Food Experiments

Took the train out to Sara's place yesterday, where she made (I mostly helped with stupid parts like chopping things or whatever she needed extra hands for while doing something else) dumplings. She'd bought some wheat gluten flour, which made the dough stretchier, and we sort of managed to make steamable dumplings. (The only thing missing was some ginger for the filling.)

Unfortunately, the rice flour available in Spain is this brown rice powder, and it's not sticky enough to make rice dumplings out of. So we wound up making sor tof rice gnocchis out of them, but it didn't quite work, they didn't really cook through right.

But she'd made a yummy sauce out of some aspargus, fresh tomatoes, and the leftover dumpling filling, and we ate around the failed rice-gnocchis.

Next food experiment (if I finish the text I need to get to her next week for one of our upcoming projects) will be a red rice she bought...

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

On the train out to Sara's, I started reading EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss, which I've been enjoying. I am a lousy typist, but also a stickler about bad spelling/punctuation (and an advocate for using serial commas), so I identify strongly with the book, which is very light and readable in tone.

Living in a country with a lot of badly translated menus and so on, I suffer from this a fair amount, but it drives me even crazier back in the U.S. where things are, alas, even worse (and oughtn't to be) in terms of mistakes of this sort.

(My friend Jonathan, who lives in Australia now, and who's also read the book, commented that in Barcelona there were less mistakes of this sort on the tourist menus than back in Sydney. Perhaps because they know they need to look it up, or spend more attention when writing in a second language, as opposed to people who take for granted that as native speakers they know what's right?? I know that when I translated some kidzbook texts of mine into Galician, which I don't actually speak, my friends who corrected them for me commented that I translate into Galician much better than I write directly in Spanish (which I do speak). I'm not surprised, since in Galician I know I need to look up EVERYTHING, since my only source for it was a dictionary, whereas in Spanish there are plenty of things I think I know or've never quite learned, which I use/say, and so on.)

Anyway, the book is a lot of fun so far.

Some snippets:

"Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root word as punctuation. As we shall see, the practice of "pointing" our writing has always been offered in a spirit of helpfulness, to underline meaning and prevent awkward misunderstandings between writer and reader." (7-8)

"Now, there are no laws against imprisoning apostrophes and making them look daft. Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegistalted: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shriveling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it. But the naming of Hear'Say in 2001 was nevertheless a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy." (36)

"In Beachcomber's hilarious columns about the Apostropher Royal in The Express, a certain perversely comforting law is often reiterated: the Law of conservation of Apostrophies. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: 'For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its.' Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall." (63)

Query Theory Recs

melymbrosia asked for some recommendations of Queer Theory titles.

I am not a fan of the academic queer theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick (EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE CLOSET) or Judith Butler.

My own incursions into queer theory have been very much applied theory, like the anthology of personal essays questioning essentialism (but from within the framework of sexual identities) that I co-edited with Carol Queen PoMoSEXUALS: CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT GENDER AND SEXUALITY.

Some capsule recs, then, of "cornerstone" books for me, that are more in this latter camp, would be:

Michael Bronski's CULTURE CLASH (South End Press) and THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE (St. Martin's Press). Reading Bronski, whether his books or even just his reviews, often provokes a paradigm-shift for me. Very astute cultural critic. CULTURE CLASH is a study of media representation of homosexuals, and the latter is a study of the process of how cultures assimilate other/foreign cultures through pleasure (food/humor/etc. i.e. they begin to lose their alienness because these pleasure-producing aspects are assimilated into the culture in question)

Dorothy Allison's SKIN: TALKING ABOUT SEX, CLASS, AND LITERATURE (Firebrand). Very smart, well-written pieces by this lesbian author on the subjects listed in the sub-title and their interconnectedness.

Kate Bornstein's GENDER OUTLAW and MY GENDER WORKBOOK (both Routledge). Two excellent books on non-binary gender identity.

Pat Califia's PUBLIC SEX (Cleis). 15 Years of Califia's journalism on sex, S/M, non-monogamy, feminism, censorship, etc. Covers a lot of ground: lesbian, gay male, heterosexual, underage, etc. sexualities.

Beatriz Preciado's MANIFESTO CONTRA-SEXUAL
This has not yet been translated into English, I believe, but if you read French, Spanish, Italian, or German, it's currently available, and it's really fascinating, because it throws aside the entire gay/straight system and, unlike many theorists who simply critique the status quo, she offers an alternative system, where everything is based on the dildo (the penis then becomes merely a biological dildo). She is very accessible (in Spanish at any rate) and her writing is of the "come with me and lets talk about some really fascinating stuff" as opposed to, "grovel at my feet and worship my intellectual superiority, you worthless ignoramus" type of tone.

Anyone else have other recs to add (or more commentary on the above)? Especially an intro/overview of Queer Theory type of book... (I know some people use PoMoSEXUALS as such, since it offers a sampler of different practical applications of theory to modern queer life. Although the book is somewhat "dated"--but not yet obsolete--given how trans-identity has moved ahead since it was published.)