(no subject)
Happy birthday raincitygirl!
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When I was at my first tech writing job after moving to the city, I worked from home on Mondays and Fridays, and on Mondays I used to have regular dinner parties for 8 people. Since then, I developed a longer commute, and everybody got busier, and then I got hermit-y, and my hostessing skills have atrophied. Plus I only had three plates for a while. It was fun to stretch those muscles on Saturday night, when I made dinner for bheerfan, cofax7, and laurashapiro--beets, greens, and stilton with walnut vinaigrette and seared tuna on lentils with bacon, vinegar and shallots. Laura brought some delicious locally-made soprasetta and pork terrine for us to share beforehand, and Cofax shared a nice wine, and the local bakery's cherry frangipane tart was also lovely--I brought the leftovers to work today so I wouldn't be tempted to keep nibbling on it.
I really need to go all out on the running this week.
And on top of the vid watching and intelligent, funny conversation, I got to see a glimpse of something called Mulder salad (I HAVE NO IDEA!), so it's only fair that I pass along molly_may's news that the X-Files movie is scheduled to start shooting 12/10.
Yesterday was a wandering day. I'm not a very organized tour guide, and bheerfan and I ended up going to the Ferry Building and Fisherman's Wharf--where the weather was sunny but freakishly hazy, possibly because of smoke from the recent fires in Southern California, and the view of the Golden Gate and Alcatraz was not as spectacular as it should have been--and then we rode the F to the Castro and loafed in the Mission. I made her climb Church Street from 18th to 20th to see the view, which wasn't very nice of me. Along the way, we saw a dog dressed up as Elmo, and bought books at Borderlands (Connie Willis for me, George R.R. Martin among other things for her) and ate crepes, and again with the need to do lots of running this week. She's on her way to parts south now--though not by way of Devil's Slide--and I was so glad to see her.
* * * * *
Book roundup:
The Book of the New Sun (Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel) by Gene Wolfe: I think very highly of Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is a densely thematic book about colonialism, and perhaps my expectations for The Book of the Long Sun were not well served by that experience. Parts of it are really imaginative and interesting--the green, terraformed moon, the guilds of witches and torturers, the ancient cities growing on the remains of even more ancient ruins, the vestiges everywhere of a far greater age of technology whose legacy might as well be magic to the more superstitious fallen civilizations that persist. I tend to gravitate toward the more realistic end of the fantasy spectrum, so the idea that there was a rational explanation for what looked to Severian and those around him like inexplicable wonders appealed to me. But ultimately, I felt like the series started out strong, raising some interesting questions about life and morality, compartmentalization, individual and collective identity, only to drop many of those threads during the course of Severian's journey--which is a pretty standard fantasy journey of young orphan to prince, pre-ordained by special signs, when you strip away the particular details--and I was never quite satisfied with the way the books hinted at rational explanations for so many of its fantastical elements, only to keep them shrouded in mystery. Overall, the books had some really striking imagery and patches of lyrical prose, but left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
By some strange coincidence, next I read two novels in a row with unsympathetic narrators:
Property by Valerie Martin: The narrator is Manon Gaudet, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a sugar planter in 1828 Louisiana. Along with her own story, Manon tells, indirectly, the story of Sarah, the slave she brings to the plantation with her, and whose fate is bound to hers. Manon is entirely preoccupied by the bitter disappointments of her life--swept along by the currents of convention, she made what seemed at the time like an advisable marriage, only to develop a loathing for her husband. She can't leave him, and when her mother dies, she faces the prospect of having all the property that could provide her with independence pass to his control. Both women hate Gaudet, and would have a common cause in that were it not for the way social institutions and Manon's own selfishness set them apart; instead, Manon hates Sarah, and blames her, and in Manon's jealous, angry, unsympathetic telling of her own plight, the reader learns that Sarah has been separated from a lover, has had a child torn away from her, and was forced to become the husband's mistress. The story is horrifying enough, but far more horrifying is the utter disconnect between the self-pity with which Manon views her own predicament and the inhumanity she shows to Sarah; in the end, owning Sarah actually becomes her solace, her reward for her suffering. It's a spare, unsettling novel that stayed in my head for a long time.
On Parole by Akira Yoshimura: Kikutani is paroled after sixteen years in jail for what the reader gradually learns is the crime of deliberately murdering his wife and accidentally murdering his wife's lover's mother. Part of the story is his adjustment to regular life; after so long in a place where routine was enforced on him, he has a difficult time making choices for himself--where he should live, when he should eat his meals, what he should do with his free time. But the constant undercurrent to that story is Kikutani's lack of moral evolution, and the way the parole system, with its emphasis on mentoring and encouraging remorse, implemented through routine check-ups and demands for certain kinds of outward behavior, utterly fails to detect Kikutani's moral emptiness and the danger he poses to others. He is perfectly capable of going through the outward motions, adhering to the prescribed behavior, expressing the correct thoughts, but he's not sorry he killed his wife--she was cheating on him and deserved it--and he's not really sorry he killed the old woman, who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And ultimately, because of that emptiness, because of that lack of ability to see others--particularly women--as actual people with hopes and dreams and feelings of their own, he kills his second wife when she makes him angry and uncomfortable, in a fit of righteous rage. It's difficult to separate the threads: Kikutani's own selfish misogyny is reinforced and enabled by the legal process, which treats the accidental murder of the old woman as a far greater crime than the deliberate murder of the cheating wife, who was judged to carry a great deal of responsibility for her own fate; but the narrative initially paints Kikutani as a sympathetic character, and only slowly does the reader realize how deeply troubled he is, and it was difficult for me to tell how much of that growing horror was reinforced by the narrative--some of it certainly was deliberate--and how much of it was my own reading of the circumstances. The murders are both portrayed as losses of control, red rages in which Kikutani snaps, but beyond a certain point, it's a level of excuse-making that doesn't wash for me: there's no such thing as redemption without remorse, but what Yoshimura seems to be saying about Kikutani's free will ended up coming ickily close to "the bitches made me do it" territory for me, and that doesn't work at all.
* * * * *
When I was at my first tech writing job after moving to the city, I worked from home on Mondays and Fridays, and on Mondays I used to have regular dinner parties for 8 people. Since then, I developed a longer commute, and everybody got busier, and then I got hermit-y, and my hostessing skills have atrophied. Plus I only had three plates for a while. It was fun to stretch those muscles on Saturday night, when I made dinner for bheerfan, cofax7, and laurashapiro--beets, greens, and stilton with walnut vinaigrette and seared tuna on lentils with bacon, vinegar and shallots. Laura brought some delicious locally-made soprasetta and pork terrine for us to share beforehand, and Cofax shared a nice wine, and the local bakery's cherry frangipane tart was also lovely--I brought the leftovers to work today so I wouldn't be tempted to keep nibbling on it.
I really need to go all out on the running this week.
And on top of the vid watching and intelligent, funny conversation, I got to see a glimpse of something called Mulder salad (I HAVE NO IDEA!), so it's only fair that I pass along molly_may's news that the X-Files movie is scheduled to start shooting 12/10.
Yesterday was a wandering day. I'm not a very organized tour guide, and bheerfan and I ended up going to the Ferry Building and Fisherman's Wharf--where the weather was sunny but freakishly hazy, possibly because of smoke from the recent fires in Southern California, and the view of the Golden Gate and Alcatraz was not as spectacular as it should have been--and then we rode the F to the Castro and loafed in the Mission. I made her climb Church Street from 18th to 20th to see the view, which wasn't very nice of me. Along the way, we saw a dog dressed up as Elmo, and bought books at Borderlands (Connie Willis for me, George R.R. Martin among other things for her) and ate crepes, and again with the need to do lots of running this week. She's on her way to parts south now--though not by way of Devil's Slide--and I was so glad to see her.
* * * * *
Book roundup:
The Book of the New Sun (Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel) by Gene Wolfe: I think very highly of Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is a densely thematic book about colonialism, and perhaps my expectations for The Book of the Long Sun were not well served by that experience. Parts of it are really imaginative and interesting--the green, terraformed moon, the guilds of witches and torturers, the ancient cities growing on the remains of even more ancient ruins, the vestiges everywhere of a far greater age of technology whose legacy might as well be magic to the more superstitious fallen civilizations that persist. I tend to gravitate toward the more realistic end of the fantasy spectrum, so the idea that there was a rational explanation for what looked to Severian and those around him like inexplicable wonders appealed to me. But ultimately, I felt like the series started out strong, raising some interesting questions about life and morality, compartmentalization, individual and collective identity, only to drop many of those threads during the course of Severian's journey--which is a pretty standard fantasy journey of young orphan to prince, pre-ordained by special signs, when you strip away the particular details--and I was never quite satisfied with the way the books hinted at rational explanations for so many of its fantastical elements, only to keep them shrouded in mystery. Overall, the books had some really striking imagery and patches of lyrical prose, but left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied.
By some strange coincidence, next I read two novels in a row with unsympathetic narrators:
Property by Valerie Martin: The narrator is Manon Gaudet, who is trapped in an unhappy marriage to a sugar planter in 1828 Louisiana. Along with her own story, Manon tells, indirectly, the story of Sarah, the slave she brings to the plantation with her, and whose fate is bound to hers. Manon is entirely preoccupied by the bitter disappointments of her life--swept along by the currents of convention, she made what seemed at the time like an advisable marriage, only to develop a loathing for her husband. She can't leave him, and when her mother dies, she faces the prospect of having all the property that could provide her with independence pass to his control. Both women hate Gaudet, and would have a common cause in that were it not for the way social institutions and Manon's own selfishness set them apart; instead, Manon hates Sarah, and blames her, and in Manon's jealous, angry, unsympathetic telling of her own plight, the reader learns that Sarah has been separated from a lover, has had a child torn away from her, and was forced to become the husband's mistress. The story is horrifying enough, but far more horrifying is the utter disconnect between the self-pity with which Manon views her own predicament and the inhumanity she shows to Sarah; in the end, owning Sarah actually becomes her solace, her reward for her suffering. It's a spare, unsettling novel that stayed in my head for a long time.
On Parole by Akira Yoshimura: Kikutani is paroled after sixteen years in jail for what the reader gradually learns is the crime of deliberately murdering his wife and accidentally murdering his wife's lover's mother. Part of the story is his adjustment to regular life; after so long in a place where routine was enforced on him, he has a difficult time making choices for himself--where he should live, when he should eat his meals, what he should do with his free time. But the constant undercurrent to that story is Kikutani's lack of moral evolution, and the way the parole system, with its emphasis on mentoring and encouraging remorse, implemented through routine check-ups and demands for certain kinds of outward behavior, utterly fails to detect Kikutani's moral emptiness and the danger he poses to others. He is perfectly capable of going through the outward motions, adhering to the prescribed behavior, expressing the correct thoughts, but he's not sorry he killed his wife--she was cheating on him and deserved it--and he's not really sorry he killed the old woman, who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. And ultimately, because of that emptiness, because of that lack of ability to see others--particularly women--as actual people with hopes and dreams and feelings of their own, he kills his second wife when she makes him angry and uncomfortable, in a fit of righteous rage. It's difficult to separate the threads: Kikutani's own selfish misogyny is reinforced and enabled by the legal process, which treats the accidental murder of the old woman as a far greater crime than the deliberate murder of the cheating wife, who was judged to carry a great deal of responsibility for her own fate; but the narrative initially paints Kikutani as a sympathetic character, and only slowly does the reader realize how deeply troubled he is, and it was difficult for me to tell how much of that growing horror was reinforced by the narrative--some of it certainly was deliberate--and how much of it was my own reading of the circumstances. The murders are both portrayed as losses of control, red rages in which Kikutani snaps, but beyond a certain point, it's a level of excuse-making that doesn't wash for me: there's no such thing as redemption without remorse, but what Yoshimura seems to be saying about Kikutani's free will ended up coming ickily close to "the bitches made me do it" territory for me, and that doesn't work at all.