Reading Nabokov’s entire catalog

Status: Work proceeds apace.

After reading his inaugural work, Mary in December, I read his sophomore effort, King, Queen, Knave. My review of KQK sparked some interesting discussion with a fellow lucky enough to read the book in its original Russian.

Two days ago, I ordered a copy of The Defense (a.k.a. The Luzhin Defense) from Amazon. That’s next up! Of Nabokov’s 15 published novels (16 if you include the posthumous fragments of The Original of Laura, 17 if you include the unpublished novella called The Enchanter. I don’t, really. I don’t think I plan on reading either, though Laura caused quite a flap with its release a few months ago), I have read six.

Classical philosophy. Then Camus.

Status: Wow, what a can of worms!

I started with the translation of five dialogues recommended by John Eikenberry. That’s Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo, if you’re counting. I have a sticky combination of too much to say and too little to say about these to write a meaningful review or coverage, which is why, of all the books I’ve read in 2010, it remains unanalyzed on my site. My contemporary cultural and personal judgments (My Gods, but ancient Greece was sexist and brutal and, by Zeus!, Socrates can be supercilious) kept combining with my staggering ignorance (what is this Form of which they keep speaking?) and lack of rhetorical training. I need to think about this for a while.

To aid me, I bought an epic lecture series. 84 lectures long, The Teaching Company’s “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition” is bound to fling me through an awful lot of material I never learned about in college. I’m three lectures in. It’s both fascinating and dense. Entelechy, nomos, the Milesians, monism, sophism. Beep! I’ve got much to learn.

Other stated goals

Aristophanes or any other lingering Greek dramatists
Status: Not yet

The Inferno, War and Peace, The Sound and the Fury. Wuthering Heights
Status: Not yet

Other things that are not goals necessarily, but keep me focused

Of my published 2010 reading list, I have read 8 of 29 titles. This seems totally fine considering that it’s March and I keep adding things to the list.

A few other things take fractions of my reading time.

One is my monthly Early Reviewer title from LibraryThing. These are pre-release reading copies mailed to me directly from the publisher. The past few months have been primarily Random House titles, but this month I’m going to be reading The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall, a W.W. Norton title.

Another is my monthly book club. We’ve read Let the Great World Spin and Sense and Sensibility this year so far. Next up is an Ursula K. LeGuin book.

Finally, I’m working my way through all four science titles I was interested in. Yep, I know I asked you to vote, but I’m going to read all four. Because I’m like that.

The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov

Five Dialogues by Plato

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen

Buy the books mentioned in this post from Amazon.com now and help me maintain my rock 'n roll lifestyle.

My mom then fired off an email to me after finding a text copy of the article in question, showing that there was a photo credited to me. Of course, being a text copy, there was no way to see the photo itself, but the content of the article suggested it was probably this one:

"Old Perpetual"

I knew that the article had been published on Feb. 22, and I knew that I needed to find a print copy, as the online variant of the article didn’t have my photo, or any mention of any photo by me. David was smart enough to Google “lakeview lyza gardner” and the first relevant hit, after posts on my own site, was this (scroll down*).

Not only did I have a photo—unknowingly—in The Oregonian, it made the front page.

My first reaction was one of shock. Having been around various folks at the paper for much of my life, I know that they don’t source photos willy-nilly. There are photo editors and procedures and these are educated people. I’ve successfully published both written and visual items with them previously.

Is this a mark of the newspaper industry’s sinking ship? The Oregonian, specifically, recently capped a series of employee buyouts with a rather sweeping round of layoffs. Budgets are furiously tight, freelancers underpaid, editorial quality wavering. Or is it a display of digital ignorance in terms of how to appropriately search for legitimate images online for use in commercial publications?

The photo in question is licensed with Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. That’s a mouthful, but the premise is fairly straightforward.

Detail of Creative Commons license page for this license. The highlighting is my own.

Not to mention that a photo editor or other professional sourcing an image for publication should know how to search correctly for appropriately-licensed images.

This little box at the bottom right of a Flickr image page links to information about licensing.

On Flickr—which is where I can only imagine that this photo was picked up—this can be done thus:

1. Get thee to the Advanced Search page.
2. Search for what you will, but near the bottom, make sure to note this section:
3. If you are looking for images for a non-commercial entity, say, this blog, which is just an instrument of personal expression, selecting the top box is enough (“Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content”
4. If you are, say, a major newspaper, you’ll want to be sure to click the box that searches for content to use commercially.

My mother, being ever a champion for my cause, followed up before I even got a chance (she knows who to call). I got a sincere apology from an editor and an offer of payment. Via an email, this editor claimed that this was only the second time a photo had slipped through the cracks during the six years he had been around.

I do believe that there is honest chagrin here. I’m sure that the professionals who are likely stretched impossibly thin cringe every time something like this gets past them. But at the same time, how much of this goes by silently? Would I ever have found out were it not for the fact that I live in town and know a lot of people who know a lot of people who read this particular newspaper? What do you think?

* I would have reproduced the image of the paper here, but the Kioske.net terms and conditions are weird/not originally in English and I couldn’t determine if it was OK.

This is the kind of book I unqualifyingly recommend to everyone. Most things I read and like have audience segments. I can’t really recommend Dumas to my friend who really loves YA novels; I don’t think David would be into Jane Austen. But this book? Read it, read it, read it.

All right, I will concede to one factor. I never took statistics. I have an intuitive grasp on probability and have taken calculus, but my mathematic foundation is not the best and is beset by termites. So it is feasible that Mlodinow’s explanations of the rules of probability–refreshingly clear and concise–might not be quite as “ah-ha!” to every reader. But the relevant examples and stories and narrative are first-rate across the board.

Mlodinow’s thesis shines a light on the common fallacies we, due to inherent human nature, make. He covers human weaknesses in recognizing and generating random data, assigning astronomical odds to something seemingly miraculous, believing in our ability to “beat the market”, falling victim to confimation biases and otherwise looking for pattern and control when there is none or we have none.

Along the way we get to re-visit with my personal bugaboo, the “Monty Hall” problem. We see how chance more than anything underlies meteoric success streaks for sports figures, actors, and writers. We get to know (sometimes in a bit too much depth) about the lives of the mathematicians who figured this stuff out, from Platonic Greece to modern times.

Though Mlodinow’s argument never wavers–chance, and chance alone, dictate far more of the outcomes in our lives and world than we generally realize–he manages to deliver this potentially depressing argument with a sincere dollop of hope, urging us to remember that it’s the stubborn and the perservering who leave a mark of genius on this world.

Mlodinow tells us about John Kennedy Toole, who wrote the novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole never lived to see his book published: he killed himself after the 11th rejection notice. His mother kept at it, and ultimately it was published, posthumously. It sold like hotcakes and won the Pulitzer Prize. This, specifically, is meaningful to me. After all, my signature cry of “My tubes!” during bouts of Crohn’s ickiness is derived directly from protagonist Ignatius Reilly’s bellow: “My Valve!” To think that the world could exist without such farcical genius makes the notion of “don’t quit” more powerful.

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Vintage) by Leonard Mlodinow

Buy the books mentioned in this post from Amazon.com now and help me maintain my rock 'n roll lifestyle.

Icelandic food specialties read more like grievous and fatal fraternity hazing rituals than anything that a human with extant taste buds and olfactory capability would submit to willingly. The regional recipes manage to get an F- on each of the rough trinity of food-is-yummy criteria, offending the user psychologically, aesthetically, and sensually.

Kæstur hákarl

At the top of the list is the somewhat infamous Kæstur hákarl. I’m going to jump ahead a bit here and give away the ending. Anthony Bourdain, chef extraordinaire, calls hákarl “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” he has ever eaten. BBC Top Gear co-host James May challenged foul-mouthed TV chef Gordon Ramsay to a weird duel in which the winner would be the one who could, essentialy, not barf. Ramsay lost.

Say you were an Icelander wandering around the beach in front of your sod-house farm one day in the mist and cold, and you came upon the body of a Greenland shark that had washed up on the gravel. You try a hunk and pass around samples to your famished sled dogs. You spend a night of extreme intoxication–like being outrageously drunk without the pleasure–and wake up to find that your dogs have keeled over entirely.

This is because Greenland sharks are poisonous in two ways, both gross. Their flesh has a high concentration of trimethylamine oxide, which is the putrid stench that we most often associate with decaying fish. It’s also toxic, and is highly concentrated in this species of shark. The second thing that will make you feel quite unwell is the presence of uric acid. Sharks don’t have the benefit of a urinary tract, and, in effect, pee through their skin. Bon appetit!

Turns out you can rectify this whole poisonous problem if, in the process, you transform the shark into something that “[t]hose new to it will usually gag involuntarily on the first attempt to eat it.” This involves beheading, gutting, burying in gravel, using a weight to expel the shark “juices”, fermentation, then drying. As I understand it, it smells like window cleaner and death. It tastes like throwing up because that’s what most people do.

As if that weren’t enough

Here’s a list of other Icelandic treats, shamelessly yanked from the Wikipedia page on Þorramatur

• Kæstur hákarl, putrefied Greenland shark
• Súrsaðir hrútspungar, the testicles of rams pressed in blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid.
• Svið, singed and boiled sheep heads, sometimes cured in lactic acid
• Sviðasulta, head cheese or brawn made from svið, sometimes cured in lactic acid
• Lifrarpylsa (liver sausage), a pudding made from liver and suet of sheep kneaded with rye flour and oats
• Blóðmör (blood-suet; also known as slátur, meaning slaughter), a type of blood pudding, which is made from lamb’s blood and suet, kneaded with rye flour and oats
• Harðfiskur, wind-dried fish (often cod, haddock or seawolf), served with butter
• Hangikjöt, (hung meat), smoked and boiled lamb or mutton, sometimes also eaten raw.
• Lundabaggi, sheep’s loins wrapped in the meat from the sides, pressed and cured in lactic acid
• Selshreifar, seal’s flippers cured in lactic acid

Mmmm, Lifrapylsa: liver sausage/pudding from sheep liver and suet. No, thanks

He says it best

A hilarious send-up on hákarl from a writer on gather.com named Michael M.:

So what does hakarl taste like then?  It tastes like crying.  It tastes like broken promises.  It tastes like the Lord God Almighty ripping the Bible out of your hands and saying, “Sorry, this doesn’t apply for you.  I think you want “Who Moved My Cheese?”  It tastes like the Predator wading into a Care Bears movie and opening fire.  It tastes like - bah.  That’s what it tastes like.  Bah.

The only – and I do mean only - upside about this food is that it was free.  I was wandering through a weekend market in Reykjavik and came across a stall serving fish.  The woman working there started talking to me in Icelandic (please see the full set of my Icelandic articles to figure out why), and the moment she realized I was not Icelandic, she smiled and offered me a little paper cup with a cube of hakarl in it.  At the time, I thought this was a warm gesture of welcome to her country.  As it turns out, she was thinking, “Well, you are foreign and now I shall poison you.”

I smiled the moment I put the cube on my tongue.  It was the exact sort of smile you get when you are having the worst day of your life and then find out that your house was crushed by an airplane carrying rubber chickens.  It is the smile you smile when everything is aligned against you and it is simply not your day.

Read the rest of the hilarious post

Sources

I’m just kind of done with Austen for the time being. Engagements and secret affairs and dances and going to London during the season. Families full of daughters. Country estates.

All good. All well-written. All in all an easy and quick read. The good guy generally wins. The good girl always does. The good girl then serves to deliver slightly heavy-handed moral allegory. Not that the morals are in any way not those that we should strive for–it’s just a bit of a pretty picture.

Highlights include the adolescent pleasure that the emotional middle daughter Marianne takes in the intensity of her deepest heartbreak, coming down with the inevitable serious fever after distraught, long, solo walks in wet long grass, moping in an estate’s chintzy, teen-pathos-eliciting, faux-Grecian ‘temple.’ Sir John Middleton with his sherry-fueled grins and hunting dogs makes a gorgeous caricature of the jolly English landed gentry.

Unlike in Pride and Prejudice, however, Austen’s jibes at the banal conceit of certain characters lack the subtlety that her later novels have. Funny, yes, biting, still, but so obvious as to be somewhat dulled in their impact. But, in its defense, the book’s characters, at least some of them, are flawed in some appealing ways: Elinor’s holier than thou moralizing, their mother’s mawkish mothery-ness, and Willoughby’s–well, I’ll leave it to you to find out about Willoughby.

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics) by Jane Austen

Buy the books mentioned in this post from Amazon.com now and help me maintain my rock 'n roll lifestyle.

Humira on the other hand can be injected at home, once we’re trained. I say “we” because my saintly David has offered to do the actual stabbing. I like the idea and hope it does not cause him too much trauma. If anything, maybe he can release some aggression! We are due at the GI clinic in an hour to be introduced to proper stabbing form.

Regarding cost, Humira, at about $800 per dose, will cost about $1600 a month in total cost to the health care system. Remicade properly taken (every eight weeks for me), costs about $2500 a month when averaged out. Our out-of-pocket costs are about $350 for each Remicade dose. The Humira package, which contains about three months’ ($4800) worth of doses, costs us considerably less. Due to a combination of good pharmacy coverage and Humira’s own co-pay subsidy program, it cost us five dollars total. Even the trip to the doctor today to learn how to use it won’t incur a charge.

This makes me a bit suspicious as to the possibly nefarious ways of Humira. I have a hunch that they are offsetting the cost of the training, and the co-pay reduction program is obviously in their best interest to keep folks using the drug. But, I should not look proverbial gift horse too deeply in its mouth.

I find it humorous that the package says “Crohn’s Disease Starter Kit” on it, as if it were some sort of yeast or fermented substance with which to make beer or cheese. Plus, I don’t want to start any more Crohn’s Disease.

Wish me luck.

Some previous posts about my experiences with Remicade:

• Remicade: So Far so Good
• Plugged In
• Mouse Serum Sickness? Really?
• Life: Reducing my burden on society by stabbing myself in the thigh
• Shedding

Humira

The great hurdle with distilling your own essential oils is obtaining knowledge. This is something you can’t really google. First, even owning a still is illegal in many states. Second, distilling anything but plant matter without license/permit/legislation is pretty much entirely illegal, and, though I give it to you on my Word that I’ve never made booze with my still, I’d wager to guess that an awful lot of people probably do, such that the group of everyday folks who own alembic pot stills who legitimately want to generate, merely, things that smell good is likely a narrow demographic indeed.

This is unfortunate, because mistakes are not always benign in this craft and I could sure use a strong guiding hand. Distilling the wrong kind of cedar can make your lungs bleed. Being a doofus about your condenser setup can get you exploded. The one time I was exposed to the master distiller (or whatever his title might be) at The Essential Oil Company (which, miracle of miracles, is here in town), I spewed out dozens of questions in rapid-fire demand, both annoying the hell out of him and also eliciting a couple of compliments as to the relative advance of my knowledge. Again, relative. Because not much of this is written down.

Here’s a good and typical story about how I might end up killing myself accidentally. I have a passionate love for Ponderosa pine, which has bark and sap that smells like butterscotch. I like to smell the trees. And they are great to look at, with that plated red bark. My idea was that maybe distilling the sap would give me some sort of wonderful ambrosia. Unfortunately, research led me to what it is you get when you distill Ponderosa pine sap. Turpentine. That is super not what I’m into.

As an entertaining side note, there is a species of pine, Jeffrey pine, that looks nearly identical to Ponderosa and often grows in the same groves (stands? Whatever.). If you try to distill the sap of Jeffrey pine, zut alors.

Occasionally the backwoods turpentine makers in the 1800s in California would mix up the two, “with explosive and sometimes tragic consequences.” Jeffrey pine sap contains heptane, a flammable hydrocarbon so potent that it was a basis for the octane scale in gasolines.

Even the dog looks dubious sometimes.

All I can say is, fire it up! It’s almost distilling season!

Sources

• “Pinus Jeffreyi (Jeffrey Pine) Description.” The Gymnosperm Database: Home Page. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .
• “Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine – Industrial & Engineering Chemistry (ACS Publications).” Turpentine from Ponderosa Pine. ACS Publications. Web. 09 Mar. 2010. .

Everyone knows that there is weird scummy stuff on the beach. Sometimes it gets opalescent and piles up in a way that looks like it might make a good desktop background for one’s computer.

I want to explore a few things about aroma. Though I am chemistry-ignorant, I want to wrap my head around the various -enes that make things redolent. I want to think about pine resin and the anti-microbial tendencies of certain distilled substances. And I want to figure out what plant matter to stuff in our still this coming summer.

Keep your eyes out for fragrance-related posts, soon.