searching for the ineffable
What’s your favorite recipe for bread, made using hands and an oven but no bread machine, and easy for a bread beginner, and not so time-consuming that it’ll discourage me from baking bread in the future? Not sourdough: I don’t have starter, and don’t like sourdough enough to seek it out.
LiveJournal readers, please to comment using the URL up top and not directly on LJ; I won’t see the latter.
Today was cheesemas. Cheeses were bought and brought – drunken goat, mozzarella, robiola, explorateur (?! – hokey name, but most excellent cheese), some other alcohol- (port-)laced semisoft cheese, Valdeon (a Spanish blue), raclette and half a dozen others. Someone even brought raclette ice cream which, really, was much milder than it had any right to be. Add to that fruit, bread, fig-and-vidalia jam, wine, beer, sprakly non-alc cider, fifteen folk or more and two mostly happy and social toddlers, and it’s cheesemas in the neighborhood. My undying gratitude and love to my cheesemas-elf conspirator.
Unrelatedly, I thought some this evening, and wrote down the following:
north is triangular, steady, monument-al
east is rounded, exotic, otherworldly
south is light, scintillating, hot
west is radio, diagonal, big
the center is small, sensitive, reactive
This coming Tuesday, September 18th, come to MIT for the first in the Purple Blurb digital reading series. “The readings will start at 6pm at MIT in 14N–233 (second floor of building 14, in the wing that is across the courtyard from the Hayden Library),” says organizer Nick Montfort in the announcement.
The first reader will be Robert Kendall, and I’m very sorry to miss it due to a prior obligation: Rob’s words tend to transport me somewhere familiar I’ve never been before. At the next event on October 18th, I’ll be reading from RolandHT and talking a bit about narrative threads running through it. The other two readings this semester will take place on November 13th (Barbara Barry) and December 4th (Andrew Plotkin).
For a good time, call on Purple Blurb.
What should I write about next?
Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:
I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.
OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?
Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.
The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.
The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?
So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.
*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.
Here‘s an interview Wired conducted with David Deutsch, the father of quantum computing. Deutsch explains what it is and why it’s useful in a very accessible way. The whole thing is fascinating and nifty; do check out the gorgeous chip in the photos. It can’t function unless its temperature is near zero Kelvin! I can’t wait to see where this goes, whether it will open any doors that our current thought paradigms haven’t been able to reach, only imagine.
In other news, and thanks to a friend’s formulation, this whole week up through today is totally fired.
Not at the same time, mind.
There’s a review in Wired of China Miéville’s new book Un Dun Lun, which looks fun. Though I never quite got into the third book (The Iron Council) of his trilogy, I more or less swallowed up Perdido Street Station and The Scar. And, right now I’m reading Looking for Jake – a collection of his short stories that, all except one, are Miéville distilled, without the buildup. Fabulous, in both senses. He’s like a slightly more creepy Neil Gaiman, and boy does he have a way with words.
Aaand, check out these Viking-era gaming pieces that someone just dug up-and-out.
Bawstinites,
I’ll be working at Diesel in Davis Square (again) tomorrow (Friday) from 10ish to 6ish, with a possible break in-between to wander: last time I got a bit of cabin fever there. Lunch, anyone? It has to be inexpensive, and Diesel food is great; I’ll just be up for company in the afternoon. Hours flexible. Do call my cell, or if you don’t have the number, email or comment on Words’ End, not LiveJournal.
Everyone else, sorry for the narrow-audience PSA. Carry on.
Even if I have a ton of material to write out, under “normal” conditions (i.e., deadline is not within two or three days) there seems to be a word limit to what I can write. It’s a loose word limit, but it’s there — and it does not matter how much time I spend on writing these words. Happily, this limit is generous enough that I’m pretty optimistic about finishing.
Also, having less time and/or a firm stopping time — a dinner date, for example — helps productivity in direct proportion to how much time I have left. In other words, work tends to speed up if I know I must stop at a certain hour. But that’s not news.
On a mailing list someone wrote:
Our good friends are still in real and serious danger.
This hit home — again — when I read the AP news article sent around on the same list.
I hadn’t made any phone calls since I live in Providence, but the article – dated today – made me do it. So I just called the attorney general, the mayor and the governor. My main question to them was: the two were arrested (more or less) before Turner made their statement; Turner has since taken the blame and a settlement has been reached; Mayor Menino said pretty definitively that Turner/Interference was the culprit; Peter and Sean are contractors twice removed. So why are they still on the hook, but more importantly, why has there been no public statement as to their fate? Will their prosecution just quietly go on its merry way, regardless of the above? That doesn’t make sense to me.
The phrasing was different, but this is the gist. I was pleasantly surprised by their taking my comments seriously and courteously, even though I am not part of their voter base. So make your calls, y’all, regardless of where you live, and ask that the charges against Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens be publicly dropped.
Attorney General Martha Coakley: (617) 727-2200
Mayor Thomas Menino: (617) 635-4500
Governor Deval Patrick: (617) 725-4005
