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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
ozarque's LiveJournal:
| Friday, May 9th, 2008 | |
| 9:33 am | Linguistics haikus... (1) The words of English can always be made empty by intonation. (2) A noun is not a person or a place or thing. A noun is a name. (3) A verb is not an action word. It is a word you can add "-ing" to. (4) A preposition isn't just a word that is short and on a list. (5) A preposition is a word that tells you how all the parts are linked. I'd be pleased to have additions to this set from you [youall], if you're willing... |
| 7:43 am | Recommended link; politics... Strongly recommended: the May 8, 2008 column titled "The Candidate And The Pastor," by Bill Press, at http://www.billpressshow.com/column |
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |
| 7:53 am | Writing science fiction; the Abban universe... From the questions that are being asked, I can tell that I haven't been making myself clear, and I'd like to fix that if I can. There are three things that seem to me to need clarifying.... First: I didn't write an enormous notebookful of backstory and background for the fictional universe of Abba. I did write a sketchy outline of basic factoids, but I didn't do what I later adopted as a standard method for writing novels. I didn't write a biography of all the characters, and a detailed description of every setting, and a complete outline of the history of Abba, and a detailed account of the culture .... and so on. When I wrote At the Seventh Level in 1971, I was a linguistics graduate student and a graduate teaching assistant and a "working mother" and a person with a teaching job at night and a person writing novels "on the side," and I was so desperately busy every single minute of the day and half of the night that I scarcely had time to breathe. I genuinely didn't have time to do the Abban backstory; I wrote only as much of it as I had to have for the actual text of the novel and the short stories, and I let it go at that. Which means that most of the questions you're asking me about Abba are questions I don't know the answer to. Two: For the record, it's perfectly all right with me if you want to write in the fictional universe of Abba yourself, which would let you answer all the questions you might have. Three: I understand why many of you perceive the Abban fiction as "horror." I understand it now. But I didn't perceive it that way when I was writing in it myself. I really -- truly -- perceived the Abban culture as a metaphor for the culture of the United States in 1971, and I thought it would be clear to every reader that that was what it was. [Novelists, especially inexperienced novelists, tend to suffer from that sort of illusion.] I took the characteristics of the culture that I was living in myself, as I perceived it, and I exaggerated those characteristics to the point of parody, and the result was Abba. Finally, I want to thank those of you who have said that you'd like to see more of my fiction set in that fictional universe; that's high praise, and I'm grateful for it. ================== Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.h |
| Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | |
| 8:41 am | Short story; "Final Exam"; Abba info... Here's an edited excerpt from At the Seventh Level with some background information about Abba; it's a conversation between Coyote Jones, in his role as superspy, and his boss, "the Fish." It appears on pp. 259-261 of Communipath Worlds. Excerpt Even the Fish was appalled by Abba, and he didn't apall easy. He had explained the assignment to Coyote with a faint air of distaste, like a Martian Orthodox Flannist discussing poultry farming. "The whole system is ridiculous," Coyote told him. "How can such a thing be allowed to go on?" The Fish shrugged. "It's a vast improvement over what they had before," he said. "That's a matter of opinion." "Let me review the basic facts for you," said the Fish. "And don't, for the Light's sake, go tramping about Abba suggesting improvements in their social system. In the first place it's none of our business. In the second place, they have ten thousand years of recorded history, and evidence of thirty thousand before that, and they look upon the rest of us as kindergarteners at the business of being civilizations." ... "When our space colonists worked their way out to the middle of the Second Galaxy," the old man went on, "they found Abba already settled... The people were humanoid, indistinguishable from Earth-type humans except for the presence of three extra ribs and some sort of difference in the liver that escapes me. At that time the Galactic Council was already well established, the Federation was a firm entity, and there were many very obvious advantages to Federation membership. It was almost unknown for a planet to refuse membership -- however, in this case the Federation wasn't offering." He pressed a stud on his desk and a threedy flashed on the wall behind him. Coyote stared at it and shuddered. "Exactly," said the Fish. "The colonists reacted as you did, with total repulsion. They found a civilization at a high degree of technological advancement, the male citizens living in luxury, and all the females in breeding pens, with stables for inclement weather, treated precisely as we treat domestic animals." "Sick," said Coyote. "Just plain sick." "It seemed perfectly reasonable to the Abbans," the Fish went on, "that being the way they had always done things... But it was most definitely not acceptable to the members of the Galactic Federation. The impasse was solved by a gentleman named David Rutherford Williams, who went out to Abba with a proposal and managed to produce the ingenious compromise they have today." "The harem. The Women's Discipline Unit." "Well, I agree with you that it doesn't seem very enlightened, Mr. Jones, but it was at least a form of society that was tolerable to the members of the Federation at the time. And you must admit that it shows a high degree of organization for a society so totally unEarth-like to be able to superimpose a sort of amalgamation of ancient Egypt, Arabia, and the French diplomatic service over its own culture. Practically overnight." "How long did it take?" "Less than six months, as I recall. Williams showed them a stack of threedies, they went 'Ah, yes' at him, their carpenters and masons trotted off and built women's quarters to specifications, and it all worked. Amazing." "Does it really work?" The Fish shrugged again. "Who can tell? It seems to. At least, since the Abban conversion to the religion of the Holy Light, they believe that women have souls." Coyote made a sound of disgust, and the Fish raised a warning hand. "I think you'll be surprised," he said. "I really do, Mr. Jones. If you expect primitive barbarians lurching about whipping their concubines you are going to be very surprised. Why don't you wait and see? And since no interference is allowed in any case, you might just as well relax." ### |
| Tuesday, May 6th, 2008 | |
| 11:39 am | Short story; "Final Exam"; questions; correction... About my response to Question #6, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mamadeb commented:"From what I gathered from "For the Sake of Grace" (a story I have read multiple times, but not in the last several years), the ONLY Profession a woman on Abba could apply to was Poetry - and the penalty for her failing was horrific." Mercy. This is what happens when you don't go back and read fiction you wrote decades ago, and you just try to Wing It. mamadeb is absolutely right. And the reason is a matter of law, set out clearly in "For the Sake of Grace": "The law provides that since the Profession of Poetry is a religious office, there must be a channel provided for the rare occasion when the Light might see fit to call a female to Its service." I apologize. And my thanks to mamadeb for rescuing me.... |
| 11:04 am | Short story; "Final Exam"; questions... After I posted the list of Professions on Abba, akitrom commented with a set of questions that I'm going to try to answer. But before I do that, I have to tell you that I wouldn't be able to answer many -- perhaps most -- questions about Abba. The work I've done in that fictional universe ["For the Sake of Grace," At the Seventh Level, "Final Exam," and "Modulation in All Things"] has been focused mostly on a narrow segment of the society, and I've never worked out the rest of the culture in detail. There wasn't the sort of intricately fleshed-out backstory for Abba that I did for my later novels; I was a much younger and much less experienced writer then. Now, to the questions... 1. What kind of crimes are legal, and what kinds are always illegal? There are only two ways a crime can be illegal. One is if the Criminal fails to do the paperwork properly ... doesn't fill out some form, fills out some form incorrectly, fails to meet a deadline for filing some form, violates some obscure technicality ... that kind of thing. The other way is if the application for the crime is rejected by the administrators and the Criminal goes ahead with the crime in defiance of the rejection. 2. Can it be legal for criminals to impersonate members of other professions? If the paperwork is done properly and the application for the impersonation is not rejected, it's a legal crime. 3. Do members of other professions who commit illegal acts become Criminals? Is that the Entrance Exam? No; it's not like that. For one thing, in the Abban culture the idea of doing something outside the boundaries of your own Profession is horrifying and repulsive. For a Lawyer or a Scientist to do an act ordinarily reserved for Criminals would not be perceived as having committed a crime; only Criminals are qualified to commit crimes. The most likely outcome if someone other than a Criminal did something illegal would be a diagnosis of mental illness. 4. Why did Abba's founders think that it was important to have a recognized Criminal profession? For Abbans, the most important thing of all, and the most desirable, is order. How could you have an orderly society if your Criminals could be just any old body? 5. Do you see something particularly "Male" to all this classification? No. Not at all. 6. How do women function in this society? Every historical patriarchy with which I am familiar, whether they treat normal women as children or property, make room for the exceptional woman. On Abba, anyone can apply to take the exams for any Profession, and any woman who was able to pass the qualifying exams for a Profession would have to be admitted to that Profession. [That's the core of the plot for the fiction I've done about Abba. The "what if" question was: "What if a young girl passed the qualifying exams for Poetry? Then what?"] But females in this culture are excluded all their lives long from almost every experience that would make them likely to be able to pass the exams. 7. But there have to be people who cannot pass exams, even Revolutionary ones. What happens to them? People who fail all the other exams have no trouble passing the exams for the Profession of Service. Those exams are made so easy that it would be almost impossible to fail them. Especially if you are male, and have therefore been allowed to have a standard education. |
| 7:36 am | Short story "Final Exam"; afternote... Just FYI, here's the list of the Professions on Abba... Law Service Government Poetry [equivalent to Religion] Medicine Business Crime Science Education Leisure Arts Agriculture & Animal Husbandry Revolutionary |
| Monday, May 5th, 2008 | |
| 9:50 am | Short story; "Final Exam"... Final Exam It was a solemn occasion. The fact that the sun shone brilliant and blue through the windows, clearly signalling joy, was no help. If anything, it made it worse, setting off the grim faces of the Administrators in sharp relief, burning their frowns on their foreheads like Ritual-Markings for the spring festivals. Kelah would have welcomed rain, a dismal weather to match the dismal weather of his mind. Beside him, his father sat stiff and nervous in the formal robes of his Profession, trying to explain the situation to the other seven men. "My son refuses," he said in the dead voice that Kelah had grown miserably familiar with lately. "He refuses. He says flatly that he will not enter the competitions for any of the Professions." "Hmmmmmm," said the Senior Administrator. "I have brought him up according to every dictate of our culture. I have given him everything a boy could want. He has been provided with the finest schools, the most brilliant tutors, the best of--" The Senior Administrator cut him off. "Yes, yes, Lawyer ban-Tressix," he said, "we understand all that. The reputation of your household is secure, and you need not belabor us with a recitation of all the things you have done for this unfortunate and ungrateful young man." The Lawyer flushed, mumbling. "I beg your pardon, Citizen Administrator." The Administrator-Advocate began, then, to ask Kelah the set of questions he had been expecting. Did he understand the consequences of his decision? Was he sure of that? Did he understand that he would be an outcast and a pariah? Did he understand that every credit disc issued to a citizen was issued on the basis of membership in one of the Twelve Professions, and that he would therefore be unable to buy even the minimum necessities of life? And to all of those questions, and more like them, Kelah doggedly answered yes. Yes, and yes, and yes. "Light's Beard, young man!" the Senior Admministrator put in, "Don't you know you'll be no better off than a woman? You will literally have no rights at all! You will simply .... not exist!" Kelah nodded. He knew it all. He bowed his head and let it all flow over him again, unresisting, since it had long since ceased to be anything but noise. The disgrace to his family. The pain he would cause his household. The fact that he could never marry, never have a household of his own. The fact that he could not be buried, since all burials were in Profession Plots. On and on and on. He didn't care. He knew it all, and he didn't care. He would not, he would not be shoved into a slot for the rest of his life, his every move and every word until he died prescribed for him by the Regulations Manual of his Profession! He would not spend his life as a slave, the way all of them spent their lives! He didn't even care if they saw his disgust on his face. There was nothing more they could do to him now. "Are you convinced?" It was his father asking, rigid beside him, his voice almost trembling. "Do you see that it is hopeless?" The Senior Administrator looked around him, taking a count of the heads nodding an affirmative, and said, "Indeed we do." And he pushed a set of studs on the comset at his side. "Congratulations!" the comset caroled, red and yellow lights flashing, bells ringing, a jet of perfume of thorka-flowers rising slowly into the air. "Congratulations, Citizen ban-Tressix, you have passed all the tests for admission into your profession! If you will just step into the Robing Room, Citizen, you will be issued your robes and your credit disc! Congratulations!" Kelah was almost too stunned to ask for an explanation. "What...." he stammered. "What...." And he saw that now they had, one and all, smiles to match the sunshine. The Senior Administrator pushed another stud and the wall at his left went suddenly translucent. On it, lifesize, was a three-dimensional projection of a young man whose robe -- unlike all the others Kelah had ever seen, with their solid color and single contrasting stripe -- was a rainbow of colors, a mingled and melting absolute riot of color. Around its neck hung a string of tiny haffa-bells, with a credit disc pendant from the center bell. And beside its head was the printed legend: Authorized Costume of the Profession of Revolutionary. "Oh, no," Kelah breathed. "Oh, please, no..." The Senior Administrator cleared his throat. "This," he said gravely, "is the Thirteenth Profession. You will understand, I am sure, why it is not publicized." "Surely," Kelah pleaded, "surely, this is a joke?" Lawyer ban-Tressix shook his head. "No, my son," he said happily. "It is as true as that you are my very dear son! My only fear was that they would not be convinced, that you would not pass the test. The Light bless you, my son, you have made me a happy man!" As the Administrators filed out of the room, and his father with them, Kelah gripped his hair with both hands, laid his head down on the table, and beat his forehead against the syntho-wood. "No," he said, over and over and over. "No. No. No." When the fedrobots came to take him to the Robing Room he was still saying it. They paid no attention to him at all. |
| Sunday, May 4th, 2008 | |
| 7:11 am | Recommended link; author blog... Recommended: the new blog by Crescent Dragonwagon -- author of The Cornbread Gospels -- over at http://crescentdragonwagon.typepad.c |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 8:13 am | Personal note: Excitement! Chaos! Fandangos! There have been developments since I last posted... First, my agent called yesterday afternoon with a huge project for me that -- as is typical -- has to be done at top speed on an emergency basis because it started being desperately needed some months ago. It's a totally nonlinear project, with Pieces X having to be done before other Pieces Y -- that those Pieces X ought to be based on -- are done. It will for sure cut into my LJ time, and I'm sorry about that. On the other hand, because it has to be done so fast it will be over in a hurry and I'll get the time back. This too shall pass. Second, our day began here with a whopping thunderstorm, and the power going off. George went out to turn on the generator, something that ordinarily takes no more than three or four minutes at the most .... and he didn't come back, and didn't come back, and didn't come back, and the generator didn't come on. The idea that he'd been struck by lightning was starting to bother me -- and I was trying to decide whether going out to check on that and getting struck by lightning my own self would be a rational move -- when he did at last appear and the generator (and lights and water) did come on. [Thank you, Providence.] What had happened was that when he took off the tarp that serves as cover for the generator, he was greeted by a wasp nest complete with angry wasps. He had to go to his shop -- where he found no cans of wasp spray -- so he grabbed a can of spray paint and a towel, went back and spray-painted the wasps into a sodden clump, wrapped the whole mess in the towel and stomped on it, and then was able to turn on the generator. Not quite like killing a wooly mammoth and hauling it back to the cave, but impressive all the same. Especially since it meant that we could now make coffee. [Thank you, Providence.] Moving right along... |
| Thursday, May 1st, 2008 | |
| 8:39 am | Writing science fiction; the "current fashion"; part three... I have managed -- with this set of posts -- to create all sorts of confusion. I'm going to try to straighten some of it out without adding still more confusion. I started out by telling you that I have a hard time following -- much less enjoying -- a lot of current science fiction... the kind that, as I perceive it, leaps all over the place in the story arc and never makes it possible for me to get well enough acquainted with the character(s) to really care what happens to them, even when I'm able to figure out what has happened to them. I have never been able to make any sense of William Gibson's Neuromancer; most of the time I don't understand what's going on in Battlestar Galactica; it's hard work, not pleasure, for me to read fiction in the comic book format. I suggested that at least in my own case this was a generation gap phenomenon, and that most younger people -- who have grown up doing things like participating in a dozen IM conversations at the same time -- don't have these problems. And I told you that I read George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" novels, books I enjoy tremendously, by dividing them into their separate point-of-view streams and reading each one of those streams straight through. So far, so good. However, I didn't mean for you to conclude that I read all multiple-POV novels the way I read the "Song of Ice and Fire" (hereafter SIF) ones. For one thing, the SIF novels are huge and intricate and packed with detail. For another, I care so intensely about the characters in the SIF novels that I can't stand the suspense of not knowing what happens to any given one of them while I make my way through intervening chapters that tell the stories of other characters. If a novel only moves among two or three points of view, and the story arc as a whole is reasonably beginning-then-middle-then-end, I read it in the ordinary way, just as you do. Then I introduced more murk into our discourse by wandering off into the question of whether some sf writers might be deliberately trying to make their work seem more "literary" -- first writing in a more traditional form and then going back and obscuring it because that's a way of introducing Chic and avoiding being tagged as writing "pulp fiction," the way nonfiction writers try to avoid being tagged as "popularizers." Which of course raises the question of how much conscious control writers of fiction have over their craft and how much of what they do is handled well below the level of their conscious awareness. It seems to me that we writers fall along a continuum in this respect. There are those who micromanage every smallest detail to the extent that they're able to do that -- people who deliberately choose between the spellings "gray" and "grey" for specific reasons they could easily explain if asked, for example, and who outline their work down to at least the level of the scene in advance before they write a single word of the text. There are those who claim to be seized by their characters and to do nothing more, essentially, than channel what they write. And there are writers everywhere in between those two extremes. As a nonfiction writer I've been called a popularizer forever -- and I'm proud of it. When I write a textbook, or a book for a general audience on a nonfiction topic, my intention is to write a book that a literate high school graduate can read without having to have a prof standing by at all times to explain the mysteries. I intend to be understood, and I do it on purpose. And I suppose I do the same thing when I write fiction; I feel an obligation to write a story that can be understood without a struggle, however old-fashioned that may be. This isn't a good career move. I not only have never won a Hugo or Nebula or Tiptree or [vamp till ready] award, I've never even been nominated for any of them, so far as I know. I can't say that that doesn't bother me; like any other human being, I'd like to have more obvious evidence of the approval of my fellow human beings for what I do. But I'm stubborn; I'm just flat out not willing to give up writing with as much clarity as my skill at my craft will allow me to achieve. I sometimes feel like a failure because I'm an Awardless Writer, but I don't torment myself about it; when I read a paragraph that I've published and realize that it's murky and convoluted and hard to follow, I do torment myself about it. It may be that the method I used for learning how to write -- writing out Wuthering Heights in longhand, every single word of it -- is the reason I turned out this way. Maybe. |
| Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 | |
| 8:43 am | Writing science fiction; the "current fashion"; part two... raqs commented:"I don't know, I'm not that old and I'm an avid multi-tasker and fan of lots of complicated stories, but I still agree with you that current SF seems to be oftentimes too hard to figure out. Personally I think it's laziness on the part of the writer, or (probably more accurately) on the part of editors who so want something new that they're willing to overlook lack of craftsmanship to get it. If I as a lifelong SF fan and professional reader can't figure out what's going on, I suspect there is a problem in the supply chain somewhere." This comment got me thinking. [I have been thinking about this discussion -- not in a very organized fashion, I'm afraid, because I'm dealing with a batch of interacting deadlines that distract me mightily, but it's been perking on my cognitive back burner.] And the comment brought to my mind a depressing possibility that hadn't occurred to me previously: What if it's not laziness on the part of the writer? What if the explanation is that the sf writers who lean toward this "make the reader struggle" style of writing are trying to prove that their fiction qualifies as Real Modern Literature? Because I write fiction, it's easy for me to imagine how this would go. First you'd write an ordinary well-crafted "any-literate-reader-can-follow-this" narrative. Then you'd look at what you'd written, smack your forehead, and say, "Oh, cottonpick! Any literate reader could understand that!" And then you'd go back through your draft and deliberately take out the parts that make things clear, and you'd throw in new hifalutin stuff that would make things obscure, and you'd fool around with the order of presentation so that the beginning was near the end and the middle was scattered through the work in pieces. And when you got through doing all of that you'd look at your new draft with a warm feeling that readers were now going to have to work just as hard to follow it as they'd have to work to follow James Joyce's Ulysses. I hope to goodness this isn't happening. It's bad enough that so many writers of nonfiction are terrified that if they write with decent clarity they'll be accused of "popularization" and "dumbing down"; it would be awful if that leaked into the writing of science fiction. |
| Monday, April 28th, 2008 | |
| 8:34 am | Writing science fiction; the "current fashion"... In my UnReview of Simak's City, I said that "the current fashion in sf is to make the reader struggle to figure out what's happening." archangelbeth commented:"I wonder how much of that is a combination of expecting that the reader will want 'new,' and thus probably more complicated stories (working on defining the tale as 'not just another cliched telling of Universal Plot #1'), and the current crackdown (at least, I've heard there's one) on word-counts to keep hardcovers from going so expensive that no one buys them... Basically, something's got to give. Either the plot simplifies or the description suffers." not_your_real commented:"That is one of my favorite things about reading SF. (I also madly love the movies Memento and Primer...)" starcat_jewel commented:"I disagree very strongly with this. I'm reading a lot of current SF that has very clear plots with beginnings, middles, and ends." ahistoricality commented:"This has been driving me nuts for a decade or so: it's very pronounced in short fiction, at least the pieces published in F&SF." I think the reason I perceive the current fashion in sf as an effort to make the reader struggle is a generational phenomenon; I suspect, in fact, that I'm entirely in the wrong about it. That is, my statement presupposes that the writers/screenwriters are deliberately trying to make the reader/viewer struggle to understand the narrative, and that's probably false. I don't think they're aware that they're doing it. I couldn't do it myself without making a deliberate effort, and I'm not at all sure I could do it successfully, but it's wrong for me to call it a "fashion"; I think it just reflects the natural evolution of storytelling. You young people have grown up with media where narratives are presented in bits and pieces, flipping back and forth from one character and setting and time to another, in a way that is baffling to an elderly reader/viewer like me. Battlestar Galactica is a perfect example; the novels of William Gibson are good examples. You're used to doing half a dozen things at the same time ... you're used to flipping back and forth among a batch of different IM conversations at the same time ... you're used to constructing a narrative from fragments. It seems to me that your entire concept of "narrative" is quite different from mine. I can imagine it, by analogy with the way I construct narrative when I'm writing poetry; but when I read prose fiction (or watch films) constructed by that method I really do have to work very hard as I read, or I just get lost. I owe you an apology for making so broad a claim with no explanation or qualification. I can only say that my mind was focused on the problem of making it clear why I had enjoyed City so much, without at the same time strewing spoilers around. And unlike you [youall], I'm no good at processing multiple threads of information simultaneously. Now -- deliberately -- so that I don't get deeper in trouble, I'll make my final yodel across the Generation Gap an acknowledgment that there are surely many elders who aren't narratively-challenged like me and can skip as nimbly from fragment to fragment as any teenager. Good for them; long may they wave! |
| Sunday, April 27th, 2008 | |
| 8:35 am | Book review; Clifford D. Simak's "City"... Once upon a time, science fiction publishers used to send copies of almost everything they published to the entire membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA); because of that, I have a very large collection of ancient sf paperbacks, many of which I still haven't read. The other night I was looking for something to read, and I lucked into Clifford D. Simak's City, in a 1981 edition from Ace that includes the extra "Epilog" story Simak wrote years after the book first appeared. My copy is yellowed, and shows the effects of sitting for decades on a bookshelf unread, but I am so very glad that it's what I chose. What a wonderful book. What a wonderful -- and horrifying -- book. City is put together as if it were a semi-scholarly work intended for a general audience [a general audience of literate dogs, as it happens]. It has eight stories that are foundation folktales of the "doggish" culture, each with a brief introductory "Notes" section that comments on the story and gives it a historical and cultural context. And it has a ninth story titled "Epilog" with a notes section written by Simak, who tells us that he never intended to write it. When he was asked to do it as part of a memorial volume for John W. Campbell, he says (on page 253): "I found myself shying away from the task. The saga, I told myself, was complete as it stood; I also was skeptical about how competent a job I could do on a ninth City story, more than twenty years after I had written the others. After all, I knew I was a different writer than the younger man who had fashioned the tales." But in the end, he agreed, and I think we can all be grateful for that, because "Epilog" is a perfect ending for the book. There won't be any spoilers in this review; I'm not going to talk about the plot. I am going to celebrate the fact that each of the nine tales has an actual beginning, middle, and end, and the fact that each one tells a coherent self-contained narrative. That's old-fashioned, I know; the current fashion in sf is to make the reader struggle to figure out what's happening. But I found it a tremendous relief. The book revolves around a single conundrum, and it's one that could not possibly be more timely. Suppose you discover that a culture slightly less advanced than your own is facing a serious problem; suppose you have the knowledge and the power necessary to intervene. What, if anything, should you do? People are dying for lack of drinkable water; you show them a simple way to make wells that will provide that water; the water turns out to be tainted with arsenic. People are dying for lack of food because farmers have no way to irrigate their crops and the rains are not dependable; you show them a simple way to put down tube wells and bring that water up for irrigation; the result, before long, is a depletion of the water table so severe that the water coming in is too salty to use for growing crops. We humans understand now that no matter how hard you try, no matter how advanced your technology, you never can know for sure what the consequences of an intervention are going to be. And that leaves us with the conundrum: Do you do nothing and just let the suffering go on? Do you intervene, knowing very well that your intervention may only make things worse? What do you do? Simak takes up this dilemma and explores it for us. He shows us a whole set of examples; the examples tell a story that breaks the reader's heart, but that is of tremendous value for a culture facing exactly the same dilemma. ====== There's a Wikipedia page for City -- that does have spoilers; because its URL ends with those parentheses that confuse LiveJournal's link-making software I'm not going to try to provide it here, but you'll have no trouble finding it; just go to Google and type title and author in the search box and the link will appear. There's a good review (with spoilers) by Tal Cohen at http://tal.forum2.org/city , and another (with spoilers) by Robert M. Tilendis at http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book |
| Friday, April 25th, 2008 | |
| 8:10 am | Book UnReview; The Cornbread Gospels; note from the author... I've had a message from Crescent Dragonwagon that she's asked me to pass along to you. As follows: "When the cornbread is made from masa, not cornmeal --- in other words, when the ph is changed from acid to alkaline via that ancient Native American technology known as 'nixtamalization', it changes the corn's nutritional profile. It no longer blocks the absorption of niacin or lysine (the amino acid that is the protein building block which is non-nixtamalized corn's achille's heel) . Thus, it no longer causes pellagra!!! This, not just the Three Sisters, is why Native Americans never suffered from pellagra. This is the kind of cornmeal used in tortillas and tamales and hominy/posole... When the colonists/occupiers from Europe arrived in America, they relied on corn for sustenance, but were so dismissive of First Peoples that they completely blew off the technology, with tragic consequences for the parts of America and the world, and the social classes, who came to rely on corn as a staple. This would include slaves, poor whites, poor blacks post-civil war, poor residents of many swathes of Africa, Italy, and Romania... Plus, while I'm here, there's a video that goes with the Macaw Muffins recipe in The Cornbread Gospels. It's at YouTube, search terms 'Cornbread Flutters Ball.' The music is performed and sung by my old friend Bill Haymes, who lived in Arkansas for many years but is now in Nashville." ===== Postscript from me: There's a Wikipedia article on nixtamalization at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamaliz |
| Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | |
| 7:57 am | Recommended links; food troubles... Thanks to Cindy Brown for alerting me to two relevant articles that are at cross purposes: 1. "Food Rationing Confronts Breadbasket of the World," by John Gerstein, at http://www2.nysun.com/article/74994 2. A Wall Street Journal piece -- "Load Up the Pantry," by Brett Arends -- at http://tinyurl.com/4wylrb . Arends suggests that "maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food"; Gerstein reports that "major retailers" in the U.S. have started "limiting purchases of flour, rice, and cooking oil..." ================== Nonfiction online: "How Verbal Self-Defense Works" at http://people.howstuffworks.com/vsd.h |
| 7:48 am | Learning to cook... The very first thing I ever learned to cook was something called Egg In A Frame, and the person who taught me how to cook it was my then boyfriend, a youngster I had been going steady with for several years at the time. [Same person who taught me how to shoot, clean, and cook squirrel; I don't plan to inflict any of that on you.] I assume that everybody over the age of ten or so already knows how to make Egg In A Frame, but I've been wrong about a lot of my assumptions in this journal, and maybe I'm wrong about this one too. So here's how it's done... Ingredients and Equipment You need a skillet [nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron are best, but any skillet will do], a spatula, a couple of tablespoons of butter, a slice of bread, and an egg. Instructions 1. Melt the butter in your skillet over low heat. 2. Make a circular hole in the slice of bread by tearing out a small round piece of it. 3. Put the bread in the butter in your skillet and turn it over once with your spatula, so both sides are coated with the butter. 4. By now your butter should have tiny bubbles showing in it; if it doesn't, wait until it does. Then break your egg directly onto the slice of bread. 5. At this point, you have a choice: a. If you're someone who likes your fried eggs unbroken, you leave the egg yolk alone and let the egg cook, picking up the bread-and-egg with your spatula every ten seconds or so to see whether the bottom of the bread is nicely browned, until the egg is as done as you want it to be. b. If you're someone who (like me) prefers your fried eggs broken, you break the egg yolk with the edge of your spatula and spread the egg around on the slice of bread, you let it cook for about thirty seconds, you turn the bread-and-egg over with your spatula and cook it for the same amount of time on the other side, and then you turn it over one more time. Either way, you want to be careful not to overcook this item, and careful to keep your heat low. Cooked too long, it will be tough and rubbery. Cooked just long enough, it will be tender and delicious. Trying it a time or two will show you how long "just long enough" is using your skillet and your stove. 6. Serve. If you have some fresh fruit to go with it, that's a nice touch. |
| Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 | |
| 10:01 am | That soup recipe; afternote... I first encountered that soup when I was staying in the south of France. The cook made it with potatoes and leeks and carrots -- no cabbage -- and then put it through a sieve before serving it as the first course for a much larger meal. It was wonderful... smooth as velvet ... and I loved it. It was my French mother-in-law who taught me to make it with the cabbage wedges, and without the sieve. |
| 8:40 am | That soup recipe... I hate to call this soup "Poverty Soup" -- because it's an excellent soup, as suitable for eating when you're prosperous as when you're poor. [I do know it's my fault it got called "Poverty Soup" in the first place; I started it. I was very fretful at the time. I shouldn't have called it "Poverty Soup."] We just call it "Cabbage And Potato Soup" at my house. And here's how you make it. Ingredients Three large, or five medium-sized, potatoes Two large onions One small cabbage Water One beef bouillon cube -- or one teaspoon of beef bouillon granules -- for each cup of water you use Garlic to taste; either fresh garlic cloves or the minced garlic you can buy in a jar About two tablespoons of butter or margarine 1/2 teaspoon oregano 1/2 teaspoon black pepper Instructions 1. Cut the potatoes into small pieces -- don't dice them or slice them, you just want potato chunks all roughly the same size. Chop the onions; if you're using fresh garlic cloves, chop those too. [For me, there's no such thing as too much garlic; you might start with two cloves, or the equivalent in minced garlic, till you know how much you want.] 2. Put the butter in the bottom of a dutch oven, or in the bottom of a heavy saucepan with a lid, and melt it over low heat. 3. Put the potatoes and onions in the pan, stir them well so that all the pieces are coated with the melted butter, and cook the vegetables for a minute or two over very low heat, stirring constantly. Your goal is just to seal the surfaces of the vegetables, the way you'd seal the surface of meat by browning it; you don't want to end up with fried potatoes. 4. Add enough water to fill the pan you're cooking the soup in to within about two inches of the top. Do this with a measuring cup so that you know how much water you've added; then add as many beef bouillon cubes or as many teaspoons of beef bouillon granules as you've added cups of water. [Note: Don't use canned beef stock; it's both too salty and too sweet. If you're someone who makes a terrific beef stock yourself from scratch, by all means, use that; but the water plus bouillon cubes/granules works extremely well.] Add the oregano and black pepper to the water and stir. 5. Bring the soup to a boil, making sure the bouillon cubes or granules are completely dissolved; then turn the heat down low, put the lid on the pan, and let the soup simmer until the potatoes are fork tender. [Note: You have to check this every now and then; if the soup insists on boiling instead of simmering -- which will be a function of the pan you're using and how much control you have of your level of heat, and not your fault -- adjust the lid of the pan so that there's a gap between the lid and the edge of the pan where some of the heat can escape.] If the simmering process makes you need to add a little more water -- which can happen -- be sure you also add the right amount of additional beef bouillon cubes or granules. 6. There's really no upper limit on how long you can let this soup cook after the potatoes are tender. The longer it cooks, the better it will be, and I recommend cooking it at least two hours. 7. Half an hour before you want to serve the soup, take your cabbage and remove the core; cut the cored cabbage into small wedges. [That may sound a little jargony; you do it exactly the way you'd core an apple and cut it up into wedge-shaped slices -- like the segments oranges give you -- except that you'll need a larger knife than you'd use for an apple.] 8. Twenty minutes before you want to serve the soup, take the lid off the pan, set the cabbage wedges on the top of the liquid, and put the lid back on for those twenty minutes. 9. When you serve the soup, put a cabbage wedge or two in the bowl for each person who likes cabbage, but not for those who don't. People who don't like cabbage will still enjoy this soup; the cabbage adds flavor, but the soup won't taste like cabbage. Serve with bread or with corn pone; serve with a salad if you have one. 10. You'll notice that I didn't mention adding salt; because beef stock is already salty, that's a very bad idea. People should add salt, to their own taste, at the table. 11. This soup re-heats beautifully, and will keep three days in the refrigerator. At our place, we add fresh cabbage wedges each time we re-heat it, but that's optional. You may need to add a little more water when you re-heat it; if you do that, be sure you also add the right amount of additional beef bouillon cubes or granules. 12. To feed more people, just use more of everything. ======= You may want to experiment with adding other things to your version of this soup -- maybe leeks, carrots, lentils, or other things you have on hand. You may want to use different spices. Whatever you add will change the flavor and the texture and the ambience. But you can rely on the recipe above to provide you with a hearty and healthy basic soup that will feed a lot of people well for very little money. |
| Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 | |
| 10:07 am | Recommended link; gardening article... You might find my "Container Gardening 101" useful, especially if doing a full-size garden isn't feasible for you. It's at http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/art |