Marie Brennan's Blog, page 149

A question for the cooking types

Paging mrissa, paging desperance . . . .

I have a recipe that was originally intended as a side dish, and has been made into more of a main dish with the addition of hamburger — but it’s kind of a bland main dish. So I’m looking for ways to improve it, and I figured some of you who read this journal could probably make suggestions.

The recipe in its original form contains:

wild rice

onion

celery

salt and pepper

cream of mushroom soup

cream of chicken soup

Which you bake into a casserole, adding hamburger if this isn’t a side dish. But like I said: bland. Any recommendations for things I could add or substitute that would make it more flavorful? Note that household tastes mean we aren’t going to go for anything involving spiciness, fungus, or cilantro. But other options are fair game.

Ideas?

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A Year in Pictures – Golden Gate at Sunset

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We recently went up to Sausalito in the North Bay to celebrate my mother’s birthday, and stayed in a hotel that was just off the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge: a prime spot to catch it in the warm light of evening.

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Modern Confederacy

Sometimes you read something that spins your understanding of a topic around like a whirligig and when it stops, you see things in an entirely new light.

Here’s what my teachers’ should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.”

Which is really just the lead-in for the part that has very direct relevance for today:

The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

(See also “The New Racism: This Is How the Civil Rights Movement Ends.”)

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The Cluster$@ of Xanth

Had you asked me a month ago, I would have described the Xanth series as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that got kind of creepy about sexuality later on.

Now? I would describe it as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that has had really awful attitudes about sexuality and gender baked into it from the start.

The change started with this post. If that isn’t enough, you can follow up with this tag, because she’s continued on into the later books (she’s partway through Castle Roogna now), giving me more than enough evidence to say this isn’t a fleeting problem. It’s pervasive. Xanth is horrible. In addition to the constant male gaze evaluating every female character (including human-animal hybrids) for their hotness or lack thereof, you have pretty women being stupid, ugly women being totally not worth anybody’s time, and the very few women who are both pretty and smart being untrustworthy schemers. You have women, countless women, who only exist to be used for men’s gratification. You have women’s protests against mistreatment being explicitly described as an act women practice to make themselves more attractive to men. You have marriage and raising a family being dreadful fates men are expected to run away from. You have men pretty much wanting to rape every woman they see, and being held up as wonderful paragons of morality when they refrain. You have a farce of a rape trial that is I guess supposed to be funny . . . somehow.

And that’s just Xanth. That isn’t even getting into his horror novel Firefly, which goes so far with the pedophilia that merely reading descriptions of the content (and the author’s justifications for same) has guaranteed I will never read anything written by Anthony ever again.

Sorry to rain on the parades of the people who remember the early Xanth books as being Not That Bad. They are. They really, really are. I mean, the original edition of A Spell for Chameleon contained the following passage (taken from that oh-so-funny mockery of a rape trial):

Bink felt sorry for his opposite. How could she avoid being seductive? She was a creature constructed for no other visible purpose than ra—than love.

Case closed.

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A Year in Pictures – The Natural History Museum

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In honor of Worldcon starting today in London, here’s a place I’ve recommended to many friends of mine: the Natural History Museum, aka the Victorians’ cathedral to St. Darwin. This broad shot doesn’t really convey it, but the place is decorated within an inch of its life, with animals carved on columns and stair posts, the ceiling panels painted with botanical images. If you’re in London, it’s absolutely worth at least walking through the front door just to gape.

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A Year in Pictures – Shuri-jou Courtyard

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If you go to Okinawa, Shuri-jou is one of the top sites you’re likely to visit: a castle dating back to the Kingdom of Ryukyu, before the islands were made part of Japan. (Well, the reconstruction thereof. Like most things in Okinawa, it got bombed to oblivion in World War II.) The style of it is highly unusual, being strongly influenced by China, but also kind of its own thing.

No, I have no idea why the courtyard is stripey.

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A Year in Pictures – Knotwork at Sacre Coeur

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I think of this kind of interlace as a Celtic thing, so I’m not sure why it’s to be found at the very tip-top of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre. Well-decorated with graffiti, of course . . . but there’s a point at which that stops actually feeling like defacement to me, and starts feeling like part of the site’s history.

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Adventures in Surgical Recovery

My left ankle appears determined to play the Evil Twin, as it is getting up to all kinds of shenanigans that didn’t happen when I had surgery on my right ankle.

Let’s recap: when we last left our not-so-intrepid heroine, she’d dealt with an allergic reaction to her antibiotics, splitting headaches from her painkillers (which is just totally illogical and should be outlawed), and twitches of a sufficiently painful sort as to make her afraid she’d actually undone some of the surgeon’s work.

To that list, we may now add the following:

1) Recurrence of the exact same pain that caused me to go to the orthopedist in the first place. This is hopefully just part of the healing process, but when I called last Monday, they told me to make a new appointment if it didn’t stop by the end of the week. Well, I didn’t manage to call on Friday, and as of yesterday it was still happening (though less intensely and less frequently), but today it seems to be okay? We can hope.

2) A muscle relaxant that refuses to either have its advertised effect of relaxing muscles (seriously, I swear I twitch just as much on it as off), or to have the side effect of drowsiness. Which sucks when you actually want the stuff to help you get to sleep.

3) Itching in and around the scars that makes me want to scratch my foot bloody — and that’s when I’m sitting down. When I get up to walk, I want to just chop my foot off and make the whole thing end. Fortunately, I can get this somewhat under control with a raft of oral antihistamines, anti-itch cream, and band-aids over the scars to protect them chafing.

4) A massive charley horse in my calf about ten minutes ago, that made me yell loudly enough to make my husband come running. The good news here is that my ankle is stable enough at this point for me to take it out of the boot and use a foam roller on my calf, which at least helps a little.

All of which I share partly to vent, and partly because I know I have enough writers reading my blog to think you all might as well get some anecdotal notes in case you ever have to write about a character recovering from something like this. >_<

I will be so glad when this is done.

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A Year in Pictures – Sculptor’s Tools

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When we were in Zakopane, a mountain village in Poland, one of the places we stopped was a model country house with a sculptor’s workshop attached (wooden sculpture being a thing Zakopane is known for). I have a special fondness for this sort of thing: not a staged museum exhibit, but the actual detritus of a craftsman at work.

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Hear ye, hear ye! (Also see, maybe buy)

For the Driftwood fans out there (I know there are more than a few of you), Wilson Fowlie has read “The Ascent of Unreason” for Podcastle. If you missed it when BCS podcasted it, or when they published the text version, head on over and give it a listen!

Also, in the “good causes” category of links: Pat Rothfuss, the brain behind the Worldbuilders fundraising charity for Heifer International, has decided he isn’t pouring enough time and effort into benefiting the world, so he’s expanded his enterprise into selling signed first editions from authors who wish to donate a few. I think I sent in ten copies of The Tropic of Serpents; no idea how many are left, but (as of me posting this) there’s at least one. The money goes to charity, so if you want a book and the warm glow of knowing you’ve done something good, this is a splendid chance to get both at once.

(I don’t have five things to make a post, but I do have this: another shout-out for A Natural History of Dragons over on io9, this time in the context of “10 Great Novels That Will Make You More Passionate About Science.” It’s a list that makes for some pretty interesting reading, I must say.)

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