Marie Brennan's Blog, page 167

A Year in Pictures – Statue on Wawel Cathedral

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Wawel Cathedral in Kraków is a weirdly eclectic building; it looks like several different buildings stapled together, with random statuary and such sprinkled around its exterior. I have no idea which Polish king this is supposed to be (I presume he’s a king), but I like the way he’s juxtaposed against the window behind.

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A Year in Pictures – Notre Dame Door

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You don’t normally think of door handles as a cool thing to photograph, but, well, I thought this one was pretty nifty. It’s on one of the front doors of Notre Dame in Paris.

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Automated Processes

This is apropos of my recent post on cooking vs. driving. It seemed easier to make a new post than to respond individually to the multiple people who made related points.

When I talked about the “attention” either task requires, what I’m really referring to is the extent to which certain processes are automated or not. If you think back to when you first started driving, changing lanes involved something like the following steps:

Look for a suitable gap
Put on turn signal
Check blind spot
Move into gap
End turn signal

(Or some variant thereof.)

Once you’ve been driving for a while, though, the process of changing lanes looks something more like this:

Change lanes

All the smaller steps that go into the act are sufficiently automated that you don’t have to think about them, not to the degree that you did before.

So it is with me and cooking — or rather, when it comes to cooking, I’m still a novice driver. If I’m making a dish that calls for chicken sautéed in garlic and olive oil, then to me, the process looks like this:

Put olive oil in pan
Peel garlic cloves
Smash up garlic cloves
Put garlic in oil
Get cutting board
Get chicken out of package, onto board
Throw away packaging
Cut up chicken
Heat up burner
Put chicken in oil
Cook until — hmm, is that long enough? — not sure — okay, we’ll call that done.

Whereas for those of you who cook a lot, I’m betting the process looks more like:

Sauté chicken in garlic and olive oil

Because the steps along the way are sufficiently automated that you don’t really have to think about them to any high degree. “Peel garlic cloves” isn’t a process in its own right; it’s part of a larger process.

And this means you have more processing cycles available for other things. When I’m driving, I can think about writing or sing along with the music or have a conversation. When the experienced cooks among you are cooking, you can listen to an audiobook or watch a TV show or — and this is what several of you reported — think about cooking. But my impression is that what you’re thinking about is stuff like “hmmm, could use a bit more rosemary” or “this should have a salad to go with it” or “if I want to make this again, we’ll need to buy more nutmeg.” In other words, you can contemplate the bigger picture, whereas I am busy struggling with the fact that I still don’t know how to cut up a chicken breast very efficiently. I can’t spare the cycles to think about anything other than that task right there.

Of course, automation hath its dangers. Drivers often overestimate their ability to multitask, which is why laws against texting while driving are increasingly common. And probably most of us who drive a lot have had the experience where you set out for the doctor’s office or wherever, but then autopilot takes over and you drive to the gym instead. (Not just a hazard of driving; it can also happen on foot/bike/etc!) In the kitchen, inattention can result in a cut finger or a burned pan. But the fact remains that competence consists partly of being able to do the minor stuff without having to think about it in a directed, conscious fashion.

I am a competent driver. I am not a competent cook. I would probably enjoy cooking more if I were competent, because then I could think about other stuff . . . but that would require me to cook more frequently first.

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A Year in Pictures – Point Lobos Egret

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We took a trip down to Point Lobos recently to enjoy the nature: cypress trees, seals, and egrets who apparently think nothing of perching on slender layers of flotsam. I caught this one just as he was about to take flight, which is a fine demonstration of the role of luck in photography.

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My appalling thought for the day

Musing to myself this morning:

Yeah, I just really don’t like cooking. I don’t know what goes on in the heads of people who do like cooking, that makes them enjoy the process. I just get bored

People like desperance probably think about writing while they’re cooking.

You know — kind of like how you think about writing while you’re driving, and because of that, you actually enjoy being in the car for an hour. Why can’t you do that while cooking?

Well, because I have to pay attention while I’m cooking. Whereas while I’m driving –

Uh.

That didn’t come out right.

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A Year in Pictures – Amber Bird

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Poland has amazing amber.

Sadly, my photos of it are mostly not as amazing, in part because I hadn’t yet got the hang of all the tricks that help make museum shots come out better. We went through not one but two museums of the stuff, though, one in Gdansk, the other at Malbork Castle, and I did not get tired of it at all. This is a modern sculpture using just a piece of amber; in the background you can see display cases full of more objects, most of them made entirely of the stuff. Utterly stunning.

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A Year in Pictures – Notre Dame at Dusk

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This was my first sight of Notre Dame in Paris. The flat where we were staying was only about a five- or ten-minute walk from the cathedral, and so after arriving in the city, we strolled down there to take a look before it got completely dark out. (The light in the upper right is a streetlamp.) In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that my husband is actually the one who took this photo, at my request; I had not realized we were going to wander down there before dinner, so I didn’t have my camera with me.

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A Year in Pictures – Bronze Artifacts

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This is on display in the part of the British Museum that is a re-creation of the place’s original style. I don’t know much about the items in the box, but in some ways that’s part of the point: the original style of the museum was not nearly so conscientious about labeling everything in detail. The tidy layout of the box is visually pleasing, though.

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Open Book Thread: The Tropic of Serpents

On the heels of my Reddit AMA, it occurs to me that I should put up the discussion thread for The Tropic of Serpents. This is the place to ask any questions about that book or the series going forward; it is therefore also a spoiler zone, so consider yourself duly warned.

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A Year in Pictures – Kiyomizudera and Moon

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I posted before about the night opening at Kiyomizudera; here’s a more general shot, showing one of the main structures in the complex. We also lucked out in that there was a full moon that night, though in a photograph it never looks quite as cool as in person.

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