Author: Laura Conrad

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I said when I reviewed
The
Year of the Flood that reading it made me want to
reread Oryx
and Crake. I have now done that. I enjoyed it more
this time. I suspect it might make sense to read The
Year of the Flood first if you haven’t read either of them
yet. They take place in the same time frame — two or three of the major
characters in Flood are minor characters in
Crake. But you really are more interested in Jimmy,
the narrator and main character in Crake, after
you’ve seen him (and Crake) throught the eyes of Ren, one of the
point of view characters in Flood.

The argument for reading Crake first is that
Flood takes the narrative one scene later, so if you
read Flood first, you know one piece more about how
Jimmy’s story resolves itself. I can really imagine a third (at least) book
in this world — I hope it happens.

Here’s an example of the same story told from two different
points of view in the two books. The characters are college roommates.

As Jimmy sees it in Oryx and Crake:

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room — none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans — she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

As Bernice tells the story in The Year of the Flood:

She’d had a roommate like that at first, plus he’d been an
animal-murderer because he’d worn leather sandals. Though
they’d been fleather. But they’d looked like leather. So she’d
burnt them. And thank God she didn’t have to share a bathroom
with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual
things with girls practically every night, like some
degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘What a meat-breath!’

This is real science fiction written by a real novelist, who is
also a fine poet. I didn’t think Oryx and Crake
was among her best work when I read it 6 years ago, but I think
the two novels together are at least equal to The
Handmaid’s Tale, and certainly better in terms of
richness of the imagined future.

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Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi

I was reminded that I hadn’t told you about Agent to the
Stars, which I read a few weeks ago, when I read John
Scalzi’s blog entry this morning.

The blog says that if you’re going to self-publish, please
don’t pay anyone to do it. You can get it online for free, and if
you need hardcopy, he recommends lulu.com, as do I.

As someone to get advice about self-publishing from, he’s one
of the obvious successes. He wrote Agent to the
Stars when he was a struggling young writer, and published
it online, suggesting that people send him a dollar if they liked
it. He wasn’t expecting to make much money that way, but he
stopped counting when he had $4,000, and the interest in the free
online book made it easier for him to sell his subsequent books to
“real” publishers.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a funny, lightweight science
fiction novel to read, I recommend this one. I can’t tell you
much about the plot, since there would be spoilers, but it’s very
well done. And you can download it for free if you have a way to
read books in html form that you enjoy.

Thanksgiving Planning

I’m expecting 8 or 9 people at my place for Thanksgiving
dinner. I do Thanksgiving every year for my family and whatever friends
don’t get to their families and want to come.

I have a schedule worked out where I go buy the turkey on Wednesday
afternoon so it only has to take up refrigerator space for less
than 24 hours, until it goes in the oven on Thursday.

I was freaking out a little when I realized yesterday that the
farm share vegetables are right now taking up the space that I
would normally put the turkey in.

I evolved a plan while walking the dog this morning where the people who are coming on Tuesday for the Cantabile Band
rehearsal would all take some of the vegetables home and
come back on Thursday afternoon with side dishes.

I may still do that, but when I looked at the vegetables I
realized that a lot of them are beets, which I’ve been getting
all summer and fall, but not using because they’ll still be good
for Borscht in the winter. They’re going to last until winter
because they’re in the refrigerator, but it won’t hurt them to
be out of the refrigerator for a day or two. But if you want to
come to Thanksgiving dinner and cook a beet side dish, you’re welcome.

Corporate bureaucracy

A dog park friend works as a web developer at some corporation
that believes a computer is a computer is a computer.

So the computer they buy for everyone works quite well for the
people who use one browser and a wordprocessor and maybe
a spreadsheet and maybe a mail client.

But if you do web development, you have to test on lots of
browsers, and often have lots of windows open in each, and an
editor with numerous windows open.

So the way he tells the story, he had requested numerous times
that he get more memory on his computer. And then one day he
realized that he could double the amount of memory for $10, and
he had that much in his pocket, so he did it. And then they
yelled at him for not following the proper procedure.

Steroid inhalers and voice range


[vocal chords with fungal infection]

Like many people with asthma, I use a steroid inhaler
regularly. But the cold I had in early October led to a very
bad flare-up of the asthma, and I’ve been taking the maximum number of puffs a day
ever since, which is quite a lot longer than I’ve ever taken
that much before.

I was wondering when I was going to be able to stop, but not
thinking very much about it. But then I started practicing the
pieces I’m going to be singing on the
December 17 concert, making a point of starting on the
correct pitch, and I found that my range was down by quite a bit
from what it normally is, and I was having troubly hitting the D
2 D’s above middle C, and even feeling uncomfortable with the B
above middle C.

It occurred to me that I had heard about there being side
effects from prolonged use of the inhalers, so I googled
it, and sure enough, there was not only scholarly writing,
but pictures like the one above.

The writing was reassuring about the problems going away if you
stop the inhaler, although a little vague about the time
frame.

So I’m not taking the inhaler any more, and hoping for the
best, and vocalizing very carefully before I practice. It’s not
really quite time to stop, so I’m having some trouble sleeping
at night.

I’m wondering if my regular steroid use is part of why my voice
in general
is so much lower than it was when I was younger. In college I
started out on Second Soprano, and then switched to First Alto.
Now I’m definitely a Second Alto, and lots of choirs would
probably be better off with me on First Tenor, if they weren’t
so prejudiced about female tenors.

I hope I get the alto range back in time to sing the D’s and
E’s on the concert. If not, we need to cut a couple of things
to make the program the right lenghth, and if those pieces
aren’t the right ones to cut, I can play them on recorder. I
will discuss this with my doctor, but it sounds from the google
search like switching from one kind of inhaler to another
doesn’t help.

I also read this
article in the New York Times, about people who have learned
a breathing technique that lets them use less of no steroid
inhalers. I’ve been trying it informally, but haven’t sent the
Buteyko Center
any money for real instruction.

Ordered the turntable

I wrote about wanting
to digitize all my LP’s, and what I was thinking of buying
to do it.

When I actually went to order a turntable, I was somewhat
surprised to realize that there was a wide gap between what was
being marketed to the teenage “let’s go over to your mom’s
basement and listen to some records” market and the audiophile
“lets compare these three cartridges with different weighted
tone arms” market, with very little in between. And looking at
what was in between reminded me very strongly that I’ve bought
two turntables in my life, and both of them are dead.

I realized that I don’t need to pay for more hardware that
knows how to digitize sound, because I already have soundcards
of a sort in all my computers, and a very good, special purpose
but quite usable for this application, soundcard in my Zoom
H2. (I should tell you about it, but that’s another
post.)

The item I was expecting to order in the post referenced above
includes speakers, which means it would take up too much space
on my bookshelves which already have lots of much better
speakers on them.

So in the end, I went for a low-end audiophile
system. I pored over the needledoctor site, and
ended up ordering the Pro-Ject
Debut III Turntable in Basic Black. It will be
upgradeable if I decide I want to be more audiophile, and
probably won’t break in quite the same way as my two consumer
turntables did. Another connector tax on the new audio system
was that I had to buy a preamp.
I’ll have to spend some more money if I decide I like digitizing
vinyl enough to get into 78’s, but I won’t need more space on my
bookshelves.

I’ll let you know how much I end up using it.

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Tuscan kale salad with honey mustard vinaigrette

The item in the farm share I picked up last Saturday that
seemed most seductive (even more so than the two giant stalks of
brussel sprouts) was the bunch of dark green pebbly textured
tuscan kale.

The recipe I read before making the salad was this one.

Then I chopped up the kale in thin ribbons, made a vinaigrette,
using my usual oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and mustard.
I increased the mustard from half a teaspoon to a full teaspoon,
and added some honey and a couple of cloves of garlic.

Then I added walnuts and grated parmesan cheese. I dressed the
salad before the band rehearsal — this was a good idea. Even
doing it earlier in the day wouldn’t have wilted the kale.

The eight people at the rehearsal demolished the salad from the
quite large bunch of kale very speedily. Everybody said it was
good, and there weren’t any plates that had remnants on them.

Instruments and Music for sale

Please reply directly to Natalie Palme at (617) 731-1560; my only connection to
these items is that I promised to put the information online for her.

Instruments

  1. Harpsichord, Zuckerman, made from kit by Thomas Todd, 1964,
    using cherry wood, SOLD
  2. Vielle, Westover, with wooden case and bow, SOLD
  3. Porka psaltery by A.M.+H.W. Westover, 1984, $250.00
  4. Cornetto, Christopher Monk, SOLD

Music

Bärenreiter new clothbound volumes of full scores: Bach, Handel,
Mozart, Schubert, Telemann. Includes opera, choral, orchestral,
concerti, etc. List available on request.

Report on the November 17, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will have our regular dropin meeting on November
24, at 7:45 at my place.

For the first three weeks in December, the meetings will be
restricted to the performers in the December 17 concert.

On December 17, three of us (me Ishmael and Anne) will be
playing a concert at the Boston Public Library at 2 PM in the Rabb
Lecture Hall. (More
information about the program.) If you’re goin anywhere where
people would want to know about this, please take them a flyer.

The party will be on December
20. I’ll have invitations shortly.
We usually start around 4 in the afternoon.

Other events

John Tyson and Aldo Abreu are having a series of recorder
masterclasses at the New England Conservatory. The next one is
tomorrow, November 19 at 7:30 pm at
the New England Conservatory, Jordan Hall entrance. The class will
be in the Carr Organ Room on the 3rd floor and is free admission and
open to all.