The plinth of righteousness

Serious sporting commitments will prevent me from drinking myself over to the wrong side of iniquity this weekend. Although I’m sure my major organs are going to benefit from a certain level of abstemiousness, it’s kind of a shame because I just made a bumper batch of gazpacho to see us through the weekend. Cold homemade gazpacho is one of the best hangover cures I know. Loads of vitamin C, thanks to the tomatoes, loads of salt, thanks to my heavy hand, bread pre-masticated by the blender, olive oil for the gods, raw garlic and onions to ward off the demons, cucumber for bright eyes, vinegar just in case.
As a bonus, it’s also good with vodka (not pictured) and probably gin if things get really dire. I, however, will be endeavouring to drink my way to virtue rather than consciousness via this jug of gazpacho.

And then there’s the bowl of cured sardines in the fridge – white wine vinegar, garlic, pepper, bay and thick sardine fillets, slippery at the skin, still bone-crunchy in the flesh – it seems wasteful to eat them purely for sustenance, such are their restorative powers. I don't believe in echinacaea or St John's Wort (scandal) but I will stand or fall on the medicinal qualities of fresh gazpacho and home-cured sardines.

Emperor’s New Clothes

This is either a post about the world changing or about things staying just the same.

On the side of fuzzy familiarity is the breakfast scene. Just Fran Kelly and I, no waiters harbouring nuptial intent hovering about, an opened bottle of Glenlivet in my line of sight, cockatoos squawking, lots of laaa di daaah morning light reflecting off the water and lighting up the buildings across the , comforting low-level domestic squalor, a few cockroaches and yesterday’s paper.

Flicking through the foodie section in order to work out where I need to eat dinner to fit in, I happened upon an article about Kopi Luwak. A cup of coffee for $50?* It must be good. So I read all the way through an article about what is apparently a legitimate contendor for Next Big Thing in the coffee world, kopi luwak beans. Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?, you eagerly inquire.

Kopi Luwak is made from coffee beans that have been eaten and excreted bu the
Asian palm civet, or luwak, a mongoose-like mammal native to the jungles of
South-East Asia. The flesh of the coffee cherry is digested, but the bean
passes through intact and is deposited in piles of scat that are collected by
hand from the jungle floor.

Now my head has been spinning since I returned to Sydney: I’ve been running around like a dervish, sleeping insufficiently, moving boxes and boggling a bit at it all. I might still be able to squeeze a drop of credibility from the excuse that I’m jetlagged ergo confused. All the same, it sounds rather like another hideous joke is being played upon the gourmets. Civets are more closely related to cats but they look like big rats. What we’re talking about here is coffee that has been shat out by a rodent after its digestive system has corroded the fruit. I pride myself on an open-mind and a broad palate. The consumption of post-intestinal coffee beans is, however, a step too far. Enough’s enough.

What did confuse me was that the article was written in such a po-faced manner that I couldn’t quite tell whether the author was taking it seriously or not. Is an article about kopi luwak beans a great prank designed to put the food porn (ah, vice, so nice) into ironic perspective? Or is written to appeal to status hungry Sydneysiders looking to impress their friends and clients with a crazily expensive tipple that doubles as a talking point. Either way, coffee whose first filtration has been through the digestive system of a civet is not on my list for 2008.

* If it costs $50 for a 250mL cup, kopi luwak is more expensive than Glenlivet, most Granges, brachetto, all but the best balsamics and extra-virgin olios, and most snake oils.

The butt end of my days and ways

Here’s the thing with giving up smoking. Everyone tells you how good you
are, how strong-willed, how sensible and decent. But it’s nonsense.
It’s not like that. Giving up on fags is giving up on immortality.
It’s not strong will. It’s the spirit submitting to the body. It’s
the triumph of fear. It’s middle age. Stopping smoking is a
milestone on the road away from golden, fire-breathing youth towards Crown green
bowls. And I knew it. I felt bad. I could breathe but that’s
small recompense.

A.A. Gill, who wrote the above, took up hunting stags in craggy Hebridean terrain when he stopped smoking, a vice which is bad for the stags but not so damaging to the livers. I stopped smoking almost a year ago now, give or take a few puffs, and I’m still looking for the payback vice to balance my life. Vice, I’ve always thought, is kind of nice. One always needs to pursue at least one vice to an immoderate degree, tweaking the utilitarian formula to read something like ‘behaviour which causes the least damage to the fewest number.’ Hunting stags in Scotland is not an option for me and I don’t have a glib single grrl in the city line about hunting stags in the Cross at my fingertips. So, the question is, what is my new vice to be? There is a marathon hazily figuring in my plans for 2009 and a motorbike license to be won in the next fortnight. Credible arguments can be advanced as to the viciousness of long distance running and hooning around the city on a motorbike; certainly neither of these last suggest I’m giving up on immortality quite yet. Still, I’m not sure whether these will provide the masochist thrills and spills that smoking provided for so long, hi-jinks that have been absent from my life for so long.

Paradigm shift

Something like work recommences tomorrow, throwing both the title and premise of this blog into confusion. The blog will stay, I think, but I must turn myself into chica incognita and remove all references to the name on my credit card and library card. Obviously all my students will immediately Google me and find the blog. Obviously my pedagogical credibility will be shot to smithereens if my students discover the habits and proclivities revealed on this blog. I will need to speak with authority on Beckett and the Western (addressing them separately rather than together; how can I possibly do so to an audience who might potentially know the strength of my feelings about the ripeness of strawberries, the Tex-Mex revolution sweeping Sydney, the dullness of teaching, the dung-slewn streets of northern India? And so, Mr Vonnegut, it goes. Clambering over temples and dodging salmonella one week, reading marking policies and trying to remember what the New England Transcendentalists were on about the next.

Ceci n’est pas une fraise

It looks like a fraise. When you squash twenty of these into a punnet they bruise and leach just enough juice to sort of smell like a strawberry. But when you cut them open, the white, pithy heart of the subject is revealed. This is not as it should be. The heart of a strawberry – the most frequently referenced fruit in highbrow erotic fiction, I’m told – should throb scarlet and smell of wet sun. Whizzed up with one of these, a smoothie might turn an anaemic shade of pink; chopped up with ripe orange fruits, these made a pretty weak claim to a place in my fruit salad this morning. Otherwise, they’re useless pieces of aerated matter, ripened too fast, stored in a too chilly environment and bumped and bruised to buggery. Balsamic, caster sugar, Pernod, they’d be wasted trying to salvage these. These were cheap strawberries, they’re not organic, and my hazy memories of Riverina and Corsican strawberry picking tell me that the season hits its peak in mid-summer. Mental note, etc.

I purchased these oh-so inadequate groundberries yesterday but this morning’s disappointment does not constitute the first relearnt Lesson of the day. No, after rushing home from yoga, the first relearnt Lesson I learnt on this day, the 19th of February, was never to believe a word any removalist says about arrival times. I rushed through Bondi Junction, ur-lieu of fantasy consumption, without even a glance at the new surfaces which have made last year’s old this year’s mesmerising new. I’m reading through some of Ballard’s novels from the early 70s and trying to draw together a set of ideas on shopping centres to write a paper or a short story or somesuch. I could have done research at sashay pace. Instead, I pierced my post-yoga calm and zipped home with barely a sniff to smell the berries. And for what? A phone call telling me there’s been a bit of a problem in the yard. Sigh. If I had a zoom lens, I’d take a photograph of the dog lolling on my neighbour’s balcony, the size and shape of an imaginary shaggy lion to cheer myself up. Oh well, I'm borrowing another neighbour's wireless connection to post this blog and that seems to be doing the trick.

And so I wait for the arrival of a bed and the long-awaited consummation of a plan to make my bed and lie in it. This particular enactment of the scene will have to unroll without any bedbound and languorous mastication of strawberries. Alas.

Canine flanerie

A number of copies of this sign are posted thirty centimetres from the ground on Macleay St. Thirty centimetres is eye height for the kinds of over-prinked yelpy dogs that frequent this neighbourhood. I’m baffled by the wording of this sign. ‘Please curb your dogs’? Direct your canine companions away from the kerb? Keep the woofers on a leash? Please curb your dog's proclivities to woof, shit, sniff, meander, yelp, chase leaves, bay at strollers and so forth? Rein ‘em in, hold ‘em back, tie ‘em up?

It’s not that I can’t retrieve a little sense from the sign, it’s that the diction seems cumbersome, somewhat obstructive and a little precious. That these signs are posted on the walls of a building – the Icon in Potts Point – which also merits these adjectives cannot be a coincidence.

Plus ça change…

I’ve been here before. Real estate agents and removalists on the phone, respiratory system full of dust, oddly positioned bruises, no available hair-bands, crumpled coffee cups scattered all the place, a slight crackle of manic urgency in the air. Laura and I moved into an apartment located less than one hundred metres from my Onslow Gardens fiefdom and even closer to my Roslyn St stronghold of old. There remain many boxes to be unpacked and whitegoods to move; a truck containing useful items like my bed is yet to arrive from Seven Hills. Nevertheless, it is not without a little sniff of panic that I sense my supply of excuses for getting my act together, for getting in touch with the world is rapidly dwindling. Pre-emptive apologies.

Not much seems to have changed in the 2011 precinct. Spray tans, yapping small dogs, a disapproving sigh constantly on the wind. I didn't need to walk past the new diamante studded petcare shop on Macleay St to realise how far I from the dreaming minarets of the Mughal empire. There are, however, great sprawling street trees and cocktail bars here. You can purchase odiferous cheeses after midnight and the butcher who plies his trade next to the dogshop is a portrait of joviality. These things are important to me. Happily I find that none of my favourite bars or restaurants have shut and that a few newbies have opened.

I must, however, note with disapproval that the tellers at the National Bank have rebranded themselves as Listeners. Is this an Australia-wide innovation?

Sorry

All the snippy things that I might find myself saying about being back in Australia, back in Sydney, need to be shelved today because of this, the long overdue acknowledgment of the wounds inflicted on indigenous communities by Federal governments of this country. May this hopeful gesture mark a turning point in Australian history.

Reading the entrails

I made it back to Sydney and so did all my bags. Waiting in the long queue for customs, an official started chatting and asked me what I did for a living. I told him I taught English Literature and he waved me through the gates. Even though I didn’t have the satisfaction of exceeding the duty-free booze allowance, this struck me as a particularly good omen for re-entry into terra Australopithecus. This blog has been sorely neglected but I’ve managed to get a job and find a place to live since hitting the ground. I’ve also eaten variously formatted trout several times and righteously emptied a number of glasses of sauvignon blanc. There’s ceviche marinating right now and a zillion photos of the Taj Mahal to putter through.
Oh look, here’s one. My guide ran into a friend in the gardens at the back-end of the Taj and they spent half an hour taking winning photos like this. If only I had a picture of the Harbour Bridge to match it.

Halfway there

I've been here before...
Last time I was in Kuala Lumpar airport, I got stuck in the twilight zone and didn't leave for ten hours. I browsed the racks of durian chips and pondered the paucity of gin on offer in the duty free shops. The only significant change I note eight months later is the availability of top shelf Beefeater gin and a lamentable absence of Cointreau. If my plans happen to coincide with those of the airline, I'll be on a plane and back in Sydney in less than twelve hours.

Incredible India

This just about sums it all up.

Polygraph

‘Madame, did you not see it on the news? The internet is down in whole of India. A cable broke in Egypt late last night. It will take at least fifteen days to fix. At least, fifteen. Until then, I’m very sorry but the internet is out of order, Madame.’

If you’re reading this, it means that I have just been delivered the most audacious excuse ever for a stuffed wireless transmitter.

On the upside, I'm home in a week. Hurrah!

Festival life

Holy cities, I’ve seen a few. It’s a low year for the Magh Mela festival in Allahabad. Here, where the Ganga meets the Yamuna and the invisible, underground Saraswati rivers, the enormous Kumbh Mela festival is held every twelve years and tens of millions of people descend on Allahabad to bathe in the holy confluence under the full moon. The Magh Mela is the humdrum annual festival. It lasts for a month and my guide told me that around 400,000 pilgrims are currently in town. The dusty tent city between the rivers stretches for kilometres . I picked up a discarded copy of the Bulletin a few days ago and read about the upcoming World Youth Day in Sydney; the dimensions of the Sydney event do pale in comparison. Still, a Sydney full of pilgrims seeking not sporting jubilation but spiritual fulfilment is an exciting prospect.

Lost in translation

I’m still not sure what this dessert is called and I doubt I’ll ever know how to spell it.
For a while, I thought it was called manaloo and then my co-traveller Ingrid told me it was called malayoo. Something like that. Whatever it’s called, it’s amazingly good: milk that’s been boiled with cardamon, sugar and orange peel, beaten up with cream, rosewater and pistachios to a texture midway between cappuccino foam and icecream. Apparently it’s a Varanasi special.
Ingrid and I were escorted to this street stall by our friends Raju (in the pic) and Sunil, who assured us that of all the malayoo vendors in Varanasi, this one was the best. The malayoo and some truly amazing lassi were ladled out of bigger vats and buckets into small clay pots.
When empty, the pots got tossed to the gutter and the stall puppies licked the shards clean.

Priorities

A chai stall: kettle, saucepan, glasses, strainer, biscuits. Instant satisfaction.
Most street chai comes in tiny throwaway clay cups but this stall, located somewhere in the Varanasi old city, served such great chai that I offer it as the type irrespective of the atypical glassware. The best chai I drank in Varanasi, and probably in India was at Ashish Café just off Assi Ghat. Ashish might be the loveliest man in Varanasi, a smiling man who cooks delicious food very slowly and serves it on his verandah; his chai is heavy with fresh ginger and served as an excellent antidote to the cold I contracted whilst in town. There’s plenty of air pollution everywhere in India so it’s not beyond my imagination why one might wear a facemask to filter out the gunk. Still, tourists in Calcutta, Bodhgaya and Varanasi prancing around, their respiratory systems protected by clean white masks, did not strike me as particularly dignified or sensitive. It was only when my nose and eyes had been streaming for a couple of days that I realised what a great service the masks might have been.

Ashish’s gingery chai has eased my cold and kept me walking up and down the ghats. ‘Burning is learning,’ a young chap told me on my first day in Varanasi. This line runs through my head each time I walk past the burning ghats where bodies are being constantly cremated. I can’t quite bring myself to watch the duration of a burning (three to four hours, I’m told) or even a funeral, I just rush on by. If burning is learning, I think I’ve learnt that I’m a little uncomfortable with death rites as a tourist spectacle. If the numbers of foreigners hanging out to watch the burnings are any indication, I may not be siding with majority opinion on this one.

I’ve had to get used to it though as I need to pass Harishchandra Ghat, a burning ghat, to reach Mansarowar Ghat from where I’m staying. The Lotus Lounge is located at Mansarowar and I’ve been able to satisfy my dumpling cravings there. I was initially a little reluctant to patronise the Lotus, it being so obviously a retreat for foreigners from the Ganges-side trials. Everybody wants to pretend they’re being intrepid and doing it like the locals and places like the Lotus – with a shiny pink and green and white balcony over the Ganges, clean low tables, a snazzy, well designed sign painted all over town, menus in proofread English and, each time I’ve visited, an Indian-free clientele – don’t really help to sustain the illusions. On the plus side, the food is cheap and delicious, the cushions are comfortable, and there is a happy absence of marauding children. Sitting on the balcony, I couldn’t help thinking of the Lotus in Potts Point and, had I a 2011 resident on hand, I would have offered for discussion the contention that the Lotus of Mansarowar Ghat is Varanasi’s answer to the Lotus of Challis Ave: really rather lovely once one has discarded the notion that one should be languishing in slightly seamier surroundings. The PP Lotus may have charming wallpaper and a bewilderingly lengthy cocktail menu but it doesn’t have the dumplings offered on the shores of the Holy River. Up there on the balcony, one more dazzling success was registered for the Tibetan veg momo, the dumpling of 2008, as far as I am concerned.
Stuffed with a gooey, garlicky mix of softened veges, steamed and lightly fried like gyoza, these dumplings are a stunning riposte to any existential angst. Is life worth living? With dumplings like this, most certainly, yes. Any doubts can be quelled with reference to the sauce. Someone has taken handfuls of garlic, chilli and tomato (raw), thrown them in a blender with a dose of salt and pressed pulverise. From my rheumy perspective, this sauce embodies the qualities some people seek in a guru: healing powers, charisma, certainty, sex appeal. I have always been easily lead.

Alas, I fear that whilst I live within reach of such delicacies, my spiritual well-being will lag. I have been to two Buddhist holy sites in the last week, Bodhgaya and Sarnath, and have been sleeping in one of Hinduism’s holiest cities. Whatever it is that is in the air in these sacred places, it has given me a cold and I find myself, as ever, bound to earthly cravings.