Categories & Cooking

From last week's New Yorker article about a Turkish chef --

"His monograph on keskek -- defined in the dictionary as "a dish made by slowly boiling well-beaten wheat, together with meat" -- is less about boiled wheat than about a process unfolding over a certain geography. Musa has identified twenty-four regional names for keskek, which may be eaten at funerals or weddings, on New Year's, Muhammad's birthday, Easter, or Ramadan; in the Turkish bath, during rain prayers, or in honor of special guests. In some villages, keskek is cooked at home and eaten with walnuts; in others, villagers bring their keskek to a communal oven that is operated only seven days a year. Keskek is sometimes cooked in vats with prickle juice, or, like rice, with chickpeas and cumin. 'There are dishes without wheat that are still called keskek,' Musa writes. He later told mea bout a kind of dessert keskek, made with dried fruit instead of meat. The facts of the dish, resisting definition, turn out to be almost incidental. What really interests Musa about keskek is that it embodies a living series of social functions."

Apart from delicious, this passage is also intriguing, because of what it says about categories. My brain is too addled from studying right now to fully articulate this -- but it has to do with a sort of diversion or misdirection. You think you know what the common elements are in a dish -- the ingredients. But you're wrong. The dish is a practice, a habit, an activity. We are what we eat, and what we eat is what we do...

That's about as far as I can take this right now, but I welcome other thoughts and comments.

Living as I do in the palace of the Victorian novel, I have started to see narratives everywhere. For example, last night the three volumes of Paul Ricoeur's "Time and Narrative" arrived in the mail. The first two were translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer -- the third by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. There you have it: some event, a marriage or a divorce, slipped in between Volume 2 & Volume 3. I don't know what exactly happened, but that small change speaks volumes.

Another gloss on "gloss"

Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer is a landmark Supreme Court case dealing with executive power. 343 U.S. 579 (1952). You may know it from such recent scandals as John Y*o failing to cite it in his infamous memo.

We just read it in class, and one of the concurring opinions, by Justice Jackson, has some really fascinating language about how life adds meaning to words:

“Deeply embedded traditional ways of conducting government cannot supplant the Constitution or legislation, but they give meaning to the words of a text or supply them. It is an inadmissibly narrow conception of American constitutional law to confine it to the words of the Constitution and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon them. In short, a systematic, unbroken executive practice, long pursued to the knowledge of the Congress and never before questioned, engaged in by Presidents who have also sworn to uphold the Constitution…may be treated as a gloss on ‘executive Power.’”

This is a fascinating and fairly controversial argument -- that over time, the executive may gain power through a mechanism almost like adverse possession, by exercising that power, so long as Congress does not affirmatively tell him or her to stop.

A textualist or formalist would be disturbed by the idea that present practices or norms could somehow alter our interpretation of the Constitution's words.

This is why Constitutional law is so thrilling -- it's a domain where the stakes of reading and interpretation are tremendously high and words like "gloss" can cause a whole big fight...