Author Archives

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Opportunity for you to laugh at my expense

I’m taking a break from grading papers to share a brief funny story with you about something dumb I did tonight.

So tonight I made some coconut chicken soup, kind of an Asian-fusion thing.  You might have seen the recipe in the latest Real Simple.  My first mistake was that I bought an unidentified chili pepper.  This is a terrible idea for anyone except the most heat-tolerant folks.  I saw these little orange chilies at Kroger; they were in the jalapeno bin, but the sign said that the jalapenos were temporarily out of stock.  I sniffed one of the chilies and thought “It doesn’t smell spicy.”  I bought it, but I was actually worried that I had bought some wimpy mini bell pepper (is there such a thing?) and that my soup wouldn’t be spicy enough.  Irony alert.

Tonight I cut the pepper in half as the recipe instructed, and I noted that it did smell spicy after being cut.  I briefly considered seeding it, since the seeds are supposed to be the spiciest part, but the recipe didn’t say to seed it, so I didn’t.  I have a bad habit of slavishly following recipes, mainly because I’m afraid to deviate.

So I threw the halved pepper in the hot pot where I was cooking the onions.  Almost immediately I started coughing, just from inhaling the steam.  I mean really coughing.  My neighbors probably thought I was in the last stages of tuberculosis.  This should have been a warning sign.

The coughing continued throughout the entire cook time of the soup (including the part where I had to stick the chicken in longer because it was still pink).  Still, I never took the chili out.  I took the lemongrass out, because the recipe told me to, but I didn’t take the chili out.  This is called legalism.

When I finally sat down to eat the finished product, you can imagine what happened.  My taste buds were singed.  My nose ran.  I cried.  But doggone it, I was going to power through it.  I grabbed a Cherry Coke Zero to cool off my mouth.  And I worked on that soup for about ten minutes.  (Incidentally, I came up with a good nickname for a sexy redhead while I was eating.  I got a big hunk of ginger in one bite, and I said, “That’s a big hunk of ginger.”)

I finally had to give up.  I was suffering.  I ate all the chicken out of my bowl, but I ended up dumping out a lot of the broth.  I hated to throw away all the leftovers, so I put the rest of the soup in a large container.  AND I TOOK THE CHILI OUT.  That’s an important detail.  Later, when I was packing my lunch, I hesitantly tried a spoonful of soup.  It was still really spicy, but it didn’t make me weep.  So I’m going to save it and try again tomorrow.  I also put a big handful of croutons in the container, hoping they would counteract some of the heat.  I don’t know if croutons actually have that power, but I’m trying anyway.  I do a lot of magical thinking when I’m cooking.

Back to grading papers.

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Ok, one more post about the survey.

I checked my Harry Potter canonicity survey today, and I’ve received 200 responses, which is a good round sum. Also, the responses have lately been trickling rather than pouring in. So I’ve decided to deactivate the survey. Now I can share the results with you!

I’m not going to post the table of all the responses, because it’s a little overwhelming to decipher. (Let me know if you want it in a Word document.) Basically, though, the average respondent ranked the novels as the most canonical source of information about the Harry Potter world and fan fiction as the least. (Not really a surprise there.) J.K. Rowling’s statements ranked as second most canonical. The movies and Pottermore are essentially at a tie for third place based on my cursory glance at the results, but I’m sure that some deeper statistical analysis would reveal some interesting differences. (If I find any, I’ll let you know.)

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey! I hope I get to meet you at LeakyCon someday. 🙂 Now that the survey is closed, feel free to wax verbose about your responses in the comments to this post.

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Re: survey

Tonight I checked the results of my survey on Harry Potter canonicity, and I was surprised and delighted to see that I’d received 195 responses!  Thank you all so much for taking the survey and sharing it with others.  I am still collecting responses, so if you haven’t taken the survey yet, or you want to send it to someone else, there’s still time.  Here’s the link: https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4PJzrBq5xWEkQVD.

There’s one thing I want to check on.  I said in the instructions that survey respondents could indicate a tie between two or more items by typing the same number for each of the tied items.  I tried to make sure that Qualtrics (the survey platform) would allow a tie in this type of survey, but I’m still having some doubts about that.  If you had two tied items, or if you tried unsuccessfully to create a tie, would you let me know in a comment on this post?  You don’t have to tell me what the tied items were.

By the way, I do realize how badly I’m slacking off in my blogging.  I haven’t forgotten you, dear readers, and I intend to post something non-survey related soon (as in, during October).

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I need your help: One-question survey

As part of my dissertation research, I am attempting to gauge Harry Potter fans’ perceptions of the relative canonicity of different sources of information about the universe of the story.  The term canon generally refers to an entire fan community’s collective understanding of what constitutes accepted information about the world of the shared text, but in a large and highly participatory fan community like the Harry Potter one, each person may have a different opinion about what sources are canonical and what makes them that way.  This survey is an attempt to find out how different fans rate the canonicity of several major sources of Harry Potter lore.  Please read the prompt carefully and answer the question thoughtfully.  Also, I’d like to get as large a sample as possible, so please send the survey link to other fans.

https://qtrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_4PJzrBq5xWEkQVD

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The child is father to the man

Well, so much for posting every week. My last few weeks have been busy, but I’m hoping to get back on a regular schedule. The purpose of today’s post is clear: I want to show you how darn cute I was as a child. Also, I want to point out how some of my interests were established at a very early age. Photo credits are shared by whichever parent took them ages ago and Sarah, who recently scanned them. P.S. If you know the origin of the quote in the title, and/or what it’s supposed to mean (without Googling it!), feel free to show off your knowledge in the comments.

I still enjoy . . .

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being feted, especially when presents are involved.

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wearing costumes.

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being in charge.

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reading.

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breakfast.

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I want your sympathy.

I’m reading The Casual Vacancy, J. K. Rowling’s 2012 debut “adult” novel, with the intention of having read all of her published works before I really get started writing my dissertation.  (I’m going to wait another week or two to see if inter-library loan can get me The Cuckoo’s Calling before I give up and order it from Amazon.)  I had heard multiple versions of two different, but compatible, assessments of The Casual Vacancy: that it was “racy” (invariably that was the word used) and that it was depressing because the characters were hard to like.

I’ve just finished Part One and found both of these evaluations to be true.  But I’ve also found something I didn’t expect: The Casual Vacancy reminds me strongly of a George Eliot novel.  What tipped me off to the resemblance was the name “Fairbrother”–it’s the last name of the man who dies at the beginning of Rowling’s novel, setting the story in motion, and it’s awfully close to “Farebrother,” the surname of a character in Middlemarch.  But this is just one of many resemblances between The Casual Vacancy and the Eliot canon, especially Middlemarch; others include themes of small-town life (and the pettiness that often accompanies it), sharply accurate depictions of mismatched marriages, long descriptions of characters’ interior thoughts, discussions of the problems of urbanization, and a particular focus on characters moving up or down the English social class scale, which appears in Vacancy to be fascinatingly (and depressingly) little changed since the nineteenth century.

What I don’t see in The Casual Vacancy, at least not yet, is any attempt on the author’s part to help us identify with the characters, especially the ones we don’t like.  Eliot did this a lot, and she did it masterfully, though not very subtly, often using direct second-person commands (“Ask yourself whether you would. . .”), all in an effort to develop the quality of “sympathy” (a key term for Eliot) in her readers.  Sympathy here is not feeling sorry for someone, and it’s not a naive ignorance of anyone’s faults.  It’s the ability to put ourselves imaginatively into another character’s situation and come to the conclusion that we would probably be inclined to act in a very similar way.  The point here is not to make a moral judgment about what would be the right thing to do in the situation, although that would be a logical next step.  The point is to be honest about ourselves.  I think all good realist novelists want their readers to develop sympathy; they just aren’t all as deliberate about it as George Eliot.  I think J. K. Rowling wants that for her readers too; she just isn’t making it very easy in The Casual Vacancy.  But a hard-won sympathy is probably more lasting than the knee-jerk kind anyway.  I’ll reserve my final judgment until I finish the book.

Let me make two more quick points about sympathy in a shameless effort to drag Charles Dickens and Harry Potter into this post:

1. It often takes multiple readings of a book to develop sympathy for a particular character.  When I first read David Copperfield, I thought David’s “child-wife” Dora was an annoying little twit, but now that I’ve read it several times I can see that she is remarkably self-aware in her own way and that she has a better grasp of the flaw in their marriage than David, apparently the more analytic one, does.  You gotta watch out for those first-person narrators.  They think they know everything.  (KATNISS EVERDEEN)

2. One valid reason for writing fan fiction is to try to develop sympathy with an unlikable, “minor,” or even villainous character.  Possibly this may be why there’s a lot of Draco Malfoy fanfic.  Certainly, some of it is of the shallow sort (“He looked extremely sexy and vulnerable as he knelt there weeping onto his elegantly cut black suit”), but I would also imagine–I haven’t actually read any Draco fanfic–that there’s some good stuff that explores, for example, what growing up in Malfoy Manor as an only child with those parents would do to a kid psychologically.

I promise I didn’t intend to write a literary criticism post this week; my original intention was to post pictures of my cute decorations for the afternoon party I hosted yesterday.  But I forgot to take pictures, so this is what you get.  I hope you’ll give me some sympathy.

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“The last scud of day”

I think what stuns me the most about Walt Whitman’s poetry is how old it is chronologically, and how new (or young?) stylistically.  He wrote much of his audaciously hubristic, rhythmically unrhymed, New Agey but never fuzzy poetry before they had electric lights, before he saw the Civil War tear up America.  England was just warming up to the Victorian period, man.  This’ll blow your mind: the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was published in 1855; that’s just five years after William Wordsworth died.  Wordsworth was the guy who called for poets to write in the language of the common man, and tried to follow his own advice.  Before Wordsworth, poets were pretty much still writing like John Milton.  Too bad Wordsworth couldn’t have lived a little longer to see Whitman do this:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me,

he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barabaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,

It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift in in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.

(from “Song of Myself,” 1855)

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Goat cheese biscuits

This post doesn’t have a clever title, partly because I couldn’t think of one, and partly because I figured the phrase “goat cheese biscuits” would sell itself.  This is a follow-up to my review of Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life around the Table by Shauna Niequist.  Last Saturday morning, a small contingent of our book club (only four of us could make it) gathered at the lovely home of one of our members, the same one who got us the free copies of the book, to share brunch and our thoughts on the book.  Maybe because what we were doing (eating) was for once related to the book topic, and maybe because we’d all read the book, we actually managed to carry on a sustained discussion about the book for, like, at least ten minutes.  (What normally happens in our book club is that somebody introduces a discussion, it peters out quickly, and we talk about other things until somebody awkwardly revives the topic of the book.  All this is fine with me; it’s a club, not a literature class.)

Each of us chose a recipe from the book and brought the result to share.  Although we didn’t know ahead of time what the others were bringing (well, I did; I got to cheat because I was the person who sent out all the emails about this particular meeting), the four dishes turned out to constitute a perfect, (mostly) healthy yet comforting meal for a quiet, overcast Saturday morning in the summer.  We ate Bacon-Wrapped Dates, Robin’s Super-Healthy Lentil Soup (I forget who Robin is, but she’s probably one of Shauna Niequist’s many friends), Goat Cheese Biscuits, and Gaia Cookies (named for a cafe, though you are perfectly free to imagine yourself as an earth goddess when you eat them).  The consensus was that all of these recipes were delicious, relatively simple to make, and versatile–for example, the dates would perform equally well as an appetizer at a fancy dinner, and the cookies could function as either a dessert or a breakfast.  You can see pictures of the food in this post by another book club member, whose blog is a lot more fun than mine.

I made the biscuits.  I think it would be ungracious of me to post the recipe here after receiving the book for free from the publisher, but you may be able to recreate it, or something like it, on your own, especially when I tell you that you’re basically taking biscuits and putting goat cheese in them.  I mean, it’s a little more complicated than that, but those are the essentials.  I thoroughly enjoyed preparing, eating, and sharing these biscuits.  My whole apartment smelled like butter while I was baking them (that’s another hint), which usually means something good is underway.  I do want to give you one modification and one piece of advice in order to enhance your goat cheese biscuit experience.

The modification: Niequist says that if you make golf-ball sized balls of dough, you’ll get about 12 biscuits.  I’m thinking Niequist isn’t a golfer (which surprises me; see my review), because I got 17.  Maybe she meant to say “baseballs.”  My point here is that you don’t need to skimp; make your biscuits a size that you would actually want to eat, and you won’t run out of dough.

The advice: Please reheat your biscuits before enjoying them.  They are okay at room temperature, but they are best when the cheeses (hint!) are melting.

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Housekeeping and hypotheticals

Get excited!  The long-promised Penelope Clearwater Revival has arrived.  You can expect two new things from my blog:

1. More frequent posts.  Now that I have more followers, and not all of you are people who know me and are willing to put up with my slacking, I feel I owe it to you to post on a more regular basis, perhaps weekly.  I can’t promise these will be long posts–after all, I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation as well–but that may be for the best.  (“Amen,” says the chorus.)

2. A better organizational scheme.  Yes, it’s true: I’ve had this blog since December 2011, and only just this past weekend did I start adding categories and tags.  I did this retroactively for all my posts, which was a fun exercise for me; I especially enjoyed seeing my most commonly used tags as calculated by WordPress.  (“Charles Dickens” was the winner by far, but there were some surprise runners-up.  Who knew I’d written so many posts about Moneyball?)  I’d love your feedback on this endeavor–if you notice a common theme among two or more posts that I haven’t seen, let me know so I can add a tag or possibly create a new category.

I hope these changes will enhance both your and my enjoyment of the blog.  So that this post won’t be completely boring, here are some fun “if” statements.  I’d love to hear how you’d complete the statements for yourself.

1. If I could write and illustrate a comic book series, it would be called . . . The Adventures of Sigyn, Intra-Yggdrasil Diplomat.  I’ve actually thought quite a bit about this.  Sigyn is a minor character in Norse mythology whom I discovered while reading Edith Hamilton.  She (Sigyn, not Edith) is Loki’s wife.  So I thought I could make a pretty fun comic series–and also send positive messages about world peace and women’s empowerment–out of the idea that Sigyn is going around trying to negotiate satisfying compromises between her husband’s world domination schemes and the contrary purposes of people like Odin and the Avengers.

2. If I wrote a screenplay, it would be called  . . . The Darlings.  I’ve thought even more about this one, and I might really write it someday.  The Darlings is about Wendy, John, and Michael after they’ve grown up.  To my knowledge, this particular Peter Pan variant hasn’t been done before. The basic premise: Michael doesn’t believe they really went to Neverland or that it’s even real (he was too little to form his own memories of the event); John knows it really happened but has only negative memories and doesn’t like to talk about it; Wendy has happy memories of Neverland and is still enamored with Peter Pan but has married a man who’s the opposite of Peter in pretty much every way.  Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff going on with careers, university studies, romance, and sibling rivalry.  Maybe I’ll write this when I’m finished with my PhD.

3. If I were on a roller derby team, my derby name would be . . . Tess of the Disturbervilles.  This is never going to happen, folks, so you can just use your imagination.

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The Weasley fanfic, part 2

Another result of going to LeakyCon is that I temporarily lost my inhibitions about writing fan fiction.  I wrote the following story on the plane ride home.  It’s loosely a sequel to a very sad story I wrote last year.  But unlike its predecessor, this story has dialogue.  So I’m looking for feedback about the three characters as manifested through their voices: Can you tell them apart?  Do they sound like men (something I always worry about)?  Do they interact like brothers?  And–this is very important to me–do you like them?

That fall, the Weasley men, including Harry, spent a weekend at Shell Cottage.  Everyone kept finding reasons to propose toasts to Fred and tell each other what he would have been doing if he were there.  Fred’s absence wasn’t the only thing that made the old easy camaraderie impossible to recreate.  Charlie had just moved back to England and was out of step with the family in little ways–nothing significant, but he would forget things, like the fact that Bill didn’t like pumpkin juice.  Ron sometimes retreated inside his head or had long whispered conversations with Harry.  Percy was very quiet and unnecessarily deferential.

But there were plenty of happy moments that weekend, and one of the best was on the last night when they built a bonfire on the beach and ate supper out there, telling embarrassing stories from when they were kids.  When it started getting dark, Arthur, Bill, Ron, and Harry went inside to talk to their wives and girlfriends by Floo network.  The wind had begun picking up when the sun began to set, and there was a definite chill in the air as George walked across the sand toward the fire, where Percy was still sitting.

“I brought you your pretty little jumper,” George said and threw a grey pullover at his brother’s head.

“Too kind of you,” said Percy with a wry face.

“Where’s Charlie?” George asked.

“He’s down there trying to skip rocks in the ocean.  Which I’m pretty certain is impossible.”

In the twilight George could just make out Charlie’s stocky figure.  “Well, let’s go tell the poor lad he’s getting himself all worked up for nothing.”  He started walking down toward the shoreline, and Percy followed, pulling on his sweater.

Charlie was, indeed, hurling bits of shingle into the choppy water.  “Oy!” George called.  “What are you doing that for?”

Charlie turned and wiped his wet hands on the back of his jeans.  “I dunno.  Something to do.”

“Well, come along with us.  I need to talk to you two gentlemen.”  George started walking backward along the edge of the water, facing his brothers.

“Is this about how strange Ron has been acting?” Percy asked.

“No, this is about how strange you two have been acting.”  Charlie and Percy looked at each other.  George turned around and fell into step with his brothers.  “Listen, I need some advice.  I have this brother who’s just moved back to the country, supposedly because he wants to be with his family, but we all really know it’s because he’s after Rubeus Hagrid’s job.”

Charlie snorted.  “Your brother sounds like a real git.”

George nodded emphatically.  “That he is.  Anyway, Hagrid won’t retire until he’s dead, and that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.  So my brother needs some gainful employment for the meantime, and he hates working in an office.  That’s problem number one.”

“Well, maybe I can help you with that,” said Charlie.  “But can we walk up to the fire?  I’m freezing.”

“That’s because your trousers are all wet,” Percy said.

“Yes, Mum,” said Charlie.

“Stop fighting, kiddies,” George said, angling back toward the bonfire.  “Let me tell you about my second problem.  I’ve got this other brother who hates his job.  He’s working at the Ministry, in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office.  But that’s really not his kind of work, and besides, that whole big dark ugly building has given him lots of bad memories.  But he doesn’t want to quit because he feels like that’s his only option, and he doesn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings.”

Percy had stopped walking.  “I never told you any of that,” he said.

George shrugged.  “You didn’t need to.  You’re an open book, mate.”

Percy shook his head and walked faster to catch up with his brothers.  They had nearly reached the bonfire.

“Now, here’s the third and most important piece of my little story,” said George.  He didn’t add anything until they had all sat down by the fire.  “All right.”  He ran his fingers through his hair, which meant that there was something he didn’t know how to say.  This rarely happened.  “Listen, I know it’s stupid to say things like ‘I know Fred would have wanted this,’ because how can we really know.”

Charlie mumbled an agreement; Percy nodded.  “But I spent nine months in the womb with him,” George went on, “so if anyone has a right to say stuff like that, I guess it’s me.  And”–he ran his fingers through his hair again–“I think Fred would want me to open the shop back up.”

“I think that sounds great–” Charlie began to say something awkwardly affirmative, but George kept going.

“And, I think it would be nice if my unemployed brother and my unsatisfactorily employed brother would join me in business.”

“Oh,” said Percy after a brief pause, evidently dumbstruck.  “In your joke shop?”

Charlie laughed.  “I think you’ve just blown out little prefect’s mind.”

“Yes, in Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes,” said George, quite seriously.  “It’s always been a family business, you see.”

“But surely you don’t expect us to–invent joke products?” Percy asked.

“Heaven forbid,” George said, finally cracking a smile.  “No, I’ll do the inventing, and you two can do the boring things like running the till and making sure we don’t go bankrupt.”

“Oh.”  Percy’s expression relaxed.  “I can do those things.”

George grinned.  “Also, Charlie, I’m hoping you can use your international connection to help me get hold of some rare magical items.”

Charlie looked very impish all of a sudden.  “Do you mean like dragon stuff?”

“Among other things,” said George.  “Rumor has it that you and your Romanian colleagues have been known to engage in some serious mischief.”

“That may be true,” said Charlie with a lopsided smile.  “I confess nothing.”

There was a silence, and then George asked, “But will you tell me later?”  Charlie and George burst out laughing.

Percy finally allowed himself a small smile, though he still looked overwhelmed.  “So we’re going into business, then?”

“We are going into business, lads,” said George.  “And I think the sooner the better.”

“We should shake on it,” Charlie said.

Percy, thinking this was a good idea, leaned over to shake George’s hand.

“Or you could just give me a hug, you two jobless gits,” said George.

And that’s what they did.