Article is off to the journal

Today Rob Lamb and I will finally send off the article we have been writing together on John Locke and charity. We are sending it for consideration at the Journal of the History of Philosophy. Looks like the journal has a good editorial board, so whatever happens at the very least we should get some good feedback on the piece. But Iain Hampsher-Monk, our supervisor, has given it a good reading, and he thinks it is a good journal piece. He should know since he is co-editor of the Journal of the History of Political Thought. So now that my name dropping is finished, I do think we have a good chance, but who can say what will happen. We shall wait and see.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Thanksgiving Recipes: Candied Yams

Here is the first in a series of traditional American foods, often served at Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other fall roast dinners.

Candied Yams or candied sweet potatoes:

This is a pretty sweet dish, but it is not a dessert. It is probably best served with a mix of other more savory and less sweet side dishes and a good course of roast meat, like turkey, chicken, turkey, goose, or pork.

Ingredients:

Three big yams,
brown sugar
butter
mixed spice (a mix of ground cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg)
salt and pepper to taste

Begin by washing the yams, but do not peel them. Cut each yam in half, or in thirds, whichever is required to fit them into a pot of cold water. Bring the water to boil. Let the yams boil until they have softened, and a metal spoon can be pushed into the yams without difficulty. Now drain the pot, and put in cold water. Let the yams cool before working with them further. Drain the pot again and replace with cold water a second time to speed the cooling process if necessary.

Now take the yams out of the cold water and take off their skins. They should come off pretty easily just using your fingers. Now take the skinned yams and cut them into slices about 1/2 centimeter thick. To make it look pretty, arrange them in an medium sized baking dish as follows. Put one row of slices down, then overlap the next row of slices over the first. Keep overlapping like this until the whole baking dish is filled. Now put a little salt and pepper over the yams. Next put just a light dusting of the mixed spice. Then put on plenty of brown sugar over all the yams. Some people like it more or less sweet, so use your judgment, but generally Americans like this pretty sweet. Then put bits of butter over the brown sugar. You need enough butter on the yams so that when it melts, it will coat all of them and mix with the brown sugar.

Now put the whole thing in the oven for about half an hour or so at about 180 Degrees Celsius. The temperature and time don't need to be too precise because the yams are already cooked.

Well I hope some of you get the chance to try this. It really is one of my favorites.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Two Turkey days?

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. I had two brilliant days celebrating. On day one I had friends from my department over. I cooked intermittently over the whole day, and then served the meal around 7:45, if my recollection is at all on target. We had chicken (major bummer, but turkey isn't available yet in England and chicken tastes exactly the same), candied yams, twice baked potatoes, and stuffing. Over the course of the meal wine was consumed in abundance. After a good deal of conversation (focusing on French social problems, Opus Dei, and the Scientologists) my guests left at about 3:00 in the morning. I had one of the most fun coach rides to London not three and a half hours later. I got to London, and then I went grocery shopping. Guess what? It was time to make another Thanksgiving meal. This time some of Ahreum's coursemates came. They were all very charming, and I'm glad she is able to have some good colleagues to go through this year with. The menu was the same, accept we did not have stuffing. After over 24 hours of giving thanks, I finally went to bed just after company left.

So, a lot of comments were given about the stuffing and the twice baked potatoes, the candied yams, and the meat. A lot of Americans will already know how to make all of this, but if anyone is interested in making some real traditional American food, I think its time for a few recipes. See the next post for a series on Thanksgiving dishes.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Lecturing on Locke

I had a very fruitful weekend in London. This time I spent a great deal of my waking hours on Sunday, preparing a lecture on John Locke. Ahreum was so supportive, and made me some great Korean food. She served bibimbop and dengjang chiggae for lunch. It sure was delicious, and the flavour of the dengjang chiggae was perfectly balanced. Thus, I had the time and energy to get the lecture polished off. She also let me read the whole thing to her twice! That’s an awfully great amount of crazy philosophy to listen to. But it let me actually deliver a lecture and not just a recitation from paper. I couldn't have done that without her.

So Monday morning came, and there was a hard frost on the ground, but I was not discouraged, I practiced once more, got ready, and walked to campus. I had to be careful to breathe through my nose, or risk damaging my vocal chords. So all precautions taken, I went to the exam hall. My professor, Iain Hampsher-Monk, introduced me, and then I got underway. The important thing is be actually interacting with the class. Although I'm just talking to them, I should not be just talking at them. Everything I do and all the walking and posturing I enact must convey meaning and bring a response from the students. This is pretty hard because I'm not an experienced public orator. Luckily, I do have a loud voice, so that helps a good deal. I just tried to push through any nerves and give the lecture without any other thoughts.

It worked out too. At the end I even had a small bit of applause, perhaps out of charity. Anyway, I got Iain thinking about how much of a defender of people's actual decisions Locke really was. Perhaps, he was closer to Rousseau in sanctioning what people ought to want (rather than what they do want) than is often imagined. Well, the point is, if it got my professor thinking, it must have stimulated the class as well. That's really all I can ask for, and I think it was a real privilege to be able to participate in their education at this level.

Now I must step out of the spotlight and back to research and grading.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Cold in Exeter

I've now returned to Exeter after a brilliant trip to London. I had a wonderful time with Ahreum and enjoyed a bit of time out in addition to my studies at the British Library.

I went to a Korean restaurant, which was alright, but overpriced. The problem is not that the dishes are too expensive, but that all the side dishes, which would simply be included in Korea, have to all be purchased separately. I guess this way of ordering has been tried and failed in Korea, but in England the locals will have no idea things are done differently. As for the Korean clientele, who seem to be a big chunk of the business, I suspect getting a good meal like at home makes up for the inconveniences. That is completely reasonable. Still having had so many wonderful meals in Korea, I can definitely say that Korean restaurants in England are only a pale doppelganger of the original.

I also went to a cool Dutch pancake house with Ahreum and another friend of ours, Tara, who is now working at a top notch conservatoire in London after finishing her PhD in Exeter. To top it all off she is from Wisconsin and studies Korean traditional opera-Ponsori (I'm sure I have not managed to transliterate this correctly). We all decided to go for desert pancakes, and it was a real treat. They were absolutely gigantic, maybe 12 inches or a bit more in diameter. Mine had sliced pears in the pancake and ice-cream and advocaat sauce on top. What decadence. Now far be it for me to be dominated by my sweet tooth, but this was very worth while, and I heartily recommend the place for all visitors to London. It's on High Holborn Street, and is called My Old Dutch Pancake House.

Research went well, but there really is a tremendous wealth of material available just on Locke's ethics of toleration, not to mention his ethics and politics more generally. I made my way through some of the monograph books, but there is still more to do. One particularly good source, by a theology professor at Yale, Nicholas Wolterstorff, works through the ethics of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is clear from this that Essay’s very project has political ramifications, for Locke’s looming fear Locke is the problem of sectarian strife, which he hopes to circumvent through his account of human knowing. Using Wolterstorff's work, one can subsequently see that Locke's theory of knowledge justifies the old Christian recommendation (though not all Christians make or hold to this recommendation) that contention and intolerance are divisive and sinful and that brotherly love and toleration are commanded by God and conducive to peaceful relations between men. My priorities are different from Wolterstorff's, but it is clear his rich account is penetrating in addition to being useful for my own research.

Now, I am away from Ahreum, from the bastion of learning in the British Library, and from the culinary dynamic of London. I am greeted by the chill frost of a November morning in Exeter. The sun shines, but it produces no warmth.

However, I am not writing figuratively. It really is cold today. I should have worn gloves to the office. Other than that, Exeter remains the same.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

Dining at Gray's Inn

Last night, I spent the evening being wined and dined at the Gray's Inn hall in the company of some prestigious barristers and many trainees. The group I sat with consisted of Ahreum, myself, and two other barrister students, one from Kenya and the other English and Iranian descent. I found the conversation pleasant, and the food except for a somewhat misconceived pudding where all very palatable. All in all, a good evening.

What was especially nice was a wonderful musical performance after the dinner – about an hour of Mozart and Dvorak. The players were all talented, and if not the most brilliant, there was nothing to be faulted about the performance. What I found particularly interesting was the rapport the performers seemed to have with each other. Almost like a group of rock and roll musicians, they really knew each other's styles and played together. The glances between the performers were telling, and you could tell they really enjoyed making music together. It was really a fabulous end to a superb evening.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

London

I've just finished the coach journey from Exeter to London. Its about 4 1/2 hours, which is quite long for an Englishman, but since I'm from the States and am used to long driving, it isn't so bad. But it still awfully hard to sit in a dry crowded coach the whole way. National Express has an excellent deal called "fun fair", and I don't think my trip cost more than a fiver. But "fun fair" or not, a coach ride is never fun.

I really feel blessed with my opportunities to travel to London this school year. My girlfriend Ahreum is studying to become a barrister at the Inns of Court, school of law. She's living in Camden town, just minutes North of Central London, and I can visit whenever I am free. This means lots of opportunity to experience culture I couldn't get in Exeter, much less back home in Janesville Wisconsin. Living in the big city has a lot of charm, and though I wouldn't want to settle in a place like London, extended visits allow me to observe life here without becoming caught up in it.

The resources for the scholar in London are exceptional. In my case the British Library tops my list. Now that I have a reading card there, I am going to be doing a good deal of archival research and reading of sources Exeter just doesn't have. It’s a real boon for my PhD. Better yet, its only twenty minutes away from where Ahreum lives.

Luckily, the library isn't really open at night, or I might bury myself there. Instead I've got freedom to explore London in the evenings. In deed, this evening I will be going to a concert with Ahreum put on by her law society. I hope they're in tune.

Once more into the breach,

Ben

When an overhead light becomes a shower faucet

Nothing in life is perfect, and that certainly goes for flats and apartments. Every apartment has its quirks, and so does mine. Until last night I thought the most annoying thing about my flat was that the doors are kind of sticky and difficult to open and close. No big problem, life goes on.

But I was very wrong. Last night around 9:00 I heard a dripping sound. I went to investigate in the bathroom, but there wasn't really any leaking going on in there. But I still heard the dripping coming quite quickly, seemingly in the direction of my bedroom. So I went one door down and I was nearly scared to death.

There is an old saying that water and electricity don't mix. Well, apparently they sometimes do (perhaps with bad repercussions). To my shock I saw water dripping rapidly from the bottom of the lightbulb in my overhead lamp. Worse the lamp was still on. Well I swore, and quickly turned the light off. I think it was just in time because there seemed to be a sort of funky electrical smoking odor in the room. It dripped all night long, and it made life real unpleasant. Luckily I have a futon, so Ahreum, was able to get a comfortable place to sleep. I wasn't so lucky and had to hit the floor.

So today I've felt a bit like the living dead. Fortunately, we know the problem is occurring because of a leaky roof line and builders should be here to sort out the problem early next week.

Other than that, my Fenelon presentation went pretty well. I wasn't fully confident that I had prepared adequately because of my new shower head in the bathroom. Also, Fenelon is a bit antiquarian and obscure. I knew this would be the case, but luckily discussion broadened into the concepts at work in his Dissertation on Pure Love and their conection to Plato, Augustine, and Plotinus. I feel a little rescued by my supervisor because he guided the conversation away from a narrow focus on Fenelon alone, which would have definately impoverished our meeting.

Once more into the breach,

Ben