hello again
Apr. 17th, 2015 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitThis week, I have been mostly reading and cooking. This will come as no surprise to anyone.
Reading: I've been speeding through Arnaldur Indriðason's mystery series featuring Reykjavik police inspector Erlendur and his colleagues. They're good books, if rather gloomy, though occasionally Erlender's endless clinging-to-his-own-trauma gets on my nerves. The one I just finished, Outrage, switches protagonists to Erlender's colleague Elínborg, whose pragmatic and less self-absorbed viewpoint was something of a relief.
I think I'd call them crime novels rather than mystery novels, as they're often more interested in the impact and aftermath of crime, or the causes of crime, as they are in whodunnit. This is something I like, and the look into Icelandic culture is intriguing to me as someone who knows nothing about it.
The most recent book to be translated into English, Strange Shores (which was the one I read first because I picked it up randomly off the new books display at the library), ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'm hoping the sequels make it into English soon.
There's something I'm interested in talking about if anybody has read these (here follows discussion of a minor character, cut for length, nothing plot spoilery) and that's Marion Briem. Marion is Erlendur's old boss, and Arnaldur carefully avoids ever revealing Marion's gender--"Marion" is a gender-neutral given name and "Briem" is a rare surname, as opposed to patronymic, used in Iceland and unlike patronymics is gender-neutral. This is all well and good, but I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be. There are hints that Marion's own gender identity, or possibly physical sex, is a complicated matter, and Erlendur at one point says he doesn't know if Marion is a man or a woman, but this is never really explored in any of the books I've read. And, realistically, Marion was a police detective in the early 1960s, so almost certainly had to have been assigned male at birth and perceived as male. A part of me suspects that Marion's ambiguity is just there for "oddity" value and perhaps for Arnaldur to show off as a writer--though I don't know how hard it is in the Icelandic language to not assign a gender to a character. Anybody have any thoughts?
I've also been reading Paul Strohm's Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, I think out of nostalgia for academia. It's not actually a scholarly book in the sense of being aimed at specialists, more the sort of thing you'd assign to bright undergraduates (in the US--I'm given to understand that UK undergraduates read real scholarship) to give them some context for Chaucer, but it still recalls the good old days--yes, I really think of them that way--when I was working on my Ph.D.
More relevant to my current interests, I picked up a copy of Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity for just $3, thanks to a sale at work, and can't wait to read it.
Cooking: I've been cooking some of the recipes in Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Nothing fancy, just a few of the vegetable dishes, but I'm enjoying them very much. I have made my own hummus! Which turned out to be easy and delicious, and I will never buy hummus again. I've also tried roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini, and roasted cauliflower (the recipe calls for it to be fried, but I didn't want to) also with tahini, and a variation on the pita-and-vegetable salad fattoush that has cucumber, tomato, radish, and pita in a gorgeous creamy yogurt dressing with lemon. This last is my new favorite thing; I diverge slightly from the recipe by toasting the pita until it's very crisp.
I always thought I didn't like salads, but what I'm realizing is that I actually don't like lettuce. Salads that are full of other vegetables, I like enormously and will gobble down like a hungry salad-eating wolf.
I'm eager to try some of Jerusalem's meat recipes, especially the one for freekeh and meatball soup and the one for meatballs with fava beans, but I need to buy some lamb for those and I should probably wait for it to go on sale.
In baking, I've been attempting to make foccaccia using Ken Forkish's recipe from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but my results have been . . . odd. It's not an easy dough to work with, and seems to want to rise too much or too little or both. I'm beginning to fear that Forkish's recipes, which I like because of how precise they are, may in fact be a little too precisely calibrated, so that they can be hard to adapt if, say, your kitchen is cooler than Forkish's optimum temperature, as mine currently is.
And lest you think I have been converted entirely to salads, let me note that last night I baked Golly Polly's Doodles, a delicious peanut butter-filled chocolate cookie with a silly name. These are a bit labor intensive because of the hand shaping but not difficult, and I felt accomplished at having made a filled cookie, almost like a Real Baker.
So, how are all of you? Please do point me at stuff you posted or saw that I may have missed!
Reading: I've been speeding through Arnaldur Indriðason's mystery series featuring Reykjavik police inspector Erlendur and his colleagues. They're good books, if rather gloomy, though occasionally Erlender's endless clinging-to-his-own-trauma gets on my nerves. The one I just finished, Outrage, switches protagonists to Erlender's colleague Elínborg, whose pragmatic and less self-absorbed viewpoint was something of a relief.
I think I'd call them crime novels rather than mystery novels, as they're often more interested in the impact and aftermath of crime, or the causes of crime, as they are in whodunnit. This is something I like, and the look into Icelandic culture is intriguing to me as someone who knows nothing about it.
The most recent book to be translated into English, Strange Shores (which was the one I read first because I picked it up randomly off the new books display at the library), ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I'm hoping the sequels make it into English soon.
There's something I'm interested in talking about if anybody has read these (here follows discussion of a minor character, cut for length, nothing plot spoilery) and that's Marion Briem. Marion is Erlendur's old boss, and Arnaldur carefully avoids ever revealing Marion's gender--"Marion" is a gender-neutral given name and "Briem" is a rare surname, as opposed to patronymic, used in Iceland and unlike patronymics is gender-neutral. This is all well and good, but I'm not sure what the point is supposed to be. There are hints that Marion's own gender identity, or possibly physical sex, is a complicated matter, and Erlendur at one point says he doesn't know if Marion is a man or a woman, but this is never really explored in any of the books I've read. And, realistically, Marion was a police detective in the early 1960s, so almost certainly had to have been assigned male at birth and perceived as male. A part of me suspects that Marion's ambiguity is just there for "oddity" value and perhaps for Arnaldur to show off as a writer--though I don't know how hard it is in the Icelandic language to not assign a gender to a character. Anybody have any thoughts?
I've also been reading Paul Strohm's Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, I think out of nostalgia for academia. It's not actually a scholarly book in the sense of being aimed at specialists, more the sort of thing you'd assign to bright undergraduates (in the US--I'm given to understand that UK undergraduates read real scholarship) to give them some context for Chaucer, but it still recalls the good old days--yes, I really think of them that way--when I was working on my Ph.D.
More relevant to my current interests, I picked up a copy of Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity for just $3, thanks to a sale at work, and can't wait to read it.
Cooking: I've been cooking some of the recipes in Ottolenghi and Tamimi's Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Nothing fancy, just a few of the vegetable dishes, but I'm enjoying them very much. I have made my own hummus! Which turned out to be easy and delicious, and I will never buy hummus again. I've also tried roasted butternut squash and red onion with tahini, and roasted cauliflower (the recipe calls for it to be fried, but I didn't want to) also with tahini, and a variation on the pita-and-vegetable salad fattoush that has cucumber, tomato, radish, and pita in a gorgeous creamy yogurt dressing with lemon. This last is my new favorite thing; I diverge slightly from the recipe by toasting the pita until it's very crisp.
I always thought I didn't like salads, but what I'm realizing is that I actually don't like lettuce. Salads that are full of other vegetables, I like enormously and will gobble down like a hungry salad-eating wolf.
I'm eager to try some of Jerusalem's meat recipes, especially the one for freekeh and meatball soup and the one for meatballs with fava beans, but I need to buy some lamb for those and I should probably wait for it to go on sale.
In baking, I've been attempting to make foccaccia using Ken Forkish's recipe from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but my results have been . . . odd. It's not an easy dough to work with, and seems to want to rise too much or too little or both. I'm beginning to fear that Forkish's recipes, which I like because of how precise they are, may in fact be a little too precisely calibrated, so that they can be hard to adapt if, say, your kitchen is cooler than Forkish's optimum temperature, as mine currently is.
And lest you think I have been converted entirely to salads, let me note that last night I baked Golly Polly's Doodles, a delicious peanut butter-filled chocolate cookie with a silly name. These are a bit labor intensive because of the hand shaping but not difficult, and I felt accomplished at having made a filled cookie, almost like a Real Baker.
So, how are all of you? Please do point me at stuff you posted or saw that I may have missed!
no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-17 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-18 01:16 am (UTC)I'm going to try some pretzel buns for the next time we do shredded beef in the slow cooker.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 08:19 pm (UTC)I have never made pretzels but now I kind of want to try.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-18 08:14 am (UTC)In the first instance, Icelandic genders people much the same as English does. For example, you'd write:
Marion walked into the room. He said... (or She said...)
There's no singular they, and there are three forms of plural they, one male, one female, and one for mixed groups.
However, you could write the sentence differently:
The police officer walked into the room. X said...
In this case the pronoun would be determined by the gender of the word "police officer," not by the gender of the person in question. So I reckon that it would be somewhat easier to write gender ambiguity in Icelandic, though it would still be a notable stylistic quirk.
I will have to remember to take a look at these books in Icelandic when I next have the opportunity. My grasp of the language is not very good but I'd like to try to work out whether my guess was right.
Also, have you read the Hilary Tamar series by Sarah Caudwell? The protagonist of that is gender ambiguous and it comes off, IMO, well. Though in that case Hilary is the narrator, which makes the writing of it much less obtrusive.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 08:23 pm (UTC)I've read the Tamar books, yes. I agree that Hilary being the narrator makes the whole thing easier to pull off. Somehow it's both less obtrusive and more central or meaningful; it doesn't feel sort of tacked on like Marion Briem's gender ambiguity does to me.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-18 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-22 08:28 pm (UTC)(I couldn't even get graduate students to read scholarship, but then I was at a particularly terrible university. We granted Ph.D.s for dissertations that I thought would have been barely competent as an undergraduate thesis. Of course, when I was a graduate student, one of my professors routinely scolded us for being unwilling to read. But she was assigning us a couple of hundred pages of dense theory every week.)