Peeking into the rock

My friend Glen Fitch decided I needed to read Master and Margarita so he ordered it for me and I regret that because it's a nice hardcover edition and it couldn't have been cheap but...I didn't last fifteen pages. I am allergic to stories where the Devil shows up to caper around and claim that whoever the author doesn't like is in cahoots with him. And I just didn't like it as a block of stuff to read. Not much of an Ambrose Bierce fan either, which it reminds me of. When it comes to satire, I kind of like stuff more on the line of The Good Soldier Schweik (or Švejk) or Iceland's Bell (as difficult as that can be to read: it's pretty grim).

What I bought myself is an immense tome, part cookbook and part social, ecological, and economic history: A Mediterranean Feast by Clifford A. Wright. I love it. I'm on the second pass. The first pass I read the parts I thought would be most interesting first--it's really immense and I was a bit daunted--and when I had read all of the book in that piecemeal way I started again at the beginning. You can probably tell I love it. I got it at the used bookstore for $7.50! That's downright amazing. I already had what I think is a fix-up of notes he took while researching the book (though I don't know this for sure), Mediterranean Vegetables. That one is in encyclopedic form and it drives me crazy because it is so raw and unedited and full of errors I can catch (the pointless little errors that arise when you're doing a large work very fast) but it's also magnificent and lots of fun to reread and I do reread it frequently. The bad editing made me worry about A Mediterranean Feast but I've only found a couple of that kind of errors in it so it's more relaxing to read. His main premise is that historically the Mediterranean was anything but a feast, and it's the poverty of the land and people that drove history in such a way that it seems to be the center of a lush life now.

It's interesting how shallow the Mediterranean food tradition is. I've already wondered foir a long time what the food was like there before tomatoes--it seems it was completely, utterly different. I would have thought that tomatoes would have pushed out other fruits in traditional sauces and it seems like that is not the case. People weren't eating the same sauces with plums or something in the tomato position. And while durum wheat and dry pasta has been known in the Mediterranean for centuries, it wasn't such a popular thing in Italy and elsewhere until the nineteenth century.And so on.

He looks at the cooking history of Spain, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia, with peeks at other places--he picks these five because of the documentation that exists and their importance at various times in the history. He includes a little information about classical Greece and Rome, but there's not as much information that far bacl and the story really gets cooking in the thirteenth century an on. The sixteenth century is a big focus. The book is arranged according to topics, and each region is visited in each topic, and their interrelationships are heavily explored too.

I heartily recommend the book, and now I have a hunger for similar books about other places.  The food I've been most interested in these days is Central/Eastern European and Western/Central Asia, and I enjoyed reading Please to the Table, about Russian cooking, but it's not anything like as deep or scholarly as A Mediterranean Feast. Any suggestions? Mostly for things I can get from the library...

On another front: I bought my membership to FOGCon. There is a story behind this I'll tell later.

Still another front: Zluta Zluta Zluta all the time. If it was up to her, we'd be walking ten miles a day. She is almost a year old and has become markedly mellower but she's still excitable and high energy and she demands something every forty-five minutes to an hour and a half.

Oh, and I'm like a day or two away from having the semi-final draft of The Drummer Boy ready for beta readers. If you were thinking of being one of them, contact me. I'm actually finishing off another few of my bagatelles also, so that I have something to do when I have to stop and think about the main project.

I have more evidence that Affordable Care is an imperfect system and we really need single payer, but I'll give that its own post.

So downstairs I am still plodding through The Island of the Day Before: I have 148 pages left. The experience is mixed but it does reassure me about a couple of things. Like the idea that there is an appropriate time and place for huge great lumps of information. And the idea that a story doesn't have to live right under the skin of the main character, and that the narration and the point of view do not have to be one and the same. Or that there doesn't have to be just the one point of view in the narration.

So there's that.

Upstairs I am zooming through The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin. This morning I suddenly realized what's going on. It's like--you're in a Zelazny type of world, but seeing it from the point of view of the populace who have to put up with the grandstanding bastards Zelazny writes about so entertainingly. This is the second book of a trilogy but you know how libraries are.


On another front: Zluta's been sleeping today, which probably bodes ill for later or for tomorrow, but I've been pretty good about getting work done in the meantime. I wrote the bit where Yanek reaps several fields of wheat in literally no time for reasons he doesn't understand, and now I'm about to write the part where he raises the dead. Well, I wrote the bridge to it once, and wiped it, because the first way I wrote it I thought he was going to look at where he's ended up and know why he was there, but once I saw that on the screen I decided it would be more consistent and more enjoyable to write if he is surprised.

Yesterday my writing was a bit interrupted by the sudden need to know at least something more than I do about using a sickle and binding wheat sheafs without a combine. I was unable to find very much but I'm hoping to find at some point a beta reader who does know about pre-in dustrial and early industrial agriculture. I almost had a combine in that field, but after I did some research and laid out the logistics I decided it was better not to. The analogous era in our world had a complete mishmash of automated and non-automated harvest techniques. Even the tools could be bought from modern factories or cobbled together by your uncle.

So Tuesday at physical therapy I guess I kind of messed up. At the time it didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong, and on Wednesday when I started to pay for it I didn't realize at first what was wrong, but I put the pieces together yesterday and I'm pretty sure that's it.

There's a machine where you rest your ankle on a cylindrical cushion attached to a lever and bend your leg against it: the lever is coupled with a weight so that it resists your effort. It is supposed to exercise hamstrings and quads. This week I had both legs on it, which seemed like a great idea because the unoperated one (the right one) has been seeming kind of paltry and it seems like it would behoove me to beef it up a little before it gets operated on. I kind of egged on the physical therapist to put a bit more weight on them and I went at it with all my strength a wee bit longer than he said to. It felt fine. I was only feeling a bit challenged. I wasn't struggling or doing anything overtly stupid.

But since Wednesday I've barely been able to walk at all. My left leg is stiff and a wee bit achy, like you'd expect from overdoing it a tad, but the right leg had some sharp pains. Oh, and the left had a couple of sharp pangs near the knee at isolated times, which freaked me out, but they didn't persist or worsen so I'm willing to call them just a thing. But the right had sharp pains in the upper muscles and it was all I could do to walk the dog halfway around the block. Today we were able to go for a whole block walk in the morning, which was good for her, because she came home and slept like a dog ought to, but it's a good thing I have Keith to take her for an evening walk, because I don't have another walk in me. Especially since I will go to dancing. If I have to sit and tap my toes like the week before last, so be it.

Today was therefore almost a wash. I got the yard watered, the dog walked and exercised with windfall apples, and the laundry washed, hung, brought in, and put away, but otherwise I lay on my bed and snored.And I had hit a nice rhythm with the note-taking and preliminary editing the last few days, too. I'll see if I can do anything tonight before and after dancing. What I've been doing while snoring? collecting simspoints, sorry to say. If you click the little button and let the little ad run while you do other things, you get five points to spend on download content. The download content goes on sale regularly too, so I've been accumulating community lots for my sims to go to. Also lots of points which I will eventually spend on worlds for my sims to live in. I know. Ridiculous. But most people have some ridiculous hobby in which someone exploits them. I figure this is EA swindling the ad companies, because they must know that there's no way that the serious points miners are actually watching those ads over and over again. All that matters is the click, though. Oh probably the ad companies know what's going on, so it's mostly Northern California Honda, SpeeDee Oil Change, etc., that are being swindled.

for some reason I'm rereading Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, in a kind of idiotic translation, and finding that (1) I didn't remember much in it and (2) if I had I might not have started rereading it. And (3) Turgenev most certainly didn't do any math when he was writing this, because nobody's ages make sense whatever. He has also stacked the deck in every respect. I'm about to read a duel scene and I don't want to.

I reread LeGuin's The Dispossessed. This is a title that one cannot spell unless one is very lucky in grabbing Scrabble tiles, and also it is a word that it is hard to stop spelling: dissposssesssesssed. It's really fascinating to see what kind of ancient things she kept in -- slide rules, for example. But when she wrote it slide rules were the quick and easy thing for calculating and they were ubiquitous. My mother taught every kid in the neighborhood to use them.

The book is a product of its times in many ways. For a niggly little detail: it';s been a while since you could use the word "libertarian" interchangably with "anarchist."

I had forgotten a lot of the plot from just before Shevek slips his keepers, so in a way it was almost like reading it anew.  I had some quarrels with some parts, but generally I still adore it. Also I kept wondering how LeGuin keeps getting away with just plonking so much opinionated unblinking expository downright communism right there in the middle of her books. Because if she can do it...

Also, I just love Anarres. No, I don't mean I think it's the right way to run a society, I mean I love it as a setting and I appreciate its good points and I feel for the people affected by its bad points.

Also I tried reading Impostor by Valerie Freireich because it was on my shelves and I didn't remember reading it before and I thought I remembered enjoying something else of hers. I probably don't remember it because it's unreadable. The writing is fine and I'd be happy to look at something else of hers, but the story is gross, and the premise is appalling. Why is it that in all our fine imaginings of spacefaring peoples, every culture group gets to evolve and split and mutate into a jillion new things with new jargon and behaviors, but if we include a culture based on somebody's idea of what Islam is, nothing nothing nothing ever changes from the eighteenth-century stereotype of the royal harem structure? It's gotten to where if there's an Arabic name or word in the early pages of a book I am suffused with dread. If you have any suggestions for Islamic-world secular science fiction or fantasy not involving any goddamned royalty or harems let me know because boy I will need a palate cleanser even though I didn't read more than ten pages of this nonsense.

Went to the library and I got Closely Watched Trains (the very very short book by Bohumil Hrabal, not the movie made from it--every Czech-language film and sound recording at the library has been checked out consistently every time I have been there since 2007 at least), which I haven't started yet, and Karel Čapek's weird collection of crime-themed short stories Tales from Two Pockets. I also got a terrible over-produced Greek Cookbook and The Best of Croatian Cooking, the second cookbook in that series I've read. And also a book I'm unlikely to like, but which I ga ve a chance because I have never heard of it or the author: The Usurper's Crown by Sarah Zettel. I say I'm unlikely to like it because it's just not my kind of thing, I think: a fantasy in which a normal person is really royal in another dimension? Maybe? But I'm feeling generous with my attention.

Karel Čapek puzzles the hell out of me. He distributes so oddly, you know? Like--he's generally considered to be kind of left-wing because of whose side he seems to take in RUR and The War of the Newts. So that interests me. I can see some rolling eyes, like it's not legitimate for me to seek out writers who are left-wing. The hell with that. If somebody can be more interested in writers because they have an engineering background, or a military background, or they used to be a cowboy, I can me more interested in writers with a more generally left-wing world view.

But see the interesting thing to me is that if I read writers who are "left-wing" in some different political, economic, cultural and ethnic contexts--all the things that history brings to bear on a person (and I have reasons for listing cultural and thnic contexts as separate items)--I'm not coming up with a mass of homogeneous Party Line.Čapek, for example. Okay, first of all, he doesn't map well on the sexist-feminist axis. That's interesting. Because he's got these places where he's saying women get a raw deal and maybe ought to have more power over themselves, and these other places wherre he's hardly noticing that women are human at all .Sometimes in the same thought.

But it's the crime stories themselves that are the most puzzling. I was going to complain here about how he constructs his stories so that there's never any question that the suspect is guilty, that he deserves the rough treatment he gets from the police, etc. etc. But then when I tried to retell any of the stories I've read so far, I kept wondering about the corrolary: because the corollary doesn't add up the way you're expecting it to.

The corollary of "the criminals are all guilty and the police are always correct about who is the relevant criminal this time" would be, in a modern story, either "the police are heroes looking out for the good of the community" or "the police are also guilty and corrupt." But that's not it here. The police are not corrupt in these stories, in that they're not on the take and they're not persecuting innocent people. They're not heroes either. In these stories they're correct about their guesses because it's they're job to be, they're unkind because they don't have any special reason to be kind, and every damned thing I try to come up with to talk about them just falls away to smoke as I try to say it.These police are completely unlike the police in modern-day US. They're prejudiced, but their prejudice is on class lines and along the lines of behavior norms. A government official has decided that the secret documents in his possession were stolen byt the Jewish businessman down the street, but the policeman ignores his anti-Semitic tirade and goes about tracking down the habitual housebreaker he's pagged for the method of entry. But he doesn't challenge the man's prejudice: it's none of his business.

Time and again the break in the case comes from a moment of kindness from the cop of anxillary detective to the fugitive. It just makes him break and confess.Another thing that Čapek emphasizes is understanding. One of the stories has a man with a long criminal history die and arrived in heaven to be judged. This is done by three departed judges: they call God to be the one witness, because he sees and knows everything. God says he knows too much to judge.  God relates the events of the fellow's life, and the judges sentence him to hell. Nope, you thought the story was going to be about how understanding leads to mercy and redemption, but no. God's just doing his job. That doesn't include reprieve.

These stories are almost a hundred years old and they follow a pattern of story telling that is qjuite different from modern stories. Some of them are set in Prague and I am anjoying recognizing names of places I have been to.

So Tanith Lee died and I was at the library so I got The Lords of Darkness.

Is it allowable that I think it's kind of appalling?

Not in the good way, alas.

Last week I read Lisa Goldstein's Summer King, Winter Fool and Noriko Ogiwara's Dragon Sword and Wind Child. I attempted to read Microcosm by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, supposedly a "portrait" of the Polish city Wrocław, and started Echoes in Time by Andre Norton and Sherwood Smith.

Both the books I finished were nice little amusements. They have stories in them that ought to seem biggish, involving the whims of gods and kings and queens, but because they were both sort of stylized and removed from actual life, they seemed small to me. Like pretty toys. I liked them both, though I got a little impatient partway through and wished they would drop the royalist crap. I mean I felt like they were wasting themselves on trivial gods-and-royals stories when all that beauty and passion could have been spoent on something I personally care about because doesn't the world revolve around my tastes and if not why not? But they were fun anyway. Goldstein's book is in a completely new world informed by late Eurpoean nedieval times, and Ogiwara's book is in a magic world not many steps removed from Japan.

Microcosm is unreadable. It's written like one of those breathless magazine survey articles of the sixties, jumbled up and oh god why don't they use any of the actual place names! What the hell! Some of the places names they translate into English and I don't mean those odd Anglicized place names, I mean stuff like "Giant Mountains" and "Snowy Head" and "Cats Hills." Also, "The River." Skipping ahead, I see that they eventually deign to use the names of at least cities and states but they've lost me already.

I was going to say that this was obviously a product of the postwar period because even though the book spans prehistory to modern times the first chapter is about World War Two and of course that would have made sense up to about 1989 because until Solidarnosc Americans thought history stopped in Eastern Europe in about 1950. But the book was first printed in 2002, so I don't understand why the book starts out like this. I recall nopeing out of another Polish history book by Davies too. Unfortunately Polish histories aren't very thick on the ground at my library. What there is--is almost exclusively this guy, and/or books about concentration camps. Which are necessary to tell Polish history but not sufficient. Maybe I'll try it again sometime when my disappointment has had a chance to settle down.

I don't have  much to say about the Norton/Smith yet, since I just started it.

I stalled out on the giant fantasy trilogy my brother-in-law lent me. I feel like I should keep trying because he was so enthusiastic about it. Also I haven't started the Kameron Hurley. But probably next is The Mystic Marriage by our own Heather Rose Jones, and anything that looks fun in the library, and another attempt at Eastern European history. I think I remember seeing some other city histories on the shelf.

( cut for medical neepery, not gross but probably boring )

On still another front: I'm hungry and I think I am going to boil some cracked grains in milk. Yes, I get to do that. Because, that's why.

Wednesday isn't sacred, right?

So I finally got back into the groove of going to the library on a regular basis, which is nice. I can catch up on old books.

I brought home a bunch of Margaret Atwood this time. I remember now why I got out of the habit of reading her, even though I admire her books and enjoy them a lot of the time. There is, however, a ration of grimness that I can't sustain. The one I just finished is Life Before Man, than which I can't recall having read much more glum except perhaps some fin de siecle century Norwegian stuff. The only glimmer of joy is Lesje's preoccupation with dinosaurs, and even that gets ground down to a pathetic misery by the end of the book. It's a feckless fellow and the three women who feel something sort of like love for him, though in none of those cases does it seem very much like affection. It's one of her realist novels. The inner lives of three of these people are on display, and those reach the sensory intensity of fantasy. It's really masterful: unlike many alternating-pov books, each shift solidly contributes to advancing the story, and the separate points of view are distinct and consequential. It's compelling even though I didn't really like anybody very much, and while at no time was I having any fun, I was really involved with the world, the story, the language. I guess I have to say that she made me care about people I kind of wanted to tell off and I am really glad I don't know.

Now I'm reading Cat's Eye and I think I read it before, though I never remember any of it till I come to it, so it's like reading a new book. I like it a lot better, though I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up hating everybody in it too.

I think I have to go read some Joyce Carol Oates now too, even though I decided a long time ago I didn't like her books and wasn't ever going to read one again. The reason I have to is that Atwood's writing in these two books reminds me a bit of Oates, especially in the ways that don't please me, and I have to figure out why I decided I like Atwood and I don't like Oates.

I am also reading a trilogy my brother-in-law leant me, something I'd never pick out for myself. It's the Powder Mage trilogy, a fat gory fantasy epic with everything I don't like to read. The author is Brian McClellan. The first book is Promise of Blood, an unpromising title for me, but I am paying attention. It's well-written enough that I'm not skimming all the incessant fight scenes. I now it's a bad habit, because sometimes information is in those scenes, but I usually find them boring and unproductive in terms of advancing the story. The one author I know that embeds enough information in fight scenes that they are worth reading every word is Jo Walton in the King's Peace books. What won me over to this trilogy besides my brother-in-law's recommendation (which has to be taken judiciously because we have almost opposite tastes in reading) is the cut line:"The age of kings is dead...and I have killed it." I am not sure whether the speaker of that line is going to turn out to be a villainous point of view after all--I would feel betrayed if he did, but there's indications that this story could go either way. It also has the problem of the characters all being kind of assholes, but they're sort of sympathetic assholes for now.

I have also been lent a Kameron Hurley and I have some other stuff in my library bag. Yes, I am reading lots of real books again, not just cookbooks and online fiction.

Also, I started a completely new story, a school story about Yanek's sister, who is a botanist with second sight which works best with respect to trees. Also she is a Zelnik, and I believe this story is how she finds out what that means and also begins to find a way to abandon her position in the aristocracy without losing her ties of affection to her family. I do not believe this story goes as far as her figuring out how to have a family of her own: that is in the future.

I finished Longbourn.I liked it a lot, though I was kind of dissatisfied with the ending. But I often am. I know some of you people care deeply about spoilers, so suffice it to say that the ending felt a wee bit rushed and forced to me. But the main thing is that here is a richly detailed working class romance where the resolution isn't "take the porotagonist out of the working class." Also, it's a great antidote for the whole (in my opinion) corrupt Regency Romance thing. I think I understand why so many people love that genre, but my response is usually "I hate these people and I want someone to expropriate everything they own and distribute it to the workers," Not exactly conducive to enjoying a lighthearted read. Longbourn is not, by the way, lighthearted.

I also read a chapbook of Karen Joy Fowler's (The Science of Herself)and now I want to call her up. She lives in my town! She actually went to school with the nice fellow, and sweetgly contacted me after he died--she didn't know he lived her until she saw his obituary.

Right this minute, I have no reading agenda, I am editing a thing for submission and I want it done byu next week, so I can do the next thing, etc. I want to get these old things cleaned upo and ready to send away, and then clear the decks so I can go back to not-Poland after surgery.

I finally got a cost estimate on the surgery and it's a relief: I do not have to cancel after all. This is of course a terrible crime against men of property and Congress would like to put a stop to it.

The other good medical news is I rode my bike to physical therapy and back: maybe three miles altogether? I'm not sure. And it was fine, though I expect to wake up tonight with the screamies. I did walk my bike up the one substantial hill, but the physicfal therapist says with my knees, I really, really should. She approved of the venture in general, though.

Yesterday I was thinking it looked like I am in a period where I can have more function or less pain, but not both, and that I seem to have chosen more function for now. Today it looks like I can have somewhat less pain if I persist in  going for more function. That's also reassuring. That's how it was until about a year ago. More exercise relieved pain as well as providing more function, bu just not right away.

Oh, and on another front: aside from the rain giving up on us and retreating, we do seem to have entered early spring, by the particular flowers blooming (quince) and the busy behavior of the birds. Also, I can tell there is more light, and both dog and I are more ambitious. She and I went for a long walk at the Yacht Harbor yesterday. She had some trouble coming back up the stairs, barely enough to call trouble.

So a lot of my reading time goes into mstuff that's hard to list for one reason or another and it looks like I don't read as much as I do. But I'm finishing up <i>A Natural History of Dragons</i> now and I'm going to read <i>The Tropic of Serpents</i> which is the sequel. They're by Marie Brennan, who has also written other things including a series of stories about an American magic college. These books purport to be the memoirs of a secondaary-world lady naturalist of a time and place sort of rather like Darwin's. She talkks about issues of gender and class and nationality among the stories of sheer wonder and adventure. hey're my daughter's books and they are perfect for her, and I only wish I had discovered them when she was a child because I would have been so excited to give them to her.