Parenthetical.net

That’s right, Parenthetical.net has been synonymous with me for eleven years. That makes internet-me the same age as LiveJournal and the word “blog.”

I started my “web journal” as a perpetually single 20-year-old on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was really, really bitter about it.

Dear 20-Year-Old Me, this video is for you:

(It’s from a site called “YouTube” that lets anyone post videos that will play directly on your computer, without downloading anything. I know, it’s very impressive.)

Comment here

(The idea of posting these “recipes” is to give an idea of my thought process as I cook. Some of you seem interested when you’re in my kitchen watching, so maybe you’ll be interested if I write about it? It amuses me, anyway. If I were less lazy and a better photographer, I’d take pictures.)

The leeks were the start of this, because there were lots of them and they were lurking in my crisper, getting brown and wrinkly. Fortunately if you peel off the outer layer, they’re just fine. Chop ‘em up, leave ‘em in a bowl of water to sift the dirt out.

The standard thing to put in this is potatoes, but standard is boring. The red potatoes do need to get used up, though — they’re sending up alien tentacles and getting soft (though that doesn’t matter because I’m boiling them anyway); red potatoes aren’t so good for storage, it turns out. Wash and chop about 6 small ones. Note to self: come up with more ways to use red potatoes in the very near future.

That monster celeriac would free up a lot of space in my fridge, and add a nice clean taste to the soup. In it goes, along with 3 apples I got from the school Dining Center today. They’re local, but too mushy for eating raw and too small to cut up large-scale for baking, so I got sent home with a huge bag. (Uh, anyone feel like making applesauce this weekend?)

Oh, and there’s a beet. A very tiny wrinkly beet that I was going to throw in the compost, except why not add it? It’s still jewel-red on the inside.

Saute the leeks and then everything else in a couple of tablespoons of butter, then add 5 cups of water (enough so the chunks are not quite covered) and simmer about 20 minutes, until the veggies are soft.

Now to make it taste like something. Salt, and… I’d originally been thinking rosemary, but that’ll be weird with the celeriac. End up deciding on a couple of big globs of the local sweet brown rice miso, because I’m obsessed with it. Oddly, it’s really good. If I were less lazy/hungry, I’d puree it now, but instead I’m just going to eat it. With a dollop of sour cream on top, because I happen to have some (though in retrospect maybe not next time with the miso).

Comment here

Note: Even more than usual, note the disclaimer. I am speaking my own mind, not that of my Library Director (quoted in this article) or my school.

Today’s New York Times includes an online Room for Debate feature: Do School Libraries Need Books? The debaters include James Tracy, Head of the now infamous in library circles Cushing Academy, and my fabulous boss Liz Gray.

The “debate” is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few bits I found noteworthy:

James Tracy:

…books deemed worthy of retention were distributed to respective departments, while those not selected were donated to local nonprofits and public schools.

And yet he also talks about the importance of librarians’ reference services. If I’m trying to help a student direct her research project, how can I do that if the resources at her disposal are, in effect, at ten different libraries with no unified collection database? In other words, I don’t have the foggiest clue what books each department has or where they are, so how can I help a student find them? I’d end up having to say, “Err… go talk to the Social Studies Department head” — thus passing my librarian duties off on a colleague, increasing the student’s running-around time, and undermining the value of my position.

Also, “thanks for the crappy books you didn’t want! We have collection policies too, y’know. Love, local nonprofits and public schools.”

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum:

Books, precisely because of their (literally) bounded limitations, teach us to ask questions that are no less essential for the databases and deep archives of the online world: Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? How is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?

I like this. Books have boundaries, and therefore clearer context. I endlessly emphasize the importance of context on the web: Who wrote that? Who published it? Why do we trust them (or not)? Every website is different, but books have a familiar format that makes that information easier to find and more intuitively understood.

Liz Gray:

The digital natives in our schools need to have the experience of getting lost in a physical book, not only for the pure pleasure but also as a way to develop their attention spans, ability to concentrate, and the skill of engaging with a complex issue or idea for an uninterrupted period of time.”

Nicholas Carr says the same, from a research standpoint. And I know this anecdotally: I can read for an hour on the train home without interruption, but just reading this article required clicking over to my work email, my home email, my previous blog post on the subject, yadda.

This also brings up a distinction that people aren’t making enough in this conversation: there’s a huge difference between reading for research and reading for pleasure. Could we get by in my library without research books? If we added some more database and e-book subscriptions, yes, we could. I’m not saying we should, but research sources at the 6th-10th grade level, at least, are quite thorough online. (More in-depth upperclass research projects might be another story.)

But I would not want to work in a library without pleasure-reading books. Real books, on shelves. Several times a week a girl asks me, “What should I read next?” And the best way I have to answer is to look at the shelves with her. What are her favorites? What didn’t she like? What’s new? It jogs both our memories, and the covers and jacket copy pull her in. A Kindle can’t do that.

And finally…

William Powers:

Likewise, the automobile didn’t kill off the passenger train. On this crowded, environmentally troubled planet, it turns out pulling up all those old rail lines was short-sighted and dumb.

The automobile effectively did kill the passenger train, actually, because we started subsidizing highways and stopped subsidizing rail. Turns out that was short-sighted and dumb, and so would be pulping all the books. As I said before, in a post-peak oil world with rolling blackouts and electricity rations, I hope I still have something to read.

Comment here

This is the second book in the Chaos Walking trilogy, the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. The last 150 pages were separated by a work day for me, and it was possibly the least productive day ever. I should’ve just finished the damn thing at the circ desk, except that the children would have been scared by my gasps of shock.

I won’t say anything about the plot for those of you who haven’t read Knife yet, but… it is an even better book than Knife in the same way that Catching Fire is an even better book than Hunger Games. Both Knife and Hunger Games are about the personal journeys of the protagonists. They introduce the characters and the world, and these are pretty dark worlds, especially for YA — but at their core they are adventure stories.

Ask and Catching Fire ramp it up a few notches: the politics are more complicated, the parallels to our world more powerful, the grey areas more gloriously, agonizingly grey. Chaos Walking isn’t getting the press that Hunger Games is in this country, but if you care about good science fiction or good world-building, whether or not you read YA, you need to be reading this trilogy now. I have both books and am happy to lend to locals.

Also reviewed (with more specifics and therefore more spoilers) by: my Cybils buddy Sheila Ruth of Wands and Worlds, the science fiction review journal Strange Horizons (which includes the awesome phrase, “Ness is not a plot hack like Shakespeare”), and Things Mean a Lot.

Comment here

My first attempt at a gluten-free pie was a fine success, if I do say so myself. I used the Flaky Pastry recipe from Rebecca Reilly’s Gluten-Free Baking, more or less:

1.5 c flour mix*
3 T sweet rice flour
2 tsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
9 T cold butter, cut into cubes
1 large egg
1.5 T lemon juice

Make sure food processor is really, actually clean of wheat flour, as opposed to just masquerading as clean. Mix dry ingredients in the food processor, then add butter and process until it’s the size of small peas (which is what you always do with pie crust). Be weirded out by egg in pie crust, but shrug and add egg and lemon juice and pulse until the dough starts to come together.

See that the dough is failing to come together as advertised, and start adding ice water until it can actually be pressed together into a ball. Make two balls, put them in tupperware, and chill in the fridge until it’s pie-making time.

Preheat oven to 400. Sprinkle rice flour on a cutting board. Attempt to roll out the dough. Have it crumble all over the place. Give up and press it into the pie plate with your fingers. Dump in filling — in this case, apple slices mixed with brown sugar, molasses, and cinnamon. (These were the last of the fall apples. Turns out Honeycrisps really do last forever in the fridge! Thanks, Tommy Nicewicz!)

Notice that S, who is more patient than you are, has managed to work the rest of the dough enough that it actually rolls. Yay! Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of it to cover the whole pie. Break his nicely rolled dough into ice-floe-like chunks all over the apples. Bake the pie for 15 minutes on the bottom rack, turn the heat down to 375, then bake for another half hour on the middle rack.

Wheat-eater and non-wheat-eater agreed: it tasted like pie! Or, you know, it tasted like molasses-y apples surrounded by crunchy butter, which is more or less what I want from my pie.

*Yes, I used a commercial flour blend, in this case Beth’s All-Purpose Baking Flour from Gluten-Free Pantry, because that’s what Harvest sold me. Using a mix offends my from-scratch sensibilities, though, so next time I will track down enough damn flours and mysterious powders whose names end in “gum” to make my own.

Comment here

I think Kristin recommended this one to me, in which case, props to you! Loved it. I finished it over a dinner shift at work and was totally sobbing in the library kitchen. But don’t worry; it’s not just a sad book — there’s plenty of funny, romantic, and hopeful in there as well.

I’m going to be vague about plot, because it’s nearly impossible to explain without giving things away. It’s a school story, a friendship story, and a family story, and that’s all I’ll say about that. (It also manages to hit several of my story kinks at once: Everything She Thought She Knew Was a Lie and epic connections between family members across time and chosen family. Plus, of course, Australia. Ooooh.)

I will say it took me a long time to get into it, longer than I would normally give a book, but I stuck with it because it came so highly recommended. There’s a long stretch where you will have not the foggiest clue what the hell is going on. “The Brigadier”? “The Hermit”? Doesn’t anyone have a bloody name in this book?

Power through that, though; it’s worth it. Even the stupid school territory battle, a convention I normally hate (I can never understand why kids in books take that sort of thing so seriously), comes clear in the end. It’s a beautifully put together gem of a book that would, I think, work packaged for adults as well. (If you are an adult who doesn’t normally read YA, let me know what you think.)

Question: Did you play some sort of Very Serious Game when you were in school, or did you know people who did? Something to do with territory wars, or hazing, or anything like that, where there were leaders and complicated rules that everyone took as gospel? And if so, can you explain to me why on earth you cared? Is it a British (and, I guess, Australian) thing?

Also reviewed at: Chicklish, The LibrariYAn, and YAnnabe.

Comment here

This recent xkcd makes an excellent point. This is why I always loved the end of Labyrinth when all the critters tell Sarah that they’ll come “should you need us” — and then she cries that she needs them and they come rock out in her bedroom! Because they didn’t just mean the life-or-death kind of “need.” (Um, spoiler alert.)

Or, of course, you could be Susan Pevensie and discover “nylons and lipstick,” at which point all thoughts of Queen Susan kicking archery ass go flying out the window. Adulthood is clearly incompatible with wanting to hang out with talking lions.

Comment here

The last post reminded me that I never posted my total winter stores for this year!* The list was made in mid-November, so some of this stuff is gone (though less than you might expect). Behold:

Pre-Made Meals
3 servings + 1 large IF** tomato, kale, & white bean soup w/ rosemary
1 IF + 1 large IF spicy carrot peanut soup
1 IF + 1 large IF corn chowder (add cream & cheese)
1 large IF Greek stew
1/2 large IF mystery (matzoh ball?)
2 large IF + 1 IF ratatouille
1 large IF sweet potato coconut soup
1 IF + 1 serving Balti roast veggie paste (add coconut milk or cream)
1 IF mystery (green beans & basil…?)
1 large IF curried roast cauliflower & eggplant puree
2 IF Moosewood Indian vegetable coconut soup
2 large IF + 1 IF moussaka w/ beef
1/2 lasagna
[Read more →]

A few weeks ago I read an article about South River Miso, “the only unpasteurized, certified organic miso that is entirely handcrafted in the centuries-old Japanese farmhouse tradition,” according to the jar — and it just happens to be made 100 miles away in Conway, MA.

I immediately informed Sherman Market, the little market just up the street from me that sells (almost) only local goodies. And just this week they announced that the miso had arrived! (When I went in this morning and made a beeline for the miso, they said, “Hey, are you Sam?”) How’s that for service?

So I picked up a jar of Sweet-Tasting Brown Rice Miso and a brick of my favorite tofu, made by 21st Century Foods across the city in Jamaica Plain. I cut the tofu into cubes and fried it in a pot (because I like the texture of fried tofu better than steamed/boiled), then added a couple of blobs of miso, a sliced onion from my pantry and the last of the (slightly pale and sad but still edible) kale from November.

Per the wise suggestion of a Sherman Market employee, I boiled some water and poured it directly over everything, so the kale steamed (and turned a nice perky green again!), but didn’t over-cook. Yum! All-local miso soup (well, ok, except for the original soybeans).

Comment here

I got myself up at 7:45 to watch the ALA Youth Media Awards webcast. (Why do they do this so early, again?) I lost video at the announcement of the Printz winner, but fortunately I could still hear all of it. Congratulations to the middle grade & YA winners! (Here’s the complete list.)

John Newbery Medal for children’s lit: When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead (eeee!!!)
Michael L. Printz Award for YA lit: Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Schneider Family Book Award for a YA “artistic expression of the disability experience”: Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork (yay!!)
Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Award: The Rock and the River, by Kekla Magoon
Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement by an African-American author: Walter Dean Myers
Margaret A. Edwards Award for “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature”: Jim Murphy, a non-fiction writer with whom I am not familiar, but who will no doubt be less controversial than Orson Scott Card was last year
May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture: Lois Lowry
YALSA Excellence in Non-Fiction: Charles and Emma: the Darwin’s Leap of Faith, by Deborah Heiligman
Pura Belpre Award for a YA novel by a Latino/a author: Return to Sender, by Julia Alvarez
William C. Morris Award for YA by a first-time author: Flash Burnout, by L. K. Madigan
Mildred L. Batchelder Award for children’s lit translated from another language: A Faraway Island, by Annika Thor (Sweden)

Comment here