Kristin Janz

I just finished reading the latest issue of On Spec magazine (I often have a magazine going at the same time as whatever book I’m reading.). On Spec is probably Canada’s best-known speculative fiction magazine (edit: Actually, Chizine might be better known, being a SFWA-qualifying publication and all; unfortunately I tend to forget about Chizine because I’m not sure I’ll ever write a horror story under 4000 words – they also publish good stories, though!). It’s mostly a print magazine, but you can also buy a slightly cheaper electronic subscription, or single issue. The website is here. If you live in Canada, I think they have some newstand distribution; if you live in the US, you might be able to find copies at a convention.

I guess I should tell you why you’d want to buy copies or even a subscription to On Spec before telling you how! I’m always impressed by the quality and diversity of the stories they publish, and the Summer 2010 issue is no exception. (Did I say the same thing about Sybil’s Garage? Well, it’s true about On Spec, too. Just because I repeat myself doesn’t mean I’m not sincere.)

My favorite story was Greg Wilson’s “Still”. It wouldn’t do the story justice to say simply that it’s about a young wooden puppet who runs away from home after being molested by her music teacher. It is about that, yes, but it doesn’t try so hard to be an allegory of real abused children that it loses sight of the puppets whose story its telling; nor does it trivialize the suffering of real children. And it manages to find a happy ending, albeit a bittersweet one.

I also really liked Rob Engen’s “Thanks for the Game,” about interstellar aliens who land in Manitoba and learn to play hockey. It’s a much more interesting story than you might think, based on that one-sentence description, even if you’re not a Canadian or a hockey fan!

And, being a chemist, I couldn’t help but love Susan Forest’s “The Right Chemistry”, about the stormy relationship of the two bonded atoms in a molecule of oxygen. It’s full of chemistry puns that are so bad they’re good.

One thing I noticed, looking at the cover: some magazines put the names of the best-known authors appearing in that issue in big print, whereas lesser-known writers might not have their names appear on the cover at all. Not so with On Spec! Everyone’s name is the same size, and all the authors are listed in strict alphabetical order. I like that.

My own story, “The Observation Deck” (a flash fiction space opera–or, as someone from my writers group put it, a space aria) should be coming out in On Spec sometime next year. I’m looking forward to it; I’m sure I’ll be published alongside some really great authors.

American and international authors will be pleased to hear that, although the three authors I’ve mentioned are all either Canadian or live in Canada (as far as I can tell from their bios), and On Spec does make a point of publishing at least 80% Canadian content, there were some Americans in this issue, as well. And they just started accepting online submissions, so you no longer have to try to find IRCs, or have your friends in Canada mail you Canadian postage.

Get published in Canada, eh?

I’m currently reading The Arabian Nights, a fairly recent translation (1990) by Husain Haddawy. Over the last few years, I’ve tried to start reading some of the classics of Western literature. Assisting me in this attempt is the embarrassingly useful reference guide, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (There are also 1001 movies to watch, 1001 albums to listen to, etc.) Laugh all you want, but I’m the sort of person who enjoys lists, and enjoys trying to do everything on a given list (Donald can attest to this, after I dragged him around to see every single sculpture at the De Cordova open-air museum.) And it’s not like I’ve stopped reading books that didn’t make it into the 1001 Books list.* It’s just that I’ve found this reference book a good place to get ideas for books I might want to read that didn’t get reviewed in Locus.

I have to say, of the really really old books in the 1001 Books list, I’m enjoying Arabian Nights far more than I enjoyed Aesop’s Fables, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chariton’s Chaireas and Kallirhoe, Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, and Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. A lot of it probably has to do with the accessibility of the translations; I can’t speak to how closely Haddawy’s translation matches the original Arabic texts, but I find the writing fresh, lively and interesting in English. I think my enjoyment of Arabian Nights may also be partly because the stories are not as ancient as the others I’ve mentioned, and are thus culturally more accessible to a modern reader. (Familiarity of the stories may be part of it, as well, though some of the more famous Arabian Nights tales are not included in the translation I’m reading because their authenticity is apparently either dubious or absent – Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, for instance. And Aesop and Ovid both had a lot of familiar stories.)

So, I’m enjoying Arabian Nights. One thing I never realized before, though, is how erotic some of the stories are. I was telling Donald about The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies. There’s this porter, waiting in the marketplace to be hired, and a woman comes by and hires him to carry her groceries home from the market. When they get back to her house, the porter finds that, not only is she quite beautiful, but she lives with two other women who are even more lovely, and no men. He invites himself to stay for dinner, and they accept his invitation, and they all start drinking … well, you should read it yourself, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot of splashing naked in the fountain and “carousing”.

Anyway, Donald said, “That sounds like a Penthouse letter or something. ‘I never thought something like this would happen to a porter like me….’” Not that Donald has ever read Penthouse, of course; at least, that’s what he tells me.

Interestingly, the version of this story that appears in the children’s abridged version of Arabian Nights says only that the porter “sang a song … The three ladies were pleased with the song, and then sang themselves, so that the repast was a merry one, and lasted much longer than usual.” Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

There is, of course, far more to Arabian Nights than erotic stories of lovely women entertaining lonely porters. It’s a wonderful source of ideas to steal–er, be inspired by–if you’re a fantasy author. And there are really great insights into the culture of the 13th century Muslim world, and the every day life. For instance, in the story about the porter and the ladies, as they go through the market, you get to read about all the different shops they stop at, and what the lady buys at each one: at the fruit vendor’s, various fruits as well as baby cucumbers and flowers; mutton at the butcher, as well as charcoal (!); at the grocer’s, olives, cheese and pickles; at the dry grocer’s, dried fruits and nuts and sugar cane and roasted chick peas; cakes and cookies and sweet breads (not the pancreas kind!) at the confectioner’s; perfumes at the druggist, as well as loaves of sugar, candles and torches. (This being the Muslim world, the lady buys wine not at a wine shop, but by stopping at the apparently unmarked door of a house, “and when she knocked, an old Christian came down, received a dinar from her and handed her an olive green jug of wine.” Obviously not a southern Baptist Christian!) I mean, this kind of information about how people would do their shopping and what they might buy is just invaluable, if you’re writing fantasy set in a medieval sort of world.

Another fascinating insight comes where, in one of the stories, a lady relates how she used to be so wealthy that she owned 10 complete changes of clothing! I mean, I guess it would still be unusual today for a man to own 10 expensive suits, unless he were quite wealthy and needed to wear suits every day to his job. But reading stories from a time so long ago can really help you to step out of assumptions you might have about what people’s lives would be like in an imagined world that you’re writing about. If having 10 outfits is a sign that you’re very wealthy, you probably don’t want the baker’s daughter in your story owning 3 or 4 outfits. (I mean, obviously it depends on which historical time period and cultures you’re borrowing from, but it’s just good to think about these things.)

The next really old book on my list is Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. An English translation, obviously. I once tried to read Victor Hugo in the original French, and gave up after a page and a half; if I can’t handle 19th century French, I’m unlikely to do better with the 16th century. We’ll see how that goes. It’s over a thousand pages long, so I’m a little worried. (I feel I should clarify that this is not the next book I’m planning to read, just the next really old book I’m planning to read.) But I hear that it has plenty of sex, too.

* No, no, there are plenty of other lists for me to choose from! I’m also trying to read all the Hugo-award winning novels. Then I guess I’ll read the Nebula-winning novels that didn’t also win Hugos, then maybe the World Fantasy winners … don’t know what I’ll do after that.

I do also read novels just because I picked them up and thought they looked cool, or because I’ve liked other books by that author, or because a friend recommended them. They don’t have to make it onto a list first. Just so you know.

I can’t decide if this is real; i.e., is this guy serious? I didn’t think so, but then I clicked on the link to go to his website, and apparently he’s a medium associated with this other medium who claims to be receiving messages from the spirit of Michael Jackson.

As something of an authority on elves myself, I was pleased to see Mr. Valentine confirm their vegetarian dietary practices; though as anyone who’s seen the elf documentary The Lord of the Rings can attest, they are not only 3 feet tall. (The late elf archaeologist, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien (Oxford) discusses these misconceptions at some length in his articles.)

The videoclip in the link is on the long side, but you only have to watch for a couple of minutes to get the joke. If it is a joke….

So, I had a weird dream the other night.

I had run off with a vampire, with whom I was romantically involved (of course!). Though he wasn’t one of those suave vampires who spoke with a European accent and oozed sex appeal; he was handsome, but not remarkably so. The two of us were living in a trailer park with this other guy from my previous life, who was jealous of the vampire (I think). I also had a black short-haired cat named Leopold (instead of my actual cat, who is also black but long-haired, and female). Leopold was quite intelligent, and could understand everything I said to him, though he could only meow and purr in response. He was a little nervous of the vampire, and was going to run away, but I convinced him not to, and he was loyal enough to stay.

The jealous guy went and told the people in town that the vampire was really a vampire, and they all showed up at our trailer in force. The vampire wasn’t there, so my friend tried to get me to turn against him and admit to the townspeople that he was an evil, bloodsucking fiend. But I refused, so then they decided to come after me instead. Fortunately, the vampire had taught me some magic tricks to help me escape from people with bad intentions. They helped a little, but didn’t work all that well, so I still had to run. It’s unclear whether I escaped; at that point, the dream morphed into something about a deer being chased into an old warehouse by a lion, and then the warehouse started to collapse, and then caught on fire.

Donald said he almost wanted to suggest that I try turning the dream into a story, since it was already so much more coherent than any of his dreams. “But,” he said, “I’m not sure the world really needs any more vampire romance fiction.”

These aren’t all writing-related, but some of them are pretty funny.

Lots of ads though, huh? I hope I never have to resort to advertising in order to keep my website running.

I made my dad (who’s visiting from Nova Scotia) come over and look at this clip, promising that it would be funny, and he said, “This isn’t going to be one of those cheeseburger cat pictures is it?”

No, even better! An Austrian sculptor has an entire exhibition of pickle sculptures at a museum in Salzburg. It must be seen to be believed.

Unfortunately, the videoclip in this link starts off with a commercial. But it’s worth waiting for!

I just finished reading the latest issue of the magazine Sybil’s Garage. I can’t claim to be unbiased in my recommendation, since the editor, Matt Kressel, is a friend of mine. But I’ve been reading Sybil’s Garage almost from the beginning (I think I did miss #1), and I’ve always found great stories there. I think #7 is the best issue yet.

I particularly liked Amy Sisson’s “Suicide Club” and Tom Crosshill’s “Thinking Woman’s Crop of Fools”, two short and somewhat chilling glimpses of the future; among the poetry, I was struck by Jaqueline West’s “One October Night in Baltimore.” One thing that I’m really impressed by, looking at the whole issue, is the diversity of content: stories and poems; flash fiction and longer short stories (though they don’t really publish anything over 5000 words); traditional narratives and more experimental approaches to storytelling; science fiction and fantasy; settings past, present and future; North American and international. I like not knowing what to expect next when I turn the page.

I don’t know what to expect from Sybil’s Garage no. 8, but I’m sure it will be worth waiting for!

If you do a lot of cooking, you start to notice that some cookbooks are better than others. Not just because the food you make from the recipes tastes better. Some cookbooks are also better than others at giving instructions that you can (and should) follow as written for the results. Other cookbooks … not so good.

My target once again is one of Rachael Ray’s recipes, from her Just in Time! cookbook. (It occurs to me that I have been, probably incorrectly, referring to this title in earlier posts without the cutesy exclamation point. My bad!) Rachael Ray’s recipes are actually better than average, with respect to being able to follow the recipe written in the book. Not nearly as good as America’s Test Kitchen … but then, who is? They’re hardcore. They test every possible permutation of the recipe, and then have all the variations submitted to tasters in a blind tasting. Not everyone can be America’s Test Kitchen.

The Rachael Ray meal in question is referred to as “Dinner at the Ivy.” This vague and unhelpful name refers to some restaurant in LA that she likes to eat at, and the “Dinner” in the cookbook is her interpretation of their Tomato Salad Stuffed Artichokes and Mushroom Tagliatelle.

First off, the cookbook said it would take 60 minutes to prepare, and it took me 2 hours. But that’s fine; by now, I double the time estimate given in any Rachael Ray cookbook. The mushroom pasta was a bit too much food for 4 servings, but not as far off as many of her recipes, so that’s fine. The issues were with the preparation.

I didn’t really like the artichoke cooking instructions she gave: put them in boiling water and put a clean dish towel on top to keep them submerged. Rachael Ray likes to dirty a lot of dish towels in her recipes (she also recommends using them to wring the water out of thawed frozen spinach, which you can do perfectly well with bare hands); but as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m not looking to have to wash any more dish towels than I absolutely have to. Also, if you submerge artichokes in water to cook them, they’re going to get pretty water-logged. I followed the ATK method, steaming the artichokes by setting them on thick onion slices so they’re just above the surface of the boiling water. Only I didn’t have any big onions (or a steamer rack, the other recommended option), so I used my dessert custard cups instead (empty, of course). This works pretty well, only you have to make sure to have the open part facing up instead of down, or they’ll jump around once the water starts boiling, and the artichokes will fall off into the water (I learned this the last time I made artichokes and didn’t have big onions lying around).

The tomato salad used to fill the artichokes involved cherry tomatoes. The recipe didn’t say anything about cutting the cherry tomatoes in half, but I thought that was ridiculous. Of course you have to cut the cherry tomatoes in half, if you’re putting them in a salad. Otherwise the flavors won’t meld properly. Also, you won’t be fitting many tomatoes into the hollowed-out artichoke if you don’t cut them in half first. Spheres aren’t going to pack together as tightly as half-spheres.

The mushroom tagliatelle recipe went more or less according to recipe. Except that when you cook the mushrooms, it says to use “medium to medium-high” heat. Well, even if you don’t have the entire skillet filled with mushrooms (and I did), they’re not going to brown on medium heat. At least not in 7-8 minutes. They’ll slowly release liquid, and you’ll have palid, unbrowned mushrooms swimming in mushroom broth for quite some time. Which is fine if that’s what you want, but it probably isn’t. With few exceptions, anything that can be browned before making a sauce or a soup should be (onions and garlic are usually exceptions, depending on the recipe). Browning food causes a chemical reaction to occur between the fat or oil in the pan, and the sugars in the food, and the product of that reaction provide depth and richness of flavor.

In any case, if you have a full pan of mushrooms and want to brown them, you pretty much have to turn the heat up all the way, or almost all the way (depends on your stove, of course). It still takes longer than the 7-8 minutes Rachael Ray thinks it takes at medium heat (unless she has some super hot stove); more like 15 minutes. And of course you have to keep an eye on them. Burning food causes a different chemical reaction to occur: the organic molecules in the food being oxidized to elemental carbon. This, of course, contributes a flavor not usually thought of as deep and rich.

Only three changes to the recipe isn’t so bad, I guess. And it’s not as if the meal wouldn’t have tasted good, had I followed the recipe to the letter. But I don’t think it would have been as good, and it would have been far more frustrating to prepare; even more frustrating than being very hungry after an hour and a half in the kitchen, and still not ready to eat.

I did make a fourth change, but I’m not 100% sure I should have. The recipe said to transfer the cooked pasta to the sauce with tongs. It was unclear whether you were supposed to drain it first. I assumed not. That seemed unwise, because it was fresh pasta, and that overcooks really easily if you leave it in the water just a hair too long. Also, it seemed that lifting it right out of the water and into the sauce would carry a lot of water along with the pasta (both into the sauce and onto the stove between the pot of pasta and the pan of sauce. And, I’m sorry, but what humongous skillet is Rachael Ray talking about here, that can accomodate sauce and 18 oz. of cooked pasta! I drained the pasta, then put it back in the empty pot and added the sauce to that. But, you know, it’s really hard to mix the mushrooms in that way, which makes me wonder if I really should have added the pasta to the sauce, not the other way around. Hmm. Maybe if I left the pasta in the colander, then transferred the sauce to the big pasta cooking pot, then added the pasta to the sauce…. Next time.

The recipe called for 1 cup of dry white wine, and I followed my friend Bob’s advice: never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. In fact, if you use a particular wine in a recipe, a glass of that wine will often taste particularly nice with the finished meal. I used a Toscana from Antinori (an Italian wine). And it was very nice! (It’s not a super-expensive wine, either; I found it for $13 at a local liquor store.) So was the food itself.

Now that Donald has moved in upstairs and lets me drive his car whenever I want to, I feel like I’m becoming one of those dreaded suburbanites who drives everywhere! I’m already doing all my grocery shopping by car, so I can go to the locally-owned greengrocer with lots of local produce, instead of going to the yuppie lifestyle conglomerate, Whole Foods (which I could get to easily without the use of fossil fuels … but I digress). Today I had to buy flat silver sandals for a wedding in early September, and instead of taking public transportation downtown, I drove Donald’s car to the Burlington Mall. A big mall in the suburbs, where no one takes public transportation. A big mall with free parking.

My excuse was that it would have taken me at least an hour to take public transportation downtown. Each way. It’s less than 30 minutes to drive to the mall. I simply didn’t have the extra time to spare. I needed the sandals. I was on a deadline.

But that’s always how it starts, isn’t it?

Fortunately, I did find silver sandals. I also found a nice pair of brown sandals that I liked, that seemed quite comfortable. And an umbrella, because my last one broke well over a year ago, and I still hadn’t replaced it yet.

And, finally, the piece de resistance:

They sat on a shelf at Sears, right in the middle of the main aisle down the center of the store, and virtually demanded that I buy them. As it happens, I didn’t have any rain boots either, and had been thinking that I should get some. Aren’t they special?

In Japan, pretty much every major tourist destination sells themed Hello Kitty souvenirs in the gift shop: key chains or cell phone charms or the like that show Hello Kitty dressed in the local costume, or in a local setting. They’re very cute. You could probably travel much of Japan on a Hello Kitty pilgrimage, picking up special local Hello Kittys everywhere you went.

You could probably do it by public transportation, too.

Like maraschino cherries, modern grenadine isn’t what it used to be. The original product was colored and flavored with pomegranate juice. These days, it tends to be high-fructose corn syrup colored with FD&C Red #40, and flavored with … well, flavored with not much of anything, to be honest (my bottle of Giroux “Premium Quality” Grenadine Syrup also mentions citric acid, sodium benzoate and “natural fruit flavors”). It doesn’t add anything to a cocktail except color and a cloying sweetness.

Stirrings has a pomegranate grenadine, but it’s not a good substitute. It does contain real pomegranate, but it isn’t red enough to give your drink any more than an anemic salmon tinge, and, although I hate to say this, it isn’t sweet enough. Drink recipes that call for grenadine take the sweetness into consideration, and if you use a product that’s a lot less sweet, the drink won’t be any good. I’ve tried increasing the amount, but haven’t been able to come up with a solution that’s right. And even with double the amount, Stirrings grenadine, though a nice product in its own right, won’t color the drink properly.

Fortunately, I’ve found a solution. Monin pomegranate syrup! This is available at the fancier grocery stores like Whole Foods, among other places. It’s intensely red in color. You can tell it’s in there by looking at the drink. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. And it adds a delicious hint of pomegranate flavor, which will usually go very nicely with whatever drink you’ve added it to (assuming it’s a drink that calls for grenadine, that is; I wouldn’t go adding it to your dry martini).

Unlike Giroux “Premium Grenadine Syrup”, Monin contains actual pomegranate juice along with the natural flavors and citric acid. So does Stirrings, for that matter. I’m not sure why the flavor and color of Monin syrup are so much better; maybe Monin concentrates their fruit juice more. Another thing that Monin and Stirrings have in common is the use of real sugar, from sugar cane, instead of corn syrup. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that sugar tastes better than corn syrup (people who swear by Kosher for Passover Coca-Cola, for instance). Though in Giroux’s case, I suspect the disappointing taste has more to do with the lack of anything approximating real fruit, than with high-fructose corn syrup.