It’s a day meant for eating tomatoes.

Of course, I signed up for Friday and completely forgot about it, but hey, it got done within the time allotted.

I am not devious enough to be writing this plot. I need a writing partner who’s completely evil.

1. All the women are beautiful, unless they’re peasants.

2. The sex scenes are ridiculous. They come out of nowhere; there’s no motivation!

Now, this is one of my favourite fantasy novels. I’ve read it several times, but not recently, so I’m re-reading it now and I think I’ve figured out why I didn’t see what he saw.

It’s because he’s missing something fundamental and profound about the lives of these women. These two criticisms are actually one.

(Major spoilers after the jump)

1. All the women are beautiful, unless they’re peasants.

Okay, yes. All the women (with one important exception) are explicitly called beautiful. But who are these women?

Miranda Belmonte d’Alveda, “said to be the most beautiful [woman] in Valledo”. This specific phrasing is used several times, by the narrator and by men (in particular a teenage boy) who’ve never seen her. She’s the wife of a high-ranked military man, so respected he’s often referred to as “the Captain” without need of his name.

She’s referred to as his property. She can read well, but it’s exceptional for a woman in her culture. It’s also worth noting that she’s mother to two teenage boys and yet still regarded as beautiful.

Zabira, courtesan, favoured consort of the king and mother to his younger sons.

Jehane bet Ishak, doctor. Member of a race/religion explicitly called animals by at least one other culture. Has eyes of an unusual colour for her race. Mostly referred to as beautiful by a teenage boy (the same one as for Miranda) who is charmed by her exoticism. In other cases her eye colour is always mentioned in conjunction with her beauty (“comely enough…blue eyes, rare for a Kindath,” “pretty for a Kindath… Her eyes were extremely blue.”)

Queen Ines. Described, but never called beautiful or striking or anything else.

So let’s break it down: why are these women beautiful?

Miranda and Zabira are married to powerful men. Powerful men who choose their own wives and consorts choose beautiful women. It’s probably just a side-benefit that both women are also talented and intelligent in their own ways.

Jehane is beautiful because she’s exotic. She’s remarkable in a few ways: she’s considered less than human, but becomes a friend and colleague to the men who describe her; she’s a woman who isn’t married, even though she’s in her late twenties; she’s a woman who has a job in two cultures where women are property; she’s valued by the upper status cultures because of her medical ability; she doesn’t swoon at the feet of the men she travels with. And also, she has that “human” eye colour.

Ines was married by arrangement. She doesn’t need to be beautiful. Her husband desires her anyway.

As well, in a cultural context like this, a woman isn’t worth noticing unless she’s beautiful. Why else would you notice her? It’s not like women are important in any other way.

2. The sex scenes are ridiculous. There’s no motivation.

The sex scenes in question are Miranda’s and Zabira’s, and possibly Ines’s.

Miranda stabs her husband and then has sex with him right after.

Miranda’s pissed. Her husband, Rodrigo, has done something thoughtless which has just put her and her sons (not to mention their farmhands and entire livelihood) at risk, and she had to kill a man to protect them all.

She has Rodrigo tied up in an outbuilding so she can stab him in the leg a few times with an arrow. It’s actually a rather funny scene. Then they have mildly kinky sex.

So why did she have sex with him if she was so angry?

To drive the point home, so to speak. Miranda’s body is the only real currency she has, the only real power over her husband. She can rebuke him with words all she wants, but she needs to show him what he’s got so he doesn’t risk it again. Also, because she’s been celibate for the weeks he’s been gone (and he has too).

Zabira seduces the man who just killed her lover, the king.

Zabira has nothing left. Her king is dead, her life and her sons’ are at risk from the new king, their older half-brother (or possibly from his brother). The assassin, Ammar, is an old friend of hers. Of course she’s going to seduce him, if only to ally herself with the most powerful man who doesn’t want her dead. She needs his protection for herself and her sons and her body is the only thing she has to tie Ammar to her. She’s also grieving, and most likely has no one in the palace who would risk reaching out to her.

Ines trades sex for religion, although she secretly enjoys the sex. She sleeps with her king and in return he observes their shared religion. Again, sex is the only currency available to her.

Contrast these women with Jehane, who has no explicit sex scenes that early in the novel. Why? She has her own power. Her currency is her medical knowledge. She doesn’t need to buy a place in society, or her safety, with sex.

For storytelling purposes, Miranda’s sex scene shows why Rodrigo loves and is faithful to her (and also pretends to be frightened of her). Zabira’s shows what she’s willing to do for herself and her sons. Ines’s sets the reader up for a major change in both her and her husband later.

So no, the sex scenes are not ridiculous (unless you’re threatened by a little light bondage) and they do have motivation. It’s just not a kind of motivation a young, white, modern man is equipped to recognize without reading up on feminism and the place of women in history.

You’d think this would be something a person would absorb from exposure to other cultural sources (it’s not like I’ve done any intense studying on either subject), but I guess not.

I made this for a post-Christmas get-together (I wish I had taken a picture; it’s so pretty, all fluffy and white, speckled with green.) and discovered a few things:

• Australian sour cream is not like North American sour cream — it’s less sour and more cream.
• Heinz salad cream is an acceptable substitute for Miracle Whip.
• My mother is incapable of writing a recipe for someone who doesn’t already know how to make it.

I have no idea where this recipe originally came from. The copy that my mother dictated to me says it’s my great-grandmother’s recipe, which, well, Miracle Whip. Possible, but highly unlikely. More likely is that my grandmother changed it.

The recipe as originally written out by my mother:

Mom’s Potato Salad

Boil as many potatoes as needed (new are best) in skins — cool, peel, and slice. 1/4 cup melted butter (browned) removed from heat and carefully pour in 1/4 cup vinegar. 1T sugar — salt and pepper to taste also green onions with tops — chopped. Mix potato mixture pour over butter then mix 1/2 cup or more sour cream and 1/4 Miracle Whip or salad dressing stir into potatoes — chill.

I’m lucky in that I’ve watched her make it a lot over the years. My husband is not so lucky and got tripped up.

The recipe as she dictated it to me over the phone one day:

Mom’s Potato Salad

Small new potatoes as needed (depending on size, one or two per person)

1 bunch chopped green onions

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 cup butter, browned

1/4 cup white vinegar

1/4 cup Miracle Whip

sour cream

Boil potatoes, drain, and cool. Slice thinly (egg slicer)

Add salt, pepper, green onion and sugar. Mix well.

Melt and brown butter. Remove from heat and add vinegar slowly.

Mix with potatoes and add Miracle Whip. Refrigerate.

When ready to serve add sour cream to make it smooth.

I’ve made this one. It didn’t taste quite right.

The reality is somewhere in between:

Mom’s Potato Salad (with changes and amendments brought on by various conditions including that of living in Australia, not Canada)

8 medium new potatoes (smaller potatoes make prettier slices, but these are what I could get)

3 large green onions (spring onions)

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup white wine vinegar

1/4 cup Miracle Whip (or 1/3 cup Heinz salad cream)

1/4 cup sour cream (plus an extra tablespoon of vinegar)

1 tsp dried dill

Salt and pepper to taste

Boil the potatoes until the skins start to split. Drain and cool. Slip the skins off because they’re annoying to slice. (At this point I looked at the pile of lovely-smelling potato skins and got out some olive oil, salt, and a baking tray. They crisped up nicely under the broiler for a few minutes.) Slice the potatoes (by hand — they only gummed up my mandoline) into pieces about the size or a quarter (or a 20 cent coin) and about a half a centimetre thick.

In a small pot, melt and brown the butter. (I also added the salt, because all I had on hand was large-grain sea salt and I wanted it to dissolve.) Remove it from the heat and add the vinegar and green onions. (Raw onions have too much of a bite for me; heating them just a tiny bit makes them more pleasant.)

Pour the butter mixture into a bowl big enough to toss the whole lot in (I used an old wok — works perfectly). Add the pepper, then the potatoes. Toss them to coat the potatoes. Add sour cream, Miracle Whip, and dill. Toss it all together. Refrigerate.

If you want to use mayonnaise, be my guest — I hate the stuff — but the important part of this is the acid. Miracle Whip has vinegar in it already, as well as paprika and a few other things, so subbing mayonnaise might dull the flavour.

I used less salad cream than Miracle Whip because it’s runnier.

Also, I’ve had good results lightening the heavy, oily Aussie sour cream with plain, non-fat yogurt to make it something more like I’m used to.

Refrigeration as the last step is important — it firms up the potatoes again and improves the flavours and the texture.

1) won a game of Carcassonne

2) won a game of Illuminati*

3) won a game of Civ 3: Conquests

* Well, would have won if we’d finished the game. I was sure to get that last alignment in the next hand.

Last week I managed to fold a fitted sheet neatly.

Just now I poured the first cup of tea out of a pot without spilling a single drop — not even a drip off the end of the spout afterwards.

Apocalypse or coincidence?

Having watched Coraline (marvellous!) on the flight over and having exhausted all the non-annoying television options, as well as too bleary-eyed to read with only two hours left on the flight, I turned to cheesy Hollywood comedy.

My choices were 17 Again (and how weird is it to have someone my age being the old one in a film like this?), He’s Just Not That Into You (not touching that), and I Love You, Man.

At least I Love You, Man has Paul Rudd and Rashida Jones.

Oddly enough, it turned out to be a smart, thoughtful movie. Yeah, I know. I wonder how it ever got funded, too.

Peter is a guy whose friends have always been women, even as a child, and he doesn’t really think about it until he realizes he has no male friends to stand up with him at his wedding.

No one ever suggests one of his female friends, but he doesn’t seem to have many of them, either. He has a fiancee and a lot of acquaintances, but no real friends. This is a guy who just doesn’t connect with many people, and he realizes he’s missing out on something that most other people have.

So he goes hunting for a guy friend. You’d think this would be the point where it would all go horribly wrong, but it doesn’t. His fiancée, Zooey, thinks it’s a great idea and is wholly supportive of him, even when one of his dates kisses him goodnight.

Did I mention the astounding absence of homophobia in this film? I can think of one instance involving a very minor character we’re meant to dislike.

In fact, Zooey supports him every way she can. The inciting incident, when Peter notices he has no guy friends, happens when he overhears Zooey and her friends talking about him. The friends gently (lovingly, I’d say) mock him for it and Zooey defends him. I think it’s important to distinguish that she defends him, not herself or her choice of him; nothing her friends do or say in this film make her doubt her choice. The only thing that does that is Peter himself later on.

The characters, with the exception of a few broadly-drawn stereotypes, are all rational, likeable adults who make thoughtful decisions, recognize their mistakes, and seek to change themselves for the better. The (deliberate, I’m sure) stereotypes, on the other hand, serve to emphasize how complex and real the other characters are. The main characters are people, not archetypes. They all have faults, they’re all a little selfish and self-centred, but in the way your own friends are, not in the way most movie characters are. They love and respect and support each other even when they act like asses.

The comedy comes from the characters’ wit and the reversal of genre tropes, not from humiliation and stupidity. It’s refreshing and well worth watching at least once.

Anyway, I’m Magpie_Lark over on http://www.steepster.com

Read

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link
The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, by Diana Wynne Jones

Watched

Don’t Look Now
Little Miss Sunshine
The Golden Compass
Tron
Sunshine
When Worlds Collide – A movie about people failing to adequately plan for a disaster they have ample warning about. I wanted to throw things at them all.
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Impromptu
Forbidden Planet