Brine of pickled fish*

[flemmings]

The weather goes cool and dry, and coincidentally I lose all memories of the last three weeks. Also experience a massive attack of wanhope and malaise. Oh but I hate working, I think, and then consider that the aching neck, the ring of pain about the eye, and the dark night of the soul might possibly relate to that part of work where I held a child with a 103F fever for an hour yesterday. Take pain killers and nap and begin to feel more human.

Point of Knives finally arrives-- arrived some time this last week, but I was in no state to do anything about it. incandescens' copy goes into the mail tomorrow, I would guess. Mine will wait to be read until this cruel war (the last two weeks of August when everyone is double-shifting except, of course, the full-time staff) is over and I have leisure to enjoy it.

Did succeed in getting up the hill to the farmer's market at the Wychwood Barns. (The barns housed streetcars in the day, not animals.) Succeeded in finding a source of goose eggs there, now the super isn't getting them in regularly. Maybe the geese aren't laying. Source is a Mennonite woman from err well Mennonite-land several hours to the west of here, and um how did she get here if they don't drive or-is-that-the-Amish? Whatever, I'm glad she *is* here, even if her eggs are nearly double the super's prices. (Then again, maybe they're just that good. Her chicken eggs were sold out by 10 am.) This also saves me having to bike Way Down South to the St Lawrence Market in search of same. I am not 32 anymore, when I did stuff like that without thinking twice. ETA: duck eggs. They were (or are) duck eggs, not goose. Which are heavenly but OMG yes expensive. And I still have no source for goose eggs.

Finished reading American Gods. It does have the feel of a classic, in that bits of it hang on in the memory even while other bits made me say Oh Neil FFS, 'easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting', remember? ('Keeping in mind that "vulgar" and "disgusting" meant something rather different in 1779 than they do now'-- vulgar, yes, but what was disgusting's first meaning?)

Is also Eid al-Fitr either today or tomorrow, depending, so happy Eid those who celebrate. (The webpage that tried to explain why it's today and not yesterday made my swimming head swim even more. I *think* it has something to do with the timing of moonrise...?)

* 'In the 1690s the Chinese mixed a concoction of pickled fish and spices and called it (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap (鮭汁, Mandarin guī zhī) meaning the brine of pickled fish (鮭, carp; 汁, juice) or shellfish. By the early 18th century, the table sauce had made it to the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore), where it was discovered by British explorers, and by 1740, it had become a British staple. The Malay word for the sauce was kĕchap.' Thus catsup or ketchup or catch-up, as you please.

Comments

[incandescens]

Thank you! I will look forward to it.

I hope the malaise clears away.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

It's a slim paperback, but a slim *trade* paperback.

Thanks. It seems to be moving off.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

You have a preference for goose eggs?! What are they like?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Larger than chicken with a very solid white-- hard to describe the texture exactly, but I would say less porous, if that makes any sense. Don't have that slightly-off chicken egg smell or taste. A more delicate flavour than chicken egg, but I've never boiled them. They poach up a treat though-- the free-range ones I got today were food of the gods and worth the $1 per egg (wince) I paid for them.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'm going to have to track some down and try them!

Duck eggs have a bigger yolk to white ratio, so they taste richer and heavier. When hard boiled, the whites are kind of tough, almost rubbery.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Clearly I am feverish. Duck eggs was what I meant, not goose. I wouldn't call the whites rubbery, though, not when poached. Just solid.

ETA: Argh. My head no work. Goose eggs are what I wanted to buy, now the super doesn't have them. They have the delicate non-chicken flavour; their whites are kind of rubbery, which I like. Duck is what I bought in my fevered state yesterday, thinking they were goose. Yes indeed they taste richer and heavier, but they're not as rubbery as goose whites.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Yes. More solid than chicken eggs. I'm definitely going to have to track down goose eggs now!

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

re: American Gods, I feel like if he'd just shelved it for a few more months and sat around thinking a bit more, it might have been better. But I'm not Gaiman, so I'll never know I guess.

But it did have some very memorable bits, I totally agree.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I did get a certain frisson of Deadline Looming at the end. But again, as I said, all Gaiman endings I'm aware of are like that.

[yumiyoshi.livejournal.com]

a certain frisson of Deadline Looming

^^^ that is now going to be my new favorite phrase :D

And haha, I'll find out when I read Neverwhere. *glances at growing stack of to-read pile*

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

re: American Gods: I notice now more than previously that it has the pacing of a comic; id est v episodic, v visual, considerably more energy spent on setup than on resolution. What makes it for me is the feeling of waiting-in-airports (and other, smaller, subtler interstitial spaces). As a British person, the US is both familiar and fundamentally alien, which contributes hugely to the psychic effect. I have legit structural complaints about Stardust and Neverwhere, but also they just basically do not seem as otherworldly as American Gods, because they are closer to home.

n.b. I am also aware that I am talking about something that was Very Important to me in my late teenage years, and which I have not returned to in a while. Not apologising, but it probably ought to be mentioned.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

the pacing of a comic; id est v episodic, v visual, considerably more energy spent on setup than on resolution.

Then a lot of what I read has a comic-book pacing. But that does explain the lingering unsatisfactoriness of, well, a lot of what I read.

I have the good fortune to be Canadian, so that both Neverwhere and America Gods come across as foreign to me. But not otherworldly at all. American Gods captures the bleak and somewhat nightmarish 'no there there' feel of most of the US, where even gods are reduced to con men from an Altman film. Neverwhere OTOH is just the oddness of London put into concrete terms.

[bladderwrack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not an entirely satisfactory description ... for a start, I'm sure people have been composing like this since before comics. But it's useful, so I'm keeping it until something better is proposed.

the bleak and somewhat nightmarish 'no there there' feel
... that's actually precisely what I like about American Gods. XD