Mars in my pocket, like a grain of sand

Not everything is all the time a metaphor. Sometimes some things are actual, unvirtual, unimagined: here.

Having said which, what's that literary figure where an element is taken to stand for the whole? Like "below the salt" speaks to the entire social structure required to sustain the phrase?

Because m'wife gave me a planet for m'birthday. Not only that, she gave me the right planet.

I have Mars, right here on my desk, set in imperishable crystal, to be an heirloom of my house lucite: a teeny-tiny fragment of a meteorite from Mars. It may be only a fleck, but it speaks, y'know. Volumes.

Time and/or a duck

To begin with a confession: I made a beef biryani for the yogi on Monday, which was kinda too salty really. Because I started with a recipe and thought "that's way too much salt, surely?" - only there wasn't any way to add salt later if I was wrong, and she's generally reliable, so I went with it. And ended up with way too much salt in the dish, and people only ate half of it, though nobody said. Lack of second helpings says a lot.

But! Katherine brought me a cabbage from the garden, so I had all these huge cabbage leaves; so yesterday I chopped all the beef in the leftovers into tiny bits and duxelled a lot of mushrooms and added those and wrapped the ricy beefy shroomy mix in blanched cabbage leaves and steamed 'em and served 'em with a tomato curry sauce, all without adding any more salt to anything, and it was really yummy. With curried cauliflower and brussels sprouts on the sides, because one crucifer is so seldom enough.

So there was that, but now there is a duck. This is for tomorrow, when we have guests. So I have been looking at recipes, and I am bewilderedly delighted by the range of given roasting times, which goes from twenty-five minutes(!) to four-and-a-half hours(!). I think the former is for a wild European duck, which in our case we have not got; while the latter is expressly for a domesticated American duck, which we absolutely have. I am quite attracted by the long slow notion, and I think I'll be going for an adaptation of that, with timings suitably juggled to take account of the Rosicrucians*.


*How's that for appropriately cryptic & mysterious? Truth is, there's a Rosicrucian Egyptian museum in San Jose which we all fancy taking a look at, but people won't be here till mid-afternoon, by which time the duck really wants to start its long acquaintance with the oven, so. I shan't be here to fuss with it, basically; it'll just have to get on by itself. And not be turned over till I get back.

Listing badly

Actually, at the moment I'm quite in favour of lists. I've just learned that if I make to-do lists and shopping lists in Evernote on my small mobile computer, I can add checkboxes, and that's fun.

However. What is less fun is that this is award season, and people's blogs are filling up with lists of what they think are their award-worthy works, and there are of course two schools of thought you don't need me to link to. Scalzi does it, and provides space for others to join in. Adam Roberts is opposed to it; Amal El-Mohtar is in favour. Arguments range as is normal from politics to gut.

Mostly, I just think people should do what they want and not try to make rules for others. In the spirit of which, I shan't be making any lists here or elsewhere. This is partly simple defeatism on my part - as Ann Leckie says, particular people and particular works tend to get more attention no matter what*, and I have conspicuously never been among that number, so what's the point of doing something that I find personally uncomfortable when it will have no effect? - and it's partly simple laziness that I like to call practicality, because it would take a while of my time to draw up such a list as I can never remember what came out where or when, or what the eligibility rules are, and why in the world should I put in that work when it will have no effect? But it is largely the squick factor that people are so scrupulously inveighing against. All writing is at heart an expression of ego, a sorry case of "Look at me, see what I can do!" - but there seems to me to be a gulf between that and "Look at what I've done, and give me awards for it!" I'm happy to draw people's attention to my new work as it comes out, and yet I flinch from drawing the same people's attention to the same work at year's end, in award season. I think what it is, in the first instance I am bringing something to the table, hoping others will find pleasure or benefit in it; in the second I'm coming to the table with an empty bowl, hoping others will toss something into it. It's the difference between offering and asking, between giving and taking. That's too big a gap for me.

M'wife, I might add, disagrees with me profoundly about this. So do a lot of people I respect and admire. So far, none of them is English; that might be a thing.


*It's only fair to point out that Ann was actually arguing the other way when she made this point.