| "Ya we in luck here / Down in the muck here" |
[Mai. 24., 2012|12:09 pm] |
I've discovered an awesome new interactive tool for depressing myself: Where are home loans underwater? at Zillow Visuals. Rate for my zipcode of residence: 68%. You have to trek all the way to the South Side to find a number that beats it. (72% in 60653, which embraces Bronzeville.) Just across Devon (technically just across Schreiber, which is even closer) the percentage is a balmy 46%, which raises the possibility that on a block-by-block basis, we may be slightly closer to the Cook County average of 44%.
We have still yet to see a sale in our building since ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) monshu and I bought here nearly four years ago. Around this time last year, we had perhaps our most contentious condo association meeting ever in which we agreed unanimously to begin enforcing the rental cap. My hope was that that would finally give some owners the push they needed to sell up, take the loss, and move on. So far it isn't working that way: The longtime scofflaw seems to have found a dodge to keep renting out his place by designating his tenants his "invitees and agents" and the only one caught up in the net so far is someone who was trying to save money while going back to school by moving in with his boyfriend while he rented his one-bedroom.
What does this all mean in terms of getting FHA approval so the other homo couple can sell up? Who the hell knows. I can't get the other board members to return my e-mails and even the one who is a lawyer by day was vague on the legality of what the Von Stomp's landlord is doing. (Did I mention that he lost the lawyer we had on retainer because he refused to take action when she notified us that she was going to destroy our files if we didn't contract to keep paying her? I'm sure that will look wise in retrospect.) |
|
|
| From the "Why am I only learning about this now?" file |
[Mai. 23., 2012|12:38 pm] |
Re called the Two Contendors before Him. He passed Divine Jugdment upon Them for Their wrong-doings. He demanded that They cease their quarreling. Seth appeared to agree. He invited Horus to stay with Him in His palace.
One evening, as the two lay together resting, Seth inserted his penis between the thighs of Horus. Horus, however, unknown to the Dark Lord of Storm, had caught Seth's semen in His hand. With the help of His mother, Isis, He placed His own semen upon lettuce growing in a garden; lettuce that Seth was to eat.
Seth spake unto Horus, "Come, let us go, that I may contend with you in the Court." Within the Court, Seth declared, "Let the office of Ruler be given to Me, for as regards Horus who stands here, I have done a man's deed to Him."
Horus laughed and said, "What Seth has said is false. Let the semen of Seth be called, and let us see from where it will answer."
And so Thoth, the Self Created, called upon the semen of Seth. The answer came from a far-away marsh, where Isis had long since deposited it.
Horus said, "Let mind be called, and let us see from where it will answer."
Then Thoth laid His hand on the arm of Seth and said, "Come out, semen of Horus!" And it spake unto Him, "Where shall I come out?" Thoth said to it, "Come out of His ear." It replied to Him, "Should I come out of His ear, I who am Divine Seed?" Then it came out as a Golden Sun Disk upon the head of Seth. Seth became very angry, and He stretched forth His hand to seize the Golden Disk. |
|
|
| Birding |
[Mai. 23., 2012|11:06 am] |
Amazing what you find when you clean up for a change: monshu cleared out the coat closet in advance of a visit from the electrician today and discovered 'Da Bird' which has been missing on the order of two years or so. I knew I'd hidden somewhere so that the cat wouldn't chew it to shreds and I thought it was that closet, but I didn't think of looking on the floor in the corner where it'd slipped down to. It's a timely discovery now that our vet has suggested he lose about two pounds. (I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but that's comparable to me dropping two stone.) It's clear he's lost some of his interest, but he still did more jumping out than I've seen in ages. If need be, I can always slip in a few catnip leaves.
The Old Man has taken his birthday week off, but rather than spend it gallivanting around one of the great cities of North America, he's staying at home and getting a hundred little things taken care of. Ten of these are the light in the closet, the halogens under the cabinets, and the trifaceted light fixture in the den. For all I know, in fact, they're all taken care of already since your man was supposed to show up at 8:30. Will he be cuter than the cable guy? We live in hope! |
|
|
| A chasut lo patac |
[Mai. 22., 2012|12:56 pm] |
Here's an interesting tidbit from a presentation I attended to day on a 14th-century register of toll charges from the South of France. The manuscript is prefaced with a couple paragraphs from the beginning of the gospel of John in Latin. My first thought was, "Did someone start an illuminated gospel before realising they needed some place to record the bridge tolls?" But a scholar from the religion department pointed out that this passage was very common in the Middle Ages as a talisman, particularly to ensure auspicious beginnings. Then a penny dropped: This is the passage which my mom read out at the baptism of my newest nephew. She explain that her father read it at every baptism in her family, but no one really understood why. Now this has me wondering just how far back in the family this tradition might go.
Another completely unexpected connexion: The manuscript contains a section on currency, indicating that the local standard is the denier tournois and giving equivalents in other common currencies, such as the florin. There's also apparently a mention of a local coin called the patac, which shares a name with the Iberian pataca or patacón. Does that last word look familiar? If so, it's because it's Crazy Jungle Spanish for tostón--a twice-fried plantain slice which is roughly the size and shape of an old-fashioned coin. |
|
|
| Moving along |
[Mai. 21., 2012|09:39 pm] |
Last week on Facebook I bet a near-stranger that I would cut off my fingernails (his idea, not mine) if his dire predictions about anarchist mayhem came true over the weekend. My counterprediction was that we wouldn't see anything worse than a few broken windows at most. Sadly, our mutual acquaintance deFriended me as a consequence so I'm not in a position to gloat at having been proved right. But really, the relief of an uneventful series of protests is more than reward enough.
There were moments last night, watching the newsfeeds, where I glimpsed the potential for things to get really ugly. Once I saw that barricaded hefted, I thought we'd see some shattered glass for sure. In the end, however, the police seem to have behaved better than I feared them capable of. (One friend reports that supervisors repeatedly broadcast the message, "Remember that you are on live television and show restraint!") Yeah, they busted a few heads, but only after being seriously provoked, and the brunt of their response seems to have landed on those actually doing the provoking; when bystanders complained that they were being given no place to go, the cops pulled back. Most importantly, they identified and surrounded the Black Bloc hooligans early on without disrupting the surrounding march. I didn't see any evidence of the awful baton charges on peaceful parties or instances of kettling vividly broadcast from the streets of Toronto. How refreshing would it be if we're actually learning from Canada's mistakes for a change?
The much-touted traffic chaos turned out to be a bust as well, quite possibly because so much of the workforce heeded calls to stay home. The shuttles I rely on to get into work, which loop down to Chicago Avenue and back north, ran perfectly on schedule. I'm still waiting for a report from our buddy Diego, who announced at Saturday's brunch his intentions to go south for some sightseeing. Again, there were moments on Sunday when I asked myself why I wasn't doing the same. Twenty years ago, I would've been there for sure. But I fall in the vast middle ground between the grannies reliving their rebellious youth and the rebellious youth living it out for the first time. |
|
|
| Tropophobia |
[Mai. 21., 2012|12:05 pm] |
Invariably when I read one of those novels which alternates between two distinct narratives, I find myself more engrossed in one than the other and end up skipping ahead to see what develops. So it was with The 19th wife. Even though the true story of Ann Eliza Young is in many ways more interesting than Ebershoff's lightweight murder mystery plot, his inability to breathe live into it led to me jumping ahead several chapters to the implausible happy denouement for our hero and his improvised family. I went back and read most of them, but I still have half of the account of Brigham Young's night in jail to go before I can take the book off my nighttable and stick a stake through it.
The happy ending might not annoy me quite as much as it does if he didn't rely on the lazy and manipulative television-police-procedural gimmick of giving a character a horrific backstory in order to engage our sympathies and then essentially ignoring the consequences that would have in the real world. His impoverished runaways are so much more trusting and less self-destructive than any number of well-educated people I've known from good bourgeois homes that I'm left with the strong impression the author has never personally known anyone really screwed up. He's also helped me realise that I really dislike the mystery trope of repeated visits to a risky and/or secured location in order to pick up crumbs of new information. The first time the protagonist revisits the polygamous compound he was kicked out of, you're generally fearful for what might befall him; another two or three relatively uneventful trips back, however, and it becomes just another locale on a par with the Internet café or the lawyer's office.
So, in a word, not recommended. I know a little more about the craziness of 19th-century Mormonism than I did before, but without one iota more insight into the human heart. It could hardly be a more different experience reading Uwe Johnson. My progress in Das dritte Buch über Achim has been glacial. Hopefully it will improve a bit now that I've gotten a bit of feedback from Nuphy, who pointed out how the text cleverly incorporates East German officialese. I'd complained to monshu that I was having the problem of words I thought I knew not meaning what I thought they meant, and now it appears at least part of that is deliberate. The reward, however, is genuinely expressive and superior prose conveying the complexities of interpersonal contact with terrific nuance. Yum!
But now I'm a bit torn. Yesterday evening, the Old Man and I sat on the deck discussing literature with the Time List of great novels as our jumping-off point. It made me want to choose something less disposable for my next English-language novel, but part of the point of having two novels going at once is having a lighter alternative when one is heavy going. So I'm at a bit of a loss for the moment. Maybe this would be a good time to give Roman fever another go, if it's not going to bum me out too terribly. |
|
|
| Passing secrets in class |
[Mai. 17., 2012|03:00 pm] |
This opinion piece by fellow alum John Scalzi is sparking some interesting online discussions, particularly on the role of class. (Here's a thoughtful response highlighting from nihilistic_kid highlighting the importance of that factor.) One of these was in the Facebook feed of a friend, and a friend of hers made this interesting observation:Upper class kids, especially those from academic families, view knowledge as something to be shared, and it is not just right but proper to defer to superior expertise. I think one of the most telling markers of class, honestly, is family recipes. If you ask someone from a lower class background about the recipe for some particular dish, nine times out of ten you'll get some waffle about my/mother's/grandmother's "secret recipe," with all the song and dance that sounds like something between the trade secrets of the medieval guilds and some occult mystery tradition. If you ask someone from an upper class background, this is invariably taken as an invitation to talk about themselves, their ancestry, or their travels, giving the provenance of the recipe, mentioning personal variations, and more often than not referring to "tricks" rather than "secrets," as the assumption is shared common knowledge rather than secrecy, and mentioning "tricks" is just a way to gauge a person's expertise. With that sort of worldview, it's not surprising that upper class kids have a leg up in academia because it comes out of the later tradition. I'm interested in hearing how this does or doesn't jibe with the experiences of others here. My family background is pretty firmly middle class (though Dad's family was on the borderline, his father being a workman-cum-farmer) and the description of "upper class" behaviour sounds about right for us and our milieu. But I don't really have enough experience trading recipes with members of the "lower class" to speak to that part of it. Most of the working-class people I've chatted with about food have been recent immigrants and I think that skews the sample. |
|
|
| I can see clearly now |
[Mai. 16., 2012|02:22 pm] |
I sincerely feel sorry for any of you who are not in Chicago right now. It really doesn't get any lovelier than this. Everything is in full leaf now--when I wake up in the mornings, I can't tell if it's overcast or not on account of the shade from the maples--but it's clear, cool, and sunny. Sunday I saw my first mosquito and haven't noticed any more since.
I am still getting used to the clarity of our freshly-washed windows. We finally broke down over the weekend and bought a squeegee on a pole, so the outside faces of the upper panes got their first actual cleaning since we moved in. (There should be some way of tilting these in to clean but I haven't figured it out yet.) Not perfect--monshu says we really need to drag out the stepladder and go over them with a cloth--but the difference is so amazing I worry about songbird fatalities.
Storms blew in yesterday evening to moderate the summer-like temperatures. (Supposedly it got up to 28℃, though perhaps not in our neighbourhood.) The first wave was barely a drizzle; I stood on the back steps with the cat in my arms and he wasn't bovvered. If anything, I was more annoyed at getting wet than he was. A couple hours later, with thunder booming and rain falling in sheets, it was a different story--but even then he spent a minimal amount of time cowering in the closet compared to when we first got him.
monshu asked me why he's so scared of storms, and I replied that storms are pretty dangerous for small creatures in the wild. But if some domestic animals don't seem to be bothered by them, then it can't be instinctual behaviour per se. Did his mother take him to a safe place in the corner of a closet when he was a kitten? |
|
|
| Unconvinced |
[Mai. 14., 2012|09:52 pm] |
After six weeks with a lovelorn 19th-century Frenchwoman, I knew I needed something completely different. A literary thriller about murder among polygamous Mormons seemed just the ticket. It's a shame, then, that author David Ebershoff bites off more than he can chew with The 19th wife, because the parts he can chew are pretty tasty. Rounding out the contemporary tale of a true believer Jailed for a Crime She Did Not Commit and the lost boy who returns to prove her innocence is the story of the woman who divorced Brigham Young. And it's here where the author loses his way.
Ann Eliza Young actually authored her own narrative of her life. Naturally, the extensive "selections" included in the novel are all the work of Ebershoff and while (from what I've skimmed of the original just now) they seem true in spirit to what she wrote I don't feel he convincingly counterfeits the voice of a 19th-century suffragette. That would be more forgivable if he didn't compound this flaw by inventing another narrative, that of Young's mother, so that he can flesh out incidents Young wouldn't have been old enough to recall (such as the revelation of the doctrine of plural marriage to her parents) along with a backstory to explain its existence which is hardly more plausible than that one about the metal tablets).
But that's not enough, so he invents more narratives, the work of husband and son, and then introduces another contemporary voice, that of a young LDS woman doing research into the live of Young, in order to provide a medium for uniting them. It's a multiplication I might be able to forgive if each new source was correspondingly distinctive. But, no, he has to go and fall afoul of one of my biggest literary pet peeves: unconvincing first-person narrative.
Do any of you remember when the Onion's "A Room of Jean's Own" completely jumped the shark? We were supposed to swallow that some college students had stumbled upon Jean Teasdale's columns and decided to deconstruct her personality. Bad enough that Jean's creators felt the need to explain the joke, but the worst part was having this all conveyed to us by Jean. Somehow, a friend overheard their discussions, relayed them all to her verbatim, and then she did the same for our benefit--all the time ostensibly having no clue what their criticisms meant! It was like hearing a dog describe how his owners got divorced.
Ask yourself this question: When was the last time you heard someone repeat an overheard conversation verbatim? When the last time you did this? It's not something you hear from ordinary people. They may remember a few particularly salient exchanges, but mostly they paraphrase and they summarise. And know what else they don't do? They don't add descriptive embellishments concerning the glint of someone's hair or the manner in which they handle a pitcher. That's because ordinary people aren't graduates of creative writing programmes, which Ebershoff obviously is because he simply cannot help himself. Every account is composed the same way: novelistically. Even the research paper has dialogue. The man is at a university and yet he can't convincingly adopt the voice of an academic.
It's frustrating, because the story itself is pretty interesting and well-told. Instead of trying to ape a half-dozen narrative voices unconvincingly, he should've stuck with one. Go third-person omniscient and call it a day, like de Bernières in Birds without wings. The only thing worse in writing than being too clever is attempting it and falling short. Not everyone can be Peter Carey or Roberto Bolaño--or even Stephen King--and if you're not, work within your limits.
I'm sure I'll finish it--after all, I'm 125 pages in after just two days--and I'll probably end up having more good things to say about it than I did about Magician's wife or Bend in the river. I guess the secret is to increase my speed to the point where the voices blend together and I no longer waste time thinking about whether I'm supposed to believe these are the words of a woman long dead instead of a man my age who knows Hyde Park better than he does Salt Lake. |
|
|
| Eierdeutsche |
[Mai. 12., 2012|07:53 pm] |
I'm pretty chuffed with my baking skills right now. It helps to start with pretty foolproof recipes. Move over, Mark; Mimi's bread pudding blows yours out of the water. There's a lot less milk and a lot more bread, so you end up with the consistency you're supposed to have. To keep things interesting, I added not only black walnuts and dried cherries reconstituted in kirschwasser but also a nice big hunk of Callebaut. I also started with multigrain bread. I think I've gone from being crust-neutral to being anti-crust, but the Old Man likes them so I'll keep leaving them in.
When he asked me what I wanted for dinner tonight, I said, "Pancakes!" Half as a joke, really, but then it reminded me how much I've lamented the lack of good savoury German-style pancakes around here. So I Googled a recipe and it turned out fabulously. I did my best imitation of a Walker Brothers Danish Garden by topping it with a sautée of garlic, portobellos, zucchini, green onion, bell pepper, and spinach. Plus, to ramp up the savoury element, I put cheese and sofregit in the batter and replaced some of the butter in the skillet with the oil it was cooked in. Oh, and of course I couldn't resist substituting a little buckwheat flour. Deee-lish!
At dinner I had a glass of Maiwein, but beforehand I wanted to reward myself for killing off Bovary with a Calvados-based cocktail, so I went for the Royal Union. Very interesting! First you get the nut (not Nux Alpina in the house, so I substituted amaretto), then the amari take over with apple notes in the background, and you finished with the taste of the chocolate bitters. At first monshu thought it was too desserty, but it grew on both of us. I dearly wanted another, but I feared it would do me in, so instead I made a stripped-down version with only the Nonino, amaretto, and chocolate bitters. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
