Excellent essays.

As recommended to me by earlymorningair.

[Neville] is, if you will, Harry's shadow--the person Harry is always afraid he really is, that Dudley and his parents always told Harry he was: clumsy, awkward, stupid [but] Neville is actually every inch the hero. [...] Ginny starts out, similarly, as the Ron that Ron would hate to be--in the second book she seems lost, emotional, clingy and dependent. [...] But Ginny has continued to grow--no longer simply a girl in reaction to her own emotion, but someone with every bit as much courage as any of her brothers, a sense of humor to match the twins, and the spirit to challenge Harry directly--something even Ron doesn't do.
[...]
Freud and Jung would say that the thing you're afraid of is the thing you buried, the thing you secretly want to do. But now we have Loony Lovegood, who is Hermione's physical photo-negative (blonde fluffy hair instead of brown), who is, like Hermione, brainy, if in an entirely different way, and who embodies all of the things Hermione most lacks: intuition and faith. Not big-F Faith, [...] But little-f faith in the possibility of the world operating on laws that transcend the limits of mere physics, chemistry and biology.
"The Expansion of the Core Trio", antosha_c in hp_essays.


[M]ore importantly, "bad faith" (or mauvaise foi in modern French) has a very specific meaning in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Bad faith is a form of self-deception. To live in bad faith is to live as if you have no choice in the way you behave; it is to adopt a role and live your life according to that role regardless of your own feelings or desires. It is, most crucially, an abandonment of responsibility. Instead of acknowledging your freedom and your ability to act spontaneously of your own will, you regard yourself as a mere thing, a tool of fate; you negate your freedom and hence your humanity. Every time a person says "I have no choice," that person is living in bad faith.
[...]
[Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] is not the beginning of Draco's bad faith, however, but the inevitable result of a life lived with nothing but bad faith.

The great Elkins once opined on HP4GU that Draco (in the first four books) frequently shows signs of mental instability. As she remarks in that excellent essay, "[this instability] often seems to be at its most pronounced when he is also on his very worst (and most "Junior Death Eater-ish") behavior." To me it seems that these signs of stress -- glittering eyes, flushed cheeks, stammering, his expression quivering -- are not indicative of underlying mental instability, but rather of Draco's consciousness of a rift between what he feels he ought to be thinking and feeling and what he really is thinking and feeling -- a rift, that is, between his authentic self and the role he has decided to play.
"Dragon of Bad Faith: Draco Malfoy and Existentialism", puritybrown in hp_essays.

Lentil curry

I made a lentil curry last night. I had difficulty finding a recipe (not that I looked too hard), because even Charmaine Solomon let me down - her Complete Asian Cookbook (a culinary bible in many Australian homes) didn't have a recipe. So I adapted her recipe for "Minced meat and split pea curry". Recipe below.

In a sidenote, I've just found out via her website that Charmaine has a Complete Vegetarian Cookbook! I'll have to see if I can find a copy somewhere!

Lentil Curry
Ingredients
250g green lentils
oil or ghee
2 medium onions, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, ditto (or two tsp of crushed garlic)
1 tsp fresh ginger, finely chopped (or 1 tsp crushed ginger)
1 tsp turmuric
About 1/4 tsp chilli (or 1/2 tsp chilli powder)
1 tbsp fresh coriander or mint, chopped
4 small ripe tomatoes, chopped
handful of beans, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
2 tsp salt (I just used a generous sprinkle)
2 1/2 cups boiling water
2 tsp garam masala

Note for non-Australian cooks
Australian measures, as I use them, are as follows: a cup is 250mL, a tbsp is 20mL, a tsp is 5mL.

Method
Wash the lentils thoroughly and soak them in boiling water. Put aside.
Heat the oil and cook the onions, garlic and ginger until the onion is transparent.
Add turmuric, chilli (to taste - I've given a very low estimate), coriander, tomatoes, beans, zucchini and salt.
Stir over medium heat for a few minutes. Drain the lentils and add to the pot with the 2 1/2 cups of water.
Cook for about 30-40 minutes or until the lentils are cooked. They should still retain their shape, and not form a porridge as they do in dhal.
Stir through the garam masala thoroughly and serve with steamed rice.

Other vegetables could be substituted for the beans and zucchini - eggplant would work well. The tomatoes are part of the base flavour of the curry, however, and should be retained.

It's a bubbling up of links.

Sub Rosa, a correspondence by prof_pangaea

An amazing piece of Sherlock Holmes fiction.

MH
REMEMBER ATLANTIS SUMMER 63 STOP RECENT REPORTS OF MY WELLBEING EXAGGERATED STOP NEED FUNDS STOP

== CAINE :::

From the Notes of Senior Librarian Vo

Because if you're not reading gearworld yet, you ought to be. Yes, especially you, barrington.

Hickory dickory dock
The mouse got stuck in the clock
After several generations of inbreeding,
his descendants became increasingly strange
and began to believe that the clock was the entire world
and anything outside it an illusion

A book I desperately want - My Own Fairy Book, by Andrew Lang.

I had a copy of one of the Fairy Books - the pink one, I think it was, and let it go through my hands. I am a fool. Fool! I have got cheap editions of Lang's Arthur myths and Arabian nights myths. I really want this one. Lang references Allan Quatermain! (I really have to track down the Quatermain books and read those, too. Damn you, Moore.)

Dinosaurs may have had feathers!

The five-year-old future palaeontologist in me just squees about this.