Things I do, mostly books I read.
Yay solstice! Finally.
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” asked Shelley. If I may be unromantically literal about his allegorical winter: Yes, it can. In these parts, it can be pretty damn far behind, like four months.
But at least from here on out it’s going to be lighter. It’ll get colder, but it won’t get any darker. Here’s to a brightening world.
The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson, 2006.
A fascinating book. It’s about how Dr John Snow made a map of the deaths in an 1854 Cholera outbreak in London and figured out what causes cholera, how to prevent it, and in the process pretty much invented epidemiology as well as influencing everything from information design to how modern cities build waste systems. Great book, fun to read, lots of cool information, makes me appreciate modern science all the more.
However: there is no print of the map. You know, the Ghost Map, from the title of the book. A good portion of the book is Johnson referencing details on the map and describing how the map was made and how it was changed in subsequent versions. Yet the only image of the map is a cropped closeup used primarily as a decorative plate for chapter title pages. It looks like a graphic designer thought the actual map was too boring or unattractive, and so decided to blow up a small portion of it for use as a background for text.
It doesn’t make any sense. The book is about the map! The book and the map are about information design! You can’t see the scale or the distribution of deaths or half the things Johnson talks about if you’re only looking at the center of the map!
The map is in the public domain, so it can’t have been any more expensive to print than the other contemporary images in the book. Look, here it is on my blog. Isn’t it interesting?
I stopped reading the book 2 chapters from the end, when Dr Snow was dead, there was no more cholera in London, and it finally dawned on me that they really weren’t going to show me the map. So I looked it up on Wikipedia and re-read the section about it in Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which rocks and is full of awesome informative images.
Stupid publishers. If the book is about an image, show me the damn image. Even my paperback copy of The DaVinci Code had a print of the Madonna of the Rocks. Sheesh.
For more information on cholera, check out the WHO cholera site.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterson, 1985
| “It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.” |
I got Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit from the library after reading on Wikipedia that the author is from my mother’s hometown, Accrington. It’s a semi-autobiographical story of growing up among Evangelical Pentecostals in Accrington, Lancashire, and what happens when the author’s unconventional sexuality comes to the attention of her church.
| “Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.” |
It sounds like a setup for a grim and bitter story, but it’s actually funny and cheerful. Winterson finds a lot of humor in the conflict between the enthusiastically religious heroine and her secular classmates, and even in the censure of her family and church. It can’t be fun to be exorcised, but it makes for a good story. The general tone is of a thoughtful, happy woman remembering a difficult girlhood with amusement.
The story takes place in the 1970s, and my familiarity with Accy begins with the mid-80s, so there were only a couple references that I recognized. At the beginning of the book, the heroine climbs what is obviously the Coppice (a nearby hill), and later someone mentions Oswaldtwistle by name. The town isn’t much of a presence in the story.
If I were to tell a story of Accrington, I’d describe the rows of stone millworker housing running up the slopes of the surrounding hills, the walk up the Coppice, and the windy moors on top. I’d have the heroine of my story sneak up into the gallery of the town’s Victorian market hall to get a closer look at the wrought iron ornamentation. Then she’d go around the corner to the vintage clothing shop on Warner St and buy three Hermes scarves for one pound each, like I did. Best vintage clothing shop ever.
I’m broke this year, so instead of buying small presents for family & friends who would normally get small presents, I made secular generic “happy winter”-themed cards.
Some of them turned out pretty well. I did a few versions of the “cardinal in snowy bushes” painting, and then experimented with cutting out silhouette shapes with an exacto blade. My master plan is to combine the cardinal and silhouette motifs into a ‘cardinal in bushes’ cutout card. Everyone likes cardinals for Christmas. I mean secular generic winter. Sol Invictus!
So, this is how dumb I am. Yesterday, while working on a small painting for my grandparents, I left the full jar of water on the gorgeous expensive living room rug while I went into the kitchen. Enter Hansel the Destroyer, a yellow cat-shaped avatar of chaos. And now the gorgeous expensive rug has a big stain right in the middle.
Guess mama’s getting a professional rug cleaning for Christmas.
I may beat him to death.
Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences proposes that each person has varying levels of each of several types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematic, musical, social, etc. People who have a lot of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence are coordinated, graceful, and have good muscle memory. I am not one of these people, as may be seen in the following examples:
That’s why I like running; it’s impossible to get physically confused. Left, right, breathe, repeat. Got it.
Baked Tilapia with Tomatoes & Olives
Tilapia was on sale at Jewel, so I grabbed a couple fillets and googled for recipes that used ingredients I have sitting around the house. I liked this recipe because it involved nothing more complicated than chopping, and it gave me an excuse to use some tomatoes. I have dozens of tomatoes that were picked green before the first frost and are slowly ripening in the basement. They’re a little wrinkly and the flavor is not great, but they’re fine for cooking.
I only made 2 servings, so I eyeballed the quantities. I substituted vidalia for the red onions and bottled lemon juice for the “fresh lime juice”. And I didn’t peel or seed the tomatoes because that’s just tedious. Most of the seeds ooze out on the cutting board anyway. I did actually have fresh thyme - I potted some from the garden before the big snowfall last week. My rosemary wasn’t rescued and is lost forever, unless 6 inches of snow has an insulative effect.
It was pretty tasty. I served the fish on top of couscous, and the juices from the sauce ran down and made the couscous more interesting. On the side I made broccoli, or, as I’ve been calling it lately, boringcoli. Next time I make this I’ll have to find a more suitable vegetable. Something vaguely mediterranean. Maybe I could put sliced eggplant right in the baking dish with the fish.
George Eliot, 1859
This was the third book in my recent “Let’s read books published in or around 1860″ reading project. I got about 50 pages in and stalled on the interminable descriptive passages, but my retro 1966 paperback is so cute that I wanted to like it, so I kept trying.
It took me about 100 pages to get used to the way everything is described in crazy minute detail for paragraphs at a time, but eventually I learned to just relax and appreciate it when Eliot (who was obviously not interested in keeping the plot chugging along) spends 3 pages talking about something like how sometimes the people you love are just regular people. Which I thought was funny considering that each one of the characters in the book is either uneducated but morally perfect or charmingly flawed in some really likable way.
Things I learned from Adam Bede:
1. Garnet earrings = lost virginity. Watch out for them.
2. Methodists are weird, unless they are very pretty women, in which case they are ok.
3. Young women who have sex die. Maybe not for years, but before the end of the story.
4. If you are wearing rural 18th century costume, no one can tell you are pregnant.
5. Vanity and weakness lead to horrible irreversible evil.
That last one is the most important. The story follows a progression of events in which decent, likable people are tempted by vanity and the pleasures of the flesh onto a path from which there is no escape but death and ruin. Having premarital sex in a Victorian novel is like having sex with the captain on Star Trek: death sentence. I like Adam Bede because the seducer isn’t villainous or apathetic, and he doesn’t die of narrative justice. He carelessly ruins someone’s life, and the knowledge of it destroys his own life, which he then lives out in misery and repentance. Um, and there are sexy main characters who end up happy. Yay!
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