Carmilla, by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

tumblr_m1ioq2wd4H1r0qbppI have to admit that I started reading Carmilla naively. I picked the book up knowing only that it was about a vampire, and that it was very old, predating Dracula. What I found when I started reading it was… Well, in the words of George Takei, oh, my.

Here’s the basic plot: Laura, our heroine, lives with her father in an isolated Austrian castle. They wind up receiving a houseguest, the beautiful young Carmilla, under mysterious circumstances. Laura and her father start to notice strange things happening. Carmilla appears to have fangs. There’s a portrait of a medieval noblewoman named Mircalla in one of the castle halls, who happens to look just like Carmilla. Laura starts to wake up feeling woozy and with a bruise at the base of her neck.

They suspect nothing, which may seem incredible to a modern reader, but keep in mind that this book was written long before the vampire genre became established. A friend of Dad’s eventually explains to them what’s going on and together, they all go and destroy Carmilla.

One of the notable things about Carmilla is that it establishes some of the conventions of the vampire genre, such as the moldering old castle in eastern Europe. But the most important thing is that it’s not really a vampire story. It’s thinly veiled lesbian erotica. Look:

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.

How the heck did J. Sheridan Le Fanu get away with this in Victorian England? Well, for one thing, plausible deniability. You have to have a dirty mind to understand what he is driving at here. Also Le Fanu throws in an explanation at the end that Carmilla is so fascinated with Laura because she’s a vampire and she wants to eat Laura. Ayup. “Eat” her. Sure, Le Fanu.

By modern standards, the book wouldn’t be considered very good. Much of the plot doesn’t make any sense and Laura doesn’t ever play an active role in the story. Yet I loved reading this book just to watch Le Fanu so brazenly push the envelope. I recommend it.

Bad September: Retro-Futurist Rock

2432604817-1I wanted to tell you about one of the hidden gems of the Twin Cities.

Bad September is a band that formed in 2009 and has been doing gigs at events around the Cities ever since. If you live around here, you might have seen them jamming out in their frock coats, waistcoats and aviator goggles. They describe their style as “retro futurist.” Translation: these guys write music about alternate history.

Bad September’s first full-length album came out about six months ago, and recently I got the chance to buy it and listen to it. This is very intelligent music. I know more about 19th and early 20th century European history from having listened to it. Ever heard of Robert’s Rules of Order, the codification of parliamentary law that was first published in 1876 and has since been adopted by most modern organizations? Listen to the album and learn.

And the music’s good, too. The songs have the occasional strained lyric (i.e., Calmly make emergency plans/disaster’s not quite rare), but that’s the only problem with the music I can find. The instrumentals are good, the singing is good (especially “Minister Rand Tells Us that Art is in Service to the State”). The melodies are hummable days afterwards. You don’t get the benefit of the costumes that you do in their live concerts, but on the other hand, the pre-recorded songs try some neat things with the sound.

The jewel of the album has got to be “Tesla vs. Edison.” Thomas Edison once had a bitter rival Nikolai Tesla. Edison went on to fame and fortune, credited with the invention of the light bulb, while Tesla died a pauper. Bad September imagines how things might have gone differently:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0rWurAy1Ls&w=420&h=315]

Their website is here: Bad September

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum

Poisoners-Handbook-coverI have to admit I felt a little weird about leaving this book lying out on my kitchen table.

The Poisoner’s Handbook by Deborah Blum isn’t a how-to guide (no, honestly). Rather, it’s an investigation into one of the most toxic eras of U.S. history: the 1920’s. It follows the story of Charles Norris, the first chief medical examiner of New York City as he investigates case after case of people killed by common household products.

Each chapter focuses on one particular poisonous substance and is organized like a murder mystery, which I thought was a great decision. The suspense of trying to figure out whodunit by the end of the chapter causes you to forget that this book is a work of nonfiction and everything in it actually happened. It’s horrifying to read about what people were exposed to in an era when the FDA was little more than a joke and we didn’t know much about toxicology. We used to fumigate houses with cyanide gas and burn pure carbon monoxide as a lamp fuel. That’s pretty bad, but how about arsenic in makeup? That still doesn’t take the cake. Radium, the stuff that’s so radioactive that it glows blue in the dark, was in people’s health tonics. There were as many cases of accidental poisonings in this book as there were murders.

Throughout the book, Norris and his chief toxicologist Alexander Gettler use science to tease out what happened to the bodies that show up in their morgue. Their evidence helps to catch several murderers, and even more gratifying to read about, they clear the name of people who didn’t do it. If you’ve got a morbid streak, or even if you’re just curious about the history of science, I recommend it.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

curious-dog(Note: this review contains spoilers.)

I have to write my book review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with mixed feelings because it is a book with a schtick. I don’t ordinarily like books with schticks, and I don’t ordinarily like mysteries, but I liked this book. Here’s the schtick: the whole story is told from the point of view of an autistic boy, Christopher Boone. One evening Christopher discovers his neighbor’s dog impaled on a garden fork, so he sets about trying to discover who the killer was.

What I didn’t like about the book is that Christopher is a poster boy of high-functioning autism. He has all of the symptoms and all of them have a classical presentation. If you want to get a good idea of Christopher’s personality, WebMD’s entry on Aspberger’s disorder (which is part of the autism spectrum) sums him up a little bit too neatly. I think I know why Haddon is doing this, too. He has an agenda to write the Great Autistic Novel. It’s a perfectly laudable agenda, since people need to be made more aware of this condition and raising awareness through story is a good way to do it. But as a result, I had a hard time believing Christopher as a person and not just a collection of symptoms.

The thing is, though… The thing is, it works. Mark Haddon has written the Great Autistic Novel. Damn it, Haddon, you’re breaking my heart with the end of that book. Christopher’s struggling to do something he’s never done before and to do it independently, and all the while he’s putting his parents through emotional turmoil and he’s oblivious to it. Christopher wants to be an astronaut when he grows up. By the ending, you still don’t know whether he gets to be one, but Christopher does have this to say about it to his school psychologist:

He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders. Also I didn’t have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Recommended. But have a box of tissues handy.

If Prometheus had been an actual scientific expedition

I just went and saw the movie Prometheus the other day, and all I have to say is, ouch. And not just because Noomi Rapace gives herself a C-section, either. The problem is that now that I work in a science field, all science fiction movies have been ruined for me.

The science of Prometheus isn’t even all that bad. It takes some stabs at plausibility, like when the exploration team can’t breathe the atmosphere because it contains 3% carbon dioxide. That’s actually pretty accurate. Suddenly breathing 3% carbon dioxide, when it’s not what you’re used to, would be bad for you.

The bigger problem is the scientists. They make so many poor professional decisions in this movie, that if this had been a real research expedition, they would all have lost their jobs and been so thoroughly discredited they could never find another academic job, anywhere, ever. Sure, the idea was to make the movie more exciting, but I think it gives people the wrong idea about what the job is actually like. So I thought I would write this post about how Prometheus would have gone if the expedition had been run by actual scientists.

A biologist being stupid.

A biologist being stupid.

Continue reading →

Reverse Engineered Sour Cream Raisin Bars

So, the co-op grocery store in my neighborhood has this really great bakery aisle. They sell brownies and cookies individually wrapped in plastic wrap that they get from a bakery in St. Paul – and these are big fat brownies, covered in peppermint frosting and just as dense and squidgy as homemade ones. Sometimes there’s weird stuff there, like these cookie bars called hobnails and Almond Joy cookies. And every once in a while, if you hit the co-op at just the right time, you can find sour cream raisin bars.

They resemble no other cookie bar I’ve had, really. They have this pudding-like layer in the middle, the bottom is like a cake, and the top is sort of like a granola bar. Out of curiosity and since they don’t have them for sale at the co-op all the time, I decided to try and recreate them.

This is a more complicated recipe than I usually post, but the bars are well worth it.

Reverse-Engineered Sour Cream Raisin Bars

To start this recipe, you’re going to need five bowls.

IMG_11471. Cake Dry Ingredients

  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • dash salt

Just stir ’em together.

IMG_11512. Cake wet ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup sour cream
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla

Beat together the butter and the sugar until the mixture is creamy (if you don’t have an electric mixer, you can use a pastry blender for this). Then add the egg, sour cream, and vanilla, and mix it up until it’s completely blended.

IMG_1150

3. Raisins

  • 2 cups of raisins

Pour warm water over the raisins until they are completely covered. Set them aside somewhere where they can soak.

IMG_11494. Granola topping

  • 1 cup granola
  • 1 cup rolled oats
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Just stir ’em together.

IMG_11485. The Pudding

  • 3 egg yolks (how to separate an egg)
  • 1 and 1/2 cups sour cream
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 2 and 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla

Put everything but the vanilla in a saucepan, but don’t turn the heat on just yet.

Now that you’ve got everything set up, you’re ready for the cooking part of the recipe. (Please, have everything set up before you start because this part goes fast!) Grease a 9″ by 12″ baking dish and set the oven to 350°. Add the cake dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir just until the lumps are gone. It should be a pretty thick batter, which you spread out in the bottom of the baking dish. Put it in the oven.

The cake needs to cook for about ten minutes, or until the cake in the middle of the pan starts looking dry on top. In the meanwhile, start cooking the pudding. Put the pan of pudding stuff onto medium heat and stir it often. It’ll look like this.

IMG_1154

Keep heating and stirring until it starts to get thick. If you need to take the cake out of the oven and set it aside, go ahead and do that. Once the pudding is thick, drain the raisins and mix them in. Turn off the heat, mix in the vanilla.

IMG_1155

Next, it’s time to assemble the bars. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of this, but I was working fast. Take half of the granola mixture and sprinkle it onto the cake. Then put dollops of the pudding around the pan on top of the granola. Very gently, spread the dollops out so they make an even layer. Sprinkle on the rest of the granola mixture and pat it in.

Now you’re ready to bake!IMG_1157

Everything is already fully cooked at this point, so all you really need is for the flavors to meld and for the granola to get toasty brown and delicious. I found 20 minutes worked well.

Let the bars cool before you try to slice them. When it’s all done, here is what you get:

IMG_1162Enjoy!

Art and Science

I found a thought-provoking article on the Science Careers magazine the other day.

Adding an Artistic Dimension to Science

The article profiles several practicing scientists who are also simultaneously pursuing a career in the arts. These two ways of looking at the world, art and science, may seem disparate, but they can exist in the same human mind. I am one of those human minds, or at least I hope to be.

By day, I’m a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I’m about halfway through a program to earn a Ph.D. in plant biology. I spend the days in a laboratory studying how rice plants transport nutrients over long distances – from the roots and the leaves to wherever they are needed. By night, I’m an aspiring spec fic and science writer. I have a short story and a couple of nonfiction pieces out in magazines, a couple of Smashwords novels, and even a few fans.

How long can one keep up doing both? The prospects of ever earning enough to survive from writing are dismal. Pursuing a career in research science requires ultimate commitment, one that might not leave much room for an artistic pursuit on the side. And yet art and science careers do positively reinforce each other. Writing helps me be more creative in the lab, and I might sneak a few references to antimatter into my writing. The Science Careers article describes people who have made it work, so I should feel hopeful.

Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett

618150Happy Boxing Day, everyone! Hope you had a great holiday.

If you pick up a Terry Pratchett book, there are certain things you can expect from it. First of all, you can expect it to be a good read. You can also expect multiple interweaving storylines without any real chapter breaks, very human characters with lovable foibles (even though many of the characters aren’t technically human), and satire. Pratchett’s Feet of Clay delivers on all these expectations.

As the third of Pratchett’s Night Watch books, ostensibly the plot of the book revolves a mystery: who is poisoning Lord Vetinari? But really, the mystery is just an excuse for all the cool Discworld stuff that Pratchett puts into his novels.

First of these is Cheery “Cheri” Littlebottom, the Watch’s first openly female dwarf. As Angua, another female cop, takes Cheery under her wing, expect lots of interesting reading about gender expression. And explosions. Cheery is the Watch’s new forensics guy and her tests tend to explode.

We also get to learn a lot more about Dorfl and Ankh-Morpork’s golem population. I love a good robot story, so I’m picky about how they’re portrayed, but Pratchett does not disappoint. Expect a lot of deep examination of the nature of freedom and slavery.

One of the storylines made me feel like an American in a strange land, though. The characters of Ankh-Morpork are obsessed with finding themselves a new king, but why? What is it with Discworld (and by extension, Great Britain) and hereditary nobility? Where I come from I guess we have movie stars and business tycoons, but it’s just not the same.

Pratchett draws all the plotlines to a satisfying conclusion, as usual, but you should check out this book for the wild ride.

The Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge

Happy No Apocalypse Day, everybody!

Secondly, I’m signing up to participate in the Mad Reviewer Reading Challenge. You may have heard of The Mad Reviewer, as she’s guest-posted on STandG a couple of times in the past. She’s a crazy-fast book reviewer who’s challenging other book reviewers to do the same thing.

You can read more of the details of the challenge at her site. You choose a challenge level, pledge to read and review that many books in a year, and put a little progress meter on your blog site. Anybody who meets their goal is entered into a prize drawing. I’m going for the Sane Reviewer level, but who knows? I might make it to Slightly Sane.

If you’re a blogger and you’re interested in book reviewing, I encourage you to check it out as well.