Ursula

Give me a topic, and I'll post about it in January?

glasseye, our friend L., and I had a quiet Thanksgiving, in which we ate baked goods (pumpkin rolls from L., ginger parsnip cake courtesy of a link from kaberett, and mushroom turnovers) and Brussels sprouts and a medieval Andalusian lamb dish, and then watched glasseye play the Untitled Goose Game.



A while ago, I wrote a story for vass that involved the apocryphal legend of Susannah. I got wrapped up in trying to write an evocative sentence about the mastic tree, because that's the sort of thing that happens when you're writing historical fiction. Since I had invested all that mental effort, I also bought some mastic. It's crystallized sap that smells like high-pitched, sour pine:



Today I finally cooked with some of it! I chose a recipe from Andalusia, translated by Charles Perry and indexed on Medieval Cookery:

Dish of Meat with Walnuts and Mastic. Cut up the meat, after boiling it, and put with it half a dirham of mastic, pepper, cinnamon, lavender, garlic, rue, a little vinegar, oil, salt, whole onions, head (and) greens (or: whole green onions) and a little water. When you have done this, pound walnuts smoothly and pulverize them until they are white and thickened and throw into the pot and stir until they give out their oil and serve on walnut leaves; cover the contents of the pot with an egg and pour it out, sprinkle with pepper and spices and serve it, God willing.

My variant uses lots of modern time-saving appliances. It omits the lavender and rue because I didn't have any, and omits the egg due to a personal dietary restriction. Here's the way I would do it, next time:

( recipe )

This time I used 1/4 cup of champagne vinegar and then back-sweetened with a tablespoon of honey because the vinegar seemed too intense, even after simmering for quite a while. The result was very tasty, and it's a plausible medieval technique, but I prefer sticking closer to medieval recipe ingredients when I can.

This is good hot, but actually even better when it cools off a bit and the flavor of the walnuts comes through. I used to love a Persian spread for crackers made from walnuts and feta, and this has a very similar flavor profile. The sweet and sour combination means that it's also good with cranberry sauce!

fiction in progress

Neal Stephenson, Fall, or Dodge in Hell. I'm kind of enjoying the sections that the title references, though Dodge's work background does seem oddly convenient.

Fonda Lee, Jade War. Really interesting balance between violence and ordinary family life, here. I'm not yet far enough to see the shape of the story.

I brought Gennoveus home this evening! He is approximately two years old, purrs very loudly, and has a name taken from an inscription found in early medieval Brittany (in one of hrj's articles).

My poem "Tuesday" is now up at The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This book is made of words.

Depending on your preferred flavor of literalism, I imagine you are now protesting either, "But so is every book," or, "Strictly speaking, this book is made of 1s and 0s encoded in the circuits of your phone." I mean something specific by my claim, though: certain sound-focused writers, especially science fiction poets (Amal El-Mohtar, Sonya Taaffe, Yoon Ha Lee sometimes) pile word on coruscating word, glistering. If you're an image-focused reader like me, the effect can be almost too much: each word is its own picture, layered, overbalancing. I worried about that effect, approaching This Is How You Lose the Time War: would I be overwhelmed? Certainly this is a book focused on individual words and associated separate images--agents braid time and dance through it, and you never quite learn how or wherefore, the process is the point--but I had underestimated the sheer exuberant fun of it. This Is How You Lose the Time War is an accurate title: it's a dare, from one agent in that time war to another.

It took me a little while to settle into reading, in large part because I was trying to sort out the differences between the two characters: one woman is named Red and the other Blue, and about half the book is letters from Red to Blue about what Blue might be doing or vice versa, so it's easy to coast along in ambiguity. I eventually--more slowly than might seem warranted--arrived at the mnemonic that blue is like green and Blue is from the Garden future, where everything is more or less a growing plant. Meanwhile, Red is from a future of machines and artificially enhanced intelligences.

Red's first letters to Blue are aggressively silly (timey-wimey something something). The book's first shift in tone involves a ridiculous, over-the-top, embodied pun. I was hooked in around that point, the moment that Red and Blue shift from writing to each other as enemies to writing as rivals who might understand one another. The story shifts again after Red's superior, the Commandant, realizes that an agent from the other faction has taken an interest in her, and shifts once more as Red reacts to Blue's reaction. Somewhere in there I started sending my friends messages consisting entirely of exclamation marks.

The ending is complete unto itself: the promise of a love story and the promise of a universes-spanning, time-spanning rivalry, woven in together.

(This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.)

My dystopian Wisconsin math poem "Circle packing" is coming out in the anthology Rosalind's Siblings, edited by Bogi Takács.

I finished my mothtopus boots!



( cut for progress pictures )

I've been doing a lot of reading lately around violent resistance, nonviolent resistance, and counterinsurgency. This involves a lot of thinking about how ordinary people respond when they don't feel safe, and how those reactions can be shaped or exploited.

Here's an annotated bibliography/suggested reading list.

accessible introductions

These books make an emotional case using history and evocative personal anecdotes. I sometimes wished for a more nuanced, scholarly approach, but they are good places to get started.

Dave Grossman, On Killing. Grossman argues that the US military has become more effective at training soldiers to kill people, and describes the psychological cost. (Depending on the edition, this book may have a strikingly racist introduction about violent video games; Grossman has been involved in militarization of US police forces, so reading this book from a peace perspective is in some ways a matter of knowing one's enemy.)

Srdja Popovic, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World. Popovic is one of the founders of Otpor!, a group that successfully pushed to overthrow Slobodan Milošević in Serbia. He writes about the techniques Otpor! used and their application in other conflicts.

between theory and practice

David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen is an Australian counterinsurgency expert who advised US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. He writes in a compelling way about how small-scale conflicts become intertwined with large ones, often using examples from his own work. This book focuses on Afghanistan, and is a good introduction to Kilcullen's theory of counterinsurgency.

theoretical structures

These books provide new tools for thinking about how power structures work. They are serious works of political science that incorporate detailed discussion of alternative hypotheses, lengthy footnotes, and so forth. I recommend them highly, with the caveat that my bar for dense theoretical writing is quite high (I actually think these are quite readable, but that's in comparison to, say, the historiography of late antiquity).

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works. Chenoweth and Stephan argue that nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance in creating lasting political change. They construct a theoretical framework and use it to analyze multiple cases of resistance, both successful and unsuccessful.

Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Kalyvas theorizes that violence against civilians is most likely to occur in areas of "contested control", where armed groups are actively competing for power. He tests his theory using data from Greece.

further reading

Amelia Hoover Green, The Commander's Dilemma. Hoover Green is interested in measuring both lethal and non-lethal violence against civilians. The commander's dilemma is training soldiers to kill without inspiring them to indiscriminate violence. Hoover Green argues that institutionalized training can change the "repertoire" of violence that a force uses (or refrains from using) against civilians, using El Salvador as a case study.

David Kilcullen, Blood Year. What went wrong in Syria.

David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency. A collection of Kilcullen's articles. The description of his experiences as part of a peacekeeping force in East Timor is particularly interesting.

David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains. Argues that we should anticipate modern, interconnected, urban warfare where the line between institutional/state and independent actors is not clear. Case studies include Kingston (Jamaica), Mogadishu, and Bombay.

Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. 1960s training manual for leftist insurgents.

Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell. The war in Chechnya, as experienced by ordinary people. Politkovskaya was later murdered for her reporting. Review here.

US Army Sergeants Major Academy, Long Hard Road: NCO Experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq. First-person accounts by non-commissioned officers who served in a variety of roles.

My interview for the "My Favorite Theorem" podcast went live today! Here's Evelyn Lamb's blog post about the episode, mirror symmetry, and ramen, and here is the episode and a transcript.