another post of things

[kindkit]

1) Reading: I made a second attempt to scale the summit of Wade Davis's 600-page Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, and succeeded this time. It didn't quite do what I wanted of it, or what the title promised. In the opening chapters Davis does a good job of establishing the 1920s Everest expeditions in the context of the war, colonialism, ideas of masculinity, etc., but then there's no follow-through. The book turns into a straightforward narrative of the 1921, 1922, and 1924 expeditions, and often with a rather odd focus to boot. Davis spends many many pages on the 1921 expedition, most of which involved trying to find a route to the mountain itself, and he follows every little side trip and false start in excruciating detail, whereas he writes much less about the 1922 and 1924 attempts to reach the summit, and the story of Mallory and Irvine's disappearance is compressed into about 15 pages.

Last time I tried to read this I complained about Davis's weirdness on the subject of sexuality, and that didn't get any better on re-read. He erases Mallory's bisexuality, arguing that falling in love with and marrying a woman prove that Mallory was straight all along, and scornfully downplays anything that might suggest Mallory was still attracted to men after his marriage. This means he doesn't talk much about the relationship between Mallory and Sandy Irvine, the young climber who died with him in the 1924 summit attempt; he scoffs at the notion some biographers have proposed that Mallory had sexual feelings for Irvine but doesn't quote enough from Mallory's letters to give us a sense of what those feelings--and Mallory was a very emotional man--might actually have been. Even more weirdly, Davis quotes at length from a letter Mallory sent to his wife Ruth during the 1921 expedition, in which he practically begged her permission to bring home Nyima, an 18-year-old porter, to work as a servant in their household. It's hard to imagine a motive for this plan that isn't on some level sexual, and Davis hints at it--he calls the letter "unsettling"--but won't acknowledge it outright, though at least he points out the creepy paternalism of Mallory's assurances that Nyima could do all the hard work and live in the cellar. The weirdest part is that Davis then entirely drops the subject. We don't know if Ruth ever replied, or what she said, or what became of Nyima. It may be that there just is no information, but Davis doesn't even say that. It's incredibly frustrating, and lends credence to my overall feeling that Davis finds the subject of male/male sexuality mildly titillating and worth including for that reason, but too "unsettling" to deal with in a serious way or to allow to stick to his hero Mallory.



2) Listening: the anon meme (yes, I've started going there--there's a lot of good discussion on many fannish topics, and it's surprisingly well-modded) got me interested in The Thrilling Adventure Hour, so I've listened to the podcasts of "Captain Laserbeam" and "The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock." They're both comedy/parody: the former is a superhero story in which, among other things, the hero may be developing a romance with Philip Fathom, The Deep Sea Detective (who is not entirely unlike Nolanverse Batman); the latter features a sort of gay steampunk Doctor Who. If you check these out, give them long enough to grow on you. I was deeply underwhelmed by the early episodes of both, but both get better as they go on. I keep wishing there was video, though, because there are a lot of moments when clearly something very funny is happening onstage that the dialogue gives no hint of.

I might try the "Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars" segments next, though I'm not at all a fan of westerns or western tropes.

3) Cooking: on my most recent days off I made more bagels and also baked an apple pie, something I've never done before. Oddly I had more trouble with the bagels than last time; for some reason the dough came out stickier and they were harder to shape. The pie turned out pretty well, though I had some difficulty rolling the dough out big enough. Also, I had no idea how long it takes to peel, core, and slice ten apples. (Answer: a very long time. I was listening to "Captain Laserbeam" which helped alleviate the boredom, but still. A very long time.) I used honeycrisp apples, one of the most commonly recommended kinds for pie. They tasted nice and kept their shape well, but they were perhaps a little too crisp for me.

In a completely different culinary vein, I also made Korean vegetable stew with soybean paste. I only loosely followed the linked recipe: I again used a bonito and konbu dashi instead of the dried anchovies, and the vegetables I used were potato, kabocha squash, Korean daikon, onion, and some frozen broad (fava) beans for something green that would benefit from simmering. The latter may seem odd, but I've read that broad beans are widely used in China, so I figured it wasn't completely bizarre.

4) Yuletide: have reviewed canon. Am writing. Am over minimum word count, yay!

Comments

[the_rck]

If you think you'll make a lot of apple pies, there's device you can buy that peels, cores and slices apples pretty quickly. It has a hand crank. You put the apple on three prongs (you want them sticking roughly around the core) and turn the crank. That turns the apple and runs it up against a little thing that peels it. Then it hits a larger slicer that makes a spiral cut around the core.

This thing is a unitasker, though, so it's only worthwhile if you're going to make a lot of apple pies. It has a footprint of about a foot in length and three or four inches in width. I don't think we have one any more; I seem to recall that it broke last year. I don't know if my husband (the pie maker) intends to replace it. It does save an awful lot of work, but he only makes two or three pies a year.

We like using Granny Smith apples for pies. They hold up pretty well and are tart enough to have good flavor. They also tend to be less expensive than honeycrisps.

[kindkit]

I think apple pie is more likely to be a once-a-year autumn treat rather than something I bake regularly. Then again, there are lots of other tempting apple recipes--strudel, turnovers, apple dumplings, baked apples, apple cake. I'm still pretty much a novice baker, so I guess I'll see how fond I become of apple things.

I'd originally planned to use Granny Smiths, but then I did some internet research and found, of course, a variety of opinions. But the one apple almost everybody recommended was honeycrisp. They are more expensive than other apples, though.

[starlady]

I really like making apple pies from scratch. They are a lot of labor, though, so eventually I started to attempt to peel an apple all in one go so as to involve my ego in the process. (This is a thing cool boys could do in books I read as a kid, I feel.) I got pretty good at it after a while.

10 apples! Were they very small? Normally I find about six supermarket or eight orchard apples is plenty for my pie pans.

[kindkit]

They were smallish apples. I think I may have deliberately selected the smaller ones thinking they'd have the best texture, without considering the labor factor. But the recipe I used (basically this one, with a few modifications) does call for a lot of apples. I figured the more apples in an apple pie, the better.

I guess maybe I should think of peeling apples as knife skills practice? I used a vegetable peeler but I don't think it saved much time or effort over using a knife.

[starlady]

I use a vegetable peeler most of the time, but I also use a knife, depending on what's lying around. I don't think either makes much of a difference.

I love Granny Smiths in pies; I'm not sure I've ever used honeycrisps. I also really like Pippins.

Hmm, boiled cider in a pie. interesting…

[kindkit]

I didn't use the boiled cider the recipe calls for, which is a specialty King Arthur product. I just boiled down some Trader Joe's spiced cider until it was syrupy, and it seemed to work fine.

[oursin]

In the autobiography of John Addington Symonds' daughter Katharine Furze, there is an offhand allusion to 'father's gondolier Angelo' accompanying the family when they moved to Switzerland for JAS's TB. She was perhaps less cool with this than it sounds in that text, because I came across a letter from her to Havelock Ellis which suggests that the reticences of her upbringing had left her in a state of confusion.

From the sound of it, that account segues dodgily over the extent to which men of that era who confessed to homoerotic feelings were told to put more effort into finding women attractive, also that once they were married the feelings would fade (in fact, have a recollection that this was why Symonds got married in the first place). It's not as though there a
weren't other men of around that period on record for whom this was a situation - that they got married either through social necessity or as a 'cure' - e.g. Harold Nicholson.

[kindkit]

I didn't know Symonds was married! That in itself is a good argument against assuming that married = not gay for men in this period.

that account segues dodgily over the extent to which men of that era who confessed to homoerotic feelings were told to put more effort into finding women attractive

*nods* I didn't get the sense that Davis had done any serious research into the history of sexuality. He cited a couple of books in his bibliography--I can't remember what they were and I'm too lazy to look--but his writing has a strong "doesn't get it" feel. And it's not just social pressure he seems unaware of, but the very existence of bisexuality. Based on the excerpts I've seen of Mallory's letters, I'm very willing to believe Mallory loved his wife (though for someone who wanted only to be a devoted family man, as Davis claims, he spent a lot of time going off on long expeditions), but Davis's "in conclusion, completely heterosexual!" is dodgy. Especially considering Davis also quotes from one of Mallory's previous, very passionate letters to James Strachey!