Book Review | Redshirts - John Scalzi

Here's my video version if you'd rather I talk at you instead of you reading the review:

Redshirts was recommended on so many of the blogs I follow, so when I saw that the author John Scalzi was going to be at the Festival of Books, I picked up a copy at his publisher’s booth and started reading. It really only took about two nights to finish, and that’s because I had schoolwork to do.

Normally “adult” books take longer to read because the author tries to be fancy with their prose and make it more literary or something. Scalzi writes in pretty much spoken English so I didn’t feel like I was struggling through a philosophical science fiction book, though there was plenty of philosophy behind all the jokes.

Redshirts is set in a Star-Trek-like universe, with the protagonists being low-ranking, probably red shirt wearing crewmen of a ship very much like the Enterprise. There’s something weird going on on the ship though. The crewmen keep dying on away missions and on certain decks when there is a battle, but certain high-ranking crewmen seem to be immune from damage, or have unnatural healing powers. There's also some dubious "scientific" machines that even the characters can't explain. It turns out that the whole setup is a tv show from the early 21st century, and the crewmen who can't die are the main characters, and the dubious science is the writers having stuff happen off-screen that they don't want to/can't explain. So a few of the red-shirt-wearing crewmen time travel to present-day Los Angeles to get the show shut down, and convince the writers to stop killing off extras in their scripts so unnecessarily.

It's like if JJ Abrams made a scifi Stranger than Fiction with a budget smaller than the original Doctor Who and added in some Princess Bride humor. Which is like combining a bunch of my favorite things into one fairly short book. It sounds ridiculous, and Redshirts was definitely ridiculous, but here's the thing: it worked. Scalzi was able to take all the most ridiculous parts of bad sci-fi and self-aware literature and make an awesome book that’s not bad sci-fi anymore, though it is very self-aware. The fourth wall is broken a couple of times at least, depending on where you want to draw the fourth wall.

If you’re not afraid of making fun of classic tv scifi a little, the humor is spot on. I didn’t know much about Star Trek before the 2009 movie got me into the fandom, so I’m not sure I got all the jokes, but I was laughing most of the time. There were also some pretty good zingers about Los Angeles. The genre criticism ala Princess Bride or Douglas Adams was perfect. I feel like Scalzi would be a great guy to hang out with and criticize the Hobbit or the Ender’s Game movie with.

Finals Procrastination: muffins!

So it was the last week of classes. And instead of working on papers and presentations, I made muffins.

Here’s the recipe:

Cranberry-walnut zucchini bread/muffins:

Makes two 9x5 loaves or 24 muffins

Preheat the oven to 325 (degrees Fahrenheit. 325 degrees Celsius or 325 Kelvin would be ridiculous.)

Forgot to put the craisins in the ingredients picture

Mix the dry stuff together:

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Mix the wet stuff with the sugar:

3 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

2 1/4 cups white sugar

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

“Fold” (whatever that means) in the zucchini/walnuts/craisins:

2 cups grated zucchini

1 cup chopped walnuts

1 cup craisins

Mix the wet stuff with the dry stuff and put into your preferred baking receptacle. 

For loaves bake for 45 minutes, for muffins, about 20 minutes. I used the "toothpick comes out clean" test, but I think they were a little overdone. 

While you're waiting for them to bake, do anything except schoolwork: dishes, mopping, clean the bathroom, watch youtube videos. This is procrastination time, not "get your work done" time.

I also made some lemon/zucchini bread, from this recipe. It was REALLY good, but the glaze makes it very hard to pretend it’s healthy.

Am I Irish?

Someone recently asked me if my family was Irish. I looked at them for a second and said, well, yeah, I guess so.

The thing of it is, the direct male line of my family was traced my great-grandfather, Darrel Harmon to a John Harmon who seems to have been born in Massachusetts. In 1650. That’s over a hundred years before the Revolutionary War. His GREAT-GRANDSON fought in the Revolutionary war and was at both Ticonderoga and Valley Forge. There is no conclusive record of John Harmon’s father. But he perhaps came from England, you know, since that was fairly early in the Massachusetts settlement period. So I’m American, as far as I can tell.

Darrel Harmon’s great-grandmother Diadama (née Mackie), or perhaps her parents, emigrated from Ireland though. Does that make me Irish? I suppose.

My grandfather’s maternal grandfather was born in Scotland. So I’m Scottish too, then? And that’s even more recent. But even he came to Colorado before Ellis Island even opened.

My grandmother’s family seems to be somewhat Irish. Or maybe it’s just because my grandma was born on March 17^th and her mom named her Patricia. She has had a green cake for every birthday. We have corned beef and cabbage every year. But only on St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t consider my heritage to be Irish, not really. We don’t keep Irish traditions. (Except celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, but really, that’s my grandma’s birthday.) I don’t look particularly Irish, though my hair tends to lighten in the summer to almost-reddish, and I get sunburned easily.

I don’t consider my heritage to be English either, even though that’s the oldest ancestor I know of. John Harmon was born in America the colonies over a century before America the country was even a dream. I can’t claim “English” heritage. It’s been way too long.

Maybe it’s because I’m from California, where all sorts of people are all mixed up and living together, but people keep asking me what my family is. And I don’t really have an answer. I don’t identify with really any heritage except “white Protestant American.”

I know I’m privileged, as a middle-class, educated, white American, and that the dominant culture in my country is my own. I appreciate people from other backgrounds. That’s why I love living here, in California, in the United States, where people are not all the same, and we can take a carload of people to Ethiopian food and none of us are remotely Ethiopian. I appreciate other people who keep their cultures and traditions. I study linguistics, remember? If everyone had the same culture and language, I’d have to find a new career. It makes my life so much more interesting that not everyone is the same as me and I can have all sorts of experiences basically in my backyard. (For real: Easter morning I was woken up at 7am by Spanish praise music.)

But that is not my story. When people try to get me to pick a heritage, whatever I say feels a little fake. I’m not Irish or English or Scottish or German. I may be all of those things, but the sum of those parts is something else entirely. When I’m forced to choose something, it feels like I’m stealing something from people who actually keep their heritage cultures alive here. I feel like I’m diluting what it means to be Irish or German if I claim to be those things. I know it’s cheesy, and it might sound callous or insensitive, but I can’t truthfully call myself anything other than American. Those vices that are stereotypically American, arrogance, stubbornness, lack of empathy, are things that I see and fear in myself. But other things that are stereotypically American, enterprising spirit, idolization of democracy, confidence, are things that I prize in myself. That is my story. 

Here's the paternal side of the family tree I made when I was 12. We were assigned to trace our ancestry as far back as possible, hopefully getting to the first generation to come to America. So that's why Thomas Harmon, a sailor (also the Revolutionary War vet), and Nathaniel Sr. have little explanations about sailing from England: it's the closest I could get to an emigration story.

Book Review: Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Philip Pullman

It's March book review time! I already recorded a video review, which you can watch if you prefer to listen to me talk.

When I got this book after Christmas, I was a little surprised at how large it was. It’s not really like other fairy tale collections. There are NO pictures. Just 400 pages of stories. And a bit of commentary after each one, which provides some historical context about the original storyteller or other versions or about other things Pullman could have done to change the story.

There’s a long introduction to the book where Pullman talks about different views of fairytales, from psychological to literary to anthropological. He cites the famous sources that all folklore literature cites, like Zipes and Bettelheim. But he’s coming at these stories as an author. He wants the stories to be good stories.  With a beginning, middle, and end that are logical as far as anything in fairytales is logical. But fairytales aren’t always coherent. Pullman complains that the characters in fairy tales are flat, either good or bad, and that there's not really character growth. 

There’s more going on than just entertainment, these stories were originally told orally to a specific audience. The original storytellers never imagined that their words would be preserved and read centuries later. Writing down these stories preserved the words, but not all the original context and meaning. Some things that would have made sense without explanation were not in the original telling. Sometimes people had a little story bit they wanted to tell for a specific reason, maybe someone in the audience had a similar thing going on in their real life. These missing parts and little threads that don’t quite meet today’s literary standards or expectations of complexity and logic. 

So Pullman takes some liberties with the original Grimm versions and weaves the bits together into a stronger thread. Which makes this an excellent book to read before bed. It’s like someone is telling you a bedtime story. Remember when that happened? Childhood was awesome. Sometimes I think Peter Pan had the right idea. I started out reading no more than three stories before bed, which would have kept me occupied for a month, but by the end I was reading until I fell asleep. I read the whole thing in under two weeks.

Pullman is excellent at storycraft. These aren’t “modern” versions of the Grimm stories, but basically English translations. His English is clear and fairly timeless. I did find some of his commentary fairly dubious. He seems to be trying to hard to justify his changes to the stories. But here's the thing: the stories were always being changed, with every retelling, with every new audience and situation. It's the frozen Grimm forms that did something unnatural to the oral stories. I can see this book being read to children at bedtime and then being read by their parents long after the children are asleep. Which is probably the highest praise that can be given to a book of fairy tales, that it can delight and fascinate both the young and the old, as the oral versions did for millennia. 

RE: Same-Sex Marriage

(I welcome comments, but please be civil. These are only a few of my thoughts, not everything I could say. Let's discuss more.)

So the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments about same-sex marriage. Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, has been overturned by lower courts and it has now reached the Supreme Court. Can states ban same-sex couples from getting married? I think we are asking the wrong question here. Why should the government have ANY say as to who marries whom? Because of taxes and bank accounts and hospital visits, that’s why. We give civil privileges to couples who make a commitment to each other.

My solution: civil marriage separate from EVERY religious marriage. If you’re a gay couple and find a church willing to marry you: fine, but you have to also go to the courthouse and get legally married. If you want to be married in a church that won’t marry a gay couple: fine, but you have to go to the courthouse and get legally married. You aren’t religious and want to get married: fine, go to the courthouse and get legally married. This doesn’t mean that the marriage in the church is any less in God’s eyes, but you don’t get the tax benefits/hospital visit privileges unless you’ve been married by the state. Separation of church and state, guys.

The government doesn’t want get rid of your right to free exercise of religion, but we cannot allow certain groups to discriminate against others. We can’t allow a privileged group to dictate what others can do. We don’t prevent people from marrying people of other religions, even if that is prohibited by the Bible. Let people make their own decisions about who to love and who to visit in the hospital. And, really, what is wrong with more love?

The argument that same-sex marriages should not be allowed because the point of marriage is procreation seems quite flawed. Is my post-menopause grandmother, then, not allowed to remarry because she can’t have children? What about couples who wait for years and years before having children (or who can't have children for whatever reason)?

The argument that same-sex marriage should not be allowed because the Bible says so is better (depending on interpretation), but the Bible is not the basis for our country’s laws: the Constitution is. Individual churches should not be forced to perform same-sex marriages. But I don’t think anyone is proposing that seriously. Americans are not forced to be Christians, why should (some) Christians’ views be the law for people with other beliefs?

Even if you don’t agree with same-sex marriage, how is it preventing a straight person from marrying the person they love? How is getting angry about this helping anything? That makes the religion I love so much look uninformed, bigoted, even hypocritical.