For some reason, I get this way sometimes: I prefer to be reading multiple books at once (well, not EXACTLY at once), dipping into each one as the mood hits me. This morning, I realized that the number has piled up:
1. The first Skulduggery Pleasant book, a YA magical-sorcery-thingy which Lyvvie recommended as an example of someone who writes 12-year-olds well. Her daughter loves the stuff. And while I can see the attraction to a pre-teenaged girl (the heroine is strong, intelligent, and brave), there isn’t much meat here for the adult reader of YA. My vote is still for the Bartimaeus Trilogy, which admittedly is aimed at an older YA crowd, but has enough humor and depth to appeal to the adult reader. And while the protagonist is male, one of the main characters is, you guessed it, a strong, intelligent, and brave young woman.
2. Still working my way through China Mieville’s The Scar. This is one of his earlier works, and I tend to like his more recent novels better. The Scar is just on the cusp of eh, think I’ll put this one down for now. But I’m 3/4 of the way through and haven’t given up yet. There simply isn’t enough there: not enough action, not enough appeal to the characters or plot, not enough of Mieville’s signature weirdness. All it has going for it is a bit of narrative drive. I want to know what happens next.
3. I’m rereading Crime and Punishment . . . again, as the mood hits. I read it between 9th and 10th grade, I think, and wanted to revisit it as an adult. I may not finish it; every time I pick it up, I want to slap Raskolnikov upside the head. He’s a very Hamlet-like character in the way he dithers, and I’ve never much liked Hamlet.
4. When I have nothing to read but Nook on my cellphone, I turn to James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand, a novel about the two Kennedy assassinations and the MLK assassination. Lots of dish on J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, various mobsters, etc. Who cares if it’s fiction; it reads like a dramatization of true events. And who doesn’t want confirmation that the JFK assassination was a fix from the highest powers? (Yup, God wanted JFK dead.) (Kidding, kidding!) I’m reading this mostly because I find Ellroy’s style so fascinating: staccato, brutally stark. Ellroy himself described the style as “ugly.” Plus, it’s fascinating how well he evokes the early 60s.
5. And when I have to have an actual paperback in my hands, I’m reading/rereading Tim Powers’s time travel novel, The Anubis Gates. First time I tried reading this many years ago, I bogged down at around page 120. The time travel gimmicks struck me as just a wee bit too coy and obvious. Now I’m at page 265 and I’m finally hooked. I enjoyed it more this time around (the first half, that is), and in retrospect I think I abandoned it for a number of reasons. Powers suffers from the too-much-research problem (. . . and I have to share all of it with you) and yet he occasionally screws up, as when one of the minor characters in the 1600s calls sausages ’sawfages.’ Just because typesetters used that f-thingy for internal s’s doesn’t mean people PRONOUNCED it that way. Jeez. Anyway, I’m skimming through all of the dense descriptive bits and having a much better go of it.
I just came across the boogers blog and I think it’s great. Is that you? Can I ask a related (and kind of gross) question here? For the last two weeks I’ve been sick with either a cold or a sinus infection and I’ve been producing copious amounts of mucus in my sinuses. A good portion of this mucus has ended up in my stomach. Am I conserving precious calories? Can my digestive tract reabsorb mucus and use it for energy or at least reuse it for mucus? Or does it just pass through? Youth wants to know and so far the internet won’t say but it seems like a question you might be able to answer.
Yes, that’s me. But I have a sneaking feeling that it’s a really, reeeeally old effort that I abandoned a long time ago, over at Blogger perhaps. Scary. I have blogs that I’ve forgotten about. I wonder if Bare Rump’s blog is still out there — you guys remember that?
But on to Luke’s question. I doubt there’s much caloric or nutritional value to mucus. Wikipedia defines mucus as a “viscous colloid containing antiseptic enzymes (such as lysozyme), immunoglobulins, inorganic salts, proteins such as lactoferrin, and glycoproteins known as mucins that are produced by goblet cells in the mucous membranes and submucosal glands.” Thus there’s some protein content and electrolytes and not much else of any value.
When that hits the stomach, your digestive enzymes will break it down and your gut will assimilate it like any other protein. The electrolytes will be reabsorbed and either used or excreted. And of course your body is extremely efficient at scavenging the mucus for its water content.
We’re fans of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and were skeptical that anyone, even an actor as accomplished as Gary Oldman, could put his own mark on the main character, George Smiley. And how do you compress a seven hour (I think) miniseries into two hours without undermining motivation and creating serious plot-holes?
Nevertheless, the movie received some glowing reviews, so we’ve been looking forward to it. And looking forward to it. But this is Bakersfield, and I suppose Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is, what? Too much of an art film for this blue collar community? Very frustrating: we had to drive ninety minutes south to find a showing — at the Burbank AMC. And, wow, the “big city” (or perhaps I should say the suburb-of-big-city) movie experience has changed. We weren’t expecting to have trouble finding parking for a 9:40 PM showing. We came twenty minutes early, and only managed to get in line for tickets by 9:40. The line took ten minutes. There was even a line to give the guy our tickets, since he was checking folks’ IDs for the R-rated movies. We were sure we were going to miss the opening, but we didn’t count on them showing 20 minutes of trailers. And the theater was so crowded, Jake and I couldn’t even sit together.
Like I said, it’s a different experience . . . not at all like seeing a movie in Crescent City, or even Bakersfield, where we would have had the theater nearly to ourselves. But back to the movie. Here’s Smily & Smiley:
The good news: casting on the film was excellent. Colin Firth was a wonderful Bill Haydon, and I can’t imagine a better Control than John Hurt. The toad-faced actor who played Percy Alleline was great (Toby Jones, who played Karl Rove in the movie W), and accomplished what I had hoped more of the actors in this film would have accomplished: he brought a whole new angle to the role. Michael Aldridge (in the miniseries) seemed slow-witted, a conveniently gullible stooge, while Toby Jones’s Alleline is power-hungry and vindictive. Inner Circle member Roy Bland, a relatively minor character in the miniseries, shines with veteran actor Ciarán Hinds (Julius Caesar in Rome) in the role. He’s not given much to do, but he dominates his every scene.
And Smiley? I doubt anyone will ever top Alec Guinness’s depiction, which reportedly left an indelible mark even on Le Carre. The best anyone can do is not do a terrible job. Oldman is a believable Smiley, but Jake and I both had the same impression: My, doesn’t he do a fine Alec Guinness imitation? He brought nothing new to the role and he brought a whole lot less to it than did Guinness. With Guinness, there’s a wealth of sadness and disillusionment and cynicism. Very little of that came out in Oldman’s version.
The worst criticism, however, concerns the plot. This is a cerebral story. You don’t watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the gun play and car chases; you watch it for the acting and, well, the story. They’ve nailed the acting fairly well, but in the movie, they’ve glossed over too much to make the story convincing.
In the movie: How does Smiley track down Jim? Why does Toby flip so easily, with relatively little pressure from Smiley & company? Worst of all, how do they know for certain they’ve caught the right mole in the end?
Anyone watching this without past knowledge of the story (and an eidetic memory) will be lost.
I’m left to conclude that some stories are not meant for a two-hour format. You wouldn’t fit LOTR into a two-hour format, would you?
***
In other news, my word count is up to 25,000, and I’ll be writing more today, hopefully finishing Chapter 5.
For tonight, I made Tyler Florence’s recipe for galumpkis (stuffed cabbage). And now that I think about it, I did futz with the recipe: I used a pound of lamb and a pound of pork, no beef. Otherwise, yeah, everything was the same.
Quite good, although the sauce came out watery. I suspect the only fix for that is to cook down the sauce (in the earliest stage of the recipe) until it’s like mud. The meat and cabbage give up too much liquid, so I suspect that’s the only way to deal with the problem.
Oh, and I’ve decided I like working with grape leaves far more than cabbage. Cabbage is a pain. On one of the comment threads (perhaps on someone else’s stuffed cabbage recipe), one person claimed that if you froze and thawed the head of cabbage, the leaves will come off perfectly. Hmm. I can tell you it was impossible to remove the leaves from a fresh head without a lot of tearing.
Happy New Year, everyone! Here’s hoping it will be better than 2011. At least up until that end of the world thingie.
Now, I really really like the way Bjork mispronounces English. It wouldn’t be Bjork if she spoke American (or even British) English. But that does lead to certain misunderstandings of the lyrics. For example, in Army of Me, I was sure she was saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet her, Annie Oakley
Which is a pretty creepy way of saying, I’ll kill you dead. Except she’s saying,
and if you complain once more
you’ll meet an army of me
Which I suppose I should have figured out from the title. Oh, well.
Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed . . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
And there are precious few Democrats who would be caught dead echoing this idea.
This is not a funny story. I think it says something about human nature, but it doesn’t say anything particularly nice about human nature.
Once when Jake was young and we were still into traveling a lot by car, we were driving down the 101 to visit Karen’s parents, and we stopped for dinner at a hotel restaurant. It was someplace between Garberville and Santa Rosa . . . Ukiah perhaps. We were one of about six families there. The place had a window-wall overlooking the pool, and it was early enough and warm enough for there to be people at the pool.
The odd thing is, we — all of us, all six tables at the restaurant — noticed at the same time a woman wearing a bikini who really should not have worn a bikini. You know those tiny rubber bands we use to put jaw fracture patients into elastics? Well, maybe you don’t know. So imagine a rubber band, the loop of which has perhaps a 1 centimeter diameter. Now imagine a few of those rubber bands stretched around a marshmallow. Not an ordinary marshmallow, either, but one of those new and improved humongous marshmallows that comes eight to a package.
Every time she got up out of her lounge chair, there would be a collective over-dramatic gasp followed by laughter. We couldn’t have coordinated it better if there had been one of those live studio audience prompters telling us to LAUGH or GASP. It was really uncanny and really mean but many people there were near tears and it just kept going on and on, maybe for twenty minutes or longer before she finally went back to her hotel room.
We weren’t the only young family in that restaurant. We weren’t the only ones who had apparently forgotten our responsibility as example-setters. I’m quite sure that if you cornered any one of us and asked him if it was okay to laugh at a fat person, he would disagree strenuously. And yet there we were, laughing.
I think about this scene every now and then, and I still don’t quite understand it. I’m guessing that if we had seen this in a movie, very few of us would have laughed. If we had been out there past the window-wall, sitting pool-side with her, no closer nor farther than we were in that restaurant, we definitely would not have laughed. Something about the fact that it was real and we had that wall of glass between us. Something.
I’d compare it to the sleazy feeling you might get laughing along with an audience for a racist or misogynistic comedian, except I know (from experience) that I don’t laugh in such circumstances. Do we have a less well developed sense of political correctness regarding obesity? Or is obesity not the issue here — were we merely laughing at someone with poor taste in swimwear?
I like that last possibility, of course. But it seems overly generous.
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
Yesterday, one of my older patients said to his wife, “You know who he looks like? That guy. You know. The one who played John Adams.”
Having missed that one, I flashed on some actor in a powdered white wig . . . but a little trip to IMDB later that day revealed he was referring to Paul Giamatti.
