mâche rosette…

Mâche is unique among salad greens: it’s the only one I’ve found that I actually like. With a sweet, nutty flavor, mâche looks like arugula but lacks the bitter aftertaste. And mâche grows in cute little rosettes (clusters of little green leaves).

Also called ‘lamb’s lettuce’ (“which may be a reference to the fact that it tastes best during the spring lambing season,” says WiseGeek.com) and even ‘corn salad’ (despite having no relation to corn), mâche (Valerianella locusta) has been cultivated in France since the Renaissance and in the last decade has been grown in California; it’s now becoming fashionable among foodies, according to NPR. I hadn’t even heard of mâche until about a year ago, but you can find it at many health food stores and even the local supermarket in my neighborhood in Queens now carries it (somewhat irregularly).

Here’s the great thing about mâche: it’s very low in calories, has no fat, has a wonderful taste, and is loaded with vitamin B9 (folic acid) and omega-3 fatty acids (a 4-oz. serving has 160 mg of vitamin B9 and more than 250 mg of omega-3s). Not only can it help you lose weight, by buying organic mâche, you’re helping the environment by encouraging land to be set aside for cultivation of this delicate green rather than for the raising of beef cattle or the construction of new exurban housing developments.

Pauline’s mâche salad:

70 grams (about 2.5 oz.) of mâche
half a cucumber
a dozen steamed broccoli florets
Port Salut or Emmentaler cheese or tofu cheese substitute
a handful of raw walnuts or almonds
a half a handful of raw organic Austrian pumpkin seeds or raw sunflower seeds
a sprinkling of parmesan cheese or soy-based parmesan cheese substitute
a tablespoon or two of extra virgin cold pressed olive oil

optional:

one organic yellow bell pepper (sliced)

on the side:

spelt flatbread or breadsticks
organic baby carrots
organic tomato
hojicha roasted green tea or Fujian white tea

Pauline’s mâche salad

Bon appetit et vive la mâche~!

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Henry David Thoreau might well have been thinking of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist when he wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” While Thoreau’s “Walden” long predates Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” short story and the Ang Lee film based on it, the transcendentalist philosopher’s magnum opus remains as relevant today as was published in 1854.

Much of the comment about the film, just released on DVD, has focused on its transgressive love story. But if “Brokeback” speaks powerfully to gay and non-gay audiences alike, it is because the film not only articulates the tragedy of true love constrained and ultimately defeated by homophobia, but also speaks to the tragedy of life not truly lived.

Thoreau could have been describing the “Brokeback” Wyoming of the 1960s when he wrote, “The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!”

Jack attempts to persuade Ennis to climb out of the rut of heteronormative expectations in rural Wyoming, but Ennis is traumatized by a childhood episode in which his father took him and his brother to see a dead gay man who was tortured and beaten to death for having the temerity to live openly with another man.

So Ennis’ fear of violence is a realistic one. But in choosing to live his life from a script written by someone else, Ennis is false to himself and to everyone else—and above all, to the one person who loves him for who he truly is. In their final encounter, Jack confronts Ennis with the desperately sad truth that they have wasted their lives in outward conformity and secret transgression. Ennis has settled for mere existence, wasting years in a loveless marriage, unable to overcome his fears. The price of outward conformity to a rigid code of heteronormativity is a slow inward death for both of them.

Canonical philosophy may have little appeal to most people, whether LGBT or otherwise. But at its most practical, philosophy poses basic questions that we all face as human beings: What is life and how shall we live it? In “Walden,” Thoreau offers this answer: “I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

What is that “moonlight amid the mountains” of which Thoreau speaks? It is the sheer exhilaration of the authentic life lived fully in the integrity of one’s own truest self. Ennis and Jack glimpse the literal moonlight amid the mountains when they live on Brokeback and later return to it on their periodic “fishing trips.” But only Jack can see the metaphorical moonlight of the authentic life that offers itself to them before they descend from the mountain into the dreary desperation of straight conformity and loveless marriage. Thoreau could well have been describing Jack in the passage in “Walden” in which he famously declared: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

The authentic life is there for the living, and the deepest tragedy of “Brokeback Mountain” is Ennis’s refusal to accept Jack’s invitation to live it. Regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, anyone seeking to live an authentic life need look no further than the conclusion from “Walden” for guidance:

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,  and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Pauline Park is a member of the Philosophy Forum, a discussion group that meets the second and fourth Sat of each month at The LGBT Center, 208 W 13th St. This article originally appeared in the New York Blade on 17 April 2006; the Blade is now defunct.

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One of my favorite places on earth: Frying Pan Creek in Mt. Rainier National Park…

Awhile back, a friend of mine suggested I do ’25 Things’ on Facebook, but I was a little reluctant to do that application on Facebook (too much like a chain letter), so I’m doing it my own way, here on my own site. So here are 25 things you may not have known about me:

1)  My favorite food: chocolate. My least favorite foods: Brussel sprouts (despite having lived in Brussels), olives (even though I love olive oil). My favorite cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, French, Italian.

2) My favorite color to wear: fire engine red. The color I will not wear: orange (unless I suddenly and unexpectedly become a school crossing guard).

3) Schools I’ve attended: South Clement Ave. School, Fritsche Jr. High School, Bay View High School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the London School of Economics & Political Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school of life.

4) My favorite composer to listen to: Mozart. My favorite operas: “Die Zauberflöte” and “Così Fan Tutte.” My favorite composers to play: Bach, Chopin, Debussy. My favorite composers to sing: Handel, Schubert, Schumann. My least favorite composers: Bruckner, Schoenberg, Shostakovich. My favorite sopranos: Bidu Sayao, Anneliese Rothenberger, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Angeles, Jessye Norman, Felicity Lott, Natalie Dessay, Yvonne Kenny, Karita Mattila. Favorite mezzo-sopranos: Conchita Supervia, Christa Ludwig, Marilyn Horne, Olga Borodina, Cecilia Bartoli, Elina Garanča, Joyce DiDonato. Favorite contraltos: Kathleen Ferrier, Marian Anderson. Favorite countertenors: David Daniels, Andreas Scholl. Favorite tenors: Enrico Caruso, Jussi Bjoerling, Tito Schipa, Juan Diego Flores. Favorite baritones: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Bryn Terfel. Favorite basses: Feodor Chaliapin, Matti Talvela.

5) My favorite jazz singer: Ella Fitzgerald (esp. the Cole Porter & Gershwin songbooks). My favorite jazz standard: “Stardust” (Hoagy Carmichael). The only non-Western music that I’ve studied: Javanese gamelan. My favorite non-Western musical tradition: Balinese gamelan. My favorite Balinese gamelan musical genre: gamelan gong kebyar. My favorite Balinese gamelan dance genre: legong.

6) My favorite folk music: Celtic. My favorite folk songs: “Péarla an Bhrollaigh Bháin” (The Snowy Breasted Pearl), “Eamon An Chnuic” (Edmond of the Hill), “Snieu, Queeyl, Snieu” (Spin, Wheel, Spin – Manx spinning song) “Arrane Ny Vlieaun” (Manx milking song).

7) The songs I want sung at my memorial service: “Bist du bei mir” (Bach), “Litanei” (Schubert), “Beim Schlafengehen” (from the Vier Letze Lieder of Richard Strauss).

8) The work of literature (other than the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare) that I’ve read and re-read more often than any other : “The Lord of the Rings” (Tolkien).

9) My favorite poets: William Blake and John Keats (English), Joseph von Eichendorff (German), Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine (French).

10) My biggest addiction: books (buying, reading, keeping, giving). My favorite bookstore: The Strand on Broadway & E. 12th St. in Manhattan.

11) The languages that I speak: only French, really (other than English, of course); but I used to speak German quite well and I’ve also studied Italian. I took a short course in (Mandarin) Chinese and can read Pinyin and Wade-Giles. I also took a semester of Swedish (Jag studerarde svenska). I’m also reading “Beowulf” in a dual Old English (Anglo-Saxon)/contemporary English language edition (translation by Seamus Heaney). The language I’d most like to be able to speak (and am most expected to speak) but can’t: Korean — but I am trying to learn hangul (the Korean alphabet). The language that would be most useful for me to learn: Spanish. The languages that I find the most intriguing: Old English, Norwegian, Icelandic, Malagasy. My favorite dictum about languages: “Il faut parler français à ses amis, italian à ses amants, allemand à son cheval et espagnol au Dieu” (Emperor Charles V).

12) My favorite queen: Elizabeth Tudor. My least favorite (control) queen: Mike Bloomberg. The members of the British royal family I’ve seen in person: Charles, Prince of Wales (just once, by chance), Elizabeth II (riding in the Irish state coach to the state opening of parliament), the Princess Alexandra.

13) My least favorite number: 13. The numbers I like to think are lucky: 7, 11, 77.

14) The countries I’d most like to visit but haven’t yet: Iceland, Norway. The most poorest and most unusual country I’ve visited: Romania. My favorite county in Romania: Maramures. The most intriguing country that I probably won’t get to: Madagascar. The most romantic city I’ve ever visited: Venice. The city I’d most like to visit but haven’t (yet): Vienna.

15) The countries I’ve lived in: Korea, US, UK, Belgium, France, Germany. The country I don’t remember living in: Korea (I left when I was eight months old). The most annoying question about a country I’ve lived (or never lived) in: “Are you from North or South Korea…?”

16) The cities I’ve lived in: Seoul, Milwaukee, Madison, London, Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Berlin, Regensburg, Brussels, Paris, New York. The most exciting cities I’ve lived in: London, New York. The least exciting city I’ve lived in: Champaign-Urbana. The most romantic city I’ve lived in: Paris. The most medieval city I’ve lived in: Regensburg. The most livable city I’ve lived in: Madison.

17) The smallest domicile I’ve lived in: a bedsit in Knightsbridge (London) that was the size of a large walk-in closet. The most unusual domicile I’ve lived in: Der Goldener Turm (the Golden Tower), a 12-century medieval tower in Regensburg (I lived in the renovated part of the building that dates from 1527).

18) The best health habits I’ve gotten into: reducing my consumption of refined sugar and saturated fat, using raw blue agave nectar as a sugar substitute, eating mache (a French salad green sometimes known as ‘corn salad’ or ‘lamb’s lettuce’), abjuring bottled water in favor of double-filtered water (tap filter + pitcher filter), walking instead of driving, climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator. Favorite source of animal protein: eggs (non-hormonal and certified humane, from cage-free hens).

19) My favorite artists: Jan Van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Antoine Watteau, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai. My favorite architects: Louis Le Vau, Andrea Palladio, John Nash, Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei.

20) The head of government I least admire whom I’ve seen in person: Margaret Thatcher, who I saw going into Westminster Abbey to attend the memorial service for Rab Butler while I was living in London. The president I most admire: Abraham Lincoln. The worst presidents in history: George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan. Worst vice-presidents in history: Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle. The presidents I found the most disappointing: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. The president I feel most sorry for: William Henry Harrison. The only president I’ve seen in person: Richard von Weiszäcker, president of the Federal Republic of Germany (whom I saw on the day of German reunification, 2 October 1990).

21) The most significant moment in world history that I’ve participated in: the formal reunification of Germany in October 1990; I was in the crowd of 3 million people in the Tiergarten as the president and the chancellor rang in the new ‘deutsche Einheit’ (German unity).

22) My most significant achievement: leading the campaign for enactment of the New York City transgender rights law (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002 in April 2002). The personal achievements that took the longest to accomplish: getting a Ph.D. (five and-a-half years); coming out as an openly transgendered woman (36 years).

23) The organizations that I’ve co-founded: Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) (1994), Queens Pride House (1997), Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY) (1997), the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) (2001), the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) (2002). The organization I will not give money to: the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

24) My favorite philosopher: Zhuangzi (The Seven Inner Chapters). My least favorite philosopher: Heidegger (a boring Nazi windbag). The denomination I grew up in: the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The denomination I now belong to: Unitarian Universalism (my congregation is All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan). The religious habit I find most annoying: door-to-door proselytizing by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The religious prejudice I find most disturbing: Islamophobia. Religious figures I most admire: Mohandas K. Gandhi (the Mahatma), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Forrest Church. Religious figures I least admire: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Muqtada al-Sadr.

25) The one thing I won’t be doing anytime soon: 25 Things on Facebook.

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Mt. Rainier

When I first heard about “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” — the new documentary by Ken Burns that is airing this week on PBS — I must admit I was skeptical, wondering if Burns could do for our national parks what he did for the Civil War.

Oh, me of little faith~! Burns has done it again. The master of the slow-moving documentary has managed to make what could have been a bore into a compelling story, beautifully told. There is drama here not only in the extraordinary beauty of the landscape but in the story of the establishment and development of the park system.

Up until August of 2009, I had never set foot in a national park. I use the phrase ‘set foot’ quite deliberately, because the Burns documentary did make me remember that I had in fact passed through a national park in my youth, when my mother and brother took the train from Milwaukee to Seattle and then onto Vancouver, passing briefly through Glacier National Park in Montana.

On August 16 of this year, I made my first real visit to a national park, when I went to Mount Rainier National Park. I had just finished attending the first national conference of the first national organization for queer APIs — the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA) — in Seattle.

While at the NQAPIA conference, I discovered that two very new friends whom I’d met there were planning on driving up to Mount Rainier, and they were happy to have the company, and so we set out from Seattle to drive down to ‘the mountain,’ as Seattleites call it.

When the sky is clear and Seattleites can see Mount Rainier, they say, “The mountain is out.” And the mountain is an impressive sight even from the city, a hundred miles away. But from Sunrise Point within the park, the sight of Mount Rainier — rising majestically 14,410 feet above sea level — is truly breathtaking.

The three of us visited Mount Rainier National Park one hundred years after its establishment in 1899. “In the national parks, all are just Americans,” Robert Sterling Yard is quoted in the Ken Burns documentary as saying. And indeed, here three queer APIs from big cities thousands of miles away could experience the wonder of nature just like everyone else.

“Designed by God to be protected forever” is what Horace Albright — who Stephen Mather founded the National Park Service — said of the Grand Tetons; how equally apt is that dictum when applied to Mount Rainier~! How fortunate we are indeed that the ‘episodically active’ volcano and the entire 235,625 acres (368 square miles) of the park has been preserved for future generations.

Frying Pan Creek

But the high point — figuratively, if not literally — of the trip for me was the drive through Frying Pan Creek, where we got out to stand on the little bridge that crosses the little sliver of a creek. The extraordinary beauty of that creek and the little valley surrounding it reminded me of my trip to Romania in 2005. Living in the largest city in the United States, so far from nature, I found this trip to be exactly what I was hoping it would be — salve for the soul. So go visit a national park when you get the chance — and consider how vitally important it is that our national parks be preserved from rapacious commercial interests forever.

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