I thought George W. Bush had gone into retirement with his bush hog but no, it turns out he took a job as an Italian Cruise Ship Captain…MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

-Rousseau

“Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money?” Mr. Gingrich asked.

YES!

A winter salad is one of those things that are infinitely various. I make them through the winter months, with whatever root vegetables I get in my CSA and local cabbage. They key is to salt the tougher roots and cabbage, and combine them with other shredded, julienned vegetables, toasted nuts or seeds, dried and fresh fruit, garlic and scallions. Sometimes I use parsley, sometimes cilantro. Often I add avocado, which is in season. Fruit can be citrus, grapefruit, tangerines or oranges, or apples, or pears. I toast walnuts, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds, pecans or almonds. Dried cranberries, raisins or cherries are great. And I barely plan. Is there celeriac? Turnip? Beets? Watermelon radish or daikon? Sprouts? It’s all good.

I squeezed lemons on the chickens, inside and out and salted them, then rubbed a mixture of minced garlic, olive oil, dried rosemary and a little black pepper in the cavities, on the skin and up between the skin and breast meat and the between the thigh and the body. I rested it breast down in a dish to marinade in the lemon juice for a few hours and come up to room temperature. Then I roasted the birds in a 425 degree oven, breast side down, on a bed of chopped onion, carrot and celery, until the back was browned and crisp, flipped them and finished them breast side up. About a half hour into it I added quartered potatoes and rutabaga pieces.

To make the winter salad:

4 cups shredded cabbage (shred it as finely as you can)

1 beet, peeled and julienned

1-1/2 teaspoons of salt

Combine salt and beets and cabbage in a bowl, mix thoroughly, rubbing the salt into the vegetables. Leave for at least an hour.

1 cup julienned carrot

1 cup julienned daikon or watermelon or other winter radish

1 stalk celery, thinly sliced on a bias

1 apple peeled and sliced into bite sized pieces

¼ cup chopped parsley

3 T walnut Oil

3 T red wine vinegar

1 clove minced garlic

¼ cup toasted nuts and seeds (toast them in a skillet over low heat, don’t burn!)

¼ cup dried cranberries

Black pepper to taste

Combine the apples and remaining vegetables (not the parsley) and garlic. Add the oil and vinegar and mix thoroughly. When the cabbage and beets are done macerating, combine with the vegetables and taste to see if you need more oil or vinegar. Garnish with parsley, nuts and cranberries. Toss it again after everyone has looked at the mix of colors.

After the chickens came out of the oven, I let them rest on a platter and returned the roasting pan to the oven to finish the potatoes and rutabaga. I made the polenta: into 6-1/2 cups of boiling salted water I slowly whisked two cups of coarsely ground cornmeal and stirred it, over medium heat, for 25 minutes, until it behaved like a single organism, pulling away from the sides of the bot, big lazy bubbles winking and popping at the surface. Cover it. Remove the roasting pan, plate the potatoes and rutabagas, pour off most of the oil and make a pan gravy with white wine. Carve the chickens and pour the polenta into a bowl, to be served like mashed potatoes.

These dishes can be altered by circumstance. I might have roasted parsnips and celeriac, might have added avocado and tangerines instead of apple to the salad and used extra virgin olive oil, lime juice and cilantro. Or lemon juice, olive oil and parsley. Or what have you.

Hangover Square

By Patrick Hamilton

Patrick Hamilton is a mid-century British author who was for a period a successful novelist and playwright. By the time of his death of cirrhosis of the liver, he was neglected. He had succumbed not just to alcoholism but to bitterness brought on by the failure of Marxism to deliver a revolution, hatred of capitalism and the modern world and weariness with life. His final novels were too nihilistic for the reading public but their reputation has benefited by renewed interest. He wrote the successful plays Rope and Gaslight, both of which were made into movies. His work has also been produced for television. In his obscurity he joins (in my mind anyway) other mid-century British novelists like James Hanley, Henry Green and Anna Kavan. Like Hanley he is a realist but like Kavan he writes from the extreme viewpoint of marginal, insane, criminal and intoxicated people. 

Hangover Square is considered to be his best work. The protagonist, George Bone, is a tragic stooge, too good for the brutal exploitive world he lives in. That is, the George Bone that is connected to reality. The other George Bone experiences periodic breaks with reality, described as schizophrenic (a literary, not psychological diagnosis), what his drinking companions call his dumb moods. The break is presaged by a click, or a crack, and the novel opens with such a click:

‘Click!…Here it is again!….

‘It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases; it had a temporarily deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead.’

In the bright, feeling world of color and being George is a sad but sweet alcoholic, infatuated with Netta, a beautiful, cold-hearted drunk who plays him for money. In the twilight world of his dumb moods he is plotting her murder.

Netta seems to have crawled onto the page from the world of Zola, transferred to Earl’s Court in London and updated to the eve of World War 2. I frankly was rooting for George to kill Netta, she is so vicious. Hamilton describes her face and body as having the qualities of ‘pensiveness, grace, warmth, agility, beauty.’

‘Her thoughts, however, resembled those of a fish—something seen floating in  a tank, brooding, self-absorbed, frigid, moving solemnly forward to its object or veering slowly sideways without fully conscious motivation.’

Netta hangs out with Peter and Mickey, two moronic, fascistic barflies. Together they mock George but tolerate him for his money. George is a bit like Obama trying to woo Republicans: every time he thinks he has a chance with Netta, every time she is nice to him, he discovers that he has been used, and falls a little farther, a little harder into self-recrimination and despair. Here he is in a cab pleading with her to treat him decently:

‘“No, Netta, listen.” He put his hand on her arm and pleaded with her. “Do listen for God’s sake. You must be human somewhere. I know I’m a fool. I know you don’t care a damn about me. But if you agree to come out with me, can’t you even be civil? You just treat me like dirt—as though I’d done something wrong. I haven’t done you any harm, Netta. The only harm I’ve done is being in love with you…” His voice began to break, and tears came into his eyes as he went on…“What’s wrong with that? You’re civil to other people. Why can’t you be civil to me? Oh, Netta, do be kind to me. I can’t go on unless you’re kind to me. It’s all getting too much. Say something civil to me, Netta. Can’t you say something civil? I’m worn out. I’ve spent what I’ve got on you—I’ve tried to please you…Can’t you be civil? Can’t you look at me and say something civil?”

‘There was a pause. He looked at her and she looked out of the window. He waited for her to speak but she did not. In the faint hope that his tears and eloquence were moving her, he went on:

‘“What have you got against me, Netta—what harm have I done? If anyone else took you out, you’d be nice enough to them, but just because it’s me you treat me like dirt. You don’t treat the others like dirt—you wouldn’t treat Peter or Mickey like this. What have I done?—That’s all I want to know. I love you, Netta—but I don’t interfere with you. I only hang about. I’m harmless, aren’t I? Aren’t I harmless?”

‘“No,” she said, still looking out of the window. “You’re not at the moment—if you want the truth.”

‘”What do you mean, Netta? What am I doing?”

‘”You’re being a bloody, insufferable bore. And the more you go on the more boring you’re being. So won’t you shut up? I’m likely to be much more civil, as you put it, if you do.”’

He resolves to quit drinking and leave London, abandoning Netta forever. He knows she uses him, he knows she despises him, but he is helpless. So he bargains. He will quit drinking. He won’t call her. He starts to feel good and thinks, why not lord it over her? One last time! Each chapter records an episode more desperate than the last. And then there are those dumb moods which come upon him.

George is not friendless, and he has some money. One friend, Bob Barton, was a partner in a wireless business venture that fell apart. He leaves George and goes to America, never to be heard of again. They have a mutual friend, Johnny, who is an accountant with a major show business agency. Johnny recognizes George in a pub one afternoon and they renew their friendship. Johnny is a decent man who treats George well, but can’t stand the scheming Netta, who is infatuated with Johnny’s boss, a theatrical agent.

George comes close to escaping Earl’s Court a number of times, and almost goes to live with Johnny, after suffering a bout of flu. While ill Johnny visits him and they form a plan to move into a flat together in another part of town. But escape is not in the cards for George, no. The reader knows, even as the hope of escape is tantalizingly close, that George will eventually crack into a dumb mood and find the opportunity to kill his tormentors.

It is hard to place Hangover Square. It reads like a hardboiled noir book in many ways. I can imagine Jim Thompson writing the story but then it would lack the subtlety and depth of Hamilton’s prose, which plumbs the minds of his characters and fits a foul world around their empty, drunken souls. James Cain might also have written it, but George is more innocent than Walter Neff or Frank Chambers, who are driven by lust and greed. Chandler’s George Bone would have been sentimentalized, Moose Malloy with golf-ball sized buttons on his coat. And Hammett would have been too cruel. He would have hated his stooge.

Hangover Square is an unflinching character study. It renders the world through the red, sleepless eyes of a ‘schizophrenic’ drunk, whose excesses lead to regret and failed resolution. Suspense builds with George’s haphazard alternation of mood and proceeds by delay as George plans and forgets the murder of Peter and Netta. Pulsing in the background is the menace of war and Fascism. Hamilton, a Communist (though never a party member), explicitly shows that the resentments and violence of Netta and her friends are fueled by Fascism and, finally, a form of Fascism itself, with its love of empty spectacle and worship of war and hatred. Netta has no real feelings at all but she is attracted to Peter because he has been to jail twice, once for killing someone in a drunk driving accident and the other for assaulting a Communist during a pro-fascist rally.

One of the pleasures of reading mid-century fiction is the absence of academic, writerly technique. These writers had not yet heard of the fatwa against adverbs. They have no problem objectifying the thoughts and feelings of their characters, or triangulating viewpoints in the free indirect method.

The book is not without a certain grim humor, but the only irony is the irony of perspective, that George sees the world through two different minds, and can’t reconcile the two, except with a golf club. I saw the end coming, I hoped it would be different, but it was a steel trap that started to close on page one. However, I won’t give away the final 6 words, which are funny indeed. Hangover Square is a nasty piece of work, relentless, sad and true.

I don’t like holidays, but I do like food. My way through holidays is to cook. For Christmas (not my holiday…a savior ain’t in the cards for MAN), I love the Sicilian tradition of seven fishes, even if they aren’t all fish. One of my old dear friends who died too young, Peter Catanzarro, came from an Italian family in Canarsie. I loved hearing his story of Christmas dinner, the calamari and the scampi. I loved his food. He cooked Chicken Catanzarro, a simple Italian American dish that was ambrosia in his hands. He would prepare it in his tiny galley kitchen and we would eat it in front of the TV, seated on foam chairs, with 2 litre bottles of Pinot Grigio from Astor Liquors. Another friend who died too young and was a fabulous cook was Jon Greenberg. Jon had lived in Rome and came back with a serious Italian food muse. When he moved in next door we used to cook together, keeping the doors of our two apartments propped open. We stewed octopus and bought the first widely available organic, free-range meat at the Union Square farmer’s market. He browned a rolled veal shoulder roast in mire poix and braised it on top of the stove in white wine. Jon always served lentils at New Year’s. Beans on New Year’s is a Latin tradition. Down south they make black eyed peas. After the New Year’s eve dinner and booze, it is fitting to have humble beans and greens. This year I made Black Eyed Peas with kale. I had forgotten to soak the beans overnight. That’s no big deal with black eyed peas. They cook very quickly. Instead I covered them with water, brought them to a boil and let the rest for an hour. Then I cooked them with a smoked pork bone for several hours. I added kale and finished it with parsley, scallions, and vinegar, and served it with jalapeno peppers, smoked ham and grilled Italian sweet sausage on the side. Smoked meat goes beautifully with black eyed peas.

4 cups black eyed peas, picked over and rinsed
¼ cup olive oil or lard
1 large onion diced
1 large carrot diced
1 rib celery diced
½ large green pepper diced
¼ cup chopped garlic
1 smoked ham hock, ham bone or other smoked pork bone
1-1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
2 teaspoons cumin
1 Tablespoon smoked paprika
2 bay leaves
Black pepper
salt
1 bunch kale chopped
¼ cup minced parsley
¼ cup chopped scallions
¼ cup vinegar
Cooked ham and sausage
If you soak the beans overnight you will have to make a stock of the vegetables, the bone and water first. I prefer actually starting with dried black eyed peas or bringing them to boil in a pot of water and letting them rest for an hour to absorb the water.

In  large pot heat the olive oil and sauté first the onions, until golden, then the carrot, celery, pepper and garlic until soft and fragrant. Add the spices and grind in some pepper (but don’t add salt) and cook briefly. Add the beans and turn them over until coated with the oil, then add the ham bone and cover with enough water to make a soup. Bring to a boil and simmer, adding water if necessary, for 2 hours. When the peas are starting to get salt, add a teaspoon or so of salt. After the beans are cooked turn off the heat and let them rest for a few hours. Bring back to a boil, add the kale and cook until very soft. Check for salt. Meanwhile heat the ham and fry the sausage if you are using them. When ready to serve add the parsley, scallions and vinegar to the soup. Serve with rice, meat and chopped jalapenos peppers. Now you have luck for the whole year! It’s twenty fucking twelve, we need it!

Kim Jong-Un has surged ahead of other GOP presidential hopefuls in Iowa, edging out Ron Paul (at 24%) with 26% of likely GOP caucus goers. Romney is in 3^rd (20%) and Gingrich has dropped to 15%. The margin of error as usual in GOP contests is huge.