Category: Leonard Richardson

White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith

July 30, 2008 /

I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”

If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.

The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.

I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”

I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)

The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.

Selfism

July 7, 2008 /

Sumana has managed to combine almost all the reasons I read her blog–inspiration, clarity, critical appraisal of systems and examination of self–into one spectacular post. You should read it.

There’s a quote from Count Zero about being taken up from a low place, rotated through “invisible stresses,” and emerging changed. It’s actually kind of negative in context so I’m not going to reproduce it here. But at some point I have to write about how my interaction with propelled and propulsive people has changed me: how my internship at Dixon Design, followed by meeting Leonard and Sumana, followed by living with Kevan and Holly, reshaped me into someone who no longer fits anywhere outside the self-determined life.

I would have to actually achieve that life first, so I’m not writing it yet. But Sumana’s post brings up another connected point: work that matters for its own sake is superior to work that matters by fiat, which is to say that academic work is worthless in the short or long term, which is to say that I think the lecture-test educational system used in the United States (and, in my understanding, most of the rest of the world) is a sham, a wreck and a hindrance. I graduated with awards and honors from a large public high school and an elite private college, and I still say the system failed me. The intersection of what I learned in classes and my work, play and continuing interests is almost nonexistent; meanwhile, I’m still dealing with the fear and shame endemic to those institutions, and the ways they damaged me.

Under all that I continue to grow more absorbed with the idea of having children someday. I’m starting to consider my life choices in terms of where they’ll grow up, how I’ll support them and how they will learn. (How I’ll actually go about having them is almost secondary.) Could I in good conscience send them down the path less traveled, without having checked it for perils myself? Could I ever prepare them enough for the perils of the path I did take? Sumana again: isn’t it possible to sidestep the bad parts, with enough planning? Well, no, Brendan. Don’t deny the imaginary kids their own invisible stresses.

But if I start seriously working on my own propulsion, maybe my example can reshape someone else.

It’s Tuesday

May 6, 2008 /

Which means all my lovely readers in the UK are back from taking off St. Crispin’s Day or whatever, and all my lovely other readers are yawning and clicking idly on Digg as the work week slowly grinds into gear, and so it is the perfect time, my friends, to tell you that Ommatidia is for sale.

A couple sharp-eyed readers (from the old school of “actually checking the front page”) have already noticed that it was up over the weekend while I poked at it for bugs, but so far everything seems fine. Some things have changed since I made the original tentative announcement–most notably that the limited edition is now signed and numbered and includes a story written just for you, but is also the same softcover binding as the now-less-cheap viral edition (it is actually insane to bind a book this size in hardcover). And yes, it took me over two years to assemble a 133-page book. Turns out autodidactic self-publishing is sort of hard!

But I’m really proud of the result and I hope you’ll be satisfied. You can check out a preview at Lulu and see one of the fourteen all-new illustrations, and if you order soon you’ll be able to get your copy and read the last Cosette story before it goes up online next month. Finally, if you get your book, take a picture! If you send it to me or put it on Flickr and tag it “ommatidia book,” it’ll get pulled into the little badge I’m putting together now for the Ommatidia front page, and I’ll send you a copy of the “Welch” toon I hastily drew for buyers at my Stumptown booth.

Finally, some of you have probably already noticed that I’m linking to ommatidia.org in this post, rather than xorph.com/anacrusis–either URL scheme works almost exactly the same, because if there’s one poor web practice in which I want to engage, it’s duplicated content and split Pagerank. Seriously, think of Ommatidia as a web site for the book that happens to display a feed from Anacrusis. Both sites now include the other new toy I built this weekend: the “all names” page, which is not perfectly accurate, but is pretty close to an ongoing list of every name I’ve scrounged up for a story title. See why I have to steal from Leonard all the time?

Day 1: Louisville

April 2, 2008 /

You have to read “Mallory,” Leonard’s newly published short story: not because it’s good (it’s very good) but because that way you can understand all the “Mallory” references I’ve been making in the over-a-year since I got to beta read it. As someone on a road trip to California that includes visiting some of my role models, I find the story perhaps a little too pat in its publication timing. I smell retcon, Richardson.

Speaking of which, The War on Clarity has been updated, due mostly to people wanting their names put on or taken off the “Lasersharking” entry. If only that could have been posted on some kind of user-editable repository.

Self-passenging

March 20, 2008 /

OKAY KIDS. On the last day of March I’m leaving my suspiciously generous hosts here in NorCar and driving across the country, with stops in Louisville, Birmingham and eventually Berkeley. After two weeks (I hope) in the latter, I’m moving up to Portland to stay from somewhere between four and nine months. Looks like the trap got me after all.

So! Are you in a southwestern state or the Bay area? Would you like to hang out? Would you like to damage local hotel revenues by letting me spend a night on your couch? These can be arranged. Other things that can be arranged: me renting a room or subletting an apartment from people you know because MAN it is hard to get people on Portland Craigslist to get back to you when you don’t live in the same city. I don’t know why!

I promise to take pictures on the trip but I can’t promise you will see them in the living future. Oh, hey, if you want to ride out with me and fly back, as I once did with Leonard, let’s talk. I should warn you that due unwise purchasing decisions on my part, you will have to ride in the glove compartment.

The Cryptid Epiphany

January 7, 2008 /

I know this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to smugly bury, when you’re writing, but I have this obsession with transparency? So here’s an example of how sometimes the world just drops stuff into your lap.

Almost a year ago I started writing stories about Proserpina, another name for Persephone, probably most well-known for the thing with Hades. In the very first one I threw in a remark about “her faded black tattoos.”

Later I decided to add an Australian of European descent, and only later did it occur to me that I’d set up her semi-suitor as an older man from “down there.” Right?

Then last week I decided to bring the tattoo thing back in, so I had to come up with a rationale for it. Poking around on Wikipedia led me to tā moko, traditional Maori tattooing; apparently New Zealand was becoming more economically entwined with Australia toward the end of the 19th century, so that’s a reasonable connection. Then I looked up the origin story of tā moko.

It’s about a man who descends into the underworld to find the wife he drove away. Persephone inverted.

I have traditionally viewed with skepticism the English-lit platform of divorcing the author from the work, but man, I could not have done this on purpose. The title of this entry comes from a discussion I had with Leonard a while back about his writing process; apparently this kind of thing happens to him all the damn time. I understood the sensation of epiphanic writing when he described it, but I couldn’t find any examples to hold up from my own corpus. This is about as close as I’ve come.

Mild ethical issues here: there’s a growing concern among Maori that moko is being appropriated by whites who have neither full grasp of nor entitlement to the art form, and, well, I’m kind of doing that. My defense is that I do plan to set it up with an explicit Maori connection, somehow, and to respect the source. I’m not sure whether recontextualization of a minority culture’s mythology is inherently evil or not, but I do think it’s inevitable. Origin stories are virulently memetic because they’re supposed to be. Eventually I’ll have to do a theme-post about how often I rip off and mash up mythology I don’t really understand.

“Categories: okay seriously korea”

August 23, 2007 /

Hillary has pretty much the best title ever for her personal journal, but today I’m plugging her food blog, Kimchi for Beginners. It meets the Gramazio–Richardson test of always making me hungry, except it doesn’t have recipes. Not that I make the recipes in Leonard’s or Holly’s blogs nearly as often as I want to.

What Hillary’s blog does have is the clever thing where it sneaks in glances at Korean culture from a unique perspective. I wish I’d been anywhere near as responsible a documentarian on my two international trips. Maybe I should try living in Canada? I understand they do startling things with ketchup and mayonnaise.

The insignificance of numbers

July 17, 2007 /

Today I posted the 1001st story in Anacrusis, and I wanted to do something a little different for the occasion: an audio story, read aloud by a startling array of generous people. I thought the hardest part would be actually asking them to read the silly little thing without cringing, and the next-hardest would be the actual mixing process. It turns out that the hard part is not being able to use all the material from everyone for the whole thing. They were all so good!

Thanks to Robert Baker-Self, Maria Barnes, Amanda and Jon Brasfield, David Clark, Amanda Dale, Kevan Davis, John Dixon, Holly Gramazio, Josh Hadley, Sumana Harihareswara, Stephen Heintz, Catriona Mackay, William O’Neil, Leonard Richardson, Kristofer Straub, and everyone who’s had a kind or critical word to say about Anacrusis. Let’s do this again when we hit 10,201.

I promise I’ll do the hard part

July 10, 2007 /

Finally got around to following Leonard’s links to Rachel Chalmers’s blog, and now regret not doing so in 2004. Her blog is the blog other blogs want to be when they grow up. Blog up. Wait, no.

I’m reading backwards through her archives, so most of the content so far has been about her daughters Claire (who appears, from this perspective, to be carefully paring down her vocabulary) and Julia (who has disappeared, then had her name retconned to Zoë, as if in a bad thriller movie). I know blogging is the new selective memory, but they sound like amazing kids. I want kids now, dammit! SOMEBODY HAVE SOME KIDS WITH ME.

March 20, 2007 /

I never remember that when I need to apply a style to a server-side generated element, I don’t have to dig ten stupid lib files deep into the PHP or whatever and add a class attribute, I can just put it in a span (or div) and style all the elements of type x within that. So in case you forget the easy way to style server-side generated elements: put them in a span or div and style all the elements of type x within that!

Okay, hi. Working a lot.

Maria visited last week, and alleviated any potential self-absorbed silliness just by being here. But we also went to Brighton and the Tower of London (pictures soon), and played lots of games, including some with Leonard and Sumana. London had changed its mind and decided to be cold, but at least it didn’t start snowing until she was on her way home. I am still not doing my fair share of the cooking.