ursula

I made honeyed dates for the baronial dessert potluck today, based on a thirteenth-century recipe from al-Baghdadi's Kitab al-Ṭabikh, as translated and collected in Medieval Arab Cookery:

Take fresh-gathered dates, and lay in the shade and air for a day; then remove the stones, and stuff with peeled almonds. For every ten raṭls of dates, take two raṭls of honey: boil over the fire with two uqiya of rose-water and half a dirham of saffron, then throw in the dates, stirring for an hour [Charles Perry's preface notes "a while" is a better translation]. Remove, and allow to cool. When cold, sprinkle with fine-ground sugar scented with musk, camphor and hyacinth. Put into glass preserving-jars, sprinkling on top some of the scented ground-sugar. Cover, until the weather is cold and chafing-dishes are brought in.

The raṭl is a unit of weight. I bought ten ounces of pitted dates and stuffed them with raw almonds. I weighed out two ounces of honey, which isn't very much (less than a quarter cup), and heated it with a tablespoon of rosewater and a few ground threads of saffron. (I should have ground the saffron and then used the rosewater to dissolve more of it, but didn't think to do so.) Once the honey mixture boiled, I added the stuffed dates and stirred for a while (definitely much less than an hour!)

I didn't have anything for musk or camphor (though I understand that in Australia they sell artificial musk-flavored Lifesavers, and I've heard of SCA people using them in recipes like these). But the footnotes said that hyacinth might mean spikenard or angelica. As it happens, we have both those things. The spikenard was ancient; I chewed on some, and it didn't taste like anything at all. I thought about running it through the spice grinder, but we've mostly been using our spice grinder for cumin lamb lately, and even after running some rice through to clean it, I thought the Szechuan pepper and cumin would overwhelm whatever flavor remained in the spikenard.

I bought the angelica powder for Persian cooking, years ago. (My sister's first husband was Persian.) I haven't used much of the angelica, since I'm not entirely sold on the flavor: it smells sharp, like amchur (mango powder) or citrus, but with an undertone like mown grass just starting to decay. I mixed an eighth of a teaspoon into a quarter-cup of sugar, and that was enough to make all of the sugar smell like angelica. I sprinkled some angelica sugar on the dates before transporting them to the event, and more after I had dished them out. I think this is a good use for angelica: it has an effect similar to a squeeze of lemon in a modern recipe, and in this quantity it's not overwhelming.

The next recipe in the book involves reconstituting dried dates using the juice of a green watermelon. This sounds like a lot of fun.

This week I read the "Ordinary Chechen Life in Wartime" chapter of Anna Politkovskaya's 2003 book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. In the prologue, Politkovskaya wrote:

As contemporaries of this war, we will be held responsible for it. The classic Soviet excuse of not being there and not taking part in anything personally won't work.

So I want you to know the truth. Then you'll be free of cynicism.

( Politkovskaya meant, I think, that if you know the truth, there is only one possible moral choice... )

Last weekend I made my approximately-once-a-year appearance at SCA rapier practice. A university function had taken over most of the room we usually use, so space was at a premium: you could take the German longsword class, or watch, or leave. So I took longsword! The class was somewhat scattered, in the way of much SCA instruction; if I actually wanted to do anything useful with a longsword ever, I'd need to slow way down and drill one or two techniques, but the high level overview was fun.

The medieval German longsword is a two-handed weapon, and the position of one's hands isn't fixed: you can move them around in various ways, including grabbing the blade and using the whole thing as a lever. A couple of knights were taking the class, and they were very interesting to watch, because in some places SCA heavy-fighting instincts carried over and in other places they were tripped up, especially at points where the longsword technique approaches wrestling, rather than hitting people with a club. Then we moved outside, and

glasseye showed Sir Gregoire and me some Fiore dagger techniques, which are even more in the wrestling/martial-arts vein.

Next time I make it to rapier practice, I need to bring a snack. Fencing for me always carries the danger that I'll get interested in some idea, and start thinking about it, and then start writing commentary in my head, at which point I do not remember where my body is in space, let alone where anyone else's weapon is. Low blood sugar makes this tendency worse. On the other hand, I'm significantly more confident in my ability to learn a physical skill than I was when I took fencing in college (where I learned that I needed glasses, and that I was better at coding than that guy in my class who was building a Linux box, two very important life lessons that don't have much to do with swords).

As a side effect, I sort of want a fifteenth-century men's doublet, now (my SCA fencing outfit is a padded fifteenth-century jacket with ridiculous puffed sleeves, because sometimes I dress according to my station). I need to spend some quality time with Illuminating Fashion, and talk someone into patterning for me.

Revenant Gun is a book about space battles, but it's also a book about mending things. ( At the end of the previous book, the ritual calendar... )

Here's an interesting ceremony described in Khodarkovsky's book Russia's Steppe Frontier:

One early example of Muscovite political incongruities was an account of a military expedition across the Urals in 1483. The Muscovite officials described their encounter with the Khanty and Mansi peoples and the ceremony involved in formalizing a peace treaty between the local chiefs and the Muscovites:

And their custom of making peace is as follows: they put a bear skin under a thick trunk of a cut pine tree, then they put two sabers with their sharp ends upwards and bread and fish on the bear skin. And we put a cross atop the pine tree and they put a wooden idol and tie it below the cross; and they began to walk beneath their idol in the direction of the sun. And one of them standing nearby said: "He who will break this peace, let him be punished by the god of his faith." And they walked about the tree three times, and we bowed to the cross, and they bowed to the sun. After all of this they drank water from the cup containing a golden nugget and they kept saying: "You, gold, seek the one who betrays."

Looks like it's library letterpress night again. Anybody want a postcard?

hexarchate_rpg, my character is currently teaching an eldritch alien the human notation for graphing logarithms, because decibels are on a logarithmic scale and she wants to talk to it about appropriate singing volume. (In retrospect, starting with exponential notation might've been faster, but I'm committed now.) I find "Kids, if you don't pay attention in algebra class, you won't be able to shush the alien" a hilarious argument, though in meta-gaming terms this level of tangent suggests that I really need to get my character back into a situation where she's communicating with other PCs.

Anyway, I looked up the history of the logarithm graph, which is kind of neat. As far as I can tell, the first person to graph the logarithm function was Leibniz (historically, you first see tables of values and second the relation to the area under a hyperbola). He wrote an article relating the graph of the logarithm to the graph of a catenary, the shape of a hanging chain. There's a simplified version of his figure here, and a modern historical discussion in this book.

I had lunch with

hrj, who took me up to the top of the bell tower on the Berkeley campus, and pointed out architecture of various sorts.

Afterward, I wandered downtown Berkeley, bought some galaxy-printed duct tape to temporarily patch my suitcase, which cracked somehow on the very short flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and ended up in the art museum. The best piece in the upstairs exhibit, of Berkeley art, is a very long piece of paper with ink drawings that look from a distance like an imitation of Japanese prints of waves, but turn out when examined closely to have subtle watercolor illustrations of plastic bags and other junk.

In the basement, there's currently an exhibit on the seventeenth-century Chinese painter Chen Hongshu. I was struck by an album of playing cards he drew as a teenager (c. 1616.) Each has a line drawing of a literary character, a gambling forfeit (starting with no coins, or half a coin, and going up to the completely unrealistic 100 million strings of coins), and a description of who should drink a small glass, a glass, or a large goblet in a drinking game. The gallery attendant barred me both from taking photos and from taking notes in pen, but I wrote down a bunch of the captioned translations of the drinking-game descriptions in pencil:

The righteous and those with bangs over their eyebrows.
Those who cherish flowers.
Those who excel in satires.
The thoughtful and elegant should drink.
Those who disturb other guests or behave inappropriately at a banquet.
Refined substance.
Those with beautiful beards.
The unkempt or the cleanliness fanatics should drink.
Toast to the unassertive ones.
The frank and serene ones should drink.
Those who wear two hairpins.
Skillful strategists should drink.
Those at home in water should drink.
Siblings from the same schools.
Those with disguised appearance.
Those with the same names as the ancients or prone to illness should drink.
Those of noble descent with wide circles of friends, huge goblet for each. Those wearing flower headdress. One cup.

brainwane asked me to post about "Condiments you like, especially ones that aren't what you ordinarily find on restaurant tables."

I'm not really into condiments, for a few different reasons: I mostly cook for myself and do the adjustments in the kitchen, I prefer meals based on rice to sandwiches, and since my earliest childhood I have distrusted squishy, oozing food. So... sometimes I put Sriracha on things.

If you look at the list of things I might combine while improvising lunch, options become much more interesting. The collection of condiment-like substances stored in the door of my fridge includes sambal oelek and a big Persian bottle of verjuice. Right now I've also got some organic lime juice, and half a Meyer lemon left over from making Moroccan-style salted lemons. Cupboard items I use on a fairly regular basis include dark and light soy sauce, fish sauce, champagne vinegar, Chinese chili paste with soybeans (I like the Lan Chi brand), sesame oil, chili oil, and Chinkiang black vinegar.

The meta-recipe here is probably to fry some garlic, add a vegetable, pick two or three of salty, hot, and acidic, add the appropriate condiment-ish things (sambal oelek is both hot and acidic, so it makes life especially simple), throw in some quinoa or leftover rice, let everything get hot, and add a handful of nuts if the vegetable was squishy.

katerinfg asked for "Laurely thoughts that might be helpful to someone on the path."

Perhaps the most standard Laurel-y advice is "Do what you love and don't worry about becoming a Laurel." I hate this advice, but it's so common that it must be useful to somebody.

The most benign interpretation of the advice is "If thinking about Laurel politics is stressing you out, maybe you should try making something instead." The advantage of this re-interpretation is that it remains useful after one becomes a Laurel, when Laurel politics become more stressful, because people tell you it is your duty to care about them. The disadvantage is that a natural extrapolation is "Maybe you should try making something that has nothing to do with the SCA at all," which may lead to happiness (I've been enjoying this strategy myself, of late) but doesn't exactly increase the glory of the Society.

The least benign interpretation is "You shouldn't be interested in becoming a Laurel, only in loving art." The problem is that saying so doesn't stop people from wanting praise, acclamation, and the respect of the people around them. Instead, it just encourages people to lie about their motivations (to themselves and others). If you have never encountered someone freaking out about why they didn't win a competition while simultaneously insisting they're only in it for the love of their art, you haven't been involved with very many SCA competitions. We'd be better off creating more local norms for decorum (like, don't be a jerk if you get bad scores in an art contest), accepting that some people are ambitious, and trying to channel those ambitions toward good.

The thing that drives me up the wall about this advice personally, though, is that it implicitly assumes that "what you love" is obvious. I am someone who likes a lot of things, and whose baseline level of intellectual intensity is pretty high. But because I am someone who likes a lot of things, it's easy for me to imagine that I could be happy doing something completely different: I commit at the 65% level very fast, and at the 95% level very rarely. The things I love are actually patterns or ways of approaching things: I care about learning new things, about formal structures like grammar and mathematics, about repetitive or meditative ways of making things, about iterating toward something better. Sometimes I tell people that my Laurel is in research and languages (learning stuff and one kind of formal structure!), but really I just did enough more or less related things until enough people on the Laurel council thought it was cool.

That's my version of the standard advice: Laurels are human. Even if you're doing everything right, it will take them a while to notice. Do things you think are interesting, ask yourself whether they're medieval things, let other people know about your questions, and try not to stress too much about the timeline.

For Yuletide, I wrote a crossover between Flatland and A.S. Byatt's Possession, with diagrams. I am very proud of my diagrams.

On the Nature of a Side (2315 words) by UrsulaKohl
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Possession - A. S. Byatt, Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Crossover, Yuletide, Romantic Friendship, Epistolary, Mathematics, Poetry
Summary:

Once one has uncovered a set of nineteenth-century letters, one is forever an expert upon such discoveries, even if they entail the mathematical fantasia of a person such as Agnes Hart, niece to the famed educator Edwin Abbott Abbott.

You don't need to know Possession to read this, except that it's about academics and Victorian poets, but you should probably read a couple of paragraphs of Flatland, if you're curious.

For the last few years, I've asked for topics to post about in January. Anyone want to suggest one, and continue the tradition?

(I'm assuming my recent spate of posting will continue for a while, but I know I take weird things for granted.)

I slept for ten hours, with a break around four in the morning which I used to read my Yuletide treat, by a very kind person who dealt with my utter failure to generate a prompt (hypothetically, what sort of fanfic would I read, if my relationship to fandom was fundamentally about reading fic, rather than going to parties in undergrad and writing odd pairings, in rather the same spirit that other people borrow cigarettes? I pondered this question for a while and then decided my time would be more efficiently spent finishing my pinch hit) by reading both of the things I've posted on AO3. By natural process of extrapolation, this means my treat is a Cyteen/Regenesis story with the Loyalty tag on it (which definitely is the kind of thing I would read all of if I were reading fic regularly). The extreme thoughtfulness evinced by all characters involved is, I think, tribute to the author's character.

The baronial holiday party was this weekend. This particular SCA group doesn't have much of a tradition of medieval recipes at potlucks, but I believe in making the effort; I made a dessert for the dessert auction, and an asparagus salad.

The 1609 household guide Delights for Ladies includes a recipe for puff pastry that ends with the following sentence: "You may convey any preetty forced dish, as Florentin, Cherry-tart, Rise, or Pippins, &c, between two sheets of that paste." In this context, I'm pretty sure "forced" means "spiced"; that's one of the possible meanings in the OED for farced, which is a possible alternate spelling. Modern puff pastry is pretty similar to the stuff that recipe would yield, and we had frozen cherries in the freezer left over from Thanksgiving, so cross-referencing with a sixteenth-century cherry tart recipe, I ended up with a lazy person's route to a c. 1600 dessert:

1 package puff pastry
1 package frozen sweet cherries
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 tbsp. sugar

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Cook the cherries, spices, and sugar until thickened slightly. Pulse in the food processor (optional). Roll out a piece of puff pastry, spread the cherries on it, roll out a second sheet of puff pastry, cover, and squish the edges together. Cut into squares. Bake until brown and crispy (I think this took about forty-five minutes?)

You could do something similar with apples, or any of the other options. "Florentin" here seems to be "Florentine", which is a bit like mincemeat; here's a flesh-day version with veal kidneys and a fish-day version without.

The asparagus salad was from the recently translated Prince of Transylvania's Cookbook. All of the salads cross-reference each other, so the instructions you end up with seem to be "make the same vinaigrette you'd make for beluga caviar, but add some sugar". I'm interested in the "rose vinegar"; I'm guessing this is vinegar flavored with roses, not rose-colored vinegar. I might try making some, sometime! In the meantime, I just went for a basic vinaigrette with a little bit of sugar and a little bit of rosewater.

What did you recently finish reading?

Sherman Alexie's memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me. It's roughly half poetry, which I hadn't realized. He loops around, retelling family stories with different details and arguing about the interpretation, in a way that actual families do. I actually first encountered Sherman Alexie's writing through his columns for The Stranger about why Stranger readers ought to appreciate basketball. I haven't spent very much time in eastern Washington, where Alexie grew up, but reading his memoir made me miss the Northwest anyway.

I also read two short stories by friends of mine: Metal and Flesh by Marie Vibbert, and Hyddwen by Heather Rose Jones. Marie's short stories tend to be simultaneously cheerful and dire. This one delivers. Hyddwen captures the feel of Welsh legend. Our heroine approaches a typical fairy-tale task with a woman's traditional skills (baking, spinning) and without a host of forest creatures obliged to help. I really admired the way that skill at spinning flax is valorized, as skill with a sword might be in another story.

And I skimmed '"The Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque": A Basque-American Indian Pidgin in Use between Europeans and Native Americans in North America, ca. 1540-ca. 1640' by Peter Bakker, which makes a pretty good case for the language development described in its title, and definitely falls into the category of things I wish somebody had told me about years ago.

What are you currently reading?

I'm reading A.M. Dellamonica's Child of a Hidden Sea, which reminds me a little bit of Alis Rasmussen/ Kate Elliott's Labyrinth Gate, on my tablet in the evenings, and Elliott's new novel Buried Heart in snatches on my phone during lunch breaks.

What do you think you'll read next?

I'm hoping to get Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700 from the university library. (I've encountered a couple of SCA people recently who were interested in Society personas reflecting their Choctaw heritage, so I'm poking around to see what academic resources exist.)

I promised to teach a class on medieval names from Africa at Pennsic, so I've been reading up on extant inscriptions. I have a book checked out of the library called Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères, which transcribes and translates Berber names recorded in the Tifinagh script, and includes a complete name index. There's only one problem: there are absolutely no dates.

Dating the Tifinagh inscriptions is, of course, extremely hard. We're talking about graffiti scratched into rocks in the Sahara, with messages that say things like "He loves Dali," or at least probably say things like that once you guess all the vowels. But the real problem for me is a classic case of different priorities. Archaeology centered on Roman North Africa, or even better pre-Roman Carthaginian Africa, is a serious industry. It's easy to find articles on classical inscriptions, and it's at least possible to locate articles on classical inscriptions written in Tifinagh. But medieval North African archaeology is a niche interest (even setting aside the problems inherent in referring to "medieval Africa" at all), and nobody has bothered to date later inscriptions more precisely than "These must be post-Islamic conquest because they're using Muslim names."

Or, rather, there is exactly one person who has tried. He hasn't published his transcriptions, just a table of inscription locations that mentions some are "Islamic era" and others are "modern". He did very kindly answer my email and point me at his article on classical inscriptions. That tells me that the word for "son" used to record Roman African names is the same as the one used in Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères (up to an unwritten vowel, at least). So it might just barely be possible to construct a Berber name for SCA use now, as long as you choose one that's both in Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères and in medieval documents written in Arabic.

I'm skimming through The Secret History of the Mongols for an SCA project. This is a thirteenth-century chronicle; I'm using Igor de Rachewiltz's translation, which has excellent and copious footnotes.

I was struck by the segment where Činggis Qa'an's mother is kidnapped (by Činggis Qa'an's father):

( history is tragic )

In the footnotes, de Rachewiltz comments that "Never forget to breathe my scent!" is literally "Go smelling my smell," with a form of the verb "to go" that suggests continuous activity. I think "Go on smelling my smell" is more evocative than his prettier translation.

This passage is simultaneously tragically romantic and pragmatic in a way that I'm not used to seeing in Western literature: I'd expect either Čiledü or Hö'elün to die here, in older stories, or one of them to kill Yisügei later, in newer ones. (Instead Hö'elün and Yisügei have five children, and then Yisügei is poisoned by some Tatars.)

What did you recently finish reading?

Listing back a little ways, since these books are thematically akin:

Full Fathom Five and Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, Night Flower by Kate Elliott, The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar, and Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks.

I read the first of Gladstone's Craft books, and found it interesting, but a little too aggressively weird for me to relate to any of the characters. Full Fathom Five, on the other hand, drew me in quite quickly. This could mean that I connect with hopelessly noble finance nerds, or that a postcolonial Polynesian setting is easier for me to deal with than a bunch of skeletons. The book starts out looking as if it's a thinly veiled meditation on the machinations that led to the Great Recession, and ends up being about faith. Recommended.

Last First Snow is about, variously, war, gentrification, and choosing to be a parent. Heroic efforts mean that a doomed plan results in only about 95% of the expected carnage. Meditations on the nature of manhood & fatherhood aren't a theme that I connect with, particularly; if those themes matter to you, I suspect this book will be fascinating/ gripping/ horrifying. I read it in small increments while moving, and had to rush to finish the last ten percent before my library ebook expired.

Night Flower continued the colonialism theme, and features another Kate Elliott heroine who is really good at selling fruit. Does not emphasize the horrors of war & its aftermath, which was a nice break.

I read The Winged Histories in one sitting, on a flight to England. I associate Stranger in Olondria with sobbing in a hostel in Toronto; I didn't quite have tears running down my face on my intercontinental flight, but it was a near thing. My thumbnail description for Stranger in Olondria was 'if Ondaatje wrote fantasy novels'. At WisCon, I went to Samatar's talk on influence; she did indeed namecheck Ondaatje, and read excerpts from War and Peace. If you cross that book with The English Patient and then imagine the protagonist as a teenage girl with a sword, you will have some idea of what reading The Winged Histories feels like.

I'm not entirely convinced The Winged Histories stuck the ending: it's an astonishingly beautiful doomed moment, but the book is complicated enough that I want to know about the messy things after the last page. I should note, also, that while meditations on fatherhood never quite draw me in, meditations on siblinghood always do. Still thinking about that strand, among many strands.

Fire Logic felt rather a lot like the Steerswoman books in style; if you thought that that series would've been improved by more women kissing, this is definitely the book for you. Oddly, Karis reminded me of my maternal grandmother.
What are you currently reading?

I started The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, which like all Ryman books is fascinating, brilliant, and very, very weird. It's also an excruciatingly realistic portrayal of how awful it is to be a teenager. I am not quite ready for another amazing literary novel just now, and may put this aside until I'm ready to stop thinking about The Winged Histories.
What do you think you'll read next?

The new Laundry Files book. I'd hoped to find this while at a conference in England, but was thwarted by the paucity of airport bookstores.

My university's student body president made national news this morning, which means it's time to make that essay I've been writing about tenure public:

https://medium.com/@superyarn/the-business-case-for-tenure-ecf9b149c3e3#.w8rafie7d

Recently read: Nine Princes in Amber.
Currently reading: Guns of Avalon.
Up next: Next one in the series, probably.

I actually stumbled on A/N/N/A/R/C/H/I/V/E, read about half of the Amber Diceless RPG rules linked therein, and decided to go back & see what the Amber books looked like, from an adult perspective.

I read Nine Princes in Amber the first time on a rainy day in the library of the Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, when I was about thirteen. I remember wondering why nobody had told me these books existed. I was interested in the world-building, I think, and the propulsive effect of the plot. I don't remember caring about the characters, particularly.

Adult me is struck by how terrible (intentionally) the characters are, and the amount of unintentional privilege conveyed. The sexism is blatant, and the echoes of Earth's colonialist history are likely planned; the casual assumption that the realest people in all of many universes can be distinguished by their pale skin and blue or green eyes is in some ways weirder.

Thirteen-year-old me was irritated by large chunks of the prose. I retain the joke "Blue sky . . . Green sky . . . Dot dot dot . . ." Adult me is interested in the structure, though. There are tales within tales, which reminds me very much of eighteenth-century novels, and a little of medieval romance.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

honeyed dates

a small corner of Hell

longsword

review: Revenant Gun, Yoon Ha Lee

(no subject)

(no subject)

graphing the logarithm

cultural activities

january journal: condiments

January journal: Laurel-y thoughts

Yuletidings

January journal?

a treat

medieval cooking, out of season

reading Wednesday

adventures in inscriptions

in every black cart/ there are women

books!

business case for higher ed: public version

reading Wednesday

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