Kristin Janz

I just finished reading The Empty Family, the new short story collection by Irish literary author Colm Toibin (apologies for the lack of accents; I’m not a sophisticated enough blogger to know if WordPress has a way of including accents in foreign words).  I try to not read just high fantasy, even though that’s what I like best, because I think that reading more broadly makes me a better writer (at least, I hope that it will).  Of course, this means that I don’t actually get around to reading most of the big high fantasy titles that come out each year.  But I think the trade-off is worth it.  I think when I just read the same sorts of stories all the time, I develop a terribly narrow view of what constitutes good fiction, and I like trying to learn what appeals to other readers in a book that I might not be quite as excited about as, say, the latest installment in A Song of Ice and Fire.

What I found most compelling about the stories in Toibin’s collection was his wonderful skill of characterization.  The individuals who populate these stories are all complex and vividly portrayed, sometimes less aware than the reader of what’s going on around them, sometimes self-deceptive, but always fascinating.  My favorite story was “The New Spain”, about a young woman returning home a few years after Franco’s death, after living in London for several years.  The family summer home on Menorca has changed in the years she’s been away, leading to conflicts with her parents and sister; but perhaps she also bears some of the blame for the changes that she loathes.  It’s a beautiful, slow-moving examination of coming home after enough years have passed to change both the traveler and the homeland.

I also really liked “The Colour of Shadows”, about a man caring for the dying aunt who raised him after he was abandoned by his mother, and “The Street”, about two Pakistani immigrant men in Barcelona and the relationship that develops between them.  I have a sense that the stories I liked best were the ones that, to me, seemed to have the most momentum, or plot, where I was intrigued because it felt that things were happening and I wanted to know what would happen next.  I think this is a genre reader/writer thing, and it seems to me that in literary fiction, it’s perfectly acceptable to write a story that is a close examination of a key moment in a character’s life, but in which (to a prejudiced genre reader) not a lot seems to happen.

It’s good to see what authors will do when they’re not working under the constraints that I’m used to.  I found the characterizations in Toibin’s collection much deeper and richer and also more subtle than I usually find in fantasy or science fiction short stories.  But I still liked best the stories where he brought this skill of characterization to a situation with more obvious conflict and momentum.

Although the title might suggest the opposite, I love the CSA I’m in.  CSA stands for community-supported agriculture; you pay the farm a set amount before the start of the harvest season, and each week you get vegetables.  You don’t get to pick which vegetables you receive.  I like all vegetables, so this is not a problem for me.  (My husband Donald, however, has been introduced to all sorts of new vegetables he hadn’t even known he disliked.)  And the vegetables are very good.  I won’t even buy fresh green beans except at Russo’s and occasionally Whole Foods, and even there I have to pick through the bin bean by bean to find ones that haven’t started to rot.  The green beans from my CSA share, on the other hand, are the freshest beans I’ve seen anywhere since my childhood, when we used to grow them ourselves.  Same for the beets, and Swiss chard, and zucchini, and lettuce, and corn, and pretty much everything else.  I like to support local businesses when I can (read:  when it’s not too inconvenient for me), and I don’t like how centralized all our agricultural production is becoming (it makes sense for some crops, like grain, and less for perishable vegetables), and I especially don’t like the crappy quality of the vegetables that I see at most supermarkets.  I feel that the value of what I’ve gotten each week is competitive with supermarket prices, and as an added bonus, the farm whose CSA I joined (Wilson Farm) has a store and they offer a 10% discount to CSA members on their pick-up day, on anything else in the store.

So what’s the problem?

Mainly, that Donald and I are having a hard time eating so many vegetables.  Here’s what I received last week.  This is a “half-share”, the smallest size offered, suggested as an appropriate amount for 2-3 people.

1 head red leaf lettuce
1 head romaine lettuce
2 large cucumbers
1 large bunch of scallions
1 bunch of salad onions (3 onions)
2 zucchini
3 yellow summer squash
1 enormous bunch of basil
6 ears of corn
1 pound wax beans
1 pound Romano beans
1 eggplant

Is that it? I think that’s it. Is it just me, or is this a lot for 2 non-vegetarian adults who don’t eat every meal at home to get through in a single week? Some weeks we get 3 heads of lettuce. We’re eating salad at every meal except breakfast (in addition to another vegetable side dish and sometimes a vegetable main dish), and we still end up with lettuce left over when it’s time for the next CSA pick-up.

I think part of the problem is me (I do almost all of the cooking in our household, because I like cooking and Donald doesn’t). I like to cook from cookbooks. I like to find an interesting recipe, then go out and buy the ingredients, and cook it. I’m not a spontaneous cook. I can’t say, well, I have beans and eggplant and zucchini, I’ll make a vegetable stew with them. Well, I guess I can say that. But I’d rather find a recipe for a bean/eggplant/zucchini stew, because experience has taught me that a reliable recipe is probably better than whatever I’m going to make up off the top of my head (I’m a pretty boring recipe-inventor, and also always add too much oil if I don’t have a recipe to keep me in check). Wilson Farm has recipe print-outs that you can pick up, and they included a free cookbook with the first CSA share pick-up, but a lot of the recipes they make available call for extra ingredients (including additional vegetables!) that weren’t actually in my share and that I probably don’t have at home, so they’re not that useful (at least not to me).

(Fortunately, Wilson Farm posts the week’s share contents on their website the day before you pick it up. It’s subject to change at the last minute, but it’s usually roughly accurate, and immensely helpful in menu planning, so that I don’t have to pick up my share on Tuesday and then go to another grocery store on Wednesday once I’ve seen what I’m getting, found some recipes, and figured out which additional ingredients I need.)

I have been making pesto with the massive amounts of basil we’re getting, and putting it in the freezer. But a CSA share isn’t really great for “putting up” food. For one thing, there’s all that lettuce. For another, although you get too much food each week, you don’t actually get enough for it to be practical to freeze, can or pickle it. I’m just not going to freeze two pounds of beans, or pickle 3 beets.

Oddly, if we were getting fewer vegetables for the price we paid, I wouldn’t feel like we were getting a very good deal. I wonder if it would make sense for farms to start offering quarter-shares. The most common complaint I hear from friends in CSAs is that they can’t manage to eat so many vegetables, so I think there would be a demand for it (assuming it was half the price of a half-share, and it wasn’t all lettuce). Or, if Donald and I could find another couple to split our weekly take with, or maybe even 1 other person … we are actually getting through everything in our share each week, except for the lettuce, but just barely.

So, I might just not be the best person for a vegetable CSA (the meat CSA is easier, because everything is frozen when you pick it up, and then you have plenty of time to figure out over the next several days what you’re going to do with it all). It’s been a really good experience, and has encouraged (nay, forced!) me to cook more seasonally. I still look to cookbooks for inspiration, but at least now I’m saying, “Okay, I need a recipe with beets or zucchini; butternut squash soup can wait until fall.” I’m sure I can continue to do this sort of thing even if I don’t also have beans, eggplant, cucumbers and basil to deal with.

A friend of mine said that she had tried a CSA in the past, but been similarly defeated. She started thinking how great it would be if she could just go each week and buy only the amount of vegetables that she actually needed … and then realized that she had just invented the grocery store.

But what am I saying: “It’s been a really good experience”? Ha! It’s Week 8 of 20. We’re not even halfway there.

Continuing in the vein of finally getting around to reading magazines that have my stories in them, I recently finished Issue 10 of Mystic Signals.  At least I finished this one before the new issue was out!  Mystic Signals is a print compilation of all the stories that have appeared in the two most recent issues of online magazines Sorcerous Signals and The Lorelei Signal.  It’s available from Amazon, but you can also read it for free at the link above.

Each issue of Mystic Signals, a quarterly publication, features two “print-exclusive” stories in addition to the online content of the parent magazines, and my story “The Shoemaker’s Daughter” was one of these.  My favorite story in the issue I read was the other print-only story:  “The Exchange Box”, by Terry W. Ervin.  Sallie is a single mother on welfare who’s offered a chance at some quick, legal money.  All she has to do is place her hand into a mysterious box.  But each encounter with the box comes at a cost, and it’s not clear to Sallie whether the force connected to the box is generous or malevolent.  I liked how the box’s true nature remained ambiguous until the very end of the story; I didn’t know which way it was going to turn out.  And I also liked the compassionate but also realistic portrayal of how difficult it is even for intelligent, well-intentioned people to pull themselves out of poverty, even with a stroke of unnaturally good fortune.

I also liked Lauren LeBano’s “The Strawberry Banshee”, about an unpopular teenage girl and the dangerous creature she harbors; and “On the Reproductive Habits of Elves”, by Edward W. Robertson, an entertaining examination of why long-lived elves seem to have so few children, and whether everything about elven culture is all that it appears to be.

Issue 10 of Mystic Signals is still available, if you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet!

I finally finished reading the Spring 2011 issue of Strange, Weird, & Wonderful Magazine (in which my story “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” appears).  Of course, now the summer issue is out.*  Oh well.  What with getting laid off from my job and concentrating on writing-related pursuits full-time, I should be able to keep up better with all the fiction I want to read, in a more timely fashion.  (Donald says that there’s no way I’ll find time to do all the things I have planned for after I get laid off.)

My favorite story in the issue was Tom Greene’s “Turnover”.  Vivica has just started a new job as assistant to Mr. Perkins, an eccentric man who controls the office supply inventory at his workplace.  The story really shines in its characterization of Vivica, a woman for whom the ideal job is “entering inventories and distributions of supplies into long columns on preprinted forms, putting forms into color-coded envelopes that the boy from the mail room picked up, reconciling records of supplies in different departments.”  Also in its portrayal of the sinister Mr. Perkins, who hates to see any employee request anything more valuable than a stick of staples.  And what exactly does Mr. Perkins keep in the locked supply closet that Vivica has been forbidden to open?  Of course, it’s no surprise that Vivica does find an urgent reason to look in the mysterious supply closet, and that there’s more to Mr. Perkins than she originally thought; but the story adds enough interesting twists to this familiar trope that I found it a very compelling read.

* Even though the summer issue is out now, the spring issue is still available at the link above.

Here’s the text of an email I sent to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s customer service division on Friday.  (Some information has been redacted, because I’m not that obnoxious.  Yet.)

 

Although I was not on the bus when this incident occurred, I am a regular MBTA customer.  I was riding my bike along Mass Ave, westbound, and was passed unsafely by the XX bus (vehicle number XXXX).  This occurred between 2:05 and 2:10 pm today (July 22), just past the intersection with Pleasant St.  The bus passed too close to me, with inches to spare, and it might have hit me, potentially causing serious injury, if I had not moved farther to the right.  This occurred just after the light changed to green.  The irony is that if I had broken the law and ridden through the red light, I could have avoided this unsafe situation, and not been in the bus driver’s way.  This is, in fact, why many cyclists do not stop at red lights, because we feel that our safety will be threatened if we do by the impatient motorists and bus drivers behind us.  I still choose to obey the law, and I would prefer to not be endangered by reckless MBTA bus drivers as a result.

I don’t want the bus driver to get in trouble, because I know that we all make mistakes on the road, and he or she may have genuinely miscalculated and not intended to pass so closely.  However, I would hope that someone would speak to the driver about this incident, reminding them that cyclists are entitled to use the roads in Massachusetts, and that if there isn’t room to pass a cyclist safely while staying in the same lane, and the lane to the left is occupied by cars, they need to wait until either the lane on the left is open, or the cyclist has turned off the road onto another street.  In this particular case, bus drivers should be aware that many cyclists who go through the intersection between Mass Ave and Pleasant St at Arlington Center are planning to take a right turn 2 blocks later onto Water St to access the bike path.  Because of the Arlington town bylaw banning the riding of bikes on sidewalks, this is the only legal way to use the bike path to get through Arlington Center without dismounting and walking.  If the XX bus driver behind me had been patient enough, they would have had the lane all to themself after I turned onto Water St.

Thank you for your time, and I trust that this matter will be addressed.  I will be posting this letter to my personal website and blog, along with any response I should receive from the MBTA regarding this issue.

So far, I have received the following, apparently an automated email response:

 

Hello,

We appreciate your business and value your feedback.  A customer service issue was logged on 07/22/2011 at 15:27:59.  A tracking number of XXXXXXXX has been assigned to this call.  Please reference this number on any additional communications you may have regarding this issue.

Type of Feedback: Complaint

Topic :                          Other

The information you provided has been forwarded to the appropriate department to be addressed.  If additional actions are required, a member from that department will follow up on your issue.

We’ll see if I ever hear anything else from them.  Like I said, I don’t want anyone to get in trouble.  Everyone makes the occasional mistake while driving, and usually nothing too terrible comes of it, and we all try to do better next time.  On the other hand, if anyone should be expected to drive safely and follow the rules of the road (including not passing other vehicles–including bicycles–unless it’s safe to do so), it’s city bus drivers.  This isn’t the first time I’ve been put in an unsafe situation while biking because of a reckless bus driver.  And I’m sick of hearing about how cyclists never stop at red lights, every time some cyclist complains about being threatened by a motorist.  I always stop at red lights.  I didn’t used to, but I do now.  The only time I ran a red light in the past year was when a motorist behind me was yelling and honking because I was moving too slowly and he couldn’t pass because of all the snow piled up on the edges of the road, and I ran the red light because I was turning onto the bike path half a block later and I was genuinely afraid that if I didn’t, the motorist was going to pull some dangerous stunt to try to teach me a lesson, or pass me when there wasn’t room to do so safely.  (Even though I was doing nothing more illicit than riding my bike on the street, which I have every legal right to do.)  Like the bus driver did on Friday.

For a moment, I was afraid that those responsible for the latest version of WordPress didn’t want those of us who aren’t so good with computers to be able to insert links into our posts.  I tried doing the usual thing where you highlight the bit of text that you’d like the reader to be able to click on, to go to the link, and then clicking on the “link” link.  That used to give you a window where you could paste in the link that you wanted to insert.  However, the first time I tried it in the new WordPress, it gave me a DIFFERENT-looking pop-up window!  (Those of us where aren’t good with computers would prefer that all the programs we use maintain exactly the same appearance for their entire lifetime, or we get really confused.)  Worse, when I pasted in the link I wanted, it put the path to the link right at the beginning of my post, not over the portion of text I’d selected.

Fortunately, before I had to start calling out “Donald!  Donald!” in increasingly desperate tones, I noticed that I now had a choice of “Visual” and “HTML” editor for creating a post, and that the default was set on “HTML”.  Hmm, I thought, maybe “Visual” is what I want here.

So I clicked on the “Visual” tab.  I got the same new-looking window pop-up when I clicked on the Link icon (they replaced the word “link” with a little picture of some links of chain, which would have confused me except that the administrator of another website had already explained to me what that icon meant).  That made me a little nervous, but fortunately, this time it put the link over the selected text (right where I wanted it), not at the beginning of my post.

I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about free software.  Fortunately, my husband Donald knows a lot more about computers and programming than I do.  Otherwise this blog would be a lot more work for me.

I post all this just in case anyone who reads my blog is even more computer-inept than I am (this is unlikely, but you never know).