Category Archives: Stories and Writing

Athelas, Lembas, and Butterbeer–impossible delights in fiction

Posted on by
Reply
For February’s project, I’m working on a second draft of the cozy mystery I wrote in November for NaNoWriMo, currently titled Warnings at the Waterfront. In this story, I describe an award-winning lemon éclair as being
“a pastry oblong about five inches long, glazed with a streak of chocolate and dotted with yellow icing flowers… She took a bite and gooey lemony custard squeezed out the sides. It was sharp, sweet, and creamy all at once…”
Yum!
But could a lemon éclair be that good? It’s one thing to describe an item so that it sounds appealing to our sense of taste, smell, or sight. It’s quite another for such an item to exist, or even be possible. Lemon and chocolate is a tricky combination, and I’ve been experimenting with combinations of lemon curd and vanilla custard in an attempt to come up with an actual lemon éclair. So far, it falls significantly short of its fictional version.
Homemade lemon eclair with chocolate glaze
An attempt at a lemon eclair
There are plenty of wonderful things in books; things that I would like to exist, but which don’t. When I first read The Lord of the Rings, I was much impressed with athelas, aka kingsfoil, and its fragrance when crushed in the king’s hands and cast into water. Its fragrance is described as follows:
“and then he crushed them, and straightaway a living freshness filled the room, as if the air itself awoke and tingled, sparkling with joy. And then he cast the leaves into the bowls of steaming water that were brought to him, and at once all hearts were lightened. For the fragrance that came to each was like a memory of dewy mornings of unshadowed sun in some land of which the fair world in Spring is itself but a fleeting memory.”  (The Return of the King, p.173)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an herb so deliciously fragrant that it could banish the Black Breath? Or, in our world, depression?
What would such an herb smell like? In my mind, athelas was a sort of combination of parsley (crisp and fresh) and peppermint (cool and sharp), without being either. I guess peppermint comes closest, at least for me, but I’d still like an athelas plant of my own.
There were plenty of other non-existent entities to long for in The Lord of the Rings. Lembas, the elves’ waybread, are described as  “very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream.” Not only do lembas taste better than the best of honeycakes, but
“the cakes will keep sweet for many, many days, if they are unbroken and left in their leaf-wrappings, as we have brought them. One will keep a traveller on his feet for a day of long labour, even if he be one of the tall Men of Minas Tirith.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, pp. 478-479)
 Maybe someone could come up with something that resembles lembas in flavor and texture, but they are unlikely to duplicate its nourishing qualities and long shelf-life.
A more modern example of a fictional delight is butterbeer. A mug of hot butterbeer on a cold day sounds like a great treat, but how would it actually taste? The name itself calls up the taste of butterscotch and root beer. I haven’t had the butterbeer that was created for Harry Potter fans, but I gather that butterscotch is one of the flavors involved. I suspect that if their version had turned out to be as good as the fictional version, it would be more widely available by now. And while I like butterscotch, it seems like a very strong, very sweet flavor for something you’re going to drink an entire mugful of. (Then again, perhaps I would have said the same of root beer, if I’d only ever had it in the form of candy.)
But back to my fictional lemon éclair. It just may not be a genuine possibility. One solution is to change the pastry in the book to something that could be genuinely wonderful (and so be able to include a recipe for it, should the book ever get that far.) That’s probably the best solution.
But that isn’t always the solution. Some books, especially fantasy, are better with a few impossibly wonderful things in them. We just have to accept that description outpaces possibility. Not every longing we have can be satisfied.
At least I’ve got peppermint.
Till next post.
P.S. Page numbers are from the 1965 paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings.

Khipus–knotty writing and knotty puzzles

Posted on by
Reply


I’ve been watching a video lecture on the Inca and their system of record-keeping on knotted cords (khipus, or quipus). There’s some disagreement among historians (or is it archaeologists?) over whether this was a system of writing, or whether khipus were limited to keeping records of inventory and service and such. Apparently the Inca did send messages in the form of khipus and also had libraries of them, which suggests that it really was writing.
(By “writing”, I assume they mean a way of representing language. If “writing” meant marks on a surface to represent language, then knots wouldn’t qualify. But that’s sort of beside the point.)
I’m fascinated by the different ways people have found to communicate information and then store the information. First there are the languages themselves: spoken languages, tonal or not, and also sign languages. One way of preserving information is to memorize it, but the memorized information only lasts as long as the memorizer (if not passed on) and only exists where the memorizer does.
Visible marks on a surface can last beyond a person’s lifetime (sometimes), can be seen equally well by many people, and are portable (sometimes). I said “visible” marks, but then there’s braille, which is meant to be felt. Braille depends on the previous existence of our alphabet, but history could have gone differently and something like braille could have been our form of writing. We would feel our messages and records of inventory, instead of looking at them. Such a system wouldn’t have been useful for inscriptions that were meant to be seen from a distance, though.
I said things could have gone differently, and apparently they did go differently in South America (though not resulting in braille). Instead of painting or scratching marks on surfaces, they knotted cords in complicated arrangements, with various colors and twists. The information lasted pretty well—there would be a lot more khipus to look at if the Spanish hadn’t burned so  many—and was very portable. On the other hand, this system doesn’t lend itself to official inscriptions and mottos carved ostentatiously into stone. The Inca could represent important events in architecture, sculpture, and paint, but archaeologists would probably have liked some inscriptions to go with them.
If the Spanish hadn’t shown up when they did, would the Inca have eventually created a visual representation of a khipu? That is, marks on a surface to represent knots that represent language? Or would they have done something different, something that I can’t imagine, just as I wouldn’t have thought of using knots as writing in the first place? (Nor would I have thought of magnetized media, etc., to represent marks that represent language, but other people did.)
One further idle thought—why did their history go as it did? Why and how did someone, long, long ago, start keeping records on a cord?
We’ll never know.
Till next post.

Reflections on the book "The Circle" by Dave Eggers–transparency versus privacy

Posted on by
Reply

When I first read The Circle by Dave Eggers, I expected it to become the 1984 of our time. It took to the logical extreme a number of problems that were already visible—reduced privacy, an increased sense of insecurity resulting from too much social media, and the constantly increasing requests for feedback from every quarter. Instead, as far as I can tell, the book just disappeared in the ever-growing flood of new books.
I’m of two minds about recommending it to other people. On the one hand, I thought it raised the issues very cleverly. On the other hand, I wouldn’t exactly call it a fun read—though it is much more entertaining than 1984, The Jungle, or The Grapes of Wrath, all of which I’m glad I (was forced to) read, and none of which I enjoyed.
I’m going to focus on privacy versus transparency for this post, setting aside the mostly separate issue of too much emphasis on feedback (really, there are areas in which asking for feedback is just a terrible idea!). There is a moment near the beginning of the story in which our main character, Mae, tries to wring clever changes on a trite phrase and ends up saying something she never meant to say. Ouch. But
“it didn’t matter. He was laughing now, and he… made her trust that he would never bring it up again, that this terrible thing she said would remain between them, that they both understood mistakes are made by all and that they should, if everyone is acknowledging our common humanity, our common frailty and propensity for sounding and looking ridiculous a thousand times a day, that these mistakes should be allowed to be forgotten.” (p. 34)
Mae is new at the company when this happens, and hasn’t yet absorbed the company’s view of things, expressed by one of their founders as “All that happens must be known.” And by “known”, he pretty much means accessible to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. It isn’t Big Brother that’s watching you, it’s your peers—everyone with an internet connection.
One of the things that kept me caught up in the book was the way the company’s spokespeople somehow managed to make the most outrageous claims seem not just plausible, but positively progressive. (I spent a lot of time mentally shouting at Mae to get a clue and realize why they were wrong.) The founder in question, Bailey, gives two main reasons for promoting transparency.
The first is that people behave better when they know they are being watched. He thinks the only reason people have for wanting privacy is that they are ashamed, either because they are doing wrong (in which case we should know about it) or unnecessarily (in which case we should all just get over it.) If we know we are watched, we will be our best selves—and don’t we want to be our best selves?
The second, lesser reason is that we owe it to others to share with them experiences that they may not have an opportunity to have for themselves.
To take the second reason first, no, we don’t owe that to others. Furthermore, sometimes part of what makes an experience special is that it is unrepeatable or rare. Sometimes the fact that an experience is shared with only one or a few people is what makes it special. Recording the experience wouldn’t really convey what made the experience special to anyone else, and might take away from it for those who were there. There are plenty of people happy to create logs of interesting places and events, and  enough places and events to fill several lifetimes, without having to record everything.
The first reason Bailey gives for transparency is more interesting. People almost certainly do behave better when they know they are being watched. But people can have good reasons for wanting privacy. As Mae noticed early on, we are terribly prone to making mistakes and we hate having everyone know about them and judge us based on them. People who don’t know us well may take our mistakes for character traits, and people who are malicious may use them as an opportunity to pounce on us and malign us to others. When we know we are being watched, we are likely to play it safe. Not only do we avoid doing wrong, we also won’t say or do anything risky, that might be taken wrong or go badly. Unfortunately, making mistakes is a large part of learning, and taking risks is how we (sometimes) make progress. So if we are constantly watched, we won’t be our best selves, we’ll just be our most conformist selves.
The other reason for wanting privacy is that we don’t necessarily want to be judged even in areas where there are no “mistakes.” I don’t want to hear what the world has to say about my taste in paint colors. It’s none of their business if I want to live in a house decorated in Easter egg colors. Some of them might think the color scheme enchanting, but others will not, and as Mae discovers when only 97% of fellow Circlers think her awesome in a silly quiz, “she could only think of the 3 percent who did not find her awesome.” (p. 405) Negative evaluations are disproportionately upsetting.
On top of that, some people are mean and will say nasty, critical things about your paint colors (or whatever) just to make you feel bad. Who needs that kind of unsolicited comment?
So we should have some control over what is offered up for public comment. Things I post on this blog are fair game; things I say to my family over dinner are not.
Other times, the benefit of producing better behavior does outweigh the value of privacy. Security cameras, open meetings, proctored tests… sometimes these are worth it. But there is usually some cost to be taken into account.
I won’t say how the book ends.
Till next post.