I try a new old author

On my last visit to LA, a friend studying English literature loaded me down with a box of her old books she thought I'd like. Mostly these have just sat on my shelf, as the ones I'm familiar with I'm not terribly excited about, even though the few I've chanced so far have been on the whole winners.

Recently, though, I picked up Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, the story of a young woman who is transplanted from the comfortable, rural South of England to a rough industrial city in the North, read Manchester, and the eventual reconciling between the attitudes of the two places, represented by her heated relationship with one of the factory owners. I must say, I like the characters, the even-handed representations of the motives of both the factory workers and owners, and especially the frank acknowledgement of passion in the relationships between men and women, but I am getting annoyed by the amount that the narrator is in everyone's heads.

It is one thing to give us insight into the feelings of Margaret and Mr Thornton after a tumultuous encounter, especially since they are so apparently poor at examining them themselves, but to be presented with every minor character's thoughts and opinions is tiresome. I don't need to hear the doctor's silent soliloquy on how much he admired Margaret's strength after she's been told her mother is dying, it was already obvious he was impressed. In fact, he practically said as much in the moment.

The amusing exception, given how much Gaskell champions for the working classes, is Nicholas and Bessy Higgins, characters whose main purpose is giving both Margaret and the reader insight into the factory workers' hard lives, turning a faceless mob into sympathetic individuals. Even the servants must suffer the narrator's regular prying into their thoughts, but not these two key characters. It is almost as if the workers are not privileged with any private thoughts to reveal; they speak everything they have.

The long and short of it is that I appreciate Austen's restraint in doling out free indirect speech much more after these outpourings.

Dog Names: A Reference Guide

Higgs	Oliver
Higgs Particle	Oliver Baron von Opel-Kadett
Higgster Fluff	Olives
Fluffy Butt	Wiggle Worm
Fuzzy Bear	Little Seal
Cuddle Bear	Cuddle Monster
Wobbles	Wiggle Stomp
Mopey Boy	Muscles McGee

More book reviewing

Today we're going to talk about Poul Anderson. Who is Poul Anderson you non-scifi geeks might be asking? Well, only the author of the best YA novel ever, The High Crusade. The premise is that a world-conquering alien race lands a scouting ship outside a medieval English town, interrupting the local lord's preparations to set off for the Holy Land. Lucky for him, the aliens are a little cocky, and soon the English have captured the ship and decided it would give them a nice advantage against the infidels. Through a series of miscalculations on the part of their alien captive, massive bluffing on the part of the English, and just plain accident, they end up conquering the entire alien empire. Amidst all this silliness, it actually gets a large amount of history right, particularly the interplay between the Norman nobility, their clergyman, the English-speaking peasantry, and the (half) Welsh knight no one quite trusts. In other words, it's pretty damn brilliant for its genre.

Sadly, Poul Anderson is quite an inconsistent writer, and you never know what you're going to get when you pick up one of his books. The most recent gamble I tried was People of the Wind, which sadly lacks both good characters and good prose. This example is pulled from the first pages:

Ranchland rolled beneath him. Here around Gray, the mainly Ythrian settlements northward merged with the mainly human south; both ecologies blent with Avalon's own, and the country became a checkerboard. Man's grainfields, ripening as summer waned, lay tawny amidst huge green pastures where Ythrians grazed their maukh and mayaw. Strands of timberwood, oak or pine, windnest or hammerbranch, encroached on nearly treeless reaches of berylline native susin where you might still glimpse an occaissional barysauroid. The rush of his passage blew away fretfulness.

I'm still half-heartedly trying to read it, but in many places (especially a later list of alien plant species) I am forcibly reminded of this comic:

Biscuits

As a prize for all you who voted, or, since I can't enforce that at all, just because I feel like it, I decided to divulge the best biscuit recipe in the world. It's one of three recipes for biscuits I have from my great granma, Mama Christine, none of them too healthy since she was used to feeding farmers. Even better, it doesn't require rolling out and cutting dough — too much work no matter how good the biscuits.

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 T baking powder
1.5 t salt
4 T vegetable shortening
2/3 cup cream
1 cup buttermilk
flour for shaping

Preheat oven to 425° and grease a round cake pan. Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl, then work in the shortening with your fingers until there are no large lumps. This is what will form the nice layers in the biscuits.

Add the cream and the buttermilk, stirring until it looks like cottage cheese. In other words, a lumpy liquidy mess. Here's what a double batch looks like at this point:

Put about a cup of flour in another bowl. Drop a spoonful of dough into the bowl and cover it in flour. Pick up the dough ball and toss it gently from hand to hand to remove the excess flour, then plop it into the greased pan. Repeat until the dough's gone and you've dusted your whole kitchen with flour.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops are golden, and enjoy with a nice soup or breakfast.

Yes, they do kinda rise all on top of one another in the cake pan, so don't fuss about spacing them out nicely or anything. I think they would ooze too flat on a sheet pan. Yes, they're so good because of all the shortening, but you know, it could be worse — the recipe actually calls for pouring melted butter on top of them once they come out of the oven. Unnecessary.

Painting

I think my dog would talk like this

I've been catching up on my Escape Pod a lot lately. Time was, I would regularly exhaust Savage Lovecast, Escape Pod, Pod Castle, and as many audiobooks as I could get my hands on, but lately I just listen when I run, which isn't often enough. With the house painting has finally come some extra listening time. The best out of the recent bunch was by far How I Mounted Goldie, Saved my Partner Lori, and Sniffed Out The People's Justice. If you've ever wondered what a talking dog would sound like, you'll find the answer there. It rivaled Conversations With and About my Electric Toothbrush in all-time enjoyability.

And yes, if you like sci-fi, I highly recommend Escape Pod.

I am tired

The other Laura, being much more motivated to get things going than anyone else, decided we should finally go on the backpacking trip we've been talking about all summer. We started at 9,000' and went up to the continental divide at about 12,000', then over a few valleys towards Rawlins Pass and back down. So glad we didn't go the other direction, because the last climb would've been so much steeper and more painful.

View Larger Map

Unfortunately, Matt couldn't come, but it still turned out to be fun, and we've already got another trip in the works. Higgs did come, along with his little pack with his food. He always seemed confused when it started to get late and we weren't heading home, though.