Adventures in the Pointless Forest

In January, it's so nice

I forgot to mention that the Christmas singing is half carols and half murder ballads. Also there were pierogies and vodka. What more can you ask for, really? We all had a blast.

Though we won't be living in the land of real winter until next year, and are instead marking our seasons by the difference between wanting a sweater before dark and not wanting it until after dark, there are some real season-oriented books in heavy rotation here. One is Chicken Soup with Rice. 

Jane loves all the Nutshell Library books, because they are tiny and fascinating, and because I sing them to the tunes from Really Rosie.

Anything that combines reading with singing is a big hit right now. This includes a little board book in which "You Are My Sunshine" is about a teddy bear (rather than the woman who left me and "shattered all my dreams," and why exactly is this a favorite song to sing to one's children, anyway?) and Tweedle Dee Dee by Charlotte Voake, which is a take on "The Green Grass Grew All Around."

The music is in the back. 

We love all of Charlotte Voake's books, especially this one, the two about a cat named Ginger, and the unfortunately out of print First Things First. Her quick and expressive pen-and-ink line reminds me of Quentin Blake's enviable looseness, without feeling like imitation Blake. Look at those birds on the cover!

The other seasonal book we have been reading a lot (Tweedle Dee Dee is not particularly about the seasons) is The Year at Maple Hill Farm, by Alice and Martin Provensen. Somehow I missed it in my own childhood, though I had seen the Provensens' illustrations in Nancy Willard's A Visit to William Blake's Inn. Steve's cousin sent it as a Christmas present for Jane, but the grown-ups have been enjoying it too.

It has so much packed into every page, but it never feels busy or cramped. For shorter attention spans, you can read the overview from the top of the page, or you can delve into the smaller details below. It is gentle but totally unsentimental, and often funny, too, and the art is of course fantastic.

You probably can't read it from here, but the picture of a cuckoo in the middle row says "This big bird is laying her egg in a little bird's nest. She must be cuckoo." Ho ho! The next picture is a sequel: "This little bird is feeding her babies. She must wonder why one baby is so big."

There is a companion book, Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm, and I want it, too.

All of these make me want to get back to drawing more. I am terribly out of the habit. My quick cartoonish owl is well honed from many instances of Jane shoving a pen and notebook in my face and saying "OWL PEASE" but everything else is just piles of rust.

How are you?

Recent status

Con: Cat pissing on things, leading us to become ever more baroque in our habits in order to keep him and tempting piss-spots separated at the times of day when extracurricular pissing tends to occur. Rapidly decreasing likelihood that I will be able to keep up the pretense of a viable academic career for the duration. Concomitant anxiety about ability to be happily self sufficient, or indeed self sufficient at all. The need to go on performing onerous ceremonial duties despite aforementioned diminishing prospect of payoff. Bright red remains of pimple on neck, of all places. Laundry backlog. 

Pro: The usual embarrassing and obvious assortment of familial blessings. Also the weather is absurdly gorgeous. The first day of classes, which I had (as always) been dreading, was (as always) fun and stimulating, and indeed even more than usual. I am reading The Dud Avocado, which is as entertaining as advertised. 

Before that I was reading Joan Aiken's insane children's book Black Hearts at Battersea, the first sequel to The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. (I am delighted to learn, via Wikipedia, that Joan Aiken had a brother and a sister, named John and Jane. Oh, Conrad Aiken, you card. "If only there had been a Jean and a June," Steve said. Greedy.) It has two best things:

First, the wonderfully offhand way that Sophie explains her unconventional upbringing.

"Who looked after you before that, then, child?"

"An otter in the forest," Sophie explained. "I can still recall how difficult it was to learn human language, and how strange it seemed to eat anything but fish."

Second, the depiction of the Duke of Battersea's apparently IMMENSE hot air balloon, "capable of carrying at least eight persons and their luggage for hundreds of miles." It carries not only our heroes, but also their dominoes, playing cards, spilikins, billiard balls, and telescopes, with room left over for Sophie to sew topazes onto a large velvet dress. It sounds like a highly comfortable way to travel:

In fact, the wicker, galleon-shaped car, with its high-decked ends and low waist, was excellently adapted to their needs. Dr Field and the Duke played chess at the forecastle end, Simon steered on the poop, directing the balloon's progress, when necessary, by means of a pair of dangling ropes, while Sophie with her dressmaking and the Duchess with her Patience occupied the central portion. 

Even better, at night everyone is tucked well up under piles of furs and sheepskin rugs, with a charcoal brazier to ensure that any last trace of chill is chased away. 

By midnight, generally, every creature in our house is gathered together into one small bedroom. Adults in the bed, cat curled up somewhere on top, baby in her infant cot-tent on the floor nearby. Because the house is poorly insulated and entirely unheated, the door is closed to give the gently glowing space heater in the corner a manageable amount of space to heat.

I like to imagine as I drift off that we are in some extra snug yet adventuresome and unlikely location like the Duke's balloon. Sometimes it is a specially eiderdown-laden version of the Kon Tiki. Sometimes it is a Victorian train car, or a biodome on the moon, or a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse.

TONIGHT, however, we are in a large fancy room at a large fancy hotel, so that I can attend Large Academic Conference. (All the small and unfancy rooms were sold out before I got around to making reservations.) There is a king-size bed! There are free cookies from the Executive Lounge! A loveseat! A six-foot-tall houseplant! There is even a corner, so that the baby can sleep around it from us.

And, god be praised, there is a real, true, functional BATHTUB. Not even the Duke of Battersea's balloon can compete with that. I can hardly believe my luck.

A cake in the throes of love.

I finally got it together and finished that illustrated book I was working on way back when. Remember that? It was in the era when the baby stayed exactly where you put her. No longer.

I wrapped it up and sent all the files off to the self-publishing outfit Lulu. Then I gave them some money and waited around for a few days, and they sent me a real live book.

I don't seem to have messed up any of the formatting, either, which is a relief. The paper is a bit thinner than I would ideally choose for a picture book, but only a bit. It's nice! The pictures look good. The printing is pretty. I'm pleased. 

The photos are a bit wan and fuzzy after all the shrinking and jpeg compression, but the real thing is as crisp and saturated as one could possibly desire.

I'd had the idea, when I was first working on this, that it might make a nice Christmas present. But now that it is done, I realize that this feels way, way too weird for me ever to do. It's deep into an uncanny valley between homemade and mass produced, with an unhealthy gloss of vanity press over the whole thing. Merry Christmas! I knew you'd love a copy of my self-published airport novel in which Harry Potter and a beautiful violet-eyed new student at Hogwarts uncover a conspiracy that links Opus Dei with radical libertarian terrorism and my cat, Mr. Snugglebottom. (Spoilers!)

So, you know, oh well, it appears that I will have to think of proper presents to give everyone, after all. Thank goodness I have devoted absolutely no thought to this project whatsoever. Maybe they would like some artisanally hand-gathered pocket fluff. You can never have too much.

It also occurs to me that I have no plans to render the house seasonally festive in any way. We have not so much as a bough or an advent calendar. Is this bad, do you think? Or is it actually a clever stratagem designed to take advantage of the last time, or at best the penultimate time, that we can get away with such laziness? 

(If you really want to know, the thing is available on Lulu's website over here. You can't get at it through their search function, because I don't want Mervyn Peake's estate to get mad at me. Please don't get mad at me, Mervyn Peake's estate! It is not priced to generate profits; I just cleverly picked a format and degree of full-colorness that Lulu charges a fair amount for, to start with. You don't want a copy anyhow, so just enjoy gawping at the sale page.)

Small pleasures.

Sometimes Steve reads aloud to me as I cook dinner and the baby kicks her feet in her bouncy chair. Usually it's something by Angela Thirkell. Soothing, lightly comic, undemanding, not too too horribly sentimental. And just this once, pornographic:

"The boats and other conveyances were just slowing down and several people were getting off."

"Saucy!" You see, here I am being "witty" by interpreting this innocuous sentence as a double entendre. Adding a little life to the proceedings, what?

Little do I realize what delights are waiting just around the corner. Steve continues:

"Calling to Mr Grant to follow her, Delia climbed onto the still-moving platform and seized the ostrich, onto which she leapt and sat sidesaddle, with an expression of pride and contentment. Under her direction, Mr Grant took possession of the cock, whose orbit was within that of the ostrich, and mounted it astride."

"What? No!"

"Oh yes. 'One of the oily men came round.'"

"Dear me."

"Mr Grant, who did not understand his cousin's peculiar devotion to this form of mental stimulus, was ready enough to ride on a cock two or three times, but felt a distinct uneasiness at the thought of half a crown's worth of this exercise. However Delia looked so happy and so pretty, with the flush of excitement on her face, that he determined to endure as long as possible."

As one would.

At this point we have to call a recess for the purpose of lying on the floor and howling.

After we have recovered sufficiently to carry on, there is a lull in the text of nearly two full pages in which nothing salacious occurs. Then Lydia Keith arrives and casually remarks, "I say, someone's on my cock."

I say.

"Mr Grant, really quite glad of an excuse to dismount, offered his cock to Lydia, who immediately flung a leg over it, explaining that she had put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always felt sick if she rode sideways."  

Gooood night, everybody!

That sailed upon a pointless sea.

Because there is no question at all that I ought to be spending every last scrap of time on (1) basic parenting, (2) moving preparation, and if there is any odd moment left over, (3) academic work, I have of course undertaken an entirely unrelated project. 

There is a great shortage of illustrated children's books, as you know. That is why it is imperative that I drop everything and illustrate one of my own. It was especially important that I select a text--"The Frivolous Cake"--that is only marginally appropriate for children and furthermore written by a man who illustrated his own books, and those of others, perfectly well already himself.

When it is all done I will have a single copy printed up by one of those clever print-on-demand places, and it will all be very jolly and Jane will hate it. I shouldn't have too much trouble finishing the drawings before we move, except that I am still not quite sure how I will render the final stanza, which depicts the sexual congress of the cake and knife. To wit:

In the speed of the lingering light are blown
The crumbs to the hake above,
And the tropical air vibrates to the drone
Of a cake in the throes of love.

As you see. Any ideas? 

Odds and ends

Jane will occasionally produce a perfect, implausible arc segment frown, as seen in the popular emoticon :(

"I hope someday to capture that one frown on film. Have you seen it?"

"Yes! Only once or twice though. She doesn't do it very often."

"True. It's rare. It's collectible. It's a get!"

Impossible to find on eBay, too, and there are no frown farmers, the way there are MMORPG gold farmers. (Although imagine if there were! Chain smoking Asian frown farmers working eighteen hours a day in combination internet cafe/creches.)

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I found this snippet in an old text file. I wonder if I planned to make something more of it, or if this was all there was:

It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

"Wow. William Gibson character, is that you? I can't tell what this program is now because I read that part and I can't make any sense of it."

"Yeah, ignore that."

"I can't. It's taken over my brain. It's a virus."

I have no memory of this conversation at all, but it turns out that the program in question was Notational Velocity, which is in fact a very nice little thing, if not in fact by nature particularly nonconformist. Handy for keeping track of my shopping list, though.

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Finally, Lizardbreath will be pleased to learn that I have a Georgette Heyer novel on hold at the library. Also a number of Jane Langton books. I can't remember which one of you tipped me off to the fact that she wrote novels for grownups, but I'm excited.

I'm also excited about re-reading the (out of print?) Boyhood of Grace Jones. I never seem to be able to track down the other book about that character, The Majesty of Grace, aka Her Majesty, Grace Jones. Have any of you ever read it?

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Oh! PS. If you would like to obtain the original wug test pictures, to test the morphological generalizations of your own loved ones, see here.

Vita longa, comœdia brevis.

I am starting a tiny new thing! It is a running list of Things I Cried Over. Now at any time you can look in my sidebar to see the most recent excuses my body has seized upon as an occasion for lachrymal purging.

(This phenomenon is common enough that Steve and I have invented a notional radio show called "The Lachrymose Hour," featuring music by the likes of Smog, Antlers, and Cat Power.)

Here is the starting list:

1. The trailer for Whip It. Yes, the 2009 Drew-Barrymore-directed movie about lives transformed through the power of roller derby. "Be your own hero"! Also, Ellen Page has appallingly gorgeous skin.

2. Awkward swaddling. Dr. Harvey Karp's baby whispering secrets are brilliant and a major reason we are not dropping dead of sleep deprivation, but his approach to creating baby burritos and I do not get along. Fuck this, I am going back to my old method, which also doesn't actually prevent the baby from squirming her arms out from under the blanket but doesn't involve six false starts and a flood of tears. Maybe I'll revisit the superior technique next week.

3. A tender moment in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals. What could be more sentimental than a Terry Pratchett book about football? And yet actually even when I am not engorged with prolactin I have been known to cry over many of his works. You should have seen me while I was reading Feet of Clay. God, I'm a simp.

I love good light reading that comes in vast quantities, so that once you get hooked you can go on reading and reading and reading more of the same. Right now that means Terry Pratchett and Angela Thirkell. Funny, charming, undemanding, not stupid. The surely horribly out of fashion Miss Read, a great favorite of my mother's mother, is also superb for this sort of thing.

Not that I am going to run out of Pratchett and Thirkell any time soon, that being sort of the point, but do you have any recommendations in this vein? Life is long and light fiction is short.

Bedknobs and what?sticks

Thursday night the following arrived at our house in quick succession:

1. A gloriously not-bent bed part. The correct one, even.

2. Weekend house guest, in town for a small and lovely Celebratory Pre-Birth Event held in my honor yesterday.

3. Saintly friend, inexplicably full of vim, vigor, and willingness to help Steve turn a very heavy assortment of bed parts downstairs into a solid, compete actual bed upstairs.

Saintly friend took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers in a dashing piratical style, then he and Steve set to work. I followed the traditional gendered division of labor, filling the time by staying well clear of all heavy lifting, feeding everyone, plying them with liquor, and advising house guest on her quilting project.

And now we have a BED, a real true bed, and though I am still not clear on what exactly makes it a better container for our mattress than the floor (beyond being pretty, which it is), I am pleased to report that whatever it is most assuredly DOES make it better. It is sunshine and lollipops and a happy lower back. Bed! Bed. Dear, wonderful bed.

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My fecundity and I have been fêted. F, who was hosting, entertained us with a remarkable booklet from 1946. This document came along with your set of silver, to teach you how to entertain in a suitably elegant fashion, although the silver company's idea of what constitutes suitable elegance was perhaps not the same as yours or mine.

A highlight was what we swiftly renamed "The Racist Pie Game." The idea is that they present you with a list of people and it is your job to determine what kind of pie each person or group of people should be expected to like. You are aiming to dredge up the "correct" answers, as provided by the wise authors of the game. So, for instance, Eve of Eden fame likes apple pie, Mark Twain likes huckleberry pie, and the undertaker likes berry (bury) pie. And then...

Q. "The Yellow Race"

and

Q. "A mulatto"

WELL GOSH! That certainly is a lovely complement to your fine sterling, Mrs. Higgenbottom.

The answers, incidentally, are that the Orientals like lemon pie, and biracial people like chocolate. Yellow pie for yellow folks, chocolate pie for brown folks. Obviously.

If that game doesn't do it for you, you could always try this one, also well suited to elegant gatherings of well heeled adults: Everyone takes a sheet of paper and writes a list of attributes down the side, beginning with "Eyes, Nose, Hair" and continuing on through "Hat" and "Sex Appeal" with any number of other things I no longer remember along the way.

Then you rate each person on each quality on a scale of one to ten, including yourself, gather up the papers, and read the ratings aloud, making the group guess which person each set of ratings is meant to describe.

Everyone will have a merry time. "No offense can be taken at low ratings, as all is in the service of good fun."

Indeed. How could it possibly go wrong? At least, I suppose, you could steal the teaspoons as restitution. And your hat got a ten, anyway.

The holiday spirit.

Christmas this year is sponsored by my new expensive thermometer. We have no tree or fuzzy green stuff or fairy lights or even an advent calendar, but the counter is buried in heaps of sugary treats and baskets of things to package them up in, and it turns out that this alone is enough to lend things a festive holiday air. There are the preserved pears and a bowl of clementines, and then lots and lots of candy.

I love my stupid thermometer. It is digital, easy to read, quick, and accurate over a gloriously wide range of temperatures. It has a handy probe --

(This reminds me of the good times we had when Ford distinguished itself by putting out a compact sports car called the Probe. "I've been rear-ended by a Probe!" we cried. "I wish that Probe would quit riding my ass!")

-- that works at any number of angles, and only needs to be inserted --

("Oh my god, that Probe came out of nowhere and just plowed right into me!")

-- an eighth of an inch into something to register its temperature. I can therefore now tell you with confidence that the air in my kitchen is 66 degrees Fahrenheit. When the water is just right, my bath is 107.5°. The bowl of yogurt I just ate was 37.8°.

Not unrelatedly, it turns out that if you heat a sugary slurry to the exact temperature they tell you to in the recipe, it turns into exactly the kind of candied substance they claim it will, every time. It's magic. I can't stop. I hope the people on my Christmas list enjoy their diabetes.

Ho ho ho.

Look how internet fashionable I am, with my flaky sea salt caramels and my super close up photographs. I also made some marshmallows. They're pretty nifty, but I didn't take any pictures of them because they are not vegetarian and this lapse embarrasses me. Of course, here I am now, announcing my animal byproduct consuming ways to the world, but there are no pictures. That's the important thing.

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Elsewhere, an NFL place kicker and his evangelical pastor teamed up to produce an astonishingly terrible, magnificently stupid thriller called Monday Night Jihad. It would certainly make a mind-blowing gift for everyone you know. It's even stupider than it sounds. It's so stupid it makes me giddy. If you want to revel in the most American brand of idiocy that money can buy, this is the book for you. And if you also love prose that clunks more clunkingly than a Volkswagen Thing, this is really really the book for you.

Of course, Things are lovable, while this book is a horror. But either way: clank, clunk, clonk.

The government was remaining tight-lipped about the attack on the Mall of America, so the news channels had exhausted their facts on the failed terrorist attempt hours ago. Until new information broke, they were just filling time with stories like the girl with the big hat who worked in the third-floor Hot Dog on a Stick who had confessed to staring in shock as the liquid rolled back and forth in the slushie machines immediately after the explosion.

"yes I said yes I will Yes"

If you want to enjoy this monstrosity without going to the trouble of reading it yourself, or providing any financial reward to the clowns who produced it, you can immerse yourself in its glories via our friend Dan's aptly named Shitty Books tumblr site. Start here.

Happy Chanukah!

Hours after I've eaten.

Hello! Would you like to eat like a hippie today?

Currently at my feet is a pile of Daniel Pinkwater books. Most, if not all, of these wonderful, crazy, delightful books, which you should certainly read if you haven't already, include at least one scene in which the protagonist eats something that is delicious and amazing and utterly unlike the food he has been eating all his life.

In one case it is corn muffins at the Bermuda Triangle Chili Parlor "in a steaming pyramid on a big platter on the counter." In another it is "plate after plate of wonderful things I had never seen before," including fry bread, blue corn dumplings, and cheese and green chile soup, served up at a little shack in the desert, where "every one of them tasted like an old friend."

Or it might be sfogliatelle at a coffee shop: "The pastry was crunchy and chewy and flaky, and had something unidentifiable and delicious in it." (The narrator observes that "the coffee was creamy and hot and strong," too.)

Or a biscuit:

I wasn't prepared to eat the best meal of my life, sitting in a creaky old camp chair, by a blazing bonfire, under a sky as black as ink, with stars as bright as light bulbs--but that's what happened. Ali Tabu could really cook. He was the best cook in Africa--maybe in the world. Everything he made--even if it was only a biscuit--was the best it could possibly be. The best biscuit. The best cup of coffee. He even made powdered eggs so we liked to eat them.

Or just plain good cooking, as in The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. 

It was good cooking. That's what changed my life, and Winston's. Both of us had been victims of bad cooking since we were babies. Gradually, we realized that the food at home was horrible.... Now, of course both Winston and I had found plenty to eat outside our homes, and there were all sorts of things we liked, but most of it was on the order of snacks and junk. What Winston and I experienced that night at Bignose's in the company of the famous Mighty Gorilla was good cooking, and it was the first time either of us had ever had it.

And sometimes it's hippie food. Or rather, "health food," because most of these books take place in a time before hippies. Sometimes the protagonist is straight up delighted by it. The kid in Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario for example finds that "Charlie's Health Food and Juice Bar was truly a great place!" where you can get "a really magnificent breakfast!" Exclamation point!

Even the less easily dazzled narrator of Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars concedes that there's something to this health food business. "I'm not saying I'd like to eat [at my grandparents' house] every day--but it's not bad--and I do feel sort of good for hours after I've eaten every time I go there." The eponymous Alan Mendelsohn, more appreciative, eats three servings of everything.

Anyway, my point is that sometimes hippie food really does do a magic thing where it makes you feel good for hours afterwards. If it tastes good, it makes you feel good at the time, too. Maybe you wouldn't like like to eat this every day, but we ate it twice this week, and I'd eat it again today if we had the ingredients.

The idea, which doesn't sound half as good as it actually is, is this: make some quinoa; add ponzu (a citrus soy sauce), sesame oil, and hot sauce; put it in a bowl with some cut up avocado and strips of toasted nori (mm crunchy seaweed); and eat it.

It is really very good.

I did two things that diverged from the instructions in the linked recipe. First, instead of sharing a measly half avocado between two people, I gave us a WHOLE, if small, avocado EACH. It was not too much.

Second, because I am a bozo, when I make quinoa the way everyone tells you to--wash it, put it in a pan with twice as much water as quinoa, bring to a boil, then simmer covered for 15-20 minutes--it always comes out wet and mushy. The most recent time, however, at last it did not. I used a little less water, because wet rinsed quinoa actually already brings some water along for the ride. But also, and this is feeble, I know, I made it in the electric rice cooker. This seems like overkill and yet the results were so much better that I have decided to do it this way all the time. The end.