Balls and Walnuts
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Between one thing and another . . .
It’s past 10. I was home late from the hospital (had to remove a hazel nut AKA filbert from someone’s esophagus), then I had to have a fight with Karen over cleaning the litter boxes, and THEN Jake decided he wanted to work on his Lego website. Jake and I have a lot of work left to do on this one, so be forgiving. In particular, the jpegs could be a lot nicer. Just the one page, by the way.
I’d intended to ruminate on the subject of political subtexts in fiction. For tonight, I’ll merely pose the questions: how important is it to understand the historical backstory for a novel — or short story, or film, or play . . . ? Can you appreciate Dr. Strangelove if you’re ignorant of the Cold War? Is your experience of Orwell’s Animal Farm poorer if you don’t know your Trotsky from a hole in the ground?
Can a political subtext ruin a novel? (Will Republicans boycott the upcoming Star Wars movie just cuz it equates W with the Emperor?)
Can a writer pen a novel with a clear political message, yet be unconscious of that message?
Coming soon . . . Karen gets a wild hair over Old Man’s War; Fantasy & Science Fiction publishes Wonkophilic Fan Fiction.
Stay tuned.
D.
Gastronomy Domine II: You don’t know what you’re missing
It’s cold. It’s slippery. It’s a disk of fleshy goodness that comes from one of the ocean’s ugliest creatures, the monkfish. It’s ankimo, better known to you hakujin as monkfish liver, and it’s one of my favorite sushi dishes.
My sister-in-law won’t eat it. The fact that she’s some sort of environmental toxicology-type person should, I suppose, make me worry every time I swallow a fat mouthful of ankimo, but hey, you only live once. And besides, a little mercury never hurt me before.
I suspect that most people’s first encounter with liver is the beef liver steak, pan-fried and smothered in onions. No small wonder then that people shy away from the Noble Gland. Beef liver is too strongly flavored to be pleasant in any form. Definitely an acquired taste.
But, what about chopped chicken liver? This, too, can be mismanaged. Make it too dry, too dense, and with too much raw onion, and you’ll have the culinary equivalent of stucco.
My chopped chicken liver is an adaptation of the Commander’s Kitchen recipe. Great cookbook, but don’t follow their ‘chicken liver spread’ to the letter; you’ll end up with liver fudge. By weight, this sucker is one-third butter. Ugh.
When I want chopped chicken liver, I begin a few days in advance. I roast a duck. Rendered duck fat is flavorful and (unlike butter) a liquid at room temperature. (That’s what makes the end product so much lighter than the usual deli fare.) I saute onion and garlic in duck fat, then I add my chicken livers. Once they are thoroughly cooked, I add salt and pepper to taste, along with a grind of nutmeg. I deglaze the pan with brandy or cognac, then add Worcestershire sauce and Tapatio hot sauce. I pour the deglaze over the livers and let them cool; then I process the crap out of them.
In its consistency, the end product is far closer to thick whip cream than it is to mud. It’s a near-perfect Atkins food, by the way — pure cholesterol, but hardly any carbs. Serve it on celery sticks and you can even feel good about eating it.
Liver: you know you want it.
D.
Old Man’s War
On his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife’s grave – and then he enlists.
In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, the universe is a nasty place. Intelligent species are common, generally hostile, and good real estate is as common as a cheap oceanfront lot in California. The Colonial Defense Forces must fight tooth and nail (and tentacle, and claw . . .) for every livable planet.
Why sign up a bunch of geezers? Their experiences are invaluable to the colonies, so the logic goes, and they have nothing much to lose. John Perry in particular has nothing to lose. His beloved wife is dead. They had planned to enlist together, but she died from a stroke eight years ago.
And why do the geezers want to join? Blind faith, really: thanks to the CDF’s interactions with alien races, they are technologically advanced relative to Earth. Surely they must be able to turn old farts into killing machines. (Oh boy, can they.) No one down here on Earth knows; one condition of enlistment is that the recruit agrees never to go home again.
Before long, John is a green recruit struggling through basic training. After that, he’s a cog in the CDF machine, traveling to foreign worlds, meeting unique races, and killing them. I’d say, “And that’s when the fun begins,†except that Old Man’s War is a romp right from the start.
OMW is bound to stir memories of The Forever War and Starship Troopers. It even reminded me (pleasantly) of Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero. Like Bill, and like Forever War, OMW is all about entertainment: action, adventure, humor, and even a poignant love story which did not feel the least bit grafted.
Scalzi gives more than a passing nod to Robert Heinlein in his acknowledgments. The novel’s main Heinleinism – the way the action intermittently grinds to a halt to allow the characters to hold a roundtable discussion – is my primary quibble. (I have other quibbles, but they’re petty enough to qualify me as a snark, so I’ll shut up.) Fortunately, this does not happen too often. And, unlike Heinlein, Scalzi does this for the sake of exposition rather than political diatribe.
Perhaps less obvious is the debt Scalzi owes Jack Vance. I see Vance as the consummate author of cultural science fiction (his short story “The Moon Moth†is a great example). One of the coolest things about OMW is the Consu, an ultra-advanced race who think they’re doing us a favor by killing us. As in Vance’s stories, the Consu culture is more than just local color – it’s a key plot element.
Old Man’s War is the most fun I’ve had with a science fiction novel since Snow Crash. This novel doesn’t try to blow your mind with post-Singularity trans-human gobbledygook, and it doesn’t pretend to be cyber-punker than Gibson. It’s an old-fashioned pulpy joyride: Scalzi has made entertainment paramount.
D.
What’s your favorite first contact story?
So we’re watching Alien Planet* on the Discovery Channel, and I’m asking myself: how do you take such an intrinsically interesting subject and make it boring?
Here are the problems, dramaturgically speaking:
1. No protags. In Alien Planet, what passes for protags are two robotic probes, ‘Ike’ Newton and ‘Leo’ (Galileo). They’re cute bots, but they’re not human. Not even close.
2. No plot. Funny thing, a lot of SF novels suffer from that same problem: as if exploration alone were enough to drive the story forward. I had that problem with Ringworld, for example.
3. Few new ideas. Many of these critters look alike: roughly mammalian, with tiny heads (or no heads), and no discernible eyes. They have a few birds, too, but these look like flying versions of the mammalian critters.
Their heart is in the right place. They’re trying to teach terrestrial biology in a new and interesting way, and they’re also attempting to depict such an expedition in a scientifically reasonable manner. In the real world, you would explore such worlds robotically; in the real world, you wouldn’t have much more of a plot than ‘let’s go out there and see what we find.’ But that doesn’t necessarily make for good entertainment.
What’s your favorite first contact story? I’m not sure which one I would choose, but here’s an old, but not-half-bad list I found on the web. Lots of novels I haven’t read here.
***
Jake’s Medford pediatrician called me late yesterday to give me the LP results: no meningitis. We’re back to square one, a presumptive diagnosis of ‘chronic tension-type headache’, with little left to do but try him out on Elavil and — get this — biofeedback.
Karen and Jake came back this afternoon. Jake has a sore throat, upset stomach, and headache, making me wonder whether he caught a virus at the hospital. I pushed the fluids and he rallied enough to eat some dinner.
The apple pie turned out okay. Store-bought puff pastry is about as good as it sounds (not). My bottom crust, a galette from Baking with Julia, was far better than my puff pastry top crust. Live and learn. I may be a foodie, but I’m not nuts enough (yet) to make my own puff pastry.
D.
*If you missed this program, here’s the idea. A manned mission to an Earth-like planet, Darwin IV, encounters one new organism after another.
Pushing through to the other side
Today’s subtitle comes from Special Inspirational Mentor-type Person Geneen Roth, whom I’d never heard of until this very moment, having recently googled the phrase “the only way out is through.”* And I’d always thought Lewis Carroll said it. (No, but he did say, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful voice, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ . . . which is better still.)
“Otch**,” my mom is saying right about now. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Well, Mum, it’s about to get even worse. This afternoon, while torturing myself on the elliptical trainer, I thought about how much exercise had in common with writing, and how quantum tunneling provided such an apt metaphor for both. Here’s a short bit from Wiki on quantum tunneling:
Quantum tunneling is the quantum-mechanical effect of transitioning through a classically-forbidden energy state. The classical analogy is for a car on a roller coaster to make it up and over a hill which it does not have enough kinetic energy to surmount.
Think about how hard it is to sit down with that blank page and get moving. Better yet, don’t think about it, just do it. Because I know you do — the writers out there, anyway. Have you ever been able to will the words onto the page? In the moments between blank page and written page, something happens. You tunnel through that energy barrier and find yourself on the other side. Conscious effort has little to do with it.
Same with exercise. Every time I get on that elliptical trainer, I’m convinced I’ll never make it past 20 minutes. By 25 minutes, I’ve hit my second wind; by thirty, I’m thinking, “Ten minutes until cool down. I can take anything for ten minutes.” Finally, I get my five minute cool down; and before I realize what has happened, I’ve sweated off 450 calories.
If I stop to think about writing, the task seems insurmountable. If I stop to wonder if I really, really feel like exercising, the answer is always no. Without fail, I have to do these things automatically, without forethought, so that they’re done before I’ve even had time to bitch.
***
Jake update:
He had his lumbar puncture this morning. Sailed right through it; his biggest gripe was having to wake up at 7AM. (Hey, he’s home-schooled. ‘Nuff said.) Clear fluid, normal pressure. What galls me is that I know they’ve done a Gram stain by now, and (if someone’s bothering to check!) we could have some useful information. Namely, does he have chronic viral meningitis? But, no. I’m only the patient’s father, not his doctor (although I have lanced his ears and pulled red string out of his nose). I’ll have to wait.
Monday morning, I’m calling.
Jake convinced Karen to stay another night in Medford, so I’m ganz allein yet again. He’s doing okay. No spinal headache, but his baseline headache is still there. If we come up with bupkes on the LP, I’m not sure what we’ll do next. Perhaps we’ll go down to the mecca (Stanford).
***
Menu for tomorrow: focaccia, oxtail stew (I make it with navy beans and smoked ham shank), and apple pie for dessert. I’m going to make a fairly standard bottom crust, but for the top I bought some puff pastry. It’s high time I tried to figure out Marguerite Slater’s* apple pie recipe.
D.
*According to Wikiquote, Geneen Roth is also responsible for “Be fully present for five minutes each day.” There’s something pathetic about that, don’t you think?
**My father’s name is Arthur, nickname Archie, further shortened to Arch, transformed further still by my mother’s thick Bostonian accent into Otch.
***Lance Henriksen’s mother, and my surrogate mom during my first year at Berkeley. And if you’re exceptionally nice to me, one day I’ll tell you the story of how Lance reunited his mom and dad after they’d been divorced for umpteen years. You won’t get that story on IMDB.
No rudder
Karen and Jake drove to Ashland this afternoon. They met with the pediatrician who will be doing Jake’s lumbar puncture tomorrow morning. The procedure will be done under IV sedation, so the worst part of the whole affair will (hopefully) be the IV. There’s always the chance of spinal headache, however, and those are no fun. (Just what he needs: another headache.) On the other hand, when I had viral meningitis a few years ago, I thought the procedure relieved the headache. Or it might have been all the Demerol they pumped me with.
This leaves me home alone without a rudder, or an anchor, or a sail, or all the above. Ideal writing opportunity, huh? Yet all I can manage to do is surf Wikipedia. I’ve done this a hundred times, but this time, for the first time, I looked a bit deeper.
Here’s where all the technical wonks (like Pat) are going to be stunned by my neutronium-like density . . . but maybe some of you will find this interesting. You see, Wikipedia is a dynamic encyclopedia. It changes constantly. Anyone can edit a Wikipedia article; anyone can write a new article. Anyone in the world. After you’ve written (or edited) an article, any other palooka can come along and edit your stuff. One other thing: Wikipedia articles are intensively hyperlinked to other Wikipedia articles.
Two things strike me. First, the only error correction mechanism (as best I can tell) is that someone smarter than the writer will happen along, find the error, and correct it. I imagine this works fine if, for example, someone calls a Russian tortoise an amphibian, but what about more subtle errors? (Note to self: have Karen check out the entries on quantum mechanics. For my part, I looked up the entry on ear wax. Aside from an annoying tendency to write both ‘earwax’ and ‘ear wax’, ‘eardrum’ and ‘ear drum’, I didn’t catch any obvious boo-boos.) What about urban legends, or hot button issues like Darwinism or abortion? The abortion discussion page is illuminating; I get the sense that this article shifts on a day to day basis.
Second, when is this bit of software — with its vast fund of knowledge, its enormous number of internal (hyper)connections, its ability to ‘forget’ untapped articles, and its ability to correct errors — going to achieve sentience?
Reminds me of a story I have yet to write. Premise: a new internet craze pops up, a website with animation so crude it makes South Park look like Allegro non troppo. The animated sequence depicts a young man showing up at a young woman’s apartment to take her out on a date. All across the world, folks log on to give ‘advice’ either to the girl or the guy. In real time, the software synthesizes a consensus which then generates the actions and dialog of our cartoon protagonists. This happens once each evening; people become obsessed to find out what will happen on tonight’s date.
What happens next is anyone’s guess. In my original conception, one night the boy and girl come to blows and murder one another; the following day, a world war begins. I dunno, but this feels awfully Twilight Zony (not a good thing, in my opinion). I could also go the Spielbergian route (night after night, the couple achieves a deeper and deeper love, a more mature, enduring relationship . . . and world peace breaks out). Feh. And then there’s option three: folks of mating age become so wrapped up in the website they forget to have sex in real life. Egad, that’s triter than the first two!
I guess that’s why I never finished that one. I’m still casting about for an ending. I have a few of those, which reminds me: one day, I really must get down to writing, “Borges, the Undead”.
D.
As the gears turn
Even though I’m not working on the novel during the week, I’m still thinking about it. More to the point, my subconscious is hard at work. Tuesday morning in the wee hours, I woke up and realized I’d figured out the solution to a choreographic problem in my climax. The interesting thing is this: I didn’t know the details of the solution; I awoke with the conviction that my subconscious had it all figured out, and that I need only begin writing to find out the solution.
Back in the dorms, people would be calling me an airhead right about now (or worse), but I suspect the writers in my audience know what I’m talking about.
Yesterday morning, I woke up with a better understanding of one of my villains’ motivations, and I had several snippets of dialog spinning around in my mind, too. Again, this is not too terribly unusual, although it hasn’t happened in an awfully long while. I’m somewhat suspicious of these little gifts. This used to happen all the time back when I was writing my aborted novel Karakoram, so often that I kept a spiral notebook around to jot down these flashes of supposed brilliance. In retrospect, much of this stuff has all the radiance of the ideas you get while stoned. I sometimes wonder (A) what my muse is doing up there, and (B) why she won’t share any of the good shit with me.
But I shouldn’t give her such a hard time. When I open my manuscript at random, I’m usually delighted with what I see. This is either (A) a very good sign, or (B) further evidence of terminal egomania.
Close . . . so very close to the end. I don’t know what the very last scene will be. I don’t even want to go there. Gotta have faith in the muse.
D.
What’s my motivation?
When I woke up this morning, I’d intended to write another installment of Gastronomy Domine. Hence the altered subtitle above. (Pop quiz: have any of you noticed that I change the subtitle with each new blog entry?) I wanted to do a piece on basturma, the Armenian ur-coldcut that is to pastrami what a Top Dog Polish is to Oscar Meyer. Real scientist George Muscat introduced Karen and me to basturma some time in the late 80s. The three of us went to Tarver’s Deli in Sunnyvale (now closed, I think) and picked up some flat bread, tarama (carp roe), basturma, and a ball of vicious cheese we’ve never found anywhere else. George taught us how to make taramosalata. We spent the afternoon scarfing roe, itsy bitsy flat bread-and-basturma sandwiches, and dime-sized bits of vicious cheese. Then we went into a crowded supermarket and breathed on people.
But, alas, I’ll have to leave that story for another time. For the past two days, I’ve been stressing over Jacob. He had three good days, and then Monday morning the headache came back in force. Most of my anxiety comes from the fact that Jake’s Medford neurologist wouldn’t return my calls. 4PM today, we’re still waiting for the guy to set up a lumbar puncture (something to look forward to! . . . but the point is to get an answer). He finally called Karen about 5PM. Tentative plan: Karen will drive in to Medford with Jake tomorrow, and the procedure is set for Thursday morning. They’ll be doing it with IV sedation, so it should not be terribly traumatic for Jake. I’ll keep you posted.
***
We’ll get back to basturma some other time. It’s worth its very own bit.
D.
Hey, you! Robot!
Karen and I watched I, Robot on DVD today. We hadn’t seen it in the movies; frankly, the trailer turned me off. It was one of those tell-all trailers that left me with the sense that I had (A) seen the movie, and (B) hadn’t liked it. Technophobic blather, I thought.
Well, I was only partly right.
I don’t think I’m being too much of a spoiler* to say that there are some baaaad robots in this film. But to dismiss I, Robot as neo-Luddite claptrap would be an oversimplification. Sure, the bots are bad and the AI is evil, but it’s the nature of that evil that is interesting.
Yes, yes, there’s the usual SF trope that humans, with all their foibles, have ‘heart’, and that is what makes us superior to machine logic. That’s the overt message, and it’s trite as hell. But there’s another message, too — a philosophy the movie condemns: in order to protect us, we must be deprived of our freedoms. If a few people are harmed along the way, well, tough noogies.
Commentary on contemporary US politics in I, Robot: am I reading too deep? It is better to live with the risk of violence than be deprived of our personal liberties. Is that sentiment so controversial we have to bury it in a Will Smith flick?
Aside from the fact I, Robot and I have the same politics, here’s what’s really cool about the movie: it has the same take on entertainment as I do. I can’t think of another film that has I, Robot‘s balance of humor, poignancy, action, and creepiness. That’s what I strive for in my writing, and that’s what I, Robot delivers.
Here’s who we have to thank:
Will Smith, who makes the most of a superb script. (“You are the dumbest smart person I have ever met.” It’s a cute line, but in Smith’s hands, it’s a corker.) Aside from starring, he also gets an exec prod credit for the film.
Director Alex Proyas, who milks Smith for all he’s worth and who makes the sentient robot, Sonny, touching without being maudlin (you listening, Spielberg? Naw. Didn’t think so).
Screenwriters Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman. Vintar, who also wrote the screen story, is perhaps best known for Final Fantasy. Goldsman has lots of fine credits but deserves a great big HUH? for Lost in Space.
Well, Karen wants to look at kitchen cabinets at the hardware store. Gotta run.
D.
*One nice thing about reviewing a year-old film: I’ll bet those of you who would watch a movie like I, Robot have already seen it.