Kristin Janz

An open letter to the nice gentlemen who hollered at me to “Stay on the f**cking sidewalk!” as I was bicycling down Cambridge St towards the Longfellow Bridge this afternoon:

1. Bicyclists do not have to ride on the sidewalks in Massachusetts. In fact, they aren’t supposed to. In some towns (such as Arlington, where I live), it’s against the law and subject to a fine.

2. Bicyclists riding in the right-hand lane do not have to pull over even farther to the right and let you pass whenever the left-hand lane is full of other cars. Particularly when there’s a line of parked cars along the edge, and the cyclist would either have to come to a complete stop, or ride close enough to the parked cars to risk getting “doored”.

3. In fact, bicyclists don’t have to pull over and let you pass even when there’s only one lane of traffic in either direction. We’re allowed to sit right in the middle of the lane. Just like a car. You can either wait until it’s safe and legal for you to pull out into the oncoming traffic lane and pass, or drive at the same pace we’re driving, or find an alternate route. (I don’t usually take advantage of this right, because I’m a nice person. I do sometimes use the middle of the lane when there’s a perfectly good left lane for motorists to use when they’d like to pass.)

All this also applies to the SUV driver who tailgated me, honking, and then passed dangerously close, so that I had to move over closer than I liked to the row of parked cars (I’m willing to give him or her–but let’s be honest, it’s usually a him–the benefit of the doubt, in that he may not have realized he was passing me unsafely. Sometimes I think they do it out of spite, though.). Apparently you don’t think you’re paying enough for car insurance!

Sometimes I’m tempted to take down license plate numbers of cars whose drivers harass me and post them on a special “Wall of Shame” page on my blog. Don’t get me started on the ones who think I’m not allowed to make a left turn from Mass Ave onto Somerville Ave from the center eastbound lane, or don’t realize that even if I were driving a car instead of a bike, I’d have to wait for the green arrow, and they’d still be stuck behind me.

Cyclists can be obnoxious too, though. Too many cyclists in Massachusetts think we aren’t required to stop at red lights (bicyclists on the road have to obey all the same laws as motorists, except that we are permitted to pass other vehicles on the right). Just today, I saw a woman biking along, weaving slightly, and when I passed her I saw that she was holding her iPod in one hand.

The problem is that, in Massachusetts, the motorists, cyclists and pedestrians all show blatant disgregard for whatever traffic laws might inconvenience them. Part of it is that the roads are set up so poorly, with inadequate signage and ridiculously long wait times at pedestrian-controlled intersections. I’m no exception, sadly. I don’t have the patience to wait through 1 1/2 entire light cycles when I want to cross the street. And the other weekend, I irritated Donald to no end by refusing to make a right turn when I found out with twenty feet to spare that I was in a right-turn only lane (I just angled the car so I was blocking both lanes of traffic if the other lane wouldn’t let me in). Or was it that I made a left turn from the right-hand lane, because I realized at the last minute that my turn had come up, and I hadn’t seen the street sign early enough to move over to the left? Ha! I’ve done both, I can’t remember which it was this time. (I hope it wasn’t both at the same time.)

At least I don’t holler obscenities at poor, defenseless cyclists.

It’s been almost a month since Donald and I got back from our honeymoon, and I’m just getting around to blogging about it now. Donald has already written about it here and here.

In case you haven’t read Donald’s posts, I should start off by saying that we took an overnight flight to Rome from Boston on Tuesday (May 10th), and arrived in Rome early Wednesday morning. I think Donald may have gotten a bit of sleep on the flight over, but I didn’t.

We spent 7 nights in Rome, staying at the Hotel San Pietrino in the Prati neighborhood of Rome, north of the Vatican. I liked the location, as it was far enough away from the Vatican that it wasn’t crowded and touristy. There was a great coffee shop across the street where I could have my morning espresso or cappucino and a pastry, and a gelato shop a few doors down. I found the hotel in the Lonely Planet guidebook, and I agree with the authors that it was “a fabulous choice”, but have to disagree most strenuously about the “comfortable beds”. I don’t think I’ve slept in a harder bed since my trip to Japan, where I mostly slept on not-very-thick futons on the floor. Donald liked that the hotel had wi-fi.

We ate lunch at a place called Hostaria dei Bastioni, just outside the Vatican walls. In fact, you can see the walls in this picture, behind Donald.

You can see the walls on the right-hand side of the picture, across the street from the restaurant

The restaurant was okay, but nothing special. Despite what Donald implies in his post, I don’t insist on eating only at restaurants I found in a guidebook. I do think it’s good to have a destination in mind when you’re going out to eat in a strange place; then, if you find something that looks better along the way, you can go there instead. Also, if you’re in a very touristy area where most of the restaurants have big menus out front in 4 different languages, it can be good to know where else to go instead. Restaurants in Rome can also be kind of expensive, so the guidebook was helpful in identifying places that were more moderately priced, since I kind of wanted to have a reasonably decent sit-down meal at least once a day, rather than just grabbing pizza or a sandwich whenever we got hungry, and Donald kind of wanted to not spend over a hundred dollars on each of these meals.

In any case, I did find this lunch restaurant in the Frommer’s guidebook, which tends to have better restaurant recommendations than Lonely Planet, though they’re still kind of hit or miss, especially in the “inexpensive” category.

Speaking of guidebooks, this was my first international vacation since getting a Kindle, so instead of lugging around big paper guidebooks (or photocopying selected pages), I bought both the Frommer’s and Lonely Planet guides for the Kindle. The Kindle editions are definitely better than trying to carry around a thick guidebook when you’re already trying to find room in your purse for a bottle of water, a camera, a wallet, a wrap for the evening in case it gets cold, and maybe an umbrella, and your husband doesn’t want to carry any more of your stuff in his backpack. However, the maps in the Lonely Planet guidebook are completely useless in the e-book edition, whereas they’re somewhat useful in the paper books (you still need to buy a more detailed map of whatever city you’re in, especially if it’s a city like Rome with confusing streets). Of course, the Frommer’s maps are useless even in the paper edition, so no change there. The Lonely Planet e-book is better organized overall (the Frommer’s doesn’t even have a Table of Contents! For shame!). But I found myself using the Frommer’s more, not just for restaurants, but also for more useful and detailed information about various attractions. (Lonely Planet is better for hotels though, if you like to stay at cheaper places like we do.)

After lunch we went to the Pantheon.

You can't see the dome part too well from here

The streets around here are very narrow and confusing, and very crowded, as this is the historic city center, full of tourist attractions. On my last trip to Rome, I spent quite a bit of time wandering around in this area, getting lost, seeing whatever I happened to come across. But Donald’s not quite as much of a fan of wandering aimlessly through strange cities, so we didn’t do that as often on this trip.

We had walked to the Pantheon from our hotel, but on the way back we decided to take the metro. I dragged Donald past the Trevi Fountain on our way to the metro. It was sort of on the way. And it’s famous.

The famous Trevi Fountain

For dinner, we went to another restaurant I found in the Frommer’s guidebook, this one a Sicilian place called Sicilia in Bocca (which I think means something like “Sicily in the mouth”). I had a fava bean and greens soup, which I liked, and something else I can’t remember. Donald had a seafood salad, and then beef rolls (thin slices of beef that were breaded, fried, and rolled around a filling). I liked the food here a lot better than at the place next to the Vatican. It was also more expensive, even though it was listed in the “Inexpensive” section of the Frommer’s guidebook.

On our walk back to the hotel, I noticed a nearby pizzeria that looked good, and made a note of it for future evenings, even though it wasn’t in the guidebook.

This may have been an ambitious schedule for our first day in Rome, with almost no sleep the night before. But the next day would be even more tiring.

(to be continued)

I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

So, Donald and I got married on May 8th. He’s already blogged about it, with pictures. I don’t have any pictures yet, so if you want to see some, you’ll have to go to his blog. (Neither of us had the chance to take a lot of photos during our wedding, unsurprisingly, but Donald copied his mom’s memory card onto his computer before she flew back to Louisiana.)

It was kind of an untraditional wedding. We did get married in a church (we both attend church regularly, so that was important to us). The words we said in exchanging our vows were pretty typical. Our minister married us. But we pretty much dispensed with all the other traditions.

To begin with, we got married during a normal Sunday church service, instead of having a separate wedding service. I’d felt for a long time that a traditional formal wedding wasn’t for me, but my faith in God and connection to my church are important enough to me that I didn’t want to disconnect my wedding ceremony from those, and go the courthouse route. And it always seemed to me that the essential parts of a church wedding really only take about 10-15 minutes (“do you take this man, do you take this woman, etc, etc, I now pronounce you husband and wife”). A lot of the other parts–the Bible readings, the songs, the homily–seem to be there to pad the service out to a half hour or so, so people from out of town feel that it was worth it for them to travel for hours just to get there. Or, less flippantly, they’re there to make the wedding into more of a church service. So I thought, why not just stick the wedding into the middle of an actual church service?

I also felt that there can be so much pressure to make the wedding into a picture-perfect spectacle that a lot of other important things can get lost or forgotten. It’s a lot of work, planning a wedding, even such a simple wedding as ours. I didn’t want our attention (or anyone else’s) to be on my dress, or the flowers, or the decorations, or the bridesmaids’ gowns, or any of that other stuff. I wanted it to be about the commitment that the two of us were making to each other, and the trust we were putting in God to help us keep it.

Fortunately, Donald was totally on board with having a simple wedding, and maybe even a little bit relieved that I wasn’t going to try to pressure him into wearing a tux or tailcoat, and he wasn’t going to get dragged around to look at flowers and tablecloths.

So, the wedding was during an actual service, which meant there were people at the ceremony who weren’t wedding guests. I wore a knee-length sleeveless blue and white dress, and didn’t carry flowers. We didn’t have bridesmaids or groomsmen. I didn’t walk down the aisle, nor was I “given away” (both sets of parents were asked to stand and give their blessing during the ceremony, though). The songs, sermon and Bible readings were all there as part of the normal church service.* And no one read 1 Corinthians 13! Yay!**

We did exchange rings, and we did kiss once the minister announced we were married! No sense throwing out the baby with the bath water!

We also skipped the professional photographer and posed photographs, and headed straight to the reception from the wedding. The reception was just at our old apartments (before getting married, we lived in upstairs and downstairs apartments of a two-family house), no sit-down dinner, or dancing (Donald was relieved about that, too), or embarrassing speeches from friends and family. We had a buffet of cold finger food catered by Whole Foods (sushi, veggie and fruit platters, plus various dip and cracker/chip assortments), plus cheese and wine selected by my friend Bob. Bob also baked the cake, a delicious lemon genoise with lemon frosting. It was all very relaxed, and people seemed to have a good time. We had a good time too, which I hear is not necessarily the case at one’s own wedding. Of course, we had a lot of friends and family helping to keep things running smoothly during the reception, and cleaning up afterwards! Without them, we wouldn’t have had nearly such a good time.

We also had a Saturday afternoon party (the day before the wedding) for out-of-town friends, and friends with children (the Sunday night reception was pretty late, so we thought it would be nice to have something at an earlier hour for people with kids). And the day before that (Friday), Donald and I took our families out to Legal Seafood for dinner. I was glad to spend all that time with family and friends, instead of spending it getting my hair and nails done, or making table centerpieces!

Donald’s parents and sisters were all able to attend, and his sisters’ daughters. My parents, grandfather, brother and sister were also there, and my sister brought her daughter, but unfortunately my brother’s wife and two sons couldn’t make it (they live in Europe, and airfare is pretty expensive).

I’m glad we did our wedding this way! It was much less expensive than most weddings (under $4000), and less stressful. And we got to focus on the things that were important to us, not the things that the Wedding Industrial Complex thinks ought to be important. Thankfully we both have tolerant and understanding families who were supportive of us in our desire to celebrate our wedding our way, and we’re very grateful for that.

We then went and spent all the money that we’d saved*** on the honeymoon, which I’ll hopefully find time to write about before too much longer.

* This sort of wedding is not for everyone. For instance, because the wedding was part of a regular church service, we didn’t get to pick the Bible readings and songs. We were okay with this (one less task to do!), but some couples might not be.
** I have nothing against 1 Corinthians 13, but reading it at weddings is kind of overdone, especially considering that it isn’t even about marriage or romantic love!
*** This is an exageration. We didn’t spend that much money on the honeymoon. I mean, it was Italy. In May. For 2 weeks. And we didn’t live exclusively off of pizza and sandwiches. (One of my goals was to spend more on the honeymoon than on the wedding, but I haven’t added up all our receipts to see whether we managed it. My other goal was to plan the wedding without reading a single bridal magazine, and I did accomplish that goal.)

My story “Woman Moving to the Country” was published in Prairie Fire magazine at the beginning of this year, and I promised in my blog post announcing the publication that I would write about the other stories in the issue once I received my contributor’s copy. Well, um, they weren’t that slow in sending it. I just haven’t been able to make time before now. The first few months of this year were rather busy, for some reason.

Prairie Fire is a quarterly Canadian print literary magazine, publishing both short fiction and poetry (the issue I was in featured 6 stories, an essay, and 21 poems). I feel I should offer the disclaimer that I tend to write and read mostly genre, not literary, fiction; which means that I might be looking for different things in a story than the typical target reader of a literary journal such as Prairie Fire. So don’t assume I know what I’m talking about here!

For me, the most memorable stories were Colin Snowsell’s “The Driver” and Kirsten Madsen’s “The Cold Snap”. Snowsell’s story makes effective use of an unreliable narrator, and a twist ending that the reader sees coming soon enough to appreciate the poignancy of the situation, but not so soon that the twist feels too obvious. “The Cold Snap” is primarily about the narrator’s affair with an older married man (37 years old! Ancient!), but also about her relationships with the other people in her life. I appreciated how we see her assessment of other people change and deepen as she comes to know them better, particularly her younger coworker at the coffee shop, and her lover’s wife. I wasn’t convinced that the titular cold snap was an essential aspect of the story, though. Madsen’s descriptions of the frigid northern Canadian winter were richly descriptive, but I ended up feeling that the same story could just as well have been set in any small, remote town.

Interestingly, all the stories in the issue were written in first person. I don’t know if this is more typical of literary fiction, or just coincidence; in the fantasy and science fiction world, we certainly don’t avoid first person, but I’d say the majority of stories are told in third person, and in fact, some prominent f/sf editors actively dislike first person. Maybe the intimate nature of first person works better for the more internal sorts of stories that literary fiction tends to feature? (Or maybe I should read a few more literary magazines before venturing such a judgment.)

It’s even harder for me to judge poetry than literary fiction, since I read even less of it. And since I tend to be more interested in plot and character development than in imagery or beautiful language, I’m really out of my depth with poetry. Having said this, among the poems in the issue I particularly liked “Harry Mayzell’s Suit” by Harold Rhenisch (because it tells a story), Ellen Shearer’s “Hydrangea (after Plath)” (I found the imagery striking, and I liked the bitter edge), and R. Johnson’s “cat walk” (possibly because of its scorn for those who don’t love cats, and because it’s also the story of a relationship, in all its brevity).

Anne Simpson was the featured writer for this issue, with 4 poems and an essay. I loved the gorgeous use of nature imagery in her poems, and found her essay on “Poetry and Community” challenging and thought-provoking in its exploration (among other things) of how writers, whose work is so often inward-focused, also need to look outside themselves into the lives and experiences of others.

The next issue of Prairie Fire is out now, featuring, among others, poet Neile Graham, whom I know from the Clarion West Workshop. It would have been lovely to have been in the same issue as Neile, but alas, it was not to be! If you didn’t have a chance to read the issue with my story, and would still like to, back issues are orderable here. The one you’re looking for is Volume 31, Issue 4, featuring Anne Simpson.

A few years ago, I got an ice-cream maker for Christmas. I’d really wanted an ice-cream maker, and I got exactly the one I’d wanted (maybe this was because I’d put it on my Amazon wish list). For the first few months, I made ice-cream pretty much every week. Remember that I live in New England, and I got the ice-cream maker for Christmas (though apparently Bostonians have the nation’s highest per capita winter consumption of ice-cream).

However, gradually my initial frenetic ice-cream making pace slacked off, and now I think I make ice-cream maybe once or twice a year. Usually vanilla, to accompany pie or some other dessert for a special occasion. (Donald no doubt wishes I would increase the amount of homemade ice-cream appearing on our table at the expense of, perhaps, vegetables.) I still like ice-cream, and I still enjoy making it. It’s not even that much work. But, other things seem to have gotten in the way.

A glance at the number of blog posts I’ve written each month since I started this blog a little over a year ago might suggest that a similar thing has happened with this blog. 11 posts in May of 2010. 11 in June. 17 in July (a record!). Back down to 15 in August. And down, and down. Well. You can see the stats for yourself. I just got married*, and I haven’t even blogged about the wedding or our honeymoon trip to Italy. I mean, if I can ramble on for pages about a visit to the Tabasco sauce factory, surely I can make time to write about my trip to Italy?

Well, maybe. Probably not tonight though, since I’ve just used all my blogging time complaining about the fact that I haven’t been blogging.

In the meantime, if you’re desperately curious about the wedding and honeymoon, my husband Donald has been way better about keeping up with his blog than I have, so feel free to check out what he has to say.

* This may have something to do with the fact that I haven’t had much time for blogging the last few months.

My story “The Shoemaker’s Daughter” is now out in Mystic Signals. You can download a PDF version for free right here.

If you like paper, a hard copy of the magazine is also available for $12. Once you get to the link, scroll down a little, and you’ll see it on the lower right.

“The Shoemaker’s Daughter” is another traditional fantasy, set in the world in which I’m writing that long fantasy series I’ve been working on forever. The story contains a brief shout-out to elves (so to speak), but no actual elves appear onstage.

The genesis of the story is perhaps a little odd, in that it was inspired by an NPR interview with a well-known former child celebrity whose career had been closely managed by his overbearing father. For some reason that stuck with me, and as it was tossing around in my head, I also started thinking about the part in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean rescues Cossette from the Thenardier family, who are supposed to be looking after her, but instead are working her to death as a servant. In that case, it turns out to be a good thing for Cossette that the mysterious stranger takes her away; but the Thenardiers don’t have any way of knowing that. What if the stranger’s motives were (possibly) less benevolent?

Enjoy!