life update + recent books
Oct. 11th, 2009 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksSpent yesterday with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sovay attempting to reverse-engineer the butter-pies from Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City, definitely one of the formative fictional desserts of my childhood.
The key thing about butter-pie is that it is made of ice cream, but has a runny hot center, which neither melts the outside nor trickles until you get there. The book does not mention any shell or barrier around the center, but we don't have the tech yet to do it without. I considered meringue but realized that it would be an incredible pain in the ass to mold (i.e. I don't have anything handy to mold it in), so I decided to try caramel, which fits the flavor profile of butter pie in the first place.
Due to a misreading of the caramel recipe, the caramel from yesterday failed to entirely harden, but if it does it's going to be perfect.
When I actually make these, I'm going to make my own ice cream (creme caramel with cumin), but we were experimenting, so we went out and got some dulce de leche flavor. So what we had was dulce de leche ice cream surrounding fleur de sel caramel covered with/eventually filled with Guinness toffee sauce.
If the later version tastes any better than the current one, it will in fact rip a hole in the space-time continuum with sheer awesome. The current one, I am willing to consider butter-pie. Because I am having to force myself to eat anything else this weekend.
Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks. Louise Brooks may have been the most beautiful woman in the silents; her hair defines something about the twenties to this day. Her most famous film, G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, is gorgeous and terrifying-- and contains, among other things, the first lesbian scene in the cinema. Due to, among other things, a lack of interest on her part, Brooks' career did not transfer to the talkies. She remained in obscurity until the seventies, when she started to write. Lulu in Hollywood is a collection of some of her pieces, mostly memoir or rumination on the film stars she knew-- and I will be hunting down every single uncollected article, because the sheer incisive brilliance and with on display here are stupendous. She is a master of the character portrait, the definition of someone indelibly in two or three sentences. She knew everyone, and did not care what they thought of her-- not defiantly, but genuinely. She speaks of her own great physical beauty with the unselfconsciousness of the professional athlete, and indeed she started as a dancer, but also would come to a set reading Schopenhauer, and everyone thought it was a publicity gimmick. She saw through Hollywood, and they couldn't see through her, and they loved her and hated her for it. This is the best book I have ever read about the movies. Read the expanded edition, which has two more articles, lovely photos, and a rather terrifyingly adoring introduction by Kenneth Tynan.
Fire, Kristin Cashore. Cashore's speciality, based on her two books to date, appears to be making plots work that should turn out as horrifying Mary Sue-fests, and yet somehow are not. In Graceling there were magical people with eyes of two different colors, and in this one the heroine is beautiful beyond the lot of mortals and has intensely improbable flame-colored hair, and I'm telling you, these are very good books. They also fall under the YA-by-fiat thing that seems to happen to books about characters who happen to be teenagers-- that is, except for the ages of the protagonists, there is nothing about these that says YA to me, and my local bookstore quite sensibly has them both there and under adult. Anyhow, this one is so newly out that I don't want to say much about the plot, but it's a complex and interesting novel with some subtlety, and though I sussed out several of the plot revelations ahead of time, they played out in ways I found unexpected. There is a prologue-- and in fact an entire subplot to go with it-- that felt structurally unnecessary to this book to me, but that I have to excuse as being structurally probably necessary to the series as a whole. It's not how I'd have done it, but it was the cleverest way to do the thing I wouldn't have done, if that makes any sense. This is a better book than Graceling, but I think its flaws run deeper. Really looking forward to more from Cashore.
On Strike Against God, Joanna Russ. I finally managed to locate and read a copy of-- well, I was going to say Russ's 'realistic' novel, but who am I kidding? This is a post-modernist experiment, a lightly (and sometimes un-) disguised memoir, an homage to the lesbian pulps, an homage to the pulps in general, a love letter, a surrealist joke, and, incidentally, a novel containing some moments of something resembling mimesis. The narrator, Esther (though she says at one point "this is written by committee, and one of me is Joanna"), is a professor at a university; it is the mid-seventies; she falls in love with a grad student; and nothing goes as the reader would expect. The problem with my trying to say much about Russ is twofold: firstly, my mind works a way that seems congenial or compatible to hers, so that when I first read The Female Man someone had gently to explain to me that it is considered experimental writing and rather hard to follow, as it read perfectly straightforwardly to me. Secondly, Russ is so good at catching and expressing a certain facet of the horrible inescapable despair I associate with being closeted that I can't tell if she would hit other people as hard as she hits me. All I can say is that her anger is my anger, and her books are one of the rocks I built my life on.
Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Charles Butler. It says something about the lovely depth and sweep of analysis in this book that it contains one of the best definitions and discussions of cultural appropriation I have seen in some time, in the context of talking about Alan Garner's novel Strandloper. The thing is, though, I think it may really be impossible to pin down the attitude that British fantasists have toward place and myth-as-place and place-as-myth. This is a very noble attempt which gave me much food for thought. Of the four authors discussed, I have essentially memorized Jones and Cooper, have read one book by Alan Garner (The Owl Service) and developed a complex and unnerving relationship with it that involves hating it desperately, rereading it at intervals, and having really strange dreams about it, and have read no Penelope Lively whatsoever. This made for an interesting perspective on the analysis. I am not sure whether Butler should have taken more account of the fact that Garner is-- well, a person I know who's met him describes him as 'glitteringly mad'. Anyway, I have concluded that there is probably no point in my reading Penelope Lively, and that instead of a vague intent to read the rest of Alan Garner, with Red Shift at the top of the list, I should ignore his first few entirely and read Thursbitch, Strandloper, the Stone Book Quartet and Red Shift, maintaining that last at the top of the list. I have also concluded that no one likes Cooper's Seaward as much as I do (I think it is her second best) and that while everyone has a different list of the Best of DWJ I should suck it up and reread Dogsbody because obviously I was too young the first and only time. (I was eight. I did not catch the pun in the title. The book itself depressed me for weeks.)
Oh good God it is four in the morning. Well, the other ones I wanted to write up will wait.
sovay attempting to reverse-engineer the butter-pies from Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City, definitely one of the formative fictional desserts of my childhood.The key thing about butter-pie is that it is made of ice cream, but has a runny hot center, which neither melts the outside nor trickles until you get there. The book does not mention any shell or barrier around the center, but we don't have the tech yet to do it without. I considered meringue but realized that it would be an incredible pain in the ass to mold (i.e. I don't have anything handy to mold it in), so I decided to try caramel, which fits the flavor profile of butter pie in the first place.
Due to a misreading of the caramel recipe, the caramel from yesterday failed to entirely harden, but if it does it's going to be perfect.
When I actually make these, I'm going to make my own ice cream (creme caramel with cumin), but we were experimenting, so we went out and got some dulce de leche flavor. So what we had was dulce de leche ice cream surrounding fleur de sel caramel covered with/eventually filled with Guinness toffee sauce.
If the later version tastes any better than the current one, it will in fact rip a hole in the space-time continuum with sheer awesome. The current one, I am willing to consider butter-pie. Because I am having to force myself to eat anything else this weekend.
Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks. Louise Brooks may have been the most beautiful woman in the silents; her hair defines something about the twenties to this day. Her most famous film, G.W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, is gorgeous and terrifying-- and contains, among other things, the first lesbian scene in the cinema. Due to, among other things, a lack of interest on her part, Brooks' career did not transfer to the talkies. She remained in obscurity until the seventies, when she started to write. Lulu in Hollywood is a collection of some of her pieces, mostly memoir or rumination on the film stars she knew-- and I will be hunting down every single uncollected article, because the sheer incisive brilliance and with on display here are stupendous. She is a master of the character portrait, the definition of someone indelibly in two or three sentences. She knew everyone, and did not care what they thought of her-- not defiantly, but genuinely. She speaks of her own great physical beauty with the unselfconsciousness of the professional athlete, and indeed she started as a dancer, but also would come to a set reading Schopenhauer, and everyone thought it was a publicity gimmick. She saw through Hollywood, and they couldn't see through her, and they loved her and hated her for it. This is the best book I have ever read about the movies. Read the expanded edition, which has two more articles, lovely photos, and a rather terrifyingly adoring introduction by Kenneth Tynan.
Fire, Kristin Cashore. Cashore's speciality, based on her two books to date, appears to be making plots work that should turn out as horrifying Mary Sue-fests, and yet somehow are not. In Graceling there were magical people with eyes of two different colors, and in this one the heroine is beautiful beyond the lot of mortals and has intensely improbable flame-colored hair, and I'm telling you, these are very good books. They also fall under the YA-by-fiat thing that seems to happen to books about characters who happen to be teenagers-- that is, except for the ages of the protagonists, there is nothing about these that says YA to me, and my local bookstore quite sensibly has them both there and under adult. Anyhow, this one is so newly out that I don't want to say much about the plot, but it's a complex and interesting novel with some subtlety, and though I sussed out several of the plot revelations ahead of time, they played out in ways I found unexpected. There is a prologue-- and in fact an entire subplot to go with it-- that felt structurally unnecessary to this book to me, but that I have to excuse as being structurally probably necessary to the series as a whole. It's not how I'd have done it, but it was the cleverest way to do the thing I wouldn't have done, if that makes any sense. This is a better book than Graceling, but I think its flaws run deeper. Really looking forward to more from Cashore.
On Strike Against God, Joanna Russ. I finally managed to locate and read a copy of-- well, I was going to say Russ's 'realistic' novel, but who am I kidding? This is a post-modernist experiment, a lightly (and sometimes un-) disguised memoir, an homage to the lesbian pulps, an homage to the pulps in general, a love letter, a surrealist joke, and, incidentally, a novel containing some moments of something resembling mimesis. The narrator, Esther (though she says at one point "this is written by committee, and one of me is Joanna"), is a professor at a university; it is the mid-seventies; she falls in love with a grad student; and nothing goes as the reader would expect. The problem with my trying to say much about Russ is twofold: firstly, my mind works a way that seems congenial or compatible to hers, so that when I first read The Female Man someone had gently to explain to me that it is considered experimental writing and rather hard to follow, as it read perfectly straightforwardly to me. Secondly, Russ is so good at catching and expressing a certain facet of the horrible inescapable despair I associate with being closeted that I can't tell if she would hit other people as hard as she hits me. All I can say is that her anger is my anger, and her books are one of the rocks I built my life on.
Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children's Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper, Charles Butler. It says something about the lovely depth and sweep of analysis in this book that it contains one of the best definitions and discussions of cultural appropriation I have seen in some time, in the context of talking about Alan Garner's novel Strandloper. The thing is, though, I think it may really be impossible to pin down the attitude that British fantasists have toward place and myth-as-place and place-as-myth. This is a very noble attempt which gave me much food for thought. Of the four authors discussed, I have essentially memorized Jones and Cooper, have read one book by Alan Garner (The Owl Service) and developed a complex and unnerving relationship with it that involves hating it desperately, rereading it at intervals, and having really strange dreams about it, and have read no Penelope Lively whatsoever. This made for an interesting perspective on the analysis. I am not sure whether Butler should have taken more account of the fact that Garner is-- well, a person I know who's met him describes him as 'glitteringly mad'. Anyway, I have concluded that there is probably no point in my reading Penelope Lively, and that instead of a vague intent to read the rest of Alan Garner, with Red Shift at the top of the list, I should ignore his first few entirely and read Thursbitch, Strandloper, the Stone Book Quartet and Red Shift, maintaining that last at the top of the list. I have also concluded that no one likes Cooper's Seaward as much as I do (I think it is her second best) and that while everyone has a different list of the Best of DWJ I should suck it up and reread Dogsbody because obviously I was too young the first and only time. (I was eight. I did not catch the pun in the title. The book itself depressed me for weeks.)
Oh good God it is four in the morning. Well, the other ones I wanted to write up will wait.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 07:57 am (UTC)Please read Red Shift so we can talk about it! I love it to death, and it's incredibly strange and difficult and does amazing, unusual technical things.
If I write you geode eyes, will you make me butter pies?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:00 am (UTC)Red Shift is very, very high on my TBR pile.
If I write you geode eyes, will you make me butter pies?
This sentence scans and rhymes so beautifully that I keep trying to think of a way to answer it in meter. Having failed to do so: yes, absolutely. I can do that the next time we are in the same place near a kitchen; the ingredients are all very easy to get. Probably ought to have at least three other people to help eat them, as the quantity of toffee sauce my recipe produces is... rather large.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:07 am (UTC)Okay. Watch your in-box!
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 08:43 am (UTC)Nine
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:01 am (UTC)And you have to try these, though they do rather produce sugar shock.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 11:57 am (UTC)I'm not reading the Butler book because I'm afraid of place-as-myth theories as relating to the inside of my head and Among Others, but it really sounds fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:03 am (UTC)I have read The Owl Service. I wish he'd spent more time showing her being flowers. Too much time on the owls, not enough ending to balance, is my thought on that.
I am much looking forward to Red Shift.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 12:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:40 am (UTC)Dogsbody was not a formative Diana Wynne Jones for me, but it is one of the books I read so young, the language looks strange to me now, like a translation from the mind I first read it with. I guessed the significance of the red-eared white hounds from their first mention; otherwise the book almost put me off ozone and jasmine for life. You might enjoy the mix of astronomy and myth if you re-read it now.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 01:56 pm (UTC)What will the runny hot center be?
And this is a dessert in A Tale of Time City? I'm going to go find out about this book....
When you create the dessert, will you take pictures?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:06 am (UTC)You're correct about the structure, and the runny hot center will be Guinness-flavored toffee sauce.
When I do the making-my-own-ice-cream run of this, I do hope to take pictures, and I will definitely be posting recipes.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:49 am (UTC)... I'll be your LJ reader who can say, "I came for the butter pies but stayed for the book reviews and poetry."
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 02:52 pm (UTC)(I don't like all her books, but those I like, I like very much indeed...)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:07 am (UTC)Which ones of hers do you like?
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 09:12 am (UTC)While she definitely revisits the same themes again and again, she does it with an intelligence that doesn't feel repetitive in the reading (except, perhaps, in the case of Samuel Stokes). And I should emphasize that her rationalism isn't at all of the sneering kind. In interview she told me that she spent the money from her first advance on a) the four-volume Katherine Briggs Dictionary of British Folktales, and b) a fridge. That combination sums up quite a lot about her, I think.
If you want a suggestion about where to start, I would recommend The House in Norham Gardens, amongst her books for children. Treasures of Time makes a good segue into her adult fiction.
Thanks for the kind words about FBF!
Charlie
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 04:31 pm (UTC)I see how you could have got that impression, because she returns again and again to the themes that interest her (and yes, she's probably more interested in fantasy as a way of tackling those themes than for itself). Some of her later books irritate me intensely, but when she's good, she really is.
The House in Norham Gardens is a favourite, and I'm very fond of The Driftway. Of the adult books, I like the early ones best The Treasures of Time, Judgement Day, The Road to Litchfield...
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 03:37 pm (UTC)I had the opposite reaction to Jo about The Owl Service, because I like late Garner and dislike early Garner, although when I say "like" it's more "appreciate and sometimes hate." Red Shift is brilliant and horribly misogynist and affects me anyway. The Stone Book Quartet is pure grace, though.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:10 am (UTC)Thank you for the misogyny warning on Red Shift, as I deal with that much better in books if I know about it ahead of time, and that one is quite high on my TBR pile.
I'm really looking forward to The Stone Book Quartet, but I got the impression from both Butler and elsewhere that there are portions of Garner in general I may wind up chucking across a room at high velocity.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 03:56 pm (UTC)It was ridiculously good.
I have also concluded that no one likes Cooper's Seaward as much as I do (I think it is her second best)
No; I consider it wonderful. It's one of the few books which is genuinely like reading someone else's dreams.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:11 am (UTC)I need to figure out a date to do the next round of butter-pie. Sometime after the current batch has run out, which may be a while.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:29 am (UTC)No one else I knew had read it, until I got to college and discovered
Sometime after the current batch has run out, which may be a while.
That is sensible. Can you link me to the recipe for fleur de sel caramel in the meantime? I found the stout toffee sauce, but there are too many recipes for the other online.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-13 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 04:42 pm (UTC)That is all.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 08:49 pm (UTC)I hadn't quite articulated the response that the flaws run deeper than Graceling, even while being a better book, but yes, that. The plotholes in the ecology bug me the most.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:14 am (UTC)The ecology is, well, rather ridiculous, isn't it. It ought to be one giant mass of writhing things trying to kill each other out there, if there are as many of other species as there are of the raptors, and anything small oughtn't to survive at all.
no subject
Date: 2009-10-11 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-10-12 04:19 am (UTC)(I so do not have the nads for regular sugar. Maybe in a couple of years.)
no subject
Date: 2009-10-15 12:07 am (UTC)I won't claim that I like it as much as you do, but I do like Seaward. It has good magic in it, and joy, and terror, and all that stuff, but I find that the plot consists a bit too entirely of things that magically had to happen next just because, and for that reason it's never been one of my top favorites.
On the other hand, The Hounds of the Morrigan (which, by the way, if you haven't read, I think you might like) has just as much stuff magically happening next because it has to, and somehow feels less forced to me. I wonder if that's because it gives a better sense of the relative powers and limitations of both the antagonists and the helpers, such that, despite the same sense of obstacles and escapes following one after another almost in the manner of a dream, it's easier to keep track of the overall strategic situation — indeed, the key may be that The Hounds of the Morrigan gives a much more convincing impression that Seaward that there is an "overall strategic situation" at all.
The Neverending Story also consists largely of things that magically happen next because the story requires them to, but that's different, because it's about that, and ultimately subverts it.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-14 01:25 am (UTC)(Also, I am so not surprised that if anyone were going to do it, it would be you. :-)
no subject
Date: 2012-12-14 01:53 am (UTC)