I'm in limbo, and always hungry. It's a time of transition. I'm at home right now - up north, where it has been raining solidly for about two weeks and we have a shortage of hot water and a hosepipe ban (North West Water are.... peculiar people at the best of times), and today there is a family friend visiting, and my grandparents are long-term visiting, so there is a feeding of the five thousand going on.
What else to even say? I feel like I ought to record something of this short space of passing days - days between seasons, rainstorms and taught courses - where I have nothing very much to do, save packing, and am reading novels very slowly and otherwise finding ways to fill time. I've seen friends, most of them very old friends:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hathy_col and I go for cocktails and dinner, talk about Deep Space Nine and True Blood, fit in a groove of friendship now worn smooth and comfortable (I noted in passing that somehow or other we've got to ten years of being friends, mostly without noticing); the other day I saw Becca, my high school best friend, for the first time in seven years, and discovered that after all this time pink wine is still the drink of choice.
Writing, right now, is like pulling teeth and I'm not sure why. I'm starting to develop a theory that writing is difficult when it's the only thing you're doing with your day; if you have a day of speaking to people, running around, reading textbooks as well as novels, or at least other things to do, then you've got the raw material to write with. (Obviously this can't be the case for everyone - professional writers write all day every day, but then that is something I don't aspire to.)
So, novels. This week, I have read Her Fearful Symmetry, the second Audrey Niffenegger novel, and I thought it was readable, but excessively bizarre. It's a ghost story, but more macabre than creepy, and sometimes I felt very conscious that this is a novel about British people written by an American, and... in the end I didn't really know what to think of it. Possibly I'll re-read it at a later date.
I also read Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (for some reason I thought this was a much older book than it is), which I liked, after taking a very long time to get into it. It's kind of sort of the story of a man who goes from the US to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, only it's filtered through his translator, whose command of English is magnificently idiosyncratic, and somehow this approach brings more depth to it all than a conventional style would have done. It's good.
Um, also several Star Trek novels, because I'm predictable, and I'm kind of leafing through a book![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gavagai gave me - it's called How To Cook Without Recipes. This is something I'm always on about, if you have the misfortune to be occasionally cooked for by me; I disapprove strongly of people thinking that "learning to cook" = "memorising recipes". Somewhat infamously, I can cook but can't follow recipes; my approach to cooking is to throw ingredients into a pan and taste periodically until whatever it is tastes right. Obviously recipes help - it's helpful, upon deciding that you want to make apricot chicken, to google for it and find that lime juice and cinnamon are helpful subsidiary ingredients, but that didn't stop me altering it to suit myself. You get the idea.
(The natural conclusion to draw from this - yes, you're right, I can't bake. My attempts at baked goods are usually biscuitlike or expeditions into excessive bicarb.)
I like the general thesis of the book, then - that specific recipes, giving you exact amounts, are a relatively recent invention, and knowing what flavours go together is more important than knowing these exact amounts - but the author is somewhat tedious. No more so than in his chapter on chilli, in which he sagely explains that chilli is an overpowering flavour, used only by poor brown people, and it has no place in a self-respecting cook's cupboard, use black pepper instead. While he might be making a valid point by saying that in cultures where chilli is a commonplace ingredient, people's palates respond to it differently from those in cultures where it isn't so common, he does makes it entirely clear who's the "normal" person, from his perspective. And so, and so. I'm still reading it, but am much less inclined towards taking anything he says seriously.
What else? Well, next week I am going to Oxford for a while, to seeandrew, and then I am going to London for a couple of days, to see gavagai and to go to a Vienna Teng gig, and then I am coming home for twenty-four hours, and then I am on a one-way flight to Ithaca, and thus passes the glory of the old world.
(See, that's a pun. Look, I made a pun.)
What else to even say? I feel like I ought to record something of this short space of passing days - days between seasons, rainstorms and taught courses - where I have nothing very much to do, save packing, and am reading novels very slowly and otherwise finding ways to fill time. I've seen friends, most of them very old friends:
hathy_col and I go for cocktails and dinner, talk about Deep Space Nine and True Blood, fit in a groove of friendship now worn smooth and comfortable (I noted in passing that somehow or other we've got to ten years of being friends, mostly without noticing); the other day I saw Becca, my high school best friend, for the first time in seven years, and discovered that after all this time pink wine is still the drink of choice.Writing, right now, is like pulling teeth and I'm not sure why. I'm starting to develop a theory that writing is difficult when it's the only thing you're doing with your day; if you have a day of speaking to people, running around, reading textbooks as well as novels, or at least other things to do, then you've got the raw material to write with. (Obviously this can't be the case for everyone - professional writers write all day every day, but then that is something I don't aspire to.)
So, novels. This week, I have read Her Fearful Symmetry, the second Audrey Niffenegger novel, and I thought it was readable, but excessively bizarre. It's a ghost story, but more macabre than creepy, and sometimes I felt very conscious that this is a novel about British people written by an American, and... in the end I didn't really know what to think of it. Possibly I'll re-read it at a later date.
I also read Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (for some reason I thought this was a much older book than it is), which I liked, after taking a very long time to get into it. It's kind of sort of the story of a man who goes from the US to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, only it's filtered through his translator, whose command of English is magnificently idiosyncratic, and somehow this approach brings more depth to it all than a conventional style would have done. It's good.
Um, also several Star Trek novels, because I'm predictable, and I'm kind of leafing through a book
gavagai gave me - it's called How To Cook Without Recipes. This is something I'm always on about, if you have the misfortune to be occasionally cooked for by me; I disapprove strongly of people thinking that "learning to cook" = "memorising recipes". Somewhat infamously, I can cook but can't follow recipes; my approach to cooking is to throw ingredients into a pan and taste periodically until whatever it is tastes right. Obviously recipes help - it's helpful, upon deciding that you want to make apricot chicken, to google for it and find that lime juice and cinnamon are helpful subsidiary ingredients, but that didn't stop me altering it to suit myself. You get the idea.(The natural conclusion to draw from this - yes, you're right, I can't bake. My attempts at baked goods are usually biscuitlike or expeditions into excessive bicarb.)
I like the general thesis of the book, then - that specific recipes, giving you exact amounts, are a relatively recent invention, and knowing what flavours go together is more important than knowing these exact amounts - but the author is somewhat tedious. No more so than in his chapter on chilli, in which he sagely explains that chilli is an overpowering flavour, used only by poor brown people, and it has no place in a self-respecting cook's cupboard, use black pepper instead. While he might be making a valid point by saying that in cultures where chilli is a commonplace ingredient, people's palates respond to it differently from those in cultures where it isn't so common, he does makes it entirely clear who's the "normal" person, from his perspective. And so, and so. I'm still reading it, but am much less inclined towards taking anything he says seriously.
What else? Well, next week I am going to Oxford for a while, to see
andrew, and then I am going to London for a couple of days, to see gavagai and to go to a Vienna Teng gig, and then I am coming home for twenty-four hours, and then I am on a one-way flight to Ithaca, and thus passes the glory of the old world. (See, that's a pun. Look, I made a pun.)
