Balls and Walnuts
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viscera
This afternoon, I heard a piece on NPR about the giant African snail, which is an invasive species in South Florida. Look at these monsters:
They’ll eat any and all vegetation. They’ll even eat the stucco off a house. They are incredibly difficult to eradicate, and they carry an organism that can cause meningitis in humans (which is why the dude in the photo is wearing gloves, I’m guessing). On the other hand, they might prove to be part of the solution for protein malnutrition in Africa. Which I am totally okay with. I would eat that snail pie. I’ll take a pass on the locusts, though.
***
We’ve been having trouble with our Miata’s AC. Dean, I’m talking to you here, since you’re a Miata owner and a car guy (i.e., you can change your oil without getting a panic attack like some of us). Here’s the deal: the AC cut out while Karen was idling the car, waiting for Jake to get out of school. Took it into the shop and the mechanic said the compressor was shot. He replaced the compressor (and showed us the old one — there was some kind of thoroughly rotten gasket thingie in there). Next time we drove it in hot weather, it was evident that the AC was underpowered. I took it back, and he flushed the system or some damn thing. After that it worked great in cool weather and hot weather, and stayed good for almost a week. Then, last Thursday, it cut out again while Karen was idling for all of about 15 minutes.
I took it in today and asked the mechanic to let it idle for 15 minutes. He let it idle for 45 minutes, he says*, and everything was fine. And I drove it away from his place and it stayed fine. I asked him what would make it cut out like that and he didn’t know.
Maybe this is one for the Car Talk guys.
***
Still writing here and there. It was a busy week so I didn’t get a chance to work until today. Gonna get back to it momentarily. I keep feeling torn between “trite” and “great.” “Great” because I enjoy rereading it, “trite” because, well, it’s a commercially sound story, i.e. the kind of thing that would likely sell. I’m almost feeling guilty that it’s not weird enough.
***
Finished Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. And, wow. This author’s writing is up there with Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Martin Cruz Smith . . . I was very impressed with this novel, and I’ve liked her other novels, too (Dope and Come Closer were great; I haven’t read Saturn’s Return to New York).
I’ve also been dipping into Jeff Huber’s Bathtub Admirals which is quite good (and reading a not-yet-published book by a certain author who frequents this blog!) The blurbs on Huber’s book compare it to Catch-22, but so far I am liking it a whole lot better than Catch-22, which I have never been able to finish, despite trying multiple times.
***
Okay, stop procrastinating.
D.
*I dunno — shouldn’t the gas gauge drop at least an eighth of a tank if he really let it idle for that long? Maybe I need to run this test myself.
word count so far
5822, spread out over three incomplete chapters.
Bits of scenes come to me and I write them down or email them to myself, to save them from memory death.
Just letting it happen however it will. Not fighting it.
Having fun.
D.
Life grinds on, and with it, my teeth
This was an unusually busy week, what with the AC pooping out in Karen’s car, scrambling around with a rental, getting the AC repaired, returning the rental, all within the confines of my 8 to 5 job. And I wasn’t even on call. On Thursday after work, I had to submit to another hour and forty-five minutes of Special Torture at the dentist, wherein he finished the root canal and got my #12 ready for a permanent crown. Why this is such a big production, I do not know. You would think I might understand these things since I look at teeth all day, but I’m not really looking at teeth. I’m looking around teeth. And if I happen to look at the teeth themselves, it’s usually because they’ve attracted my attention in an “oh, yuck” kind of way.
I had surgery on Tuesday*, administrative duties on Wednesday, and clinic pretty much every day of the week, and what with the car and the dentist and everything else, I only managed to make dinner on Friday night. Otherwise it was all takeout. On Friday I made doro wat (this recipe), which went over well, except no one liked the couscous. Would have been better had I had some pita, I guess, or even basmati rice, but I was already so pressed for time that I made the fastest starch I could think of, hence the couscous. Of course, traditional is the fermented Ethiopian pancakes known as injera, but I’ve never been able to reproduce these pungent little crepes at home. Wrong ingredients and likely the wrong technique.
Needless to say, I didn’t get any writing done this week. Thinking, yes, writing, no. Not even blogging.
And on Thursday, I succumbed to my usual eat-under-stress drive and consumed WAY too much salt (in the mode of pork rinds) and my weight shot up three pounds. I’ve been piling the water in to try to pee off that weight, but it’s a slow process. I hate my body, the way it craves salt and yet punishes me with instant poundage if I give into the craving even a little bit. (And on Thursday, I gave in more than a little bit.) I wish I could live in a boot camp where I can only eat what they feed me. Such is my lack of self control.
Making lasagna tonight, but I’ll have to avoid eating it myself, other than for the little taste to make sure it came out okay. Since I don’t have a working pasta thingie at the moment, I am going to try using those no-boil pasta sheets. Hell, Cooks Illustrated swears by them.
And now I’m biding time . . . Jake has service hours this afternoon (the Greek Food Festival, where they will hopefully feed their slave labor pool of eager student volunteers) so I will get a chance to go sweat in the gym and hopefully excrete some of this salt water weight.
D.
*Occurred to me in rereading this that most folks would interpret this to mean that I went under the knife. No, gentle readers, I was most definitely over the knife, not under it.
Britain’s loudest national resource
Brian Blessed: I love this guy. 74, and I hope he’s here to bellow at us on his 100th birthday.
D.
No, not dead
But I have been writing. New stuff, not just editing old stuff. Don’t know how long it’ll last but for the time being, the muse is feeding me ideas, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you don’t fuck with the muse.
D.
A word about essay writing
One of my favorite essayists is former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham (who, in his life since Harper’s, now edits Lapham’s Quarterly). Lapham’s essays often have a unique form of argument, stabbing at the thesis from multiple directions, convincing you of the thesis’s validity before the thesis has ever been articulated. By the time the reader finishes, he not only agrees with the thesis (usually) but has a deeper understanding of the topic; and if he does not agree, he still comes away with that same depth of knowledge.
I have always felt that this was the pinnacle of essay writing, the ideal to which the young author should aspire. When I home-schooled my son, knowing that he didn’t have the depth of knowledge that decades of scholarship brings, I simplified the format into one which would still stand him in good stead in college. Begin with your thesis paragraph, I told him, develop and prove it in the paragraphs which follow, and restate at the end; but, and here’s the kicker, your goal should be to augment the thesis with your arguments, and when you conclude, restate a thesis which is deeper than the one with which you began. Call it value-added essay writing.
Jake’s Theology teacher (a Jesuit, and therefore in my opinion NOT an intellectual lightweight) disagrees. Theology this year is a writing class more than anything else. All to the good. I asked Jake how he was doing, and he told me that the only thing the teacher red-lined was precisely the thing I had been teaching him all these years. I know what his teacher has in mind because he discussed this with us at Open House. He wants a very simple format: state your thesis, support it, restate it at the end. In other words:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it.
The taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
Hence, okra is a disgusting vegetable.
Whereas my ideal essay would run more like this:
Okra is a disgusting vegetable.
It’s slimy no matter how you cook it, and the taste in no way compensates for its inherent sliminess.
In many areas of the country, a child could easily get through the first twenty years of life without seeing, let alone tasting, an okra dish, while in other areas of the country, okra is as much a part of a weekly schedule as potatoes, onions, or carrots. Those people often develop a fondness for okra.
In other parts of the world, staple foods may include things that others find unacceptable and “disgusting” — blood, intestines, insects. Foods we find acceptable (poached egg, anyone?) might be similarly revolting to people living in those regions. The emotion of disgust in response to particular foods may have more to do with what the eater is used to than anything else. Never eat anything slimy? Then slimy is not a characteristic you associate with acceptable food.
Okra’s unacceptability to many Americans is thus not only an example of the diversity of dietary practices in the world, but also tells us a little something about human nature.
(Forgive the topic, you okra-lovers; I pulled that one out of the air. And I’m afraid I did not put much time into creating something that would stand in the same galaxy as Lapham’s essays, let alone the same room.)
The Theology teacher’s version is geared toward getting high marks on AP History or English essay exams. The SAT written exam almost certainly has similar grading practices. Considering how poorly most college students write at the undergraduate level, I suspect most college profs would be delighted to read a well executed version of the A, B, C, D, and therefore A essay. So there’s nothing at all wrong with this goal. It’s good writing. But it’s not great writing.
Okay, so maybe I was wrong in my attempt to get Jake to shoot for the stars. But I don’t think so. Because if you can write even a little bit like Lapham, you can easily modify your writing to suit the circumstances. I explained this to Jake this morning . . . hopefully he can excuse me for making him write with too much finesse.
D.
Errata
Well, I’ve had a lumbar puncture at the hands of a crappy ER doc and a root canal at the hands of a competent dentist, and I can confidently claim that the root canal is less painful. Though I guess the best comparison would require me to have a root canal at the hands of an incompetent dentist. But I think I’ll pass.
(Those few of you who also “friend” me at Facebook . . . yeah, so I cross-posted. I have an excuse. I just got a root canal.)
Thus far I am not impressed with Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
It’s a pre-9/11 tale of international terrorism in which the multinational “Rainbow” group, composed of cookie-cutter stamped übermenschen who can shoot the eyes out of a sewing needle at 100 yards, deal with one incident after another . . . I suppose. I’ve only made it through the first such incident, wherein Swiss police are somehow too incompetent to handle a hostage crisis at one of the banks (somehow I think not, but hey, suspension of disbelief).
Thing is, the team, based out of England, flies to Switzerland on a commercial airline. No, really. There’s a bit where one of ’em kvetches that the Swiss really need to decide soon if they want them or not, because the flight leaves in 2 minutes, and if they miss that flight they’ll need to wait another 90 minutes for the next one. Well, I guess if this NATO-sanctioned outfit actually took military aircraft to jump the Channel they would miss out on all their frequent flier miles . . .
Oh, and then there are the supervillains, who I gather are tree-huggers intent on sending the world back to the Stone Age, or some such. And one of them is a woman who doesn’t like men. Horrors.
And then there’s crap just thrown around like this BS about a characteristically German handshake, which is a sudden grab, a single shake with a warm squeeze midway through, and then a quick release. WTF? Kira, you reading this? IS there a characteristically German handshake?
I could forgive him the one-dimensional characters for whom I feel nothing if he got the other details right. I mean, I had always heard that Clancy was a details man, that the reader could count on him to get the techie stuff correct. But do I really care that he knows his armaments if he does crap like send his SuperSWAT team to Switzerland on TWA?
/vent
D.
Life after Thrones
I’ve reached the last chapter of George R. R. Martin’s fifth Game of Thrones novel, A Plethora of Puppies, and after reading, what is it? Four thousand pages of this stuff? I’m wondering what to do next. Go back to book one, keep cycling through them until Martin releases the sixth book? Because that’s the only way I’ll ever remember who everyone is. Not that I could remember who everyone is even having read each book one right after the other. I lost track of how many times I would start a chapter and say to myself, “Who the hell is this?”
Give the guy credit, he created a world and populated it with a few billion people, every ten of whom have their own unique heraldic emblems, or whatever the hell they’re called. Somehow I feel inadequate, not having my own coat of arms, though I suspect the main device would be Parents Combatant.
Anyway, what to read next? I’ve downloaded Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six to my cell phone’s Nook app, but I’m not wedded to the idea of reading Clancy. Just thought I’d see what goes into making an author wildly successful. Suppose I could read King to that end, but I lost my taste for horror some twenty or thirty years ago.
So what are people reading?
D.
The 2 Jesuses
In the last few days, I’ve been spending more time in the hospital than I would prefer. My partner had the gall to take a week of vacation, which leaves me holding the bag. Or the scalpel, I suppose. Anyway, it’s been a rough week, with three 10 1/2 hour days, and yesterday I didn’t make it out until 8:45.
The hospital we use is an Adventist hospital. I like the Adventists, mostly because they seem to have a left-wing political bias. This agrees well with their religious philosophy, which (speaking as an outsider) seems to be that they read the New Testament and actually pay attention to Jesus’ teachings. Anyway, the Adventists really love their larger-than-life Jesus portraits, like this one here. Our hospital has two larger-than-life Jesus murals. Perhaps it was the fatigue of a 12.75 hour day that made me notice yesterday that the two Jesuses are really quite different.
The first one is in our lobby. Jesus is sitting in a field with his arms outstretched. There’s a kindly, loving, welcoming smile on his face. You would gladly sit down with this guy for a sardine sandwich even if he does make you listen to one incomprehensible parable after another. He just looks like a hell of a guy.
The other Jesus is in the chapel area, or whatever they call the room for quiet reflection. This Jesus looks older. Two thousand years older, but aged 2000 years in a way that only an immortal could age. He’s still got a full head of brown hair, I mean, and there are no turkey wattles under his chin, but you can tell this guy has been around to see the Inquisition, two world wars, a couple thousand years of slavery, and so forth. While he is still smiling, this Jesus’ smile is an expression of intense exasperation. This Jesus has his hand out, but I have the sense he’d like to slap us upside the head with it before regaling us with an incomprehensible parable. A parable no doubt regarding the way people never seem to listen to him.
I’ll have to snap a couple photos with my cell phone tomorrow and share them with you. I’m curious to see if you agree with me.
Meanwhile, I’m counting the hours until this weekend is over and I can pass on the emergency box o’ goodies to my partner.
D.