A very unhappy anniversary: Guantanamo turns ten

Once upon a time, the United States of America believed in something called due process of law. The United States of America believed so sincerely in due process of law that the nation enshrined a right to it in the fifth amendment to its founding document, the Constitution.

I quoted the fifth amendment to the Constitution of the United States just last month, in Rescuing freedom from U.S. government predation, but I don't suppose it could hurt to quote it again, with the same emphasis as I added last time around:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Pretty unambiguous, or so one hopes when one drafts an amendment to a constitution.

So yesterday, 11 January 2012, was a sad day for anyone inclined to think well of the Constitution of the United States. Yesterday marked ten years since the opening of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. There was a fine op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle to mark the occasion, contributed by the convener of the Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture, Northern California's affiliate of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture -- a woman by the name of Louise Specht. Her piece was titled Ten years later, Guantanamo still harms us all.

Not everyone agrees with Ms. Specht. There were only a few comments to the article on the SF Chron's website as of about 8pm last night, all of them sharply disagreeing with or missing the point of her position. But, hey, the intertubes permits each of us to express our opinion, or to echo somebody else's.

I'm going to echo the opinion of Louise Specht today. Literally. Here's some of what she wrote in yesterday's op-ed:

[...] Bush administration officials have admitted ordering torture against prisoners in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and secret sites in third-party countries, yet no one has been held to account for violating U.S. law. Their illegal actions and the recent passage - and signing by President Obama - of the National Defense Authorization Act have undermined fundamental structures of law and morality that are our heritage as Americans.

It's as if we have built a fort out of earth we've dug out of a levee, as we attempt to protect ourselves from a hypothetical future threat by undermining the bulwark that keeps us safe every day.

When members of the Bush administration ordered our military and civilian contractors to employ tactics of torture, they misused the United States' legal authority in order to engage in illegal actions, undermining U.S. law.

[...]

Where are we now, 10 years after the first hooded and shackled prisoners stumbled off a cargo jet and behind the bars of Guantanamo? The United States is widely seen as a nation that abandoned its values under threat. [...]

I assume more people read the SF Chron than Daily Kos, but I could be wrong about that. In any case, another excerpt-worthy piece was published yesterday by Timothy Lange, who posts diaries on Daily Kos as Meteor Blades and is a member of the DK staff. His piece yesterday was titled Un-Occupy Guantanamo and give the land back to Cuba. It's mostly about Lange's argument that the U.S. ought to get the heck out of this occupied corner of the island of Cuba, but he had this to say about the prison operated by the U.S. government at the naval base there:

Today, on its 10th anniversary, three years after President Obama signed an executive order to close it, the prison at Guantánamo remains open and the indefinite detention of its remaining inmates is enshrined in the law, the product of another executive order signed in March 2011 and the recent National Defense Authorization Act. One of the prisoners still there is Suleiman al-Nahdi. Like several dozen others, he was cleared five years ago for release. The way things are going, he may well live out his life in the tropics.

Two evils in one. Our nation's imperialist past, denied, glossed over, rationalized and justified under American "exceptionalism" and, contradictorially, by its self-interested Manifest Destiny. And America's imperialist present, backed both by a core military budget that is larger in real terms than any since the end of World War II and slated to grow larger still over the next decade, and by a law that permits indefinite detention of anyone executively deemed a terror suspect.

While no new prisoners will probably ever be sent to Guantánamo, its unending presence as naval base and precedence as stolen foothold are a stain our leaders would excoriate were any nation not a U.S. ally operate such an facility on seized foreign territory.

Yup.

Not a happy anniversary.



Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Rescuing freedom from U.S. government predation
News cycle, information glut
TV Debate on Nuclear Weapons Needed Now



Thanks to Act Against Torture for the photo of a 20 March 2006 action demanding "that the U.S. end its heinous practices of torture and indefinite detention; and end the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan." I took many of the photos on the linked page of the AAT web site, but not the one used in this post ... I'm afraid I don't remember which photographer ought to be credited, my apologies.

Taking the coast road north from Santa Cruz

I spent a few days in Santa Cruz, California last week, extending the time-away-from-work that comes "free" with the holidays in order to turn away from the hustle of 'regular' life and develop deeper plans for my novel-project-in-progress. Santa Cruz (pop. ~60,000) is a small coast-and-campus city just a couple hours' drive from where I live, less if you take a more direct route than I usually do.

I've spent a fair bit of time at nearby beaches, I have family and friends who live or have lived in Santa Cruz and points south. The downtown area has a generous offering of cafés, bookshops, and restaurants in most imaginable cuisines and price ranges. The city's just a bit too small for me to want to live there, but I do like to visit.

I enjoyed my stay, including a lot of time at the desk of a light-filled room in a quiet Bed and Breakfast a few blocks from the Town Clock end of downtown, a place called The Adobe on Green Street (highly recommended); and a visit to my longstanding-favorite coffee house, the quirky and comfortable Caffe Pergolesi (ditto, but for entirely different reasons ... it's rarely quiet, for one thing).

I also had a fine time trolling through a couple of the local independents, Bookshop Santa Cruz and Logos, for reading material; and puzzling over the wackiness that passes for decor in places like Chocolate, the restaurant attached to Bookshop Santa Cruz (see photo), where I had lunch on Thursday.

But for me a favorite part of a visit to Santa Cruz is getting there and back.

From where I live, in Berkeley, there are a few choices: one can drive down the east side of the Bay and circle around from the south, through Watsonville (where some of my cousins live) via Hwy 101 and any of a host of roads between 101 and the coast; there's the drive through redwood-forested hills that separate Santa Cruz County from the central Bay Area, via the treacherously congested Hwy 17; or there's the way I almost always take, which is almost always slower than "over the hill" (as locals describe the second route), but so much more relaxing: down the coast, along Highway 1.

The coast road, most of which is in San Mateo County, is lined with agricultural land on the one hand, dominated by artichokes and strawberries; and, on the other, by beaches that span a full range from placid and sandy to rugged and rocky. It's a fine contrast, the domesticated fields and the wild sea. There are fine wineries along the way (Bonnie Doon Vineyard, with its brilliantly-labeled -- and delicious -- Le Cigare Volant); there are marine reserves and teeming tidepools; there are even a couple of lighthouses along the way.

Here are some personal best-of picks from my drive home at the end of last week...

My first stop was the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, south of Pescadero. Pigeon Point has a hostel I've been meaning to check out for years, and getting a glimpse of the dramatic coastal views that residents enjoy from the rooms makes the prospect of a writing-retreat stay here all the more enticing. Would it work? Or would I be driven batty by the incessant sound of the crashing waves? I'm thinking that only an experiment can answer that question with certainty.

The lighthouse's Fresnel lens has been taken down temporarily, but if you visit between Friday and Monday, and speak with one of the volunteers, you're likely to get an invitation to check it out in the Fog Signal Building, where it's being restored. Pretty cool, even if the original light and lens is only used ceremonially nowadays.

Here's a bit of video taken from the far end of the point, giving a panorama of the coast and a view of the lighthouse itself from the seaward side. The crackly sound is the wind getting into my camera's microphone.



Bean Hollow State Beach is just up the coast from Pigeon Point. It was my family's beach-of-choice when we first moved out to California. Depending on the time of month and year the tidepools can be terrific: starfish, sea urchins, sea anemone, even (very occasionally) an octopus.

Oh -- and lots of crabs, small ones, the largest I've seen have been maybe three or four inches across. When I was in junior high school my father was getting his doctorate in medical microbiology, and worked with a Japanese MD who was doing a post doc with my dad's advisor. Our families became friends, and we spent many a Sunday together at Bean Hollow. One time -- in flagrant violation of the law, but hey, it was the seventies and we weren't very good at environmentalism -- my dad's colleague and family spent a ridiculously long and patient time lying in wait for crabs to emerge from their crevices, then catching them.

An hour or two yielded just two of the quick and evasive little buggers. Then they skewered and roasted the critters over a driftwood fire. I refused the skinny little leg they offered to me, and they giggled at my squeamishness. Truth be told, I've never really warmed to the messy business of eating crab out of its shell. The same family taught me to play Go using stones and a grid drawn in the sand, but I never got very good at that either.

Pebble Beach is just a mile further north and is bureaucratically part of the same state beach, according to on-site signage and the California Dept. of Parks and Recreation web site. I stopped at Pebble Beach on my way down a few days earlier ... the photo shows waves making toward the pibled shore north of the modest parking lot. The real draw here, though, are the strangely sea-carved sandstone formations that geologists call "tafoni." I'll share some photos I took of the tafoni at Bean Hollow / Pebble Beach in a later post, stay tuned...

In the Bay Area, all good drives come to a traffic jam sooner or later. After easy sailing through Half Moon Bay and Pacifica, my Subaru and I climbed over the last of the coastal hills, heading for the Bay Bridge and home to Berkeley. Below you can see the view from my windshield at about 3:45 pm. Yes, it was safe to take a photo ... we were barely moving.

As far as I'm concerned, the forty-five minutes it took to complete a 20 min. drive is a pretty good argument for my usual modes of transportation: bike or public transit.

O well....the leisurely drive along the coast was worth the congestion getting through San Francisco. No regrets. I hope to do it all over again, sooner than later.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Tafoni at Pebble Beach on the San Mateo County coast

Jim Campbell's "Exploded Views" at SFMOMA

On Monday I wrote about last week's visit to the De Young museum. I made another visit to a Bay Area art museum between Christmas and New Year's Day: SF MOMA, where I was wowed for the second time by an exhibition of Richard Serra's drawings (on offer until the sixteenth of this month; if you haven't seen it yet this is your last call).

I wrote (and vlogged) in late November about Richard Serra's "Sequence" at the Stanford Art Museum, but despite my fascination with this artist's sculpture I did not anticipate how powerful a show made up almost exclusively of simple black shapes mounted in simple white rooms could be. I had to see it to get it ... and the fact I was drawn to return to SF MOMA to see the show again speaks for itself ... well worth the visit if you can get there by the time the exhibit closes.

On our way up SF MOMA's grand staircase, and again on the way down, we spent time watching an installation in the museum's atrium by San Fransisco artist Jim Campbell, Exploded Views.

The installation is a rectangular volume of over 2,800 spherical, white LEDs, in which computer-controlled switching create shadow-images that move hauntingly through the space. To a ground level observer, the shadows play across the volume in seemingly random patterns; but from the first landing of the staircase, at about an equal altitude to Exploded Views, a viewer discovers -- with surprise and delight that replays itself over and over as visitors ascend the staircase -- that the shadows are figures dancing their way through the volume.

(There are four films scheduled for exhibition as the source of the shadow-images in Exploded Views, each to be 'played' for two months, in rotation, over the eight months the piece will remain installed. When I visited late last week, the shadow-figures moving through the installation were filmed in collaboration with Alonzo King's LINES Ballet.)

Here's a video spliced from a number of different angles on Exploded Views, with thanks to painter, blogger, and vlogger Matthew Felix Sun:



A couple of weeks ago a well-read friend took note of the diverse contexts into which I've inserted reference to Milton's Paradise Lost on One Finger Typing. She was commenting on my post Subaru dipsticks, the intertubes, and me (12 Dec 2011), but there was also The Adjustment Bureau meets Paradise Lost, in April of last year.

T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets are another work of poetry that percolate up from the depths of my memory over and again (see Safeguarding cloud ephemera Part II... and Whales at the Field Museum). Watching Jim Campbell's piece I thought of these lines from the first of Eliot's quartets, "Burnt Norton":

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always --
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

The Campbell piece gave me the same sense as Eliot's image: delight, mystery, movement, immediacy. The installation is mesmerizing. I hope you get a chance to see it while Exploded Views is on display in the atrium at SFMOMA, through September 25, 2012.







Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for his terrific video of Jim Campbell's Exploded Views.

Portraiture and history: Masters of Venice at the de Young Museum

Between Christmas and the new year the university where I'm employed shuts down for a week. This time off from work is perfectly suited to visiting local art museums, at least in my world. On Tuesday of last week I visited the de Young museum in San Francisco with my partner and an old & dear friend, to see Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

I missed my chance to see many of these paintings the one time I visited Vienna, in June of 2002. It was my own weakness ... my partner has more stamina for art museums than I do. That, and one other thing: I couldn't imagine visiting Vienna without paying homage to Sigmund Freud (an errand in which my traveling companion was decidedly uninterested). So while Matthew visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum, I took a stroll to Berggasse 19, where Freud lived, wrote, and practiced until he was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938; and then hung out at an outdoor café and scribbled in my journal until Matthew showed up to tell me what I'd missed.

Patience paid off, though: nine and a half years on, and here's a chance to see some of the paintings from Austria's great museum on the wild, provincial west coast of the U.S. of A.

The exhibition is lovely, a riot of sumptuous 16th century color painted by Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoretto, and more. A side effect of the exhibition -- for me, anyway -- was a vertiginous sense of time and event that I have felt when I visited or read about Venice.

I am a poor student of history. There are vast tracts of humankind's record that I have only glimpsed in fuzzy fragments, and the Republic of Venice is prominent among these. Venice was a great naval power during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance -- think of Shakespeare's Othello -- but to me the city and its influence are shrouded in intrigue and mystery ... which is a fancy way of saying that an in-depth sense of Venice runs aground in the shallows of my historical reading.

Perhaps for that reason I was particularly struck by Tintoretto's Portrait of Sebastiano Venier (and the Battle of Lepanto), dated to approximately 1571. I'm sure that sometime, somewhere, the Battle of Lepanto has crossed my neural radar (did I read the timeline at the back of Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red? I might have...). But the significance of this naval battle is not deeply imprinted in my sense of the world.

At Lepanto, the Ottoman empire suffered a significant defeat and crucial losses in a naval battle against Spain, Venice, and others. The Turks had superior numbers of ships, sailors, and fighters; the so-called "Holy League" brought more than twice as many guns and cannon to the battle. Decimation of the Turkish fleet and elite fighting forces at Lepanto is regarded in retrospect as a pivotal turning point in preventing Ottoman incursion deep into the European continent. Had the battle gone otherwise, it is reasonable to imagine, European history would have been a very different story from the one we now tell.

And so to Tintoretto.

Pure portraiture is not my favorite flavor of fine art ... I read, I write, I'm moved by narrative ... and the narrative in much of formal portraiture is too subtle to catch my imagination. But the Portrait of Sebastiano Venier (and the Battle of Lepanto), hung in a room near the end of the Masters of Venice exhibition, instantly drew me in. The subject, Sebastiano Venier, was chief admiral of the Venetian navy and commanded Venice's ships in the Battle of Lepanto; he was elected Doge (the ruler of the Venetian city-state) a half-dozen years later. I learned this much from the curators' note hung beside the painting at the de Young.

Venier's visage is commanding and his armor imposing in Tintoretto's painting, but the most fascinating thing to me is that he is portrayed against a background depicting the decisive battle of 1571: he is not only a man, not only an admiral, not only a ruler of Venice, but a man whose role in the history of Islam and Christendom would ring plangently, thought Tintoretto, even into these modern times, four hundred and forty years on. Across a long stretch of water, galleys face off in clouds of smoke and fire, as a sumptuously armed old man gazes with stern humility from the canvas. It's an invitation to story.

I read the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Lepanto after visiting the de Young, for whatever that's worth in our era of communal pre-digestion. But will Tintoretto's painting lead me to read more deeply about the sixteenth century conflict between the Ottoman and European empires? Well, to make certain-sounding statements in that vain would be rash. I still have half of Thucidides waiting on the I'll-get-back-to-it list for more years than I care to cop to. But even if I duck the opportunity to seriously strengthen my grip on Venetian history, I've at least filled in another piece in my hazy sense of How Things Happened. Perhaps my own personal Age of Reading History is yet to come....

I'll mention one more painting from the de Young exhibition, if only to keep from getting too lofty in this post. Think of this mention of Bernardino Licinio's Portrait of Ottaviano Grimani as a step down from the sublime to the frivolous.

Grimani was Procurator of San Marco, essentially a Vice Doge of Venice, and I was struck by Licinio's portrait because I loved seeing the slashed-fabric look of his doublet in a painting executed in 1541, nearly five centuries ago. Michael Jackson's dressers might have drawn inspiration from Grimani. Matthew thought if he were to dress in Grimani's style he might prefer a more vivid color than black beneath the slashed doublet.

The more things change......

Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna is at the de Young through 12 February.




Related posts on One Finger Typing:
Déjà vu at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna
Hidden Histories
Art as long as history, time beyond memory
Time, History, and Human Forgetting


Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the image of Bernardino Licinio's portrait of Ottaviano Grimani.

Looking backward

This very post is One Finger Typing's two-hundreth since I started the blog in February 2010.

No, a 200th post is not nearly so dramatic as putting a man on the moon, perhaps not even as dramatic as baking a souffle that doesn't fall. But. Let's keep it in context, shall we? This is a blog, not NASA, and not Le Cordon Bleu. It's also the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, which gives one license to turn to matters that are ... less than earthshattering.

Though you can probably peg it short of earthshattering, it's hard to gauge a blog's impact. Who's reading? How carefully? With what result? Bottom line, does anybody really care? For better or worse, the answers to these questions are often a mystery.

Here's what I can tell you: some posts on One Finger Typing get a lot more hits than others. Blogger stats, Google Analytics, Feedburner, and Google Webmaster Tools all point in roughly the same direction on this question (some more directly than others) ... and who am I to question four opaque tools, whose data sources appear to overlap, and that are run by the same disinterested party? Disinterested in my particular blog, I mean.

Coming in at #1, says the most informative of my unimpeachable sources, is Drafting vs. Editing, posted on 18 Nov 2010, a meditation on how a writer (this one) approaches drafting new material as opposed to editing work-in-progress.

You wouldn't think a post like this would attract a lot of attention. I mean, I'm not Stephen King, or a ghost writer for Strunk & White. So what gives? Maybe it's the image included in the post one of Michelangelo's "Prisoners" from the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. In fact, when I look at search terms in Google Analytics, variants of searches for Michelangelo's sculptures, unfinished sculptures, and prisoners account for some of this blog's highest positions in Google Search results. How many of those click-through to read my work (or see images shamelessly appropriated in my post)? More than a few, apparently. On average, visitors spend enough time on the page to suggest most are reading the post, and the bounce rate is respectably low. Hmmmmmm....

Shakespeare, power, theme in literature also finishes in the top-five. There are a lot of people searching for Shakespeare out there on the intertubes, and sometimes they find me. Why is that? When I saw this post's recently-read rate spike as the semester came to a close at the university where I work, the lightbulb clicked. Readers spend more time on this page than on Drafting vs. Editing, and the bounce rate is higher. That could suggest readers on a focused mission. Students. Term papers. Cut and paste. And a content source who doesn't have the brains to charge for his literary musings!

O brave new world...

Here's the thing, though. Between impossible-to-gauge impact and vagaries of page-hit trackers, I'm less inclined to dwell on statistical analysis and wacko theories to explain the numbers; and more interested in reflecting back on a couple of hundred essays that, in better moods, strike me as decently written and, for the most part, better considered than your average Tweet.

(Is that an oxymoron? To call a Tweet well-considered? I suppose if brevity is the soul of wit ....... but, then, Polonius wasn't exactly deep.)

So never mind the numbers, here are a few posts from this blog's first two hundred that make some of my 'best of' lists:

• For a post that came closest to saying something that matters: Making a world where queer kids thrive (Nov 2010)
• Perhaps my broadest meditation on art, politics, and power: Property: thoughts on Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Oct 2010)
• My only blog about Justin Bieber, and I have been made to promise it will be my last: Take a sad song (Sep 2010)
• Most irresistible hit piece on the blogger's own employer: Moral turpitude at the University of California (Jan 2011)
• My most ambitious attempt to explain the politics of everything: Facing things we'd rather weren't so (Mar 2011)
• The post that garnered best comments & most "recommends" when cross-posted on Daily Kos: Paying what things cost (Dec 2011)
• The technology post most likely to make a blogger question the utility of blogging: Rock, Paper, Digital Preservation (March 2010)

If you're a regular reader: thanks for your time and attention. And please feel free to leave more comments. Lots more comments!

If you're just stopping by: welcome, and I hope you enjoy some of the posts linked above. And do leave a comment ...

If you're a search engine bot, cut me a break, okay?

Reconsidering hotel amenities and other overreaching theories

What's a blogger to write the day after Christmas? Hmmmmmm ... I dodged this dilemma last year by taking a holiday during the holidays.

It was so tempting last week to draft a blog full of potshots at idjut Senators of both parties who fantasized that a two month extension of payroll tax relief would look like anything other than inability to govern; and at Republicans in the House who imagined that voting down this pathetic "compromise" was somehow going to come off more heroic than holding their collective noses and punting on real legislation until 2012.

Somehow, that didn't work out for the Party of No, not even in the Wall Street Journal. Trying to hand a hundred sixty million U.S. citizens a tax hike for Christmas? Not a smooth move. Silly, silly elephants...

What theory could possibly explain why "rank-and-file" G.O.P. Representatives would hang that albatross around their own party's neck?

Well, tea party people are a mystery to me, but CNN quotes a GOP source who explains that most members were concerned with the uncertainty caused by just a two-month extension [fair enough] as well as the political benefit the White House could gain in the national dialogue over taxes [wha ... huh? really?].

As SemDem of DailyKos, to whom I owe the CNN link, put it: The House GOP is admitting their big concern is that the middle-class will get a tax cut, and Obama will get credit for it... so let's JUST F- them!!

It's a theory.

But hey, it's still Christmastime, more-or-less, and just because my idea of celebrating on December 25th is to see a movie and go out for Chinese food doesn't mean I'm blind to the merit of dismounting from high horses for one week each year. Minimum, I mean.

So I'd like to take this opportunity to retract a theory of my own. It's a theory I advanced in Decline and fall of hotel amenities, a post I published here on One Finger Typing in late August.

In that post, having recently stayed at a series of hotels that, across the board, provided guests with shampoo in bottles that are virtually guaranteed to leak in your luggage if you dare take them home, I theorized that cheap shampoo bottles might well be a secret plot on the part of a hotel industry determined to shore up its bottom line by any means necessary ... that hotel management types put their heads together at some hotel management type conclave, and figure[d] out that flimsier bottles would stanch the flow of amenities (and profits) from their properties.

It was a theory, okay?

However.

I'm here today to tell you, mea culpa, that my sample size was, well, a little on the anemic side. Since August, I've stayed in several more hotels, some of them downmarket, one of them featuring $600 rack rates on the back of the door (no, of course I didn't pay that much). In point of fact, the mix of shampoo bottle quality at these hotels was ... mixed. The most downmarket among them provided single-serve, hard-to-tear-open envelopes of astringent shampoo, and nary a drop of conditioner. The place with the $600 rack rate offered well-constructed bottles, with secure screw-tops that would easily survive a trip home in a traveler's luggage.

So much for late-summer's conspiratorial theorizing.

It's a big world out there, no? I guess you can't always tell Why Stuff Happens.

So here's to chillaxin' through the last week of 2011. And to hopes that the federal government will come back fresh and rested in 2012, ready to do the jobs we elected them to do.

Yeah, right......

Latkes!

Yes, indeed, it's Chanukah, or Hanukkah, or Chanukkah, or Chanuka, depending how you Romanize the Hebrew. Last night was the second of eight, and my partner and I declared the evening Latkes for Dinner night.

Latkes are potato pancakes, and a traditional food for celebrants of Chanukah. While variants abound, the basic ingredients are, well, basic: grated potatoes, eggs, flour, and grated onion. Salt and pepper, natch. Fry 'em up in a fry pan with not too much oil but not too little. Serve them with apple sauce, or sour cream, or both. Bacon? Ahhhhh .... probably not.

A colleague came by my desk earlier this month and asked me how I make latkes. His daughter (ten years old, or thereabouts) is an enthusiastic cook and a vegetarian, and she wanted to give latkes a whirl. 'Tis the season, and all that. My colleague, R--, can't summon up latkes from his own cultural background, so he asked my advice.

Sitting at my desk, thinking technology thoughts, I wasn't expecting the question. I reeled off what I remembered off the top of a head that was immersed in wikis and code repositories and enterprise service busses. When I went home, I looked up a recipe for latkes from a book my grandma once gave me and realized I'd forgotten a few key elements (like the grated onion -- oy!), so I brought the book in the next day and photocopied the recipe for R--.

But I never actually use the recipe.

Any residual tendency to use recipes for savory dishes was knocked out of me by a stint as a cook some twenty years ago, the one I mentioned last week in Changing careers. We didn't serve latkes per se at Oliveto, a restaurant here in the East Bay that focused then and still on northern Italian cuisine. We did occasionally serve potato pancake variants, perhaps serving them with smoked salmon and creme fraiche and chives. Mmmmmmmmmm... But I was saying: cooking with your senses -- touch, smell, taste, vision -- it's a principle, a habit, an abiding joy, actually. It sticks with you.

(For the record, I do tend to closely follow recipes for pastry, bread, cakes, and so forth. Baking is fussier than cooking savory dishes, I prefer to hedge my bets.)

So when I came home yesterday evening and started to prepare latkes I made them the way my grandma used to describe most anything she taught me to cook: a few of these, some of those, a smidgen of the other, season, pan fry, serve. However. I did pay attention to what I was cooking by instinct ... expressly so that I could share with you, my faithful readers, Steve's Own Latke Recipe.

To wit:

The Ingredients

3 russet potatoes, medium size
1/2 of a red onion, medium size
3 eggs, large
4 heaping tablespoons flour
salt & pepper to taste
cooking oil, for frying

The Prep

Peel and grate the potatoes and the half-onion into a large steel bowl. The grated root vegetables will be pretty wet, so you want to squeeze out the water, then spread them on a towel (I use a clean dishtowel) and roll it up tight, pressing and squeezing to force the water out of the vegetables and into the towel. Then return the potatoes and onion to the bowl.

(You're going to need to wash that towel now, by the way. You've already added the starch.)

Next, crack the eggs and mix them in with a spoon. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture, one spoonful at a time, mixing in-between. Add salt and pepper to taste. I'm pretty generous with both. No, I'm sorry, I can't really be more precise than that.

Cooking 'em up

Heat a pan. I use a non-stick, 12" frying pan. Once the pan is hot, add oil. I use canola oil; olive oil tastes nice, yes, but its smoking point is pretty low so it's not a great choice for frying, not even in a pan. How much oil should you use? Enough to get the whole surface of the cooking pan slick -- more than a film, less than a pool. When you put the latkes in the pan, you want them to kind of slide around easily, to skate on the oil slick as it were, but not to be sunk in a pool of cooking oil, not even a shallow one. Or maybe you're looking for something more like deep-fried? Look, it's cooking, there's room for judgment calls.

Let the oil get hot, but don't let it smoke.

Form pancakes with your hands. Yes, it's messy. Get into it! Six big latkes or perhaps eight or ten smaller ones can be had from the ingredient quantities listed above (check out the photo). I cooked up two batches of three latkes each, and put the first ones on a paper-towel lined pizza pan in the oven to stay warm while I cooked the second batch. You want to let the latkes get nice and crispy on one side, then turn them over. You'll see the grated potato turning decidedly brown as the time to turn them approaches. It's okay to peek to check for doneness. After flipping the latkes the 2nd side will cook faster than the first.

The meal

I'm not big on sour cream, but don't let that stop you. Apple sauce is the perfect accompaniment to latkes in my book.

Enjoy! Even if you don't celebrate Chanukah, or have a preferred spelling of the word.