Around 600 words on The White City today, and still waiting for it to tell me how it goes. I wrote the last scene (denouement), and the closing sentence, but I'm missing like four scenes that comprise the climax.

It's interesting writing Sebastien in a situation where he is NOT in charge.

Tomorrow is a work day. God damn it. I will have focus and I will get somewhere.

Well, time to stare at it  for a while again.

Tags: abby irene, the white city
Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Garbage - The Trick is to Keep Breathin'

I'll wait until the finale next week to form a full opinion. Spoilers may follow.

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"Suspense writers, present and future: Remember you are in good company. Dostoyevsky, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe...there are hacks in every kind of literary field...Aim at being a genius."

—Patricia Highsmith

When I've expressed similar sentiments as regards horror, I've been called a faggot. As regards SF and fantasy, I've been called patriarchal.

But then again, wasn't Patricia Highsmith a patriarchal faggot? AHA! I knew I was onto something...

I don't know about you guys, but I find traveling by air pretty darn exhausting. It's not the jet lag so much as all the time that one running and then waiting, being hassled and making nice back, stressing and being stressed out.

Well after the latest childish and inept attempt to blow up an aircraft on US soil, the TSA has announced more irritating security measures of exactly the type that don't actually seem to be doing much more than stress, hassle, irritate and make traveling by air something so far removed from the stately ultra-modern event it once was that it's now, well, something only the desperate, the bereaved or the obligated do.

Having grown weary of making nice to rude airport security, stressing out at the border, and biting back vitriol, I'm going to make a few points.

1. I'm sure airport security does useful stuff. They also do stupid, irritating useless stuff like take away old lady's knitting needles. I'm not sure how knitting needles are any more deadly than a mechanical pencil or a serious martial artist's body. Rules should probably make sense if they're to be taken seriously. Many of the security rules make no sense at all so it's hard to take them seriously. It's hard to respect the people who create them or enforce them. This does nothing to improve air travel.

2. The last three publicized attempts to blow a plane to smithereens were foiled by passengers or the police, not by TSA officials. The theatre of security does not soothe my troubled mind. I don't believe that because I did all the steps and walked through a magic beeping hoop and had someone authorized pass a wand over me that I'm any safer than I was a moment ago. If the TSA wishes to be seen as anything other than a witchdoctor of an organization, maybe they should publish reports of the plots they've foiled. If any.

3. I don't know about others but I think I'm done with flying. It's not because I'm afraid to fly (I am a little) and it's not because it's outrageously expensive, stressful, uncomfortable, airless and one can never be sure if the airline is actually going to get them to their destination. It's because I'm tired of the theatre of security, and I'm not willing to play along any more. I don't want to add legitimacy to security measures that do nothing to enhance security, and require my participation and therefore my tacit approval. I'm just, you know, done.

So I think, from now on, it'll be the train or the ferry or a slow boat for me. I've had enough of flying.

Tags: news, personal, politics

Ehrlich, E. (1997). Miriam's Kitchen. New York, Penguin.

I can't recommend this book. I can't recommend this book because it is too delicate. It is too coercive. it is too emotional.

I loved this book.

There are two aspects to the book: in one, Elizabeth Ehrlich listens to her mother-in-law talk of life in Poland, of being a survivor, of being a young mother in Israel and an immigrant to the United States, and begins to learn from her how to cook the families' traditional dishes. In the other, Ehrlich herself begins and makes the move back to kashrut, to keeping a kosher home. It also contains recipes which work (I've tried a few).

For those here who don't know me very well, I am a lapsed Orthodox Jew, whose parents were completely non-observant, but whose grandparents were conventional Orthodox. I was sent to a Jewish elementary school but to a "secular" state secondary school where I was the only Jew. I regard myself as lapsed but believing, where my parents would both call themselves lapsed but non-believing. For the past five years I have felt guilty about not keeping a kosher home, but I married out. I made my choice and I'm not about to make someone else's life a misery (although it has occured to me that being lactose intolerant would make a full dairy kitchen irrelevant). Combined with my interest in oral history, I was utterly ripe for this book, I am completely its audience.

Much of this book is written as an elegy for a lost place and time, but also for a future set of choices, what will be preserved, what will be lost, what will be actively discarded. Ehrlich is writing both a memoir and a cultural history in which she takes in the radical politics of her parents, and weight of responsibility, in which she works out the cultural space in which her own choices were received by others.

Miriam and many of her friends were holocaust survivors. There are many ways in which this becomes linked with the food culture. I'm going to quote you just one paragraph which both indicates the power of this book, and why I am so reluctant to actually recommend it. This is not a book for everyone although I think I will be returning to it over and over again.

"It was Uncle Fred who at last described this crowd's aversion to the buffet meal. "I was in a concentration camp for five years," he said. "I don't stand in line for food." I blanched and cringed: my wedding. No one had told me, and I never understood for ten long years what was the matter, quite, what...."

This morning we have freezing rain in Mehama, so it seems unlikely that we'll get any more "outside" chores like cutting more of the old telephone pole done today. Brr!

Last night and today, we're working on trying to bring back to life some of the hard drives on Lisa's computers. Here's an odd thing: she has one IBM T30 she can't use because it doesn't have a touch-pad, but it will boot. We cloned its hard drive. The clone wouldn't boot, but if I booted from the Windows CD and ran FIXBOOT, the clone worked just fine. A couple of other drives seemed to only need to have FIXBOOT run on them, but one of them began throwing STOP 7A and other my-drive-is-dying errors, so I suggested to Lisa that she get any files off of it that she can -- the drive is more or less readable as a non-booting device -- and discard it.

We'd install from scratch on a larger drive, except that for some reason any installation from scratch comes with the default setting of maximizing all windows, and Lisa very much does not want this. It's a tremendous pain in the neck to keep having to reset computers, and it's also frustrating that -- if our online searches are telling us anything -- that nobody else considers this a problem. We've found lots of ways of forcing all new windows to maximize, but hardly anyone seems to think it's worthwhile for new windows to not be maximized.

Tags: computers, lisa
Current Location: Mehama, Oregon
Current Mood: okay

A friend has just mentioned how often he poops. Several other people chimed in to talk about their own habits. I was taken aback by what people were taking for granted.

I do not mean to be alarmist, but one of the things that so delayed my own diagnosis of celiac was not knowing what was normal. Surely everyone went to the loo about half an hour after breakfast and stayed there awhile? Surely everyone felt bloated and uncomfortable after lunch? Surely everyone had a bowel movement four or five times a day? Surely everyone "had to run"? There are more serious conditions than celiac which cause bowel problems but what they all have in common is that the symptoms are too embarrassing to talk about.


1. Normal bowel movements are in the range of 3 times a day to 3 times a week. It varies but that's sort of ok.

2. It shouldn't hurt.

3. It shouldn't be catching you unawares.

4. You shouldn't feel bloated after eating and have regular constipation/the runs (I can't spell the correct word, sorry).

If you have issues with any of the above, see the doctor. If the doctor tells you that you have irritable bowel syndrome without running any tests explain very, very patiently, that this is a description and not a diagnosis.

Of the possible causes, celiac is now considered so common that if you have any of the symptoms (easy enough to look up) I recommend that you have the blood tests. If you are an Ashkenazi Jew, Italian, Irish or Scandinavian in origin, I raise the recommendation. Also if anyone in the family has aspergers or autism as there seems to be a link but it's not understood what it is or if it really exists.

Teacup today: cabbage roses, a gift from ctwriter.
Tea today: Mokalbari East
Temperature this morning: a balmy fiftyish


Sebastien is having a fraught conversation with somebody he's never met before, who knows him uncomfortably well. I have just skipped the climax and am working on the denouement.

ETA: And a very brave neighborhood cat is apparently using our back porch as a base of operations, as there are two Green Bits (TM) on the steps. I wonder if that was the end of our Kitchen Smouse.

Tags: tea, the daily commute, the white city, the writer at work
Current Mood: grateful
Current Music: George Harrison - Give Me Love

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Current Mood: amused

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