the other end of the spectrum, in his book Fiction, photographer Michael Ackerman claims that "places do not exist. A place is just my idea of it."

Literary travel writing thrives between the extremes represented by the travel guide and the solipsistic Ackerman. The best travel writers may be of only limited reliability when it comes to bus times but they express timeless truths about the buses of a given country - or at least about their relationship with those buses. Take DH Lawrence, whose responsiveness to places was both instantaneous and profound. Editors and publishers were keenly aware of this gift and Lawrence was eager to turn it to financial advantage.

When Rebecca West visited Norman Douglas in Florence in 1921 he joked that although Lawrence had been in town only a few hours he was probably already hammering out an article, "vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people". To West this seemed "obviously a silly thing to do", but Douglas was right: they turned up at Lawrence's hotel to find him doing just that. At the time West thought that Lawrence did not know enough about Florence "to make his views of real value". It was only after his death that she appreciated that he "was writing about the state of his own soul at that moment" and could only do so in symbolic terms. For this purpose "the city of Florence was as good a symbol as any other".

West wrote this in 1931. She had not yet made the first of the trips to Yugoslavia that would form the basis of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but the importance of this realisation on her own magnum opus is considerable. Indeed, relative to the size of the finished book, her experience of Yugoslavia was pretty skimpy. As Edith Durham, a noted authority on the Balkans, bitchily put it at the time, "The novelist Miss West has written an immense book on the strength of one pleasure trip to Yugoslavia, but with no previous knowledge of land or people." For the record, Miss West had made three trips to Yugoslavia: the first, at the invitation of the British Council, to give lectures in the spring of 1936; a second with her husband, Henry Andrews, in the spring of 1937; the third in early summer of the following year.

Initially she had hoped quickly to write "a snap book"; four months after the second trip this potentially profitable venture had grown into a "wretched, complicated book that won't interest anybody".

In the course of researching its "long and complicated history" West learned and clarified her ideas about Yugoslavia - and about much else besides. To paraphrase Italo Calvino's comment on The Ruins of Kasch by Roberto Calasso, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon takes up two subjects: the first is Yugoslavia, and the second is everything else. By the time it was published - in two volumes totalling half a million words - West was somewhat at a loss to discover why she had been moved "in 1936 to devote five years of my life, at great financial sacrifice and to the utter exhaustion of my mind and body, to take an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view". As the "mass of [her] material" swelled and changed, so this "inventory" became an immense and immensely complicated picture not simply of her own soul but that of Europe on the brink of the second world war. The result, which she feared "hardly anyone will read by reason of its length", is one of the supreme masterpieces of the 20th century.

Like the book itself its reputation is rather odd. West is considered a major British writer. If she is not regarded as a writer quite of the first rank that is largely because so much of the work on which her reputation should rest is considered secondary to the forms in which greatness is expected to manifest itself, namely the novel. As a novelist West is clearly less important than James Joyce, Lawrence or EM Forster ("a self-indulgent old liberal with hardly a brain in his head," as West sharply deemed him). Her best work is scattered among reportage, journalism and travel - the kind of things traditionally regarded as sidelines or distractions.

The success of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is due in no small part to the ingenuity with which she contains this tendency to dispersal by giving it free rein. The book is manifestly a work of literature, but since literature in English (at least as far as prose is concerned) is synonymous with the novel - with an agreed upon form of writing rather than a certain quality of writing - it is removed from the company in which it belongs. (When I mentioned to a novelist friend that I was writing this introduction she asked if the book was set in Yugoslavia; it was assumed to be a novel.) Palpably inferior works - novels - sit far more securely on the literary syllabus than this awkward tome that seems to topple from the top canonical shelf as soon as it is placed there. Since it takes up so much room Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is stocked on a lower, less prominent shelf.

Even some commentators who claim the book as a masterpiece have little to say about why it is one. In Abroad, Paul Fussell's highly regarded survey of "British literary travelling between the wars", West, unlike Waugh, Lawrence or Greene does not get a chapter-compartment to herself and her book receives a mention more or less in passing. Victoria Glendinning, in her biography of West, has no doubt that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is "the central book of her life ... the work in which Rebecca West formulated her views on religion, ethics, art, myth and gender". Beyond that, she has almost nothing to say about it. Is the book doomed to repel attempts to articulate the awe that it inspires?

To try to make good this lack let's begin, uncontentiously, by observing that it is a key book about Yugoslavia. I read it in 1993 after visiting Serbia (for the British Council, as it happens) to learn about Yugoslavia - or ex-Yugoslavia, as it had by then become. The book had been reissued a few years earlier in response to the outbreak of a conflict West had, in some ways, foreseen. In the prologue, West remembers herself "peering" at old film footage of the king of Yugoslavia, "like an old woman reading the tea-leaves in her cup". The book's prophetic quality is hinted at as early as page 10, when West writes that "it is the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, 'Ah, So-and-so was a marvel! He kept things together so long as he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone!'"

I can still remember how weirdly disorienting it was to read this in 1993, when the blaze of contemporary events was fierce enough to make one wonder if she was writing not about Franz Josef, but Tito. Much later in the book, in Kosovo, West's chauffeur, Dragutin, grabs a Croat boy by the ear and says with a mixture of irony and threat, "We'll kill you all some day." Even in my own minuscule experience of Serbia and Montenegro there have been many times when the scene unfolding before my eyes seemed to have been faithfully enacted from the pages of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

As a book about Yugoslavia, then, it is of "extraordinary usefulness" - a kind of metaphysical Lonely Planet that never requires updating. (West herself observed, "sometimes it is necessary for us to know where we are in eternity as well as in time".) The book's practical worth is nicely suggested by the journalist Robert Kaplan, who remembers taking the book with him everywhere in Yugoslavia. "I would rather have lost my passport and money than my heavily thumbed and annotated copy of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon."

If you are not in - or interested in - the Balkan peninsula the number of pages devoted to the history of the region can seem off-putting. Except this is history as it might have been written by Ryszard Kapuscinski or Gabriel García Márquez. Take the extraordinary scene from Sarajevo in 1914 when, shortly before his assassination, Archduke Franz Ferdinand finds the reception hall he is standing in crammed with the half-million beasts he has killed in his career as a hunter:

One can conceive the space of this room stuffed all the way up to the crimson and gold vaults and stalactites with the furred and feathered ghosts, set close, because there were so many of them: stags with the air between their antlers stuffed with woodcock, quail, pheasant, partridge, capercaillie, and the like; boars standing bristling flank to flank, the breadth under their broad bellies packed with layer upon layer of hares and rabbits. Their animal eyes, clear and dark as water, would brightly watch the approach of their slayer to an end that exactly resembled their own.

When Susan Sontag directed Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo during the siege it was widely felt that what was happening on stage offered some kind of absurdist commentary on events beyond the theatre. In a café in Mostar - a place which became stitched into international consciousness in the same way as Sarajevo - a comparable fable had unfolded before West's eyes in the 1930s:

Young officers moved rhythmically through the beams of white light that poured down upon the acid green of the billiard tables, and the billiard balls gave out their sound of stoical shock. There was immanent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom. It seemed possible that someone might come into the room, perhaps a man who would hang up his fez, and explain, in terms just comprehensible enough to make it certain they were not nonsensical, that all the people at the tables must stay there until the two officers who were playing billiards at the moment had played a million games, and that by the result their eternal fates would be decided; and that this would be accepted, and people would sit there quietly waiting and reading the newspapers.

West's intention was "to show the past side by side with the present it created" and part of her achievement is to reveal how even an apparently ahistorical sensation - the scent of a plucked flower, say - is saturated with the smell of the past. Geography and history, to make the same point rather more sweepingly, cannot always be distinguished from one another - hence the way that certain places "imprint the same stamp on whatever inhabitants history brings them, even if conquest spills out one population and pours in another wholly different in race and philosophy". Impatient readers tempted to skip the historical bits are taking a big risk because the past - the narrative history - can melt into the immediate present with zero notice. The most spectacular instance comes after a lengthy disquisition - a bit too long, I was thinking - on events in Pristina during the reign of Stephen Dushan in the 14th century. After 20 pages or so we learn of his death:
In the 49th year of his life, at a village so obscure that it is not now to be identified, he died, in great pain, as if he had been poisoned. Because of his death many disagreeable things happened. For example, we sat in Pristina, our elbows on a tablecloth stained brown and puce, with chicken drumsticks on our plates meagre as sparrow-bones, and there came towards us a man and a woman; and the woman was carrying on her back the better part of a plough."

Isn't that the boldest jump-cut - the most daring time-shift, the most outrageous deduction - ever? And West does not stop there. The sight of this man and woman prompts her to return to one of the major themes of the book, the vexed relations of men and women.

Any area of unrestricted masculinism, where the women are made to do all the work and are refused the right to use their wills, is in fact disgusting, not so much because of the effect on the women, who are always taught something by the work they do, but because of the nullification of the men.

And West does not stop there, either - she loops this vision back to the death of Stephen Dushan before leaving the table to go to "a lavatory of the Turkish kind":

The dark hole in the floor, and something hieratic in the proportions of the place, made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and hostile and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth with dark ooze and sickly humidity ... I felt as if the place were soiling me with filth which I would never be able to wash off because it was stronger in its essence than mere mild soap and water.

And West does not stop there, either. The book's inexhaustible capacity for self-fuelling discussion, for examining the implications of everything that it touches upon, is central to West's structural and stylistic method. Any conclusions she draws are tied to the process (a key word in the book) by which they are being teased out. Something catches West's attention; the incident - a Mozart symphony coming on the radio in a restaurant on page 507, say - is conveyed with vivid immediacy. As West articulates and processes this experience, she takes us on a discursive journey into the furthest reaches of speculative thought before returning us to the exact spot or occasion from which we started. Franz Ferdinand's assassin, Princip, is in this way the active representative of the author's own purpose: "He offered himself wholly to each event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had to make about the nature of the universe."

How, with this in mind, could Black Lamb and Grey Falcon have been anything other than a vast book? Even enthusiastic readers of Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation are likely to feel that its impressive bulk is due solely to accumulation, to the mass of material contained in it. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon earns its size as a work of art. Like WH Auden in his "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936), West needed "a form that's large enough to swim in". The scale of its conception is imprinted internally in its syntax and composition.
Ostensibly convenient and alluring, the edited selection offered in The Essential Rebecca West feels like an aesthetic violation. There is, in fact, something inappropriate about reducing such a book to its essentials. I suspect that some of the passages that most delight me are, by the kind of limiting definition West repeatedly decries, the bits that might be considered inessential.

I don't want to diminish the importance of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a book about Yugoslavia; it is predicated on "a coincidence between the natural forms and colours of the western and southern parts of Yugoslavia and the innate forms and colours of [West's] imagination", but while many of the parts I value have their origin in they are not unique to that part of the world. A few examples from hundreds: the "erotic panic" of a horse which "rolls the eyes not only in fear but in enjoyment, that seeks to be soothed with an appetite revealing that it plainly knows soothing to be possible, and pursues what it declares it dreads"; the woman who had "the beauty of a Burne-Jones, the same air of having rubbed holes in her lovely cheeks with her clenched knuckles"; the Muslims for whom "the reward for total abstinence from alcohol seems, illogically enough, to be the capacity for becoming intoxicated without it".

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is digressive and meandering - you never know what's going to happen next - but this is not to say that it is shapeless. It may sprawl - it is sprawling - but remember, for a start, how what is offered as an account of a single journey has in fact been stitched seamlessly together from three separate trips. Over time we have grown familiar with the complex organisation of works such as Bleak House or Ulysses; in contemporary fiction we admire the intricate interweaving of plot, character and themes in the novels of Ian McEwan. Making different demands on the reader's expectations of order, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has the unity and fluidity of a sustained improvisation in prose. As with a saxophonist or trumpeter, the controlling factor, the thing that allows West to range so widely without ever losing her way, is tone. The book's bold demonstration of the way that tone can take over some of the load-bearing work of structure is crucial to its innovatory importance. Within an overall constancy of tone West moves easily between registers.

She can be witty: "The visit had been extraordinarily pleasant, though it had been nothing at all, and least of all a visit." She can be playful:

"Then why did we not bring the book?" asked my husband. "Well, it weighs just over a stone," I said. "I weighed it once on the bathroom scales." "Why did you do that?" asked my husband. "Because it occurred to me one day that I knew the weight of nothing except myself and joints of meat," I said, "and I just picked that up to give me an idea of something else."

She can be lyrical: "As we drew nearer the shore the water under the keel was pale emerald where the diving sunlight had found sand"; and fantastical at the same time:

Beyond the bridge the river widened out into a curd of yellow water-lilies, edged with a streak of mirror at each bank, in which willow trees, standing above t heir exact reflections, amazed us by their shrill green and cat-o'-thousand tails forms; they were like static fireworks.

As happens when she dismisses a woman she meets in a hotel in Bosnia, West can be abusive and intemperate: "she was cruelty; she was filth". Most surprising of all in a book of such length West has the gift of brevity: "We fell again through Swissish country"; "A naked range as black as night, its high ridge starred with snow"; "the first heavy pennies of rain".

A few years after Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published West sat down to consider a proposal from her American editor, Ben Huebsch, that she write a book on the British empire. It was something she would like to have done, but "except for the fancy bits on religion and metaphysics that I would throw in in my demented way", she decided, there was nothing new she could contribute to such a study. It is, of course, these "demented" bits that make Black Lamb and Grey Falcon a great book of ideas. (It sounds a little odd, that phrase, doesn't it, compared with the way that "a novel of ideas" trips so unthinkingly off the tongue?) In the epilogue, West comments on the way that, in her teens, Ibsen "corrected the chief flaw in English literature, which is a failure to recognise the dynamism of ideas". With characteristic vehemence she later decided that "Ibsen cried out for ideas for the same reason that men call out for water, because he had not got any."

To say that West has them by the gallon is an understatement. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is, along with everything else, a great flood of ideas. As with Lawrence it is impossible to say where sensation stops and cogitation begins. Observation and metaphysics, thought and responsiveness to "the visibility of life", are all the time flowing into each other.

The book's biggest idea is also its simplest, so simple that it should be no more than a preference "for the agreeable over the disagreeable". The problem is that:

only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

As West wrote this Europe was hurtling towards just such a catastrophe; in 1993, when I first read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, TV screens were full of images of the blackened foundations of houses in the very places she had described. West had enough of the disagreeable in her nature to realise that an affirmation of the agreeable is part of an ongoing personal and political struggle. Her faith in this idea is echoed by Auden in the commentary appended to his sonnet sequence In Time of War (published in 1938 while West was immersed in writing her book):

It's better to be sane than mad, or liked than dreaded;

It's better to sit down to nice meals than to nasty;

It's better to sleep two than single; it's better to be happy.

In both cases the modesty of the conclusion is proof of its wisdom - and vice-versa. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a vast, ambitious and complex book which repeatedly stresses the kinship between homely and universal truths. By making a cake for friends, West insists, "one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart". In Montenegro, West encounters a woman who is trying to understand the many hard things that have befallen her. The meeting persuades West that if "during the next million generations there is but one human being born in every generation who will not cease to inquire into the nature of his fate, even while it strips and bludgeons him, some day we shall read the riddle of our universe". And if, once or twice a century, a book like this appears, the wait will be only a fraction as long.